Dedicated Public Servants: the Antidote to Trump

The Trump/Pence regime and its entourage of grifters and crooks is a huge malignancy on America.  It is like watching a crime syndicate writ large except that even in "The Godfather,"  Don Vito Corleone had some shred of principles.  Trump has none.   This past week in sharp contrast, Americans got to witness the testimony of career diplomats and public servants who  take their jobs and duties seriously and adhere to a code of duty, honor, country. The contrast between these individuals and Trump - and Devin Nunes based on the new CNN reporting - could not be more stark.  We need more of these people in government and in politics if we are to save the nation and its soul.  Andrew Sullivan notes this in column in New York Magazine that focuses in particular on Fiona Hill who dismantled the lies and obfuscation being put worth by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee.  Here are excerpts: 

I’ve been in Britain, so it was tough to give this week’s impeachment hearings the attention they deserve. But one obvious theme has emerged: the imperturbability, professionalism, and courage of the women who have testified. When I sat down last night and watched some of the footage of Fiona Hill online, I was gobsmacked.

One of the wretched things about the last few years has been following and staying sane in the blizzard of bluster, misinformation, gaslighting, conspiracy theories, and the actual empirical, complex reality we have been confronted with. To keep one’s focus while enduring this torrent of deliberate confusion and competing narratives has been extremely hard.

But not for Hill.

Watching her listen carefully to Castor and Nunes’s questions and arguments, and then just as carefully, methodically dismantle them was a kind of cleansing shower in an impossibly humid summer. Her clear distinction between national security and a “domestic errand” is at the heart of the profound corruption in this presidency, and I have simply never seen it expressed so coherently and plainly.

This is why we needed impeachment hearings. We can see this “deep state” for the patriotic professionals so many of them are. We can pierce through the propaganda and see the Washington that many of us who live there have always seen: countless quiet, principled public servants, usually genuinely seeking the public good. Yes, there are many, many cronies and lobbyists and swamp-dwellers as well. But they are outnumbered.

And to see how these people have had to endure a president this deranged, this indifferent to the truth, this craven toward the enemies of the United States because they can be assets for his domestic political purposes is to experience the appropriate amount of anger toward the damage he has done. It feels like a moment to me.

And it is right and just that it has been women who have faced down this belligerent, blustering tyrant. And not just women but immigrant women, whose commitment to this country and its ideals can often be more intense than those of the native born.

She knows what’s at stake. And she has done her part. It gives me hope, I guess. Hope that we can, in fact, expose and defeat this malignancy at the heart of our democracy.

If we see Trump as the poison he truly is, we have now also seen something else. We have seen the antidote. 

Carl Bernstein Savages McCain

Carl Bernstein , the former Washington Post reporter of Watergate fame, has a column that is nothing short of a brutal in his assessment of the craven, dishonorable figure John McCain has become. Not only are his campaign tactics worthy of a slimy used car salesman, but his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate becomes less defensible with every passing minute that she opens her mouth. Again, I am not anti-woman and have two extremely intelligent and capable daughters. From watching Palin's interviews and reading the transcripts, my 19 year old college student daughter is (a) more savvy (and more honest), and (2) knows a hell of a lot more about issues, both domestic and foreign.

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Palin calls herself a hockey mom. Candidly, she strikes me as a cold weather version of the mindless soccer moms of this area who worry about children's sports events and piss ant PTA fundraisers, yet are oblivious as to the larger issues in the state, nation and the world. And I reach that assessment without even having to factor in her lunatic religious beliefs. With Palin on the national ticket, no wonder there is talk of America's fading empire. We must look like absolute morons - what McCain and the GOP apparently are counting on - to those living in educated foreign countries. Here are highlights from Bernstein's column:

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Three weeks after the 2008 Republican convention, on the cusp (maybe) of the first presidential debate, it is time to confront an awkward but profound question: whether in picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has committed -- by his own professed standards of duty and honor -- a singularly unpatriotic act.

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[W]hat does John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin -- the cavalier, last-minute process of her selection and careless vetting; and her over-briefed, fact-lite performance since -- reveal about this military man who has attested to us for years that he is guided by his personal code of honor?

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It does not take a near-death experience to know that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be commander in chief, or that -- in choosing her -- McCain has ignored his own oft-avowed code of conduct. "McCain made the most important command decision of his life when he chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee," noted David Ignatius in the Washington Post. "....No promotion board in history would have made such a decision."

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The conservative commentator George Will has been especially incisive of late about the "dismaying," "un-presidential temperament" of McCain and the sleazy tenor of his campaign. Karl Rove (!) has responded to the incessant lying of McCain's ads (one claims falsely that Obama has promoted "comprehensive" sex education for five-year-olds -- he had, in fact, endorsed legislation to insure that kindergartners were warned about sexual predators), by saying, yes, the McCain camp's mendacity has "gone one step too far."

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The issue of Palin's relative ignorance about international affairs and the larger world beyond America's shores (compared to previous vice presidential nominees), her attending arrogance in seeming to revel in it, and McCain's decision to subject the country to it in choosing a possible president -- is the biggest question in this election, or perhaps ought to be.

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Ultimately it is the choice of Palin, made in the moment when action speaks loudest, that may undermine a quarter-century of assertions by John McCain about the preeminence of duty, honor and country in his political schema.