I can’t help but feel this is using guilt by association to find something to be disappointed about.
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He also appears to be the only really bad one in the group. I’m much more worried about the announced appointments. Specifically, I find Avril Haines the most disappointing. She’s a big torture fan, and basically all the other bad stuff we do. She’s also a consultant for like Thiel’s nightmarish project.
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You’re searching for my motives? Okay, I’ll try to explain them.
This is a thread about Biden’s appointments, and presumably, the tea leaves to be read therein about his administration’s likely direction and plans.
Liberals in the U.S. have a bad habit of falling back into complacency once an obviously awful, odious conservative politician has been vanquished. For them, centrist sins tend to go unseen.
Seems to me that when Biden appoints people with cozy ties to big, BIG money (and thus to the abuses that seem to inevitably go along with the attainment of huge piles of hoarded loot), we should spend more time keeping those nefarious connections in focus, and less time celebrating “diversity” and “decades of institutional experience.”
So far, I have no trouble finding “something to be disappointed about” in Biden’s appointments. His party has made some great gains in terms of real progressive policy pushers, e.g., The Squad. Progressive Dems need the continued help and effort of clear-eyed supporters.
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It also occurs to me that electing someone should not be the end of political engagement, as some seem to believe electing “not Trump” is enough, when it’s really not. If we want the Biden administration to reflect progressive values, then being critical of things such as his appointments is incredibly important to getting that done. We should do that with ALL our elected officials, even those who are closer to our political values. They can’t improve if we don’t provide them feedback on what they’re doing, right?
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Agreed. Law firms like that are huge. Maybe there’s something with more details about the types of legal cases involved, and whether or not this individual had anything to do with them. I mean, I’ve worked for a variety of corporations during my career, and would hate to see someone paint me as 100% on board with everything those firms did before, during, and after my time there in areas where my influence was minimal.
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But you weren’t a partner at a legal firm, right? And who said anything about Mayorkas being 100% on board with everything his firm does?
At any rate, hearing alarm bells in his case isnt the same thing as impugning guilt by association. Something something lying down with dogs, fleas, etc.
But yes, here’s hoping that some intrepid reporters are looking into what’s available about the types of legal cases involved, and whether or not this individual had anything to do with them.
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It’s rather sad that simply “qualified for the position” is now considered laudable these days.
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I’m concerned, but there are immigration lawyers and immigrant advocates that are very happy with the appointment as well so I have mixed feelings.
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What it tells me is that he’s a member of the establishment and that he’s going to prioritise the security of corporate entities like his firm’s clients over that of regular humans. Which, no big surprise.
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Intel chief pens congratulatory letter to President-elect Biden urging work on immigration and domestic manufacturing
Intel CEO Bob Swan has penned an open letter to President-elect Joe Biden congratulating him on his win, and urging his incoming administration to continue investment in domestic semiconductor manufacturing.
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I’m with you. I want to see who Mayorkas represented. But there’s also over 1,000 lawyers at that firm. I wouldn’t hold out a half-dozen of their clients as representative of the firm’s values, much less every lawyer at the firm.
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By all accounts, the frontrunner to be Joe Biden’s pick for Secretary of Defense is Michèle Flournoy. It’s a prospect that should do more than set off alarm bells — it should be understood as a scenario for the president-elect to stick his middle fingers in the eyes of Americans who are fed up with endless war and ongoing militarism.
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Mayorkas was Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security under Obama. I don’t really see anyone else that I would default this job to.
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To be honest, I was thinking more about the guy in the tweet than you, but thanks for the explanation!
I do agree that people shouldn’t get complacent or anything. But the complaints in the tweet were, as @PsiPhiGrrrl says, extremely vague – being a partner at a very big law firm, which has represented big banks and companies like GE and Boeing (and calling either of them “weapons manufacturers” is really oversimplifying it), doesn’t mean Mayorkas has been doing anything bad or even vaguely shady himself.
I mean, if he has personally been involved in some egregious corporate bullshit, or covering up bad deeds or something, that’s an entirely valid reason to criticize him and, by extension Biden and his transition team. But I really do think that being down on him for the reasons in the tweet isn’t constructive or reasonable.
Hopefully this clarified what I meant, even in case you disagree. 
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That is brilliant. Am stealing this.
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How about being suspicious of him? Seems to me there’s a difference.
The Tweet that’s getting under your hopeful skin states neither that the writer is “down” on Myorkas, nor that he’s merely suspicious of him. Nonetheless, I take the information provided in the Tweet as confirmation that I’m justified in being the latter.
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It’s starting to look like it may not be long before we’ll need a thread called The Gallery of Biden-inspired Assholes.
There is a temptation to take a moment to breathe, to celebrate that the Trump administration has been voted out (although Trump appears determined to maintain power), and to hold on to hope that Biden will mark a turn away from some of Trump’s worst impulses, including his war mongering. But we learned from the earliest days of the Obama administration that it is sober assessment — rather than projection — that is called for in moments like this.
Obama, with Biden at his side, oversaw intervention in Libya, disastrous involvement in the Yemen war, ongoing occupation in Afghanistan, support for the coup in Honduras, and much more. And Biden is now pulling from the same team of advisors and influence peddlers and consultants who helped make it all happen.
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—
If you are confronted with two evils, thus the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Those who denounce the moral fallacy of this argument are usually accused of a germ-proof moralism which is alien to political circumstances, of being unwilling to dirty their hands.
Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
— Hannah Arendt
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The empire is bipartisan.
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Seems like Ron Wyden knows what he’s talking about. Maybe Brennan shouldn’t disparage a sitting Senator who has served this country for decades.
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