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| Matt Gaetz |
Some folks think Gabbard is the worst pick. She’s a seriously unserious person with a penchant for blame-America-first arguments and flip-flopping like a wounded moth trying to find the limelight. The director of national intelligence should be a stolid, solid man or woman in a gray suit, an answer to a tough trivia question, not a political and ideological exotic.
Others think Kennedy is the worst pick. I have to agree that he’s the worst person of the bunch, and I say this even if all of the allegations against Matt Gaetz are true (and I’m open to the possibility that some aren’t). Kennedy is a profoundly dishonest and dishonorable man.
In 2001 alone, he cheated on his wife 37 times. This isn’t gossip. This is his own account. And it wasn’t bragging. That number comes from his own diary. His wife found the journal, and it apparently played a role in her suicide
We can come back to his shoddiness in a moment. But I am happy to concede, as an intellectual matter, that an adulterous sleazeball could make for a competent Health and Human Services secretary. His grotesque personal behavior should be a reason to disqualify him from any honored role in public life—yes, I’m one of those judgy conservatives—but reasonable people can disagree about such things. But it is his “professional,” public behavior that should make him unacceptable.
For starters, there’s nothing in his résumé that qualifies him to oversee 1 in 4 dollars spent by the federal government. Then there’s the fact that he’s a crank and fabulist who insists, to name just two examples, that cell phones and Wi-Fi cause cancer. Think about how much you’ve been exposed to Wi-Fi and cell phone signals over the last 20 years. It’s certainly true that massive exposure to electromagnetic radiation is best avoided. But if he was right, you’d think we’d see an increase in the cancers he says are caused by moderate exposure. There has been none.
The Heritage Foundation and others think he’s a hero because of his anti-vaccine crusade in the COVID era. I think that’s all nonsense for the most part. But he was anti-vax when conservatives were mocking anti-vaxxers as left-wing loons. His anti-vax group directly contributed to the deaths of 83 Samoan children from measles, and the supposedly science-driven Kennedy simply lied about it.
Kennedy is an intellectual lightweight hungry for respect as an expert. So he talks like an expert with the hope that people won’t notice that he’s just making stuff up.
In a secret recording, he just made up nonsense about COVID being bioengineered to target black and Caucasians while sparing Jews and Asians. It was all nonsense. So by all means … let’s give him a $2 trillion budget?
And then there’s Matt Gaetz. Personally, I think he’s the worst pick, because the attorney general is a lodestone of the executive branch. I totally get how under the theory of the unitary executive, the attorney general is just an extension of presidential authority. But there’s a longstanding expectation that the attorney general is supposed to be a de facto—if not necessarily a de jure—check on abuses of executive authority. This is why conservatives complained so bitterly about previous attorneys general being too chummy with the president, starting in the modern era with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s father.
Over the years, thousands of right-wing op-eds and cable news diatribes have excoriated Janet Reno, Eric Holder, Merrick Garland et al. for too much water-carrying for Democratic presidents. The factual merits of those indictments vary, but the principle they invoked was correct. The only argument for Gaetz boils down to “we should do it too!”
If you believe that overly politicized AGs are bad, if you wax righteous about the rule of law, and if you decry politicized prosecutions (accurately or not), arguing “now it’s our turn” is not an honorable, moral, or patriotic argument. But that is the only argument for Gaetz
America can handle a flibbertigibbet in the DNI’s office. It can handle a dangerous loon at HHS. It can even handle an anti-woke cable news host as defense secretary. But an attorney general whose only “qualification” is to be a MAGA version of the Hand of the King, makes the burden of handling those other things infinitely more burdensome.
Gaetz would not see getting to the bottom of executive branch excesses as part of his portfolio—he would see defending and enabling those excesses as central to his mission. Trump wants a Roy Cohn to run the Department of Justice, and that alone is reason to reject his preferred choice.
Indeed, that’s the real problem with all of these picks: the picker.
Trump wants loyalists, enablers, and TV pitchmen to staff his administration. There’s nothing we can do—now—to change that. He was legitimately and decisively elected president. But every senator was elected to be a senator, too. And, according to the Constitution, their job isn’t to “support the president,” but to protect and defend the Constitution and, with that in mind, to advise and consent to presidential appointments.
Rod's Comment: I agree. Although, if Tulsi Gabbard really is a Russian asset, having her in charge of American intelligence could pose serious security risk to the nation. Kennedy is a nutjob of the first order and could lead to millions of deaths if America has a major health crisis and if we do not, it could lead to a resurgence of diseases that have mostly been eradicated and cause the death of many American, especially children. On balance, however, I must agree that Gaetz is the worst of the picks. Having an Attorney General whose task is to go after the presidents' critics is a danger to our democracy and a step toward a true authoritarian regime.
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