Trump Taps Former Fox News Ideologue As UN Ambassador

The totally unqualified Heather Nauert.

As if proof of the premise of the previous post - i.e., that today's GOP is the party of the witless - were needed, Der Trumpenführer has selected someone utterly unqualified to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.  Rather than select someone with knowledge and experience, Trump picked a former Fox News ideologue who has a total of 16 months in government and no foreign policy experience.  It's reminiscent of Hitler's placement of  the unqualified in positions as long as they were loyal to him and would parrot his sick agenda. Bloomberg looks at this idiotic choice that is all too predictable given the Trump/Pence regimes recruitment of stooges to date.  Here are article highlights:

Donald Trump has settled on State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert to replace departing United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Nauert, 48, is an unusual choice for the UN role given that she had little experience in government or foreign policy before joining the administration in April 2017 after several years as an anchor and correspondent for Fox News, including on the “Fox and Friends” show watched by Trump. Haley also lacked foreign policy experience when she took the UN posting, but she had twice been elected governor of South Carolina.

Nevertheless, Nauert’s candidacy had the strong support of Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, who came to trust her as a reliable voice and advocate for Trump’s agenda. It was a stark turnaround from the era of Pompeo’s predecessor, Rex Tillerson, who shut her out from his inner circle. She had threatened to quit several times under Tillerson but, thanks partly to her alliance with Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband Jared Kushner, she ended up outlasting her former boss.

“Nauert is a very good public operator, and should do a professional job presenting U.S. policy at the UN,” Richard Gowan, a senior fellow at the United Nations University’s Center for Policy Research, said in an email. “It is less clear that she has the experience to hammer out hard deals with China and Russia over problems like Iran and North Korea.”

Aides believe Nauert’s key assets include strong communications skills and a fluency with the Trump White House, particularly in understanding the thinking of the president and secretary of state.

Nauert won’t face an easy confirmation battle given her lack of experience and the likelihood that she’ll be asked to answer for the Trump administration’s scorn for international bodies, including the UN. In a speech in Brussels this week, Pompeo made his doubts about the organization clear, asking, “Does it continue to serve its mission faithfully?”

“In the absence of any actual diplomatic experience I suppose it’s reassuring to UN supporters that she will arrive with no particular personal agenda,” said Loren DeJonge Schulman, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. But in a reference to Nauert’s background as a spokeswoman, she added, “It’s not a role for merely reading talking points.”

Brett Kavanaugh Lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee

Like Trump, Kavanaugh is the deliberate liar.

Sadly, today's Republican Party is synonymous with lying and working to endlessly dupe and deceive average Americans - a trait they seemed to have adopted from the Christofascist in the party base.  Trump's disturbing Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, appears to be no exception to this rule and as mounting evidence indicates, Kavanaugh perjured himself during bothe the current hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee as well as before his appointment to the DC Circuit.  It is bad enough that Kavanaugh is a partisan ideologue.  That he lies with abandon is even more disturbing.  A piece in Slate looks at Kavanaugh's apparent deliberate lies.  Here are excerpts:

Last week, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein accused Judge Brett Kavanaugh of repeatedly misleading the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings. “Brett Kavanaugh used materials stolen from Democratic senators to advance President Bush’s judicial nominees,” the committee’s ranking member tweeted. “He was asked about this in 2004, 2006 and this week. His answers were not true.”

Citing an essay in Slate by Lisa Graves, a former staffer for Sen. Patrick Leahy, Feinstein presented a line of argument that’s gaining currency among Democratic senators: that Kavanaugh’s lack of honesty makes him unfit to serve on the Supreme Court. In this case, Kavanaugh has repeatedly sworn that he never received documents stolen by Republican Senate aide Manny Miranda—documents that he did, in fact, receive.

Kavanaugh said to Hatch in 2004 that he didn’t receive “documents that appeared to [me] to have been drafted or prepared by Democratic staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.” He said to Sen. Chuck Schumer in 2004 that “Mr. Miranda never provided these documents” and that he had never “come across memos from internal files of any Democratic members.” And Kavanaugh said to Kennedy in 2006, “I do know that I never received any memos.”The bar for a lie here is to demonstrate that Kavanaugh had received any memos from Democratic staff or documents from Miranda that appeared drafted or prepared by Democratic judiciary staffers. By the plainest meaning of those words, Kavanaugh received both things.

Documents released last week reveal that in early 2003, Miranda sent Kavanaugh an email with the subject line “Judiciary Dems obstruct on reorganization.” That email contained a draft letter from Democratic Judiciary Committee members to Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle laying out their desired negotiating position over a new process for judicial confirmations. Miranda indicated to Kavanaugh that the document was not public at the time he sent it, saying, “I am told that all [Democrats] on the [Judiciary Committee]” were signing on to the document.

Another email released last week included a bullet-pointed memo written by Graves for Democratic staff. The memo contains a laundry list of research Graves put together for Judiciary Committee staff laying out legal arguments Democrats planned to make regarding a controversial Bush judicial nominee. . . . Miranda’s email to Kavanaugh describes this memo as “confidential information” from “Dem staffers.”

But even if Kavanaugh didn’t suspect at the time that this was a stolen memo, it should have been obvious after Miranda’s theft became a major news story. And yet he insisted under oath that nothing that Miranda stole ever crossed his desk.

Other former staffers whose material was stolen argue it’s absurd to contend that Kavanaugh would not have known that this detailed information wasn’t ripped off directly from the Democrats themselves.

Bob Schiff, former chief counsel for Sen. Russ Feingold, added. “To hear Judge Kavanaugh testify recently that this was kind of common for there to be information shared across the aisle as his way of explaining why key Democratic arguments and plans [were not suspicious to him] does not ring true.”

If the documents that have been released in recent weeks had come to light in 2006, they could have easily torpedoed Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Even without those documents, which clearly demonstrate that Kavanaugh has misled the Senate, his appointment was incredibly controversial.

Kristine Lucius, who worked for Leahy on the Senate Judiciary Committee from 2002 through 2017, argued that these revelations would have stopped Kavanaugh’s judicial career cold. “I sincerely believe that if this information had been out at the time of his lower court confirmation hearing, he would not have been confirmed,” she argued. Lucius noted that Kavanaugh’s nomination to the D.C. Circuit occurred just after a sergeant-at-arms report was released detailing Miranda’s theft, when feelings on the subject were “still quite raw.”