Hugh Hewitt was feeling very good about it, the others on the panel including the moderator looked queasy.
When you have a president that doesn't read his daily briefing, but never misses cable news political punditry every morning, this is what you're going to get, a cabinet and staff full of hyperbolic hard-charging types, as Robert Costa described them. However, the president is the only one who doesn't seem to know that you cannot run the government of the most powerful nation in the world like a soap opera. In fact, it's inexplicable some of the thought islands this president is on such as: tariffs are good - no one agrees; Russia didn't meddle, they certainly did; there were good people on both sides. It's like the Superman comic book character Bizarro who is the mirror image, exact opposite antagonist to Superman. His thoughts and inclinations are all backward.
With regard to John Bolton's appointment in particular, Heather McGhee described an old white guy who avoided ever going to war so doesn't know the human impact of it while cavalierly calling for bombing and troops and regime change. Unintentionally, she was also describing Mr. Hewitt in a sense as well, which must explain why he's happy with the choices.
Corey Lewandowski was also praising the president's decisions, saying that the president was putting America first by installing people on that fully behind the president's positions. If you're thinking that those two notions run counter to one another, take consolation that you have a good read on things. In response to the president congratulating Vladimir Putin on his election 'win' and the subsequent leak on the conversation briefing adamantly advising the opposite, Mr. Lewandowski blamed it on a leak from the deep state. Give us a break... It came from an aide to the president as Mr. Todd pointed out, which is NOT the deep state.
A new rule for "Meet The Press" should be that any one who blames the 'deep state' for anything should not be allowed to appear on the program. What's the point? The person instantly discredits him or herself thus simply becoming a waste of good air time henceforth. You can't take the person seriously.
You can get other individuals on the program to confirm that the president will go without a chief of staff if General Kelly is dismissed from his post or that Rex Tillerson was fired because he basically disagreed with the president on every foreign policy crisis. But as soon as you get into the 'deep state,' forget it.
John Bolton on the other hand is for cancelling the Iran deal as is new Secretary of State nominee Mike Pompeo, which will further isolate the United States from its allies and rivals alike. The other countries that signed on, which include China, Russia, England, France and Germany will not follow suit. Mr. Lewandowski also said that H.R. McMaster wanted more troops in Afghanistan, which the president disagreed with, only to replace the fmr. NSA with a person who wants to put lots of troops in other places. Playing the long game is not what Trump does, obviously.
For all that, Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) said we're more vulnerable as a country, because he didn't call out or condemn Mr. Putin for his actions. One of the core questions we all hope that Mr. Mueller's investigation will answer is why doesn't the president ever say anything in opposition to or negative about Mr. Putin?
More poignantly, Senator Warner stated that he thought Facebook has been less than forthcoming about what it knew about what Cambridge Analytica was doing with ill-gotten Facebook data, and for how long they knew.
Mark Zuckerberg is open to the idea of testifying in front of Congress? As Mr. Warner emphatically stated, it's his company so he has to take responsibility for it, and answer for it in front of Congress. As he described it, there was a broad weaponization of information through social media, most prominently through Facebook. The argument that Facebook and Twitter are in a sense media companies is well founded, certainly media aggregators.
And hopefully Mr. Mueller's team can unravel all the tentacles that Cambridge Analytica has and the role it's played. Now we find out that Steve Bannon was a founding partner of the firm while being the president of a media company and having roles as campaign chairman and presidential advisor. And where Mr. Bannon was (not now), the Mercers were always standing two feet behind. The entire thing looks dirty. As Robert Costa explained, since the election the Trump Administration has been trying to distance itself from the data firm after singing it praises during the campaign.
***
Lastly, in response to Mr. Todd's query about what would have more impact 6 months from now, the Stormy Daniels story or the March For Our Lives, call for gun control, the time frame seems a bit disproportionately (not purposely) to the short-term. Stormy Daniels, which has potential for explosiveness and very public legal battles, isn't going away anytime soon. It's the kind of 'entertainment' that Mr. Trump does in fact like, but only when it doesn't involve him. Basically, a mess.
More significantly, in more than 800 cities around the U.S. and the world, people lead by students came out in the hundreds of thousands in a March For Our Lives to say, "Enough with gun violence," and this is not going away for generations. You have to realize that the students that lead this march have grown up in a world where mass shootings are part of life and only getting worse. They're tired of it, enough is enough, they will not shut up about it, and they will vote on it.
Their passion now will turn into action later, and gun-control votes for years to come.
During the voter round table segment, a woman who supports the Second Amendment explained the 'shall not be infringed' clause of it, which is understandable, but she failed to mention the 'well regulated' part, which is not the case at all.
The round table featured one independent voter, an African American Army veteran who was featured little, but the three things he said were the three that made the most sense:
-Gun violence has become an national emergency now that white kids are getting killed.
-Adults are not good advocates for children right now.
-Like cigarettes, there should be a big tax on the a gun purchase.
Panel: Heather McGhee, President of DEMOS; Kasie Hunt, NBC News; Robert Costa, The Washington Post; Hugh Hewitt, Salem Radio Network
No comments:
Post a Comment