FOCUS: The Ship Is Sinking. The Rats Are Scrambling.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
Thursday, 12 April 2018 11:00
Pierce writes: "I am fully aware that, more than any other occupant of that office, this president* is capable of creating a sturdy bubble in which he is the indomitable and wise master of the universe, all objective evidence to the contrary."
Inside the White House, Mr. Trump—furious after the F.B.I. raided his longtime personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen—spent much of the day brooding and fearful and near what two people close to the West Wing described as a “meltdown.” Mr. Trump’s public and private wrath about the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election are nothing new. But the raids on Monday on Mr. Cohen’s Rockefeller Center office and Park Avenue hotel room have sent the president to new heights of outrage, setting the White House on edge as it faces a national security crisis in Syria and more internal staff churn.
I am fully aware that, more than any other occupant of that office, this president* is capable of creating a sturdy bubble in which he is the indomitable and wise master of the universe, all objective evidence to the contrary. But, ever since the FBI dropped by Michael Cohen’s office, it seems that this might be the event that shatters the bubble for good.
We can safely speculate that Cohen knows everything: the money, the scams, the women, the Russians. All of it. And in the days since the raid, Cohen has abandoned the truculent public persona that had served him so well in the past in favor of being someone who seems grateful that he wasn’t hauled off to Pelican Bay on the spot.
"I am unhappy to have my personal residence and office raided. But I will tell you that members of the FBI that conducted the search and seizure were all extremely professional, courteous and respectful. And I thanked them at the conclusion," Cohen said in a phone conversation on Tuesday with CNN. Asked if he was worried, Cohen said: "I would be lying to you if I told that I am not. Do I need this in my life? No. Do I want to be involved in this? No." The raid was "upsetting to say the least," he added.
This would seem to indicate that Cohen has sized up matters and decided that his best move is to flip on the president*. Back in ‘73, you wouldn’t have seen Gordon Liddy complimenting the FBI on his arrest, I’ll tell you that. They don’t make thuggish apparatchiks like they used to.
Anyway, back at Camp Runamuck, things are going pretty thoroughly haywire. From the Times:
Mr. Trump’s mood had begun to sour even before the raids on his lawyer. People close to the White House said that over the weekend, the president engaged in few activities other than dinner at the Trump International Hotel. He tuned into Fox News, they said, watched reports about the so-called deep state looking to sink his presidency and became unglued. Mr. Trump angrily told his advisers that people were trying to undermine him and that he wanted to get rid of three top Justice Department officials — Jeff Sessions, the attorney general; Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who appointed Mr. Mueller; and Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director — according to two people familiar with what took place.
He eventually calmed down and the anger abated. But it was stoked anew on Monday, after the F.B.I. raids on Mr. Cohen. Mr. Rosenstein in particular was a source of Mr. Trump’s anger on Monday, and some aides believed the president was seriously considering firing him, to a degree he has not in the past.
Ah, but the strawberries, that’s where I had them…
Few people still at the White House are able to restrain Mr. Trump from acting on his impulses after the departures of crucial staff members who were once able to join forces with other aides to do so. That included Hope Hicks, his former communications director; Rob Porter, his former staff secretary; and, in 2017, the chief of staff Reince Priebus and the chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon. John F. Kelly, the current chief of staff whose influence over the president has waned for months, appeared beaten down and less hands-on, according to two White House officials. Mr. Kelly has told Mr. Trump it is frustrating for staff members that the president deems most news media stories fake news but believes the ones accusing various advisers of leaking, according to people familiar with the discussions.
Let us sum up, shall we? We have a deeply corrupt and incompetent president*, who’s never been entirely on the rails, sensing quite accurately that he’s very close to being run to ground by a prosecutor he can’t bully or bribe out of his way. And, as this Times story indicates, as the ship continues to list, the traffic down the ratlines is getting awfully heavy.
All these anonymous quotes are coming from people who are clearly immunizing themselves against ever having signed aboard this catastrophe, in the hopes that they will one day have careers in politics again. This has to be stoking the president*’s paranoid rage to the point where it’s melting ice lagoons on Neptune. Meanwhile, there’s a genuine crisis brewing over Syria, and there’s only one person who can give the national command orders, and he may be unravelling by the hour.
Maybe voting for someone just because he pretended to be pissed at the same people you’re pissed at wasn’t the best idea in the world.
We've Seen This Movie Before. It Ended With Impeachment.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=23383"><span class="small">Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post</span></a>
Thursday, 12 April 2018 08:55
Parker writes: "It would seem but a matter of time before the president of the United States is asked a question under oath and gives a false answer. A lie, in other words. In the prequel, starring Bill Clinton, impeachment followed."
Donald Trump. (photo: Getty)
We've Seen This Movie Before. It Ended With Impeachment.
By Kathleen Parker, The Washington Post
12 April 18
t would seem but a matter of time before the president of the United States is asked a question under oath and gives a false answer. A lie, in other words. In the prequel, starring Bill Clinton, impeachment followed.
When the FBI, after a referral from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, raided the offices and hotel room of Trump attorney Michael Cohen , the thud of the other shoe dropping sent ripples along Pennsylvania Avenue, down the Mall and over the Potomac River into Northern Virginia, where more than a few veterans of earlier political wars probably grimaced at what could come next.
No one should feel good about what’s happening now.
This isn’t to say the raid wasn’t necessary or proper — it was ordered not by Mueller but by the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. But it shows that we’ve reached a point that apparently made it necessary. The timing, given world affairs, couldn’t be worse.
As President Trump himself pointed out amid lamentations of a witch hunt, “We’re talking about a lot of serious things.” Indeed, we are, especially as concerns the dire humanitarian situation in Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad reportedly executed a chemical attack on civilians, including children, near Damascus.
Trump is caught in a double bind with potentially disastrous consequences either way. To not take military action, as he has said he would, risks his being seen as weak or indecisive. Remember President Barack Obama’s flimsy red line. To engage Syria militarily risks everything else, further worsening relations with Russia, which vowed last month to retaliate against the United States should it attack Assad’s forces, within which Russian troops are embedded.
Closer to home, Trump risks the plausible perception, given history and his often impulsive decision-making process, that he would strike to create a distraction from the personal chaos surrounding him. Back to the prequel, you’ll recall Clinton’s 1998 missile strikes in Sudan, where a pharmaceutical factory was destroyed, as well as simultaneous strikes in Afghanistan. According to U.S. intelligence, the Sudan facility was part of Osama bin Laden’s empire and was believed to be a chemical weapons site, which turned out not to be so.
Thus was born the wag-the-dog theory that Clinton was creating a distraction from his tortures at the hands of independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, who was investigating the president’s alleged relations with Monica Lewinsky. According to the Clinton administration, there was only a small window of time when the missiles could be launched effectively, which just happened to be on the very same day of Lewinsky’s appearance before Starr’s grand jury. Wrote Christopher Hitchens at the time: “What was the rush? . . . Clinton needed to look ‘presidential’ for a day.”
Recall, too, that Starr’s original mandate was to investigate an allegedly questionable land deal in Arkansas known as “Whitewater.” But, well, one thing led to another, and you know the rest. Sexual relations did take place in the Oval Office, but Whitewater was a bust. And the 9/11 Commission concluded that the rationale for the bombings had been credible given information at the time. My, but history does seem to enjoy repeating itself.
As for the alleged Mueller “break-in” — Trump’s characterization — the perps were FBI investigators, not burglars, who came equipped with a warrant approved by a judge. Also, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein personally approved the raid, even though he wasn’t required to do so.
Of this much one can be fairly certain: The agents knew what they were after and were convinced that Cohen wouldn’t voluntarily hand it over. Whether Cohen’s $130,000 payment to the porn actress Stormy Daniels can be shown to have been an illegal “campaign donation” — or that he violated banking laws — remains to be seen. But he’s now in the grip of the Justice Department — and possibly Mueller — and soon it could behoove Cohen to become a witness in the special investigation.
It has been observed that most movies end with a repetition or variation of the opening scene. Increasingly, this plot seems to be foreshadowing a day when Trump, exposed and possibly impeached, is shown going back up the down escalator — alone, perhaps, but glad to be home.
Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Hearing Was an Utter Sham
Wednesday, 11 April 2018 13:52
Teachout writes: "On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg was in the hot seat. Cameras surrounded him. The energy in the room - and on Twitter - was electric. At last, the reluctant CEO is made to answer some questions!"
CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg. (photo: AP)
Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Hearing Was an Utter Sham
By Zephyr Teachout, Guardian UK
11 April 18
n Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg was in the hot seat. Cameras surrounded him. The energy in the room – and on Twitter – was electric. At last, the reluctant CEO is made to answer some questions!
Except it failed. It was designed to fail. It was a show designed to get Zuckerberg off the hook after only a few hours in Washington DC. It was a show that gave the pretense of a hearing without a real hearing. It was designed to deflect and confuse.
Each senator was given less than five minutes for questions. That meant that there was no room for follow-ups, no chance for big discoveries and many frustratingly half-developed ideas. Compare that to Bill Gates’ hearing on Microsoft, where he faced lawyers and staff for several days, or the Kefauver hearings, which were over a year. By design, you can’t do a hearing of this magnitude in just a couple of hours.
The worst moments of the hearing for us, as citizens, were when senators asked if Zuckerberg would support legislation that would regulate Facebook. I don’t care whether Zuckerberg supports Honest Ads or privacy laws or GDPR. By asking him if he would support legislation, the senators elevated him to a kind of co-equal philosopher king whose view on Facebook regulation carried special weight. It shouldn’t.
Facebook is a known behemoth corporate monopoly. It has exposed at least 87 million people’s data, enabled foreign propaganda and perpetuated discrimination. We shouldn’t be begging for Facebook’s endorsement of laws, or for Mark Zuckerberg’s promises of self-regulation. We should treat him as a danger to democracy and demand our senators get a real hearing.
The best senators understood this was a show, and used it as such. “Your user agreement sucks,” said John Kennedy. “Are you a monopoly?” asked Lindsey Graham. (Zuckerberg “comically” responded: “It certainly doesn’t feel like that to me.”) Richard Blumenthal said we needed laws, not promises or apologies.
Because each senator was limited to under five minutes, Zuckerberg tried to run the clock by talking about mission, philosophy or what he believed in. There were some good questions, but there was little chance for follow up. You could almost see him, well-trained to count the minutes, playing for time when things got a little hot.
Senators Mazie Hirono and Cory Booker, for instance, both pointed out the damning reporting by Julia Angwin at ProPublica, which showed that employers and landlords were using Facebook for discriminatory ads. Zuckerberg defended the company by saying they were hard to flag, and that they depend on community flagging to stop them.
The tools Facebook provides make discrimination easy. Facebook has monopoly profit margins, so it could easily provide real staffing to protect against discrimination, if it wanted to. It doesn’t want to.
Hirono and Booker could have shown that, but, like the rest of the senators, they each had only a few minutes for a line of questioning. Zuckerberg replied with vague answers about how their comments were “important” or “interesting” or “an important conversation to have”.
Some of the hearing seemed designed to figure out whether Zuckerberg is a good or bad man, or whether he has a good or bad – or bizarre – political philosophy. Zuckerberg strikes me as reliably self-serving. That doesn’t make him that interesting as the CEO of a corporate monopoly; it makes him a run-of-the-mill robber baron.
Asking Zuckerberg philosophical questions, such as how he thinks we should deal with questions of hate speech, treats him as a thought leader. Accepting his failures to catch discriminatory housing ads, for instance, treats him as a good-hearted actor with limited resources, instead of someone who is making monopoly margins and billions in profits.
In my view, we need to break up Facebook from Instagram and the other potential competitors that Facebook bought up. We need to – at a minimum – move towards opt-in, we need to hold Facebook responsible for enabling discrimination, and we need to require interoperability.
But that’s not enough. There is so much we don’t know about Facebook. We know we have a corporate monopoly that has repeated serious violations that are threatening our democracy. We don’t know how their algorithm treats news organizations or content producers, how Facebook uses its own information about Facebook users or how tracking across platforms works, to just give a few examples.
Now that the initial show trial is done, we need the real deal, one where no senator gets cut off after a few minutes. The real hearing would allow for unlimited questions from each of our senators, who represent millions of people. If it takes two months of sitting in Washington DC, let it take two months. This is our democracy.
House Speaker Paul Ryan's Retirement: Good Riddance to the Biggest Fraud in American Politics
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=33430"><span class="small">Matthew Yglesias, Vox</span></a>
Wednesday, 11 April 2018 13:49
Yglesias writes: "House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is announcing his retirement today, was not the most pernicious figure in American life during his era of prominence, but he was the biggest phony."
House Speaker Paul Ryan's Retirement: Good Riddance to the Biggest Fraud in American Politics
By Matthew Yglesias, Vox
11 April 18
Good riddance.
ouse Speaker Paul Ryan, who is announcing his retirement today, was not the most pernicious figure in American life during his era of prominence, but he was the biggest phony.
His Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell, was always willing to wear the black hat, from his early rise to prominence as a lonely opponent of campaign finance reform to the cynical smirk with which he stole a Supreme Court seat from Merrick Garland. Ryan wanted something more. Power, yes. To improve the lives of the wealthy while reducing the living standards of the poor, of course.
But he also craved a certain form of respectability that’s led him to leave behind a staggering track record of broken promises and glowing press clips from journalists who were gullible enough to believe them.
From his early days as a Social Security reformer to his mid-career posturing as a deficit hawk to his rebranding as a person deeply concerned with poverty, he’s been the Jack Abernathy of Congress. Eventually, the con ran out, leaving Ryan with little in the way of substantive accomplish as he chose to cut and run before a midterm election that’s shaping up to be a race between his party’s deep unpopularity and the strength of its aggressive gerrymandering.
The many lives of Paul Ryan
Ryan joined Congress in 1998 but first really made his mark during the Social Security privatization wars of 2004-’05.
The basic idea here was that George W. Bush’s administration wanted to use the program’s long-term fiscal deficit as a pretext to alter its fundamental structure away from a guarantee of a decent standard of living in retirement to one where individuals would be reliant on private investment accounts. Ryan emerged as a player by sponsoring, along with then-Sen. John Sununu, a further-right plan that would create more generous private accounts at the cost of $2.4 trillion in larger deficits over the first 10 years. Indeed, as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted at the time, “the plan would increase the national debt (i.e., the debt held by the public) every year for at least the next 75 years.”
This obviously went nowhere, in part because the cost envisioned was much larger than the Obama stimulus, the Trump tax cuts, or basically anything that Congress ever does. Nevertheless, it did not stop Ryan from rebranding himself a few years later as a deficit hawk.
By 2010, he was hailed by journalists like US News’s Paul Bedard and the professional deficit-cutting community as the very model of fiscal responsibility:
Need proof? A new coalition of budget watchdogs tell Whispers that they plan to unveil a new award today that will reward the best and the brightest of the green eyeshade crowd. Called the Fiscy Awards, they will reward two federal elected officials and one state or local elected official for bringing the deficit to the nation’s attention.
The Fiscy Award judges are serious budget watchers: David Walker, founder and president of the Comeback America Initiative; Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Budget; and Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition.
This award was completely at odds with Ryan’s actual record in Congress, which had featured support for multiple rounds of budget-busting Bush tax cuts, Bush’s deficit-financed 2003 Medicare bill, his wars, and his TARP bank bailout. But the new Ryan was said to be a deficit visionary thanks to his 2010 budget framework, which outlined a long-term plan to reduce the budget deficit. Except as Jonathan Cohn wrote at the time, the plan relied entirely on magic asterisks — an unspecified tax reform that would bring revenue to 19 percent of GDP while increasing economic growth, unspecified cuts to domestic discretionary spending, and a bare assertion that Medicare cost growth could be greatly reduced through privatization, with no plan to explain how that would work.
After being tapped as Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012 and losing, Ryan decided that his fake budget plan had landed him with a reputation as being too mean-spirited.
So by 2014, he was garnering gushing coverage from McKay Coppins and others for his newfound commitment to fighting poverty. Ryan’s newfound commitment to fighting poverty didn’t mean he disavowed his support for a large tax cut for the heirs to multimillion-dollar estates. Or his support for a large tax cut for the owners of businesses. Or his support for a large tax cut for high-income individuals. Or his support for reducing spending on poor children’s health care, housing, and nutrition assistance. Indeed, nothing about Ryan’s actual policy agenda of sharply lowering the material living standards of low-income people in order to finance regressive tax cuts had changed.
But he cared. A lot.
And Ryan is really good at caring. In January 2017, there was a truly heartrending moment at a CNN town hall when he promised a young mother who’d received protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that she had no need to fear deportation even in the coming Trump era. It was really great television.
Of course, Ryan’s reassurances were total bullshit, as Vox’s Dara Lind pointed out at the time. Trump didn’t need a new deportation force to change Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s instructions, and House Republicans have been happy to pony up more money for stepped-up enforcement activities. Trump himself, of course, canceled DACA later that year. In September, though, Ryan told DREAMers they could “rest easy” because Congress would soon step in with a fix.
They did not. Back during this past winter’s immigration debate, it was commonplace for Ryan’s tireless apologists in the press corps to note that he would be “risking his speakership” if he defied House backbenchers’ opposition to a DACA fix. This might not really have been such a high price to pay to avoid ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent young people, but regardless — the DREAMers for whom Ryan would not risk his speakership can know that at the end of the day, he was happy to throw it away anyway; he just forgot to help them.
Though in his defense, he mostly failed at the things he did try to do too.
Ryan’s brief speakership, by contrast, did not amount to much. The dream of Social Security privatization that launched his policy relevance is dead. The Medicare privatization plan that relaunched his policy relevance is also dead. His reputation as a deficit hawk has been exposed as a sham. He didn’t repeal the Affordable Care Act, and he didn’t undo the Obama administration’s financial regulations. The year isn’t over yet, but Congress has basically abandoned hope of doing anything else.
What he got was a tax cut, the thing that every Republican majority gets.
And since that’s what his donors wanted in the end, that’s probably the important thing. But it is worth saying that the tax cut ultimately came together because Republicans abandoned Ryan’s vision of a high-minded tax reform and his dumb talking point about filing taxes on a postcard. At the end of the day, they slapped together an old-fashioned deficit-financed tax cut for the rich that throws quarters at the middle class in hopes of disguising the $10 bills handed out to the rich. Flimflam and phaseout gimmicks, rather than reform and loophole closing, make it work.
Ryan has, of course, also abdicated Congress’s constitutional responsibilities in an unprecedented way. Under his leadership, the House of Representatives is a land of “see no evil” when it comes to Donald Trump’s financial conflicts of interests or the dozens of various corruption scandals swirling around Scott Pruitt and other members of his Cabinet. When it comes to Robert Mueller’s investigation, they have actively worked to thwart it.
This is sometimes described as cowardice on Ryan’s part, but I think it was actually all rather daring. To throw in so wholeheartedly with an unpopular and corrupt president in order to maximize your odds of enacting an unpopular legislative agenda is brave, not cowardly. Cowardice only entered into it lately, when, having led his caucus most of the way off the plank, Ryan chose to quit rather than jump with them.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=45434"><span class="small">Spencer Ackerman, The Daily Beast</span></a>
Wednesday, 11 April 2018 13:39
Ackerman writes: "With much of the world bracing for Donald Trump's new missile strikes on Syria, the president's legal authority to attack Bashar Assad is conspicuously AWOL."
The Commander in Chief is not a king who can go to war at will, and the Congressional authorization for the use of military force after 9/11 had nothing to do with ‘Animal Assad.’
ith much of the world bracing for Donald Trump’s new missile strikes on Syria, the president’s legal authority to attack Bashar Assad is conspicuously AWOL.
Assad isn’t subject to either of the two authorizations Congress passed after 9/11 to bless the use of military force. He’s not part of al Qaeda, nor a successor organization like the Islamic State—which is dubiously covered under the 2001 authorization as it is—nor is he part of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
The closest Trump aides have come to providing a domestic legal justification for striking Assad, offered by his former secretary of state, is that Trump possesses the inherent authority to do so as commander-in-chief, a gigantic assertion last used—and ultimately abandoned—by George W. Bush’s administration.
The implications are large and ominous, according to a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “If [Trump] strikes Syria without our approval, what will stop him from bombing North Korea or Iran?” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.
Trump’s casus belli is the apparent chemical weapons assault Assad launched on the Damascus suburb of Douma on Saturday. That assault, from which at least 70 are dead after an estimated 500 people were exposed, is “correctly characterized as a war crime,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, an international law specialist at the University of Notre Dame. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. can legally respond, absent a United Nations Security Council resolution, which Assad’s ally Russia will veto.
“Military force against Syria will violate international law just as surely as the use of chemical weapons. President Trump wants to enforce the law by breaking it,” O’Connell said.
Much like last April, when Trump ordered 59 Tomahawk missiles to hit a Syrian airfield used to stage a chemical assault on Khan Sheikhoun, Trump is likely to shoot first and answer questions about his legal authorities later—if ever. His administration has yet to declassify a legal memorandum, penned by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel around the time of last year’s Syria strike, that court papers describe as “advice and recommendations to the president and/or other senior Executive Branch officials regarding the legal basis for potential military action.”
That memo is the subject of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from the Protect Democracy Project, a bipartisan group centering around Obama administration attorneys. On Monday, the group filed an emergency motion for its release, citing the “potentially imminent military action” in Syria flowing from its contents.
“[T]his recent development indicates that the withheld documents are serving as the working law that embodies the agencies’ law and policy governing legal authority for the use of military force,” the group contended in its Monday filing.
But the memo, for now, remains withheld. The closest its contents have come to a public discussion is a comment made by Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, in October.
Asked, months after the fact, why the April 2017 strike on the Shayrat airbase was legal, Tillerson told Kaine that Trump ordered the strike “pursuant to his power under Article II of the Constitution as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive to use this sort of military force overseas to defend important U.S. national interests.” Since the strike came as a reprisal to Assad’s Khan Sheikhoun chemical attack, Tillerson continued, it was “justified and legitimate as a measure to deter and prevent Syria’s illegal and unacceptable use of chemical weapons.”
That was a statement of policy masquerading as a statement of law. Assad’s most recent chemical massacre was devastating to Syrian civilians, but there is no state of war between the U.S. and Assad—neither asserted by the White House as flowing from a declared war, nor declared by Congress itself. Accepting Tillerson’s assertion would open the door further to an “unbounded” presidential power, said Allison Murphy, counsel for the Protect Democracy Project, all without so much as an explanation.
“In our democracy, the Commander-in-Chief’s power is constrained by the Constitution and Congress, and the rule of law,” Murphy said. “If we concede that President Trump has unilateral authority to decide to strike Assad, do we concede he has similar authority to unilaterally strike North Korea, or Iran, or France?”
Yet Congress typically does accept such broad assertions of presidential warmaking authority, as it’s the path of least political resistance. Congress stood idly by as Bill Clinton attacked Serbian forces in Kosovo in 1999 and as Barack Obama attacked Muammar Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. Both of those were lengthy military campaigns, not one-off strikes like Trump’s 2017 cruise-missile strike on Shayrat.
It’s unclear if Trump is looking to do another one-off or something more substantial, since Assad’s repeated chemical attacks over the past year demonstrate that Trump’s 2017 strike ultimately failed. But Trump is suggesting that he’s all but given the order.
He pledged on Monday to make “some major decisions over the next 24 to 48 hours.” By the evening, ahead of a meeting with senior military officers, Trump said his new national security adviser, John Bolton, had “picked the right day” to start work, as “you’re going to find it very exciting.”
On Tuesday, Trump canceled what would have been his first trip to South America, scheduled for late this week, “to oversee the American response to Syria,” explained spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders. If that wasn’t enough, Trump has every incentive to change the subject from the extraordinary search warrants served on his personal attorney.
Bolton is no fan of international law, having famously quipped that the United Nations secretariat building could lose ten of its 38 stories and it “wouldn't make a bit of difference.” O’Connell, of the University of Notre Dame, said that an attack on Syria absent U.N. approval to reinforce a norm against chemical weapons usage is “reminding me of the old U.S. strategy in Vietnam of destroying a village to save it. And we know how well that turned out.”
Representatives of the National Security Council did not respond to a request for comment. The Justice Department and State Department declined comment. A Pentagon representative, Eric Pahon, declined comment about the legal predicates for any forthcoming strikes, but said: “The president and his national security team are consulting closely with allies and partners to determine the appropriate response.”
“Assad must face consequences for the horrific atrocities he’s committed against the Syrian people,” Kaine told The Daily Beast. “But President Trump needs to finally lay out a Syria strategy and come to Congress for approval if he wants to initiate military action. He’s a president, not a king, and Congress needs to quit giving him a blank check to wage war against anyone, anywhere.”
THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community.
he hinges are all hanging loose and broken.
t would seem but a matter of time before the president of the United States is asked a question under oath and gives a false answer. A lie, in other words. In the prequel, starring Bill Clinton, impeachment followed.
n Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg was in the hot seat. Cameras surrounded him. The energy in the room – and on Twitter – was electric. At last, the reluctant CEO is made to 
ouse Speaker Paul Ryan, who is announcing his retirement today, was not the most pernicious figure in American life during his era of prominence, but he was the biggest phony. 
ith much of the world bracing for Donald Trump’s new missile strikes on Syria, the president’s legal authority to attack Bashar Assad is conspicuously AWOL. 
