James Clapper isn’t exactly my favorite appointee of the Obama era. But I still perk up when someone of his background and experience talks like this, as reported by Julian Borger at The Guardian. After Donald Trump’s incredibly discreditable performance in Phoenix Tuesday night, Clapper, former director of national intelligence for a little more than six years under Obama, challenged Trump’s “fitness to be in this office,” and said it’s “pretty damn scary” that he has access to the nation’s nuclear codes:
Once a president has verified his identity with a code kept constantly on his person or nearby, the military chain of command has no power to block his launch orders. [...]
[Clapper said]: If “in a fit of pique [Trump] decides to do something about Kim Jong-un, there’s actually very little to stop him. The whole system is built to ensure rapid response if necessary. So there’s very little in the way of controls over exercising a nuclear option, which is pretty damn scary.”
Clapper did not mention Richard Nixon, who was involved in a tense stand-off with North Korea in 1969, after the regime shot down a US spy plane. Nixon is reported to have gotten drunk and ordered a tactical nuclear strike, which was only averted by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger.
Nixon’s biographers Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan quoted a top CIA official, George Carver, as saying: “The joint chiefs were alerted and asked to recommend targets, but Kissinger got on the phone to them. They agreed not to do anything until Nixon sobered up in the morning.”
One problem. Trump doesn’t get drunk. He’s inebriated every minute of the day and night by the power he now wields. How do you warn people to refuse to follow orders from a man who never “sobers up.” If the Senate Judiciary Committee releases a transcript of the 10 hours of testimony from Glenn Simpson—who helped compile the dossier containing allegations of Trump-Russia collusion—Trump’s recklessness may involve more than just his big, stupid, lying mouth. He might cut and run, as he has done in the past. Or he might act out.
However, although I don’t have the exact quote, another top former intelligence official I don’t care for, R. James Woolsey, said in an interview Wednesday with CNN’s Don Lemon that people in 1961 had more reason to be concerned with whether John Kennedy had the wherewithal to deal with the Russians than should be concerned about Trump’s ability in the foreign policy sphere. Wow.
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“The children start school now in August. They say it has to do with air-conditioning, but I know sadism when I see it.”
~Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South (2015)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
At on this date in 2004—Dole a hypocrite:
Josh Marshall applies the smackdown to Bob Dole, so I don't have to:
Today Bob Dole suggested that one or more of John Kerry's Purple Hearts may have been fraudulent in some way because they were for "superficial wounds."
Dole knows better.
In a 1988 campaign-trail autobiography, here's how Dole described the incident that earned him his first Purple Heart: "As we approached the enemy, there was a brief exchange of gunfire. I took a grenade in hand, pulled the pin, and tossed it in the direction of the farmhouse. It wasn't a very good pitch (remember, I was used to catching passes, not throwing them). In the darkness, the grenade must have struck a tree and bounced off. It exploded nearby, sending a sliver of metal into my leg—the sort of injury the Army patched up with Mercurochrome and a Purple Heart."
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, we continue with the origin stories of the so-called “alt-right,” their money man Regnery, the meteoric rises and falls of some of their leading insta-celebs, and a reminder that this might just be our future. I mean, who else is left in the Republican Party?
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