CSotD: Wives and Lovers and Weasels
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Clay Bennett (CTFP) points out what we all know, that Nikki Haley’s endorsement of Trump comes after a blistering primary campaign in which she repeatedly scored heavily against him.
Haley said in speeches that he was unfit for office and that the GOP could not win with him as their candidate, and her supporters continued to vote for her, even after she had withdrawn from the race.
But in an early debate when there were still several candidates, the moderator asked which of them would pledge to support the Republican nominee, whoever it turned out to be, and Nikki Haley raised her hand.
So why all the surprise? Is she a weasel for having declared him a bad candidate who would be a bad president, then turning around and offering him her support?
I suppose the answer is up to those who, given the choice between Haley and Trump, chose Haley. We’ll see their answers in November.
My guess is that some will stay home, more of them will vote for the Republican and very few will vote for Biden, despite his overtures to them.
Anyway, the political world is full of weasels. Lauren Boebert, for example, is only one of several Republican politicians happy to take credit for infrastructure projects in their home districts made possible by a major bill which they voted against.
I’m sure this revelation must come as a disappointment to voters who believed Lauren Boebert was a paragon of good character, but, sarcasm aside, Nikki Haley really was seen as a principled straight-shooter, so the two cases are only congruent in a cynical world.
What could be more cynical, Christopher Weyant asks, than ducking responsibility for your own extreme political viewpoints by foisting them on your wife and pretending you had no way to persuade her to keep quiet and accept having made a good marriage to a powerful political figure?
We don’t know much about Martha-Ann Alito, except that she apparently favors the violent overthrow of the American government when at home and the establishment of a white Christian Nationalist government when she’s on vacation.
And she apparently doesn’t mind compromising her husband’s reputation in proclaiming her beliefs, which gosh golly for goodness’ sake are certainly probably not his own.
(She’s not the weasel.)
As Ann Telnaes points out, this means only two of the nine justices of the Supreme Court (22%) are ethically compromised, given Ginni Thomas’s open lobbying for overthrow of the government and Clarence’s acceptance of major gifts from political activists.
Perhaps nobody told them that the expression “Politics makes strange bedfellows” is intended to be metaphorical, not literal.
As she suggests, there is also an ethical cloud surrounding the chief justice, given that he has failed to show any hint of leadership by attempting to enforce ethical guidelines that would be obvious even if he hadn’t authored a new set and promptly filed it away unused.
But take heart: Even so, only a third of the court (33.33%) is ethically compromised.
What could possibly go wrong?
I should have told RJ Matson my question was only rhetorical and wasn’t intended to reflect any real world legal possibilities.
After all, the truth will out!
Well, most of the truth will out, assuming nobody veers from spin and slant into blatant lies, such as deliberately misinterpreting a bit of standard boilerplate as a threat.
John Darkow illustrates what is either an intentional lie or evidence of paranoid insanity, given that every FBI search includes a guidance that agents are only to use deadly force if deadly force is threatened against them. Trump’s claim that this constituted a plan to assassinate him is not just incorrect but, to use a technical term, loony.
Darkow shows the bat guano fantasy, first of all, by having Trump present, when the feds specifically avoided confrontation by timing the search in Florida for when he was in New York. They also made a point of not wearing the marked caps and jackets seen in TV cop shows and in this cartoon, because, having alerted and coordinated with the Secret Service, they knew it would be a standard search with no need to fret over who was who at the scene.
But why let things like logic and facts get in the way of an outrageous story when you are addressing people who believe blood-sucking pedophiles are hiding in pizzeria basements?
Clay Jones offers a lovely rant on the topic, and both he and Darkow allude to the inconvenient fact that Trump’s own lawyers have argued that a sitting president could order the murder of a political opponent and be protected by the immunity they claim he has.
And while we’re talking about facts and about dubious insights, I’d like to have a time machine so that I could go back three weeks and ask Eric Allie (Counterpoint) and several others to name the president of Iran whose grave they are currently dancing upon.
They’re all rejoicing over how much they hated him, but they never mentioned him by name until his helicopter crashed.
I’ve followed Iranian politics through a variety of losses of human rights over the past quarter-century, and I couldn’t possibly have come up with his name, much less said anything specific about the guy, since the nation is obviously run by the Supreme Council, of which he was not a member.
Bart Van Leeuwen claims Raisi’s death leaves a power vacuum, but I hope that the “Expiring Soon” label on the jar refers to the power vacuum and not the regime, because Raisi was an interchangeable part and the results of the upcoming election are highly unlikely to threaten the Supreme Council’s stature.
I guess Raisi made some hateful, incendiary speeches, since, as Mike Smith (KFS) points out, that’s how you get to be president there. Sometimes it even works in other countries, but he and I both digress.
As Mike Lester (AMS) points out, we offered some basic cut-and-paste generic sympathy, not to him or even his government specifically but to the Iranian people.
The Senate Chaplain agonized over even doing that much, while National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby explained the government’s very limited response to the press:
There being a difference between being a weasel and showing common decency.
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