A sickening moral slum of an administration

George Will;  Washington Post, Dec 2

 Regarding Venezuela, Ukraine and much more, Trump and his acolytes are worse than simply incompetent.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.

In 1967, novelist Gwyn Griffin published a World War II novel, “An Operational Necessity,” that 58 years later is again pertinent. According to the laws of war, survivors of a sunken ship cannot be attacked. But a German submarine captain, after sinking a French ship, orders the machine-gunning of the ship’s crew, lest their survival endanger his men by revealing where his boat is operating. In the book’s dramatic climax, a postwar tribunal examines the German commander’s moral calculus.

No operational necessity justified Hegseth’s de facto order to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug boats obliterated by U.S. forces near Venezuela. His order was reported by The Post from two sources (“The order was to kill everybody,” one said) and has not been explicitly denied by Hegseth. President Donald Trump says Hegseth told him that he (Hegseth) “said he did not say that.” If Trump is telling the truth about Hegseth, and Hegseth is telling the truth to Trump, it is strange that (per the Post report) the commander of the boat-destroying operation said he ordered the attack on the survivors to comply with Hegseth’s order.

Forty-four days after the survivors were killed, the four-star admiral who headed the U.S. Southern Command announced he would be leaving that position just a year into what is usually a three-year stint. He did not say why. Inferences are, however, permitted.

The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine demonstrated.

Marco Rubio, who is secretary of state and Trump’s national security adviser, seemed to be neither when the president released his 28-point plan for Ukraine’s dismemberment. The plan was cobbled together by Trump administration and Russian officials, with no Ukrainians participating. It reads like a wish-list letter from Vladimir Putin to Santa Claus: Ukraine to cede land that Russia has failed to capture in almost four years of aggression; Russia to have a veto over NATO’s composition, peacekeeping forces in Ukraine and the size of Ukraine’s armed forces. And more.

Rubio, whose well-known versatility of convictions is perhaps not infinite, told some of his alarmed former Senate colleagues that the plan was just an opening gambit from Russia — although Trump demanded that Ukraine accept it within days. South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, a precise and measured speaker, reported that, in a conference call with a bipartisan group of senators, Rubio said the plan was a Russian proposal: “He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.” Hours later, however, Rubio reversed himself, saying on social media that the United States “authored” the plan.

The administration’s floundering might reflect more than its characteristic incompetence. In a darkening world, systemic weaknesses of prosperous democracies are becoming clearer.

Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell’s 1976 book, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” argued that capitalism’s success undermines capitalism’s moral and behavioral prerequisites. Affluence produces a culture of present-mindedness and laxity; this undermines thrift, industriousness, discipline and the deferral of gratification.

Today’s cultural contradictions of democracy are: Majorities vote themselves government benefits funded by deficits, which conscript the wealth of future generations who will inherit the national debt. Entitlements crowd out provisions for national security. And an anesthetizing dependency on government produces an inward-turning obliviousness to external dangers, and a flinching from hard truths.

Two weeks ago, the chief of staff of the French army said: “We have the know-how, and we have the economic and demographic strength to dissuade the regime in Moscow. What we are lacking … is the spirit which accepts that we will have to suffer if we are to protect what we are. If our country wavers because it is not ready to lose its children … or to suffer economically because the priority has to be military production, then we are indeed at risk.”

Putin has surely savored the French recoil from these words. And he has noticed that, concerning Ukraine and the attacks on boats near Venezuela, the Trump administration cannot keep its stories straight.

This probably is for reasons Sir Walter Scott understood: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/ when first we practise to deceive!” Americans are the deceived.

 

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Notice the Band-Aid and make-up on his right hand.  Trump is in early stages of Alzheimer’s and he is receiving regular infusions of two drugs called donanemab and lecanemab which are given via intravenous infusion every 1-4 weeks for Alzheimer’s. The treatment requires regular monitoring with brain MRI scans to ensure the medication is not causing bleeds in the brain.

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Meanwhile, here’s Pete Hegseth’s name tag.  Look closely.

I guess they meant to say this:

 

 

 

 

 

Photo two weeks ago at Mar-A-Lago.

 

This tired, demented, failed, bankrupt deeply-damaged man is so needy. He has to have references to him being president on his hat, on his shirt, and on a faux-gold-framed placard next to his overcooked cheeseburger he’s almost too-out-of-it to eat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Birthday June 16, 1946 — he will be 80 years old in a few months, oldest serving President.  When Joe Biden turned 80 and 81 in office, Republicans lost their minds — Biden was too old but Trump is just fine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

US negotiators are meeting in Geneva today with representatives from Ukraine and Europe in an emergency session brought on by our corrupt, madman leader’s outrageous threats this week to end all support for Ukraine by this Thursday (hey, why not? What about Friday?) if they don’t agree to a Russian crafted plan to end the conflict.

Events are likely to over take this post today, but we learned a few things yesterday worth sharing……

First, this horribly corrupt and dangerous plan (see my post from yesterday for more) was forged in part here in the United States in late October by Special Envoy Witkoff, Jared Kushner and a Putin emissary Kirill Dmitriev (yes a sanctioned Russian was allowed to enter the US).

It must be noted that Dmitiriev is a banker, not a diplomat, who runs one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world, and that this new American-backed proposal has various provisions that would enrich American investors and Trump itself. So I can write here without hyberbole that Witkoff-Kushner-Trump (and Vance) are attempting to sell out Ukraine, Europe, and democracies throughout the world in part to enrich themselves.

Second, Secretary of State Rubio, who is also the national security advisor to Trump, told alarmed Senators on a call yesterday that the plan was a Russian wish list not backed by the US. A few hours later he reversed course, and claimed that in fact it was an American plan not a Russian one. The lying, incompetence, confusion, recklessness, malevolence – it’s all jawdropping, and incredibly dangerous. Here’s how the NYT described these extraordinary turn of events:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Saturday that the United States “authored” a 28-point peace plan to end the war in Ukraine, after a Republican senator asserted that Mr. Rubio had distanced himself from the proposal and called it a Russian initiative.

Mr. Rubio made the assertion on social media after Senator Mike Rounds, Republican of South Dakota, said Mr. Rubio had earlier on Saturday held a call with a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers attending a security conference in Canada. Mr. Rounds said that in the call, Mr. Rubio had suggested that it was a Russian proposal, not a U.S. plan.

“He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives,” Mr. Rounds said Saturday at a news conference at the Halifax International Security Forum, speaking about Mr. Rubio. “It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.”

Mr. Rounds said Mr. Rubio “made it clear that it was an opportunity to have received” the plan. “You now have one side being presented, and the opportunity for the other side to respond,” Mr. Rounds said. Some critics of the plan have said it would force Ukraine to make unreasonable concessions to Russia.

Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, on Saturday denied an allegation that the plan was essentially a Russian wish list, saying that this was “blatantly false.”

“As Secretary Rubio and the entire Administration has consistently maintained, this plan was authored by the United States, with input from both the Russians and Ukrainians,” Mr. Pigott wrote on social media.

The plan, which was initially negotiated between the United States and Russia without direct Ukrainian involvement and has not officially been made public but has been widely leaked, would involve Ukraine ceding land it currently holds, limiting the size of its military and foregoing any attempt to join NATO. In the past, Ukraine has rejected these steps as a capitulation, and Ukraine’s allies have pushed back against the proposal.

Lots of reporting this morning that Vance is the lead in this traitorous new effort to appease Putin and throw Europe and Ukraine under the bus:

And this from a top WSJ reporter:

All of this is happening now in my view because Trump’s decline is accelerating, everyone knows it, and factions in the regime are starting to make power graps and go full on Game of Thrones on one another……..

What is happening here is incredibly dangerous and not fucking OK. We need to hit the phones at 9am EST tomorrow and demand that our Congressional leaders fight this incredible, historic sell out of our national interests and appeasement of Putin.

Trump was rebuked a few weeks ago when the Senate voted three times to roll back his terrible tariffs. He was rebuked again, powerfully, in the 2025 elections. Last week Congress delivered one of the most aggressive legislative rebukes of a President in all of our history. And now we must rebuke him again for this outrageous “plan” and attempt to sell out Ukraine, Europe, and democracies all across the world, including our own.

We need to be loud — very, very loud.

Call Your Senators and Member Of The House And Demand They Act to save Ukraine and Our Republic 

1. Stand with Ukraine and our European allies, and far more forcefully challenge Trump’s traitorous efforts to sell out the US and the West to Russia; demand Congress rebuke/issue a no confidence vote on his 28 point “plan”
2. Roll back Trump’s terrible, illegal tariffs that are re-igniting inflation, driving up prices, shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to working people, hurting small businesses and farmers, reviving tyrannical “taxation without representation,” and alienating governments and people throughout the world
3. Defend our democracy, rule of law, and our liberties by blocking the expansion of ICE, restoring due process for immigrants across the country, vigorously defending the 1st Amendment, warring against his outrageous targeting of his domestic political opponents, and ending the use of the military on our streets and the unlawful occupation of our cities
4. Fight Trump’s war on science, higher education and our public health; reverse – not delay – the cuts to the ACA and Medicaid; support and co-sponsor Rep. Haley Stevens’ effort to Impeach and remove Robert Kennedy