It is a high bar, but Trump's would-be national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, may be the single worst Trump pick so far. He is the sort of paranoid dimwit who would eagerly get us into a shooting war for the sake of getting into a shooting war.
Days after Islamist militants stormed the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn reached a conclusion that stunned some of his subordinates at the Defense Intelligence Agency: Iran had a role in the attack, he told them.
Now, he added, it was their job to prove it — and, by implication, to show that the White House was wrong about what had led to the attack.
So faced with a genuine act of terrorism that claimed American lives, Mike Flynn's official reaction as intelligence gatherer was to brush aside work to determine who was behind the attack and order his staff to prove his own preferred theory. Why this was not immediately followed by Mike Flynn being tossed into a rubber room so that his department could do actual work remains unclear.
Building the would-be facts around the desired policy, of course, is how we entered Iraq in the first place. The theory was that Iraq was "working with" Al Qaeda; the "evidence" was whatever stovepiped half-truths or curveballed garbage-of-the-moment a neoconservative White House could lob to an eager press. Having an Alex Jones-influenced paranoia magnet like Flynn be the driving force behind whatever the "intelligence" Donald Trump can be persuaded to see is a recipe for military policies as untethered from reality as, well, Flynn's own past statements, and already lands us far over the same line that brought us our most recent war.
That he was booted from his previous intelligence job for take-your-pick has so far been glossed over by the Trump crowd, but there is information enough to deduce the man is a military version of Trump himself.
Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his. [...]
Some also described him as a Captain Queeg-like character, paranoid that his staff members were undercutting him and credulous of conspiracy theories.
That last bit is evident from his own comments. The man is clearly not playing with a full deck. Nevertheless, it still doesn't seem likely the entire collected Republican Party has either the remaining dignity or remaining expertise to object to Flynn. And that very likely sets the stage for a new, unnecessary war; we're just waiting to hear from the stovepipers who the new target should be.