Dude, don’t make me come down to Canberra.
I saw former CIA Director Brennan talking about Mike Flynn’s pardon. And Brennan had this weird idea that Flynn had served honourably in the military and then somehow went wrong in private life. Brennan didn’t seem to understand why this happened to people.
And it’s like… You know you tortured people, right? And so all of the honourable people you worked with in the CIA were at least okay with torture. And the longer torture went on the more of the people around you liked torture.
I don’t know Flynn’s bio or whether Flynn had anything to do with that, but Flynn was in the military. The first thing that comes off the top of my head is a top to bottom policy of covering up sexual assault. If you spend your career in an organization where it was honourable to shield men from accusations of sexual assault then it is no wonder that you know “honourable” people who are amoral fucks.
I see the same thing when former members of congress and current Democratic ones talk about Republican senators who are protecting Trump. They talk like, “Hey, I know Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham, I can’t believe they are acting like this.” No you didn’t know them. If you didn’t think this was in their wheelhouse you didn’t know them at all. You constantly accept the unacceptable and then are surprised when a new threshold of unacceptable is crossed.
We have this insane narrative that people in their fifties and sixties who have lived righteous moral lives until that point can suddenly break bad under political pressure or mild temptation. If there was only one of them then maybe we could convince ourselves it was weird. But it’s not weird, it’s just that people can be terrible judges of character when it serves their interest to be.
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Glad he’ll be OK. Still, I’d rather have an active president who has pets and gets injured playing with them than a petty one who dislikes animals and fakes injuries to get out of military service.
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Who is her spouse again? Right - Alan Greenspan, Reagan appointee to the Fed Reserve Chairmanship.
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And here I am having already posted the “MORE WOMEN PRISON GUARDS” tweet…
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Hey, we care about mean tweets again! —Worthless News Media
Neera Tanden has criticised senators on Twitter
Zounds! Is that even legal?
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Well this sucks…
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Well, Joe could make him personally rebuild every sorting machine removed before the election.
Perhaps he’d quit after one or two.
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Prosecute him for election tampering. How’s the weather in Leavenworth, Louis?
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Won’t somebody think about the wall, all five miles of it… [clutches pearls]
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So do a lot of other picks.
Here we go again, socialism for the rich, neoliberal austerity for the rest of us.
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If your political aspirations are mainly about getting a seat at the table, these appointments may feel worth lauding. But they are in many ways symbolic gains, a point that even some of those who celebrate such symbolism can accept. Their takeaway is that girls will see these women in these jobs and realize “they can do that, too”—not that they will also have the means to do it or that it will necessarily improve many other women’s lives. It’s a regression to the kind of individualistic, girlboss feminism we have been trying to pull away from but that still has a powerful hold on those who posit a commitment to “gender equality” largely confined to who holds the power, not what they do with it.
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Diversity of appearance, not of opinion.
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The low goal of mixed faces in high places.
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Not sure if it applies to politics, but there have been solid studies of women in business leadership positions that shows that, corrected for all other factors, women push for more progressive policies across the board compared to their male counterparts.
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tld;dr: The problematic people in question are Brian Deese (NEC) and Wally Adeyemo (deputy treasury secretary), both from late-stage-capitalism poster child BlackRock. I’d add Neera Tanden into that mix.
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