More Drumbeats

Winds of War:  Trump met with his national security team yesterday to discuss “a range of options to respond to any form of North Korean aggression or, if necessary to prevent North Korea from threatening the US and its allies with nuclear weapons.” That last part is code for  preemptive strike, a concept that is particularly unnerving in light of Trump’s earlier suggestion that Secretary of State Tillerson was “wasting his time trying to negotiate” with rocket man Kim Jong Un and his tweet that “only one thing will work.”  While Trump met with his team, the US military, together with South Korea, flew two strategic bombers over the Korean peninsula in a show of force.  Concerned by Trump’s increasingly aggressive stance, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, hardly a shrinking violet, urged him to be careful with his rhetoric, because hot rhetoric “just puts an environment around the problem that’s hard to get it solved.” Unless they are totally new and innovative, the military options presented to Trump may not be much of a secret to Pyongyang since North Korean hackers stole US and South Korean classified wartime contingency plans last year when they breached the South Korean military’s computer network.  One of files they stole included South Korea’s plans to remove Kim Jong Un, a scheme that’s probably been feeding his paranoia and fueling his nuclear ambitions.  North Korea isn’t limiting its cyber intrusion efforts to the snatching of military plans, yesterday NBC reported that they’ve also been targeting US utilities with spearfishing emails.  Hopefully, no utility employees downloaded any invitations to disaster fundraisers because if they did, malware is now spreading through the US electric grid.  While North Korea sizzles, Trump is getting ready to start dismantling the Iran nuclear agreement, he is expected to announce that he will not recertify the Iran nuclear deal despite the efforts of his advisors and a number of world leaders, including France’s Macron and English Prime Minister May, who called him yesterday to tell him that trashing the agreement would speed up Iran’s nuclearization. It’s unlikely that Trump, will heed anyone’s advice.     

Russia, Russia, Russia:  An analysis by the Brookings Institution concludes that Trump likely obstructed justice in firing former FBI Director Comey.  Brookings believes that even though Trump had the authority to fire Comey, he couldn’t do so if his intention was to disrupt an ongoing investigation.  If Special Counsel Mueller reaches the same conclusion then legitimate articles of impeachment could be drawn up, a conclusion that sounds heartening but would require Republican leadership to actually stand up to Trump confronting the ire of his henchman, Steve Bannon, and the fury of a number of ultra-right wing billionaires who would rather that they focus their energies on passing big tax cuts.  The White House has not commented on the Brookings analysis but a number of Trump’s long term friends and allies are recommending that he aggressively pushback against Mueller’s investigation, they believe that Trump’s lawyers strategy of cooperating in the hope that Mueller will say that Trump didn’t collude or obstruct is “naïve to the existential threat” facing his tenure.  They want Trump to go back to street fighting and tweet attacking Mueller and his team.  For his part, Devon Nunes, the duplicitous head of the House Intelligence Committee, has started issuing subpoenas again as part of his effort to impugn the validity of any part of the infamous Christopher Steele dossier.  His current target is Glenn Simpson, the head of Fusion GPS, the political research firm that hired Steele to amass the dossier.  Simpson has been cooperating with the investigation so his lawyer calls the subpoena a “blatant attempt to undermine the reporting” of the dossier.  Carter Page, the bizarre character who served as a foreign affairs advisor to the Trump campaign and who has been the subject of a FISA warrant is once again in the limelight.  Page, who previously had no problem chatting away about all things Russian on several cable TV shows, is now clamming up. He told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he plans to invoke his Fifth Amendment rights if called to testify about election meddling. Facing a penalty for lying the talkative Page has finally shut up.                

Football Skirmishes:  Things are heating up in the “standing for the anthem” fight.  Yesterday Trump threatened the NFL’s tax exempt status, even though the league no longer has that status. Jerry Jones, owner of “America’s Team” the Dallas Cowboys said that going forward he will bench any player who doesn’t stand for the national anthem.  NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell sent a letter to team owners telling them to “move past the controversy,” now siding with Trump, he wants players standing during the anthem.  The league owners are meeting next week and plan to address the issue, whatever that means.  Lost in the discussion is that players are taking a knee over racial injustice, it’s Trump, who earlier dissed John McCain for being a prisoner of war and went after the mourning Gold Star dad, who has turned player protest into an insult to the flag, country and the military.  The players union promises to push back against any mandate that players stand, a command that will probably be ignored by many players anyway. Famed former player and coach Mike Ditka, who has clearly suffered at least one concussion too many, weighed in on Trump’s side saying there has been no oppression in the US in one hundred years.  Like racial inequality, this issue isn’t going anywhere.   

Fake News:  Last weekend Trump told former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee that “one of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with, is ‘fake,’ as in fake news.” Of course that was a piece of fake news, and today when Trump travels to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to push his tax reform plan he will begin his speech with one of his favorite false statements, saying that the US is the “highest taxed nation in the world.” In reality the US ranks 13^th among developed nations, but that hasn’t stopped Mike Huckabee’s daughter, Sarah, from defending Trump’s remarks by saying ”That’s what he’s talking about, we are the highest corporate taxed country in the developed economies across the globe.”  When it was pointed out that by referring to corporate taxes her comment disputed Trump’s she glared at the assembled reporters, nonsensically insisting that they’d just have to agree to disagree.  She has a job to do, and lying is part of it.  Trump is now claiming that the reason that he didn’t appoint his newest nemesis “liddle” Senator Bob Corker to be his Secretary of State is because the 5’ 7” Corker is too short for the role and he told Forbes Magazine that his IQ is much higher than that of Rex Tillerson, the guy who called him a moron.  Corker may be diminuitive, but in all liklihood Trump’s IQ claim is more fake news.

Health and Travel:  Last night, as expected, the Supreme Court dismissed the challenge to Trump’s now expired version of his travel ban without ruling on the merits of the case, a victory for Trump at least until the next law suit is filed. Trump is expected to soon sign an executive order loosening restrictions on buying health insurance policies across state lines, another effort to drain healthier, younger Americans away from Obamacare plans.  Yesterday, with a geriatric Henry Kissinger by his side, Trump said that the new order would save the former Secretary of State lots of money, apparently he doesn’t know that Kissinger qualifies for Medicare.