Category Archives: 2016 presidential campaign
Mother Of All Bannons
The U.S. dropped the biggest non nuke bomb ever on ISIS caves in Afghanistan last week. The bomb is so huge it has to be loaded into a C-130 transport and then shoved out the back door over the target (here’s a good ABC video if you don’t mind a 16 second commercial). The name of the bomb is GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB). Or Mother Of All Bombs.
Mother Of All Bombs
There’s speculation that Steve Bannon’s career in the White House is also turning into the mother of all bombs. He’s the guy most responsible for bringing in the “deplorable” vote which got Trump elected. But for now Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and economic advisor Gary Cohn seem to be pushing him out the back door. Meanwhile they’re pushing the president in a more moderate direction.
That is if you consider dropping the Mother of all Bombs moderate.
Reset of a Reset
President Trump doesn’t look like much of a Russian collaborator lately. Last week he bombed Putin’s Syrian Ally al Assad for using chemical weapons. Weapons the Russians promised to eliminate.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson got a chilly reception from his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov and President Putin in Moscow yesterday. And he didn’t bring a reset button with him.
Reset of a Reset
When asked on the Journal Report what he makes of the U.S. Russian relationship, Dan Henninger answered, “I guess you could call it a reset of a reset. Because whatever Donald Trump’s relationship may or may not have been with Vladimir Putin, it’s not the same as of this strike against Syria.” CNN says, “Donald Trumps Russia’s reset already needs a reset.”
Follow the Unmasking
The Trump/Russian conspiracy theory is dragging. For one thing, no real evidence is being presented. And for another Trump bombed Syria, the ally of his alleged co-conspirator Vladimir Putin.
Meanwhile, there is evidence Team Obama spied on Team Trump. Bloomberg‘s Eli Lake and others broke the story last week. Obama national security adviser Susan Rice purused raw intelligence data on Russians’ conversations with Trump associates. Spying on foreigners is legal but spying on Americans isn’t. When American citizens get caught up in foreign surveillance their names are supposed to be masked in the intelligence report.
Follow the Unmasking
But Susan Rice had American names unmasked. Adam Housley at Fox News reported that she then circulated raw reports with the unmasked names.
The unmasked names, of people associated with Donald Trump, were then sent to all those at the National Security Council, some at the Defense Department, then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and then-CIA Director John Brennan – essentially, the officials at the top, including former Rice deputy Ben Rhodes.
Somewhere along the line somebody leaked Michael Flynn’s name and he was forced to resign as Trump’s national security adviser. Kimberley Strassel in the Wall Street Journal suggests that FBI Director Comey has a conflict of interest in all this. And that it’s even possible “his staff was among the leakers.”
Andrew McCarthy wrote a column in National Review titled Susan Rice’s Unmasking: a Watergate style scandal.
War on Coal
Trump ended Obama’s war on coal, as promised. Come to think of it, I don’t know why Obama declared the war in the first place. Or why Hillary signed on for it. The natural gas industry went to war against coal for them. Gas is cheap, clean, and – despite President Obama’s efforts – plentiful.
So, looks like a rout.
Republican Majority
The last Republican majority in the House and Senate was during the Bush administration. They were better known for pork barrel earmarks than governing.
