President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

It'll be OK. You can go hire an attorney to sue Atlas. After tort reform, you might get enough to cover the legal bills.

 

Actually, that Consumer Protections Agency sounds great. I'll take one, please

 

There's no doubt that Obama loyalists within agencies are leaking, or that former Obama staffers are working to discredit Trump.

Two of Ben Rhodes former underlings -- office mates even -- recently resigned from their positions.

The guy, a CIA employee who worked for Rhodes, wrote a first person account in the Washington Post detailing his reasons for resigning.

He forgot to mention that he had donated $5,000 to Hillary and the Democratic Party, forcing the Post to later issue this clarification:

Clarification: This column should have included a disclosure of donations made by author Edward Price in support of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. In August, Price gave a total of $5,000 to the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party.

Opinion | I didn’t think I’d ever leave the CIA. But because of Trump, I quit.


The Atlantic gave the woman a forum to list her grievances in a first person account:

I Was a Muslim in the Trump White House—and I Lasted Eight Days

She gives the false impression that she was not a political appointee: Since I was not a political appointee, but a direct hire of the NSC, I had the option to stay.

But, she was a political appointee in the job she held. She'd only recently -- in January -- gotten a civil service position, so if she had stayed on, it wouldn't have been in the role she had under Obama -- at least not for long.

But, when asked about this, even the Atlantic doubled down on the misinformation:

When I emailed the editor of the Atlantic to ask for clarification regarding Ahmed's employment status in the White House, Atlantic magazine senior director for communications Anna Bross replied: "Rumana Ahmed was a direct hire by the NSC and not a political appointee. She was staff and planned to stay on."

That's wrong. Ahmed was a political appointee in the Obama White House. According to Trump White House officials, it was very late in her tenure in the Obama administration when she applied for a civil service position with administrative duties. "Burrowing," as it's commonly called, is the process through which political appointees move into career government status. She was granted her new status at the end of January, just as the Trump team was moving into the White House. That is, Ahmed took the highly unusual step for a White House staffer of choosing a considerably less ambitious career path in government, as she went from a junior policy position to a secretarial post.

Fake News, Exposed

So, Ben Rhodes, who bragged about writing narratives that he could push out into the echo chamber through friendly and/or uninformed journalists, is still doing his work. The question is why the Washington Post and the Atlantic continue to cooperate with him, and why we should trust them, and others, as long as they do.

 

Atlas Shat.

 

Sic 'im, Radar!

 

This thread just needs a mangling of Coase's Theorem by @Azrael to be complete ...

 

Just go ahead and say it: As long as my retirement account is growing because big business can do whatever it wants to the environment, I'm cool.

 

But now you've gone and put it so well ... How could I improve upon that without plagiarizing?

 

Look, I'm just trying to figure out where the line is here. I'm not saying the EPA is perfect. If there's a better way to ensure that we don't create Superfund sites all over the continent, I'm listening. But generally speaking, history (and frankly, current situations elsewhere in the world) show that, without regulation, whatever benefits the bottom line comes first. I'd love to have the government out of the environment business. What's the alternative?

 

I'm OK with the EPA, unless they cross the red line and tell me how to cook and eat my steaks.

 

Here's what the "CIA employee" who was actually Ben Rhodes deputy, though the his Post account doesn't mention this, says about his decision:

To be clear, my decision had nothing to do with politics, and I would have been proud to again work under a Republican administration open to intelligence analysis. I served with conviction under President George W. Bush, some of whose policies I also found troubling, and I took part in programs that the Obama administration criticized and ended. As intelligence professionals, we’re taught to tune out politics. The river separating CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., from Washington might as well be a political moat. But this administration has flipped that dynamic on its head: The politicians are the ones tuning out the intelligence professionals.

We get this from him:

There was no greater reward than having my analysis presented to the president and seeing it shape events. Intelligence informing policy — this is how the system is supposed to work. I saw that up close for the past three years at the White House, where I worked on loan from the CIA until last month.

But, he wasn't serving as a analyst. He was working in a political position, as the deputy to the Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting.

His job was political messaging.

Let's take a look at how he comes up in the infamous NYT Magazine profile of Rhodes:

The Boy Wonder of the Obama White House is now 38. He heads downstairs to his windowless basement office, which is divided into two parts. In the front office, his assistant, Rumana Ahmed, and his deputy, Ned Price, are squeezed behind desks, which face a large television screen, from which CNN blares nonstop.
...
Standing in his front office before the State of the Union, Rhodes quickly does the political math on the breaking Iran story. “Now they’ll show scary pictures of people praying to the supreme leader,” he predicts, looking at the screen. Three beats more, and his brain has spun a story line to stanch the bleeding. He turns to Price. “We’re resolving this, because we have relationships,” he says.

Price turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administration’s well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from “senior White House officials” and “spokespeople.” I watch the message bounce from Rhodes’s brain to Price’s keyboard to the three big briefing podiums — the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon — and across the Twitterverse, where it springs to life in dozens of insta-stories, which over the next five hours don formal dress for mainstream outlets. It’s a tutorial in the making of a digital news microclimate — a storm that is easy to mistake these days for a fact of nature, but whose author is sitting next to me right now.
...
In this environment, Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them — ”

“I can name them,” I said, ticking off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House messaging.

Price laughed. “I’ll say, ‘Hey, look, some people are spinning this narrative that this is a sign of American weakness,’ ” he continued, “but — ”

“In fact it’s a sign of strength!” I said, chuckling.

“And I’ll give them some color,” Price continued, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”

Yep. Just an apolitical, career CIA analyst, who was happy to provide the President with his analysis, who had to resign when he didn't respect the new guy.

Such a shame.

 

Has anyone else here ever actually seen a Superfund site?