Profiles in Courage: Patel, Hegseth, RFK Jr.
One in a continuing series / Next up: Roger Stone, Roy Cohn & Sidney Powell
Kash Patel – When confronted at confirmation hearings with evidence of everything he stands for, the now FBI Director no longer stood for anything. But then this passionate Trump loyalist has been living in the Post-Fact Era longer than the rest of us. So, when your words come back to haunt you, question whether you said the words. Or question the questioner. Or just say you can’t answer because, “I don’t have that in front of me.” Translation: You say I said it, but you’re one of “them,” so unless it’s right here in front of me, I deny your right to have heard it or even to ask me about it. We done here? Nixon had The Plumbers. Trump will have The FBI.
Pete Hegseth – Trump’s neophyte Defense Secretary clearly has the depth to manage the world’s largest military. After sending a rather detailed war plan to a journalist during an unsecured chat session on Signal, Hegseth faulted the journalist (the quintisenntial Trump beatdown) and said the war plan wasn’t a war plan anyway (must have been a peace plan). Do any Trump appointees take responsibility for their mistakes? Before being appointed to manage the world’s largest military organization, Hegseth was in full command of a Fox & Friends couch while married and sleeping with his TV Fox producer. But there’s more, like links to right-wing militia groups during his military service. His first order of business: Abandon Ukraine, cozy up to Vladimir Putin and alienate US pilots by leaking their morning briefing. At ease, Russia & China, we have met the real enemy … incompetence.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – look for his photo in the next edition of Webster Dictionary under “sketchy.” Can a wealthy, entitled crackpot ooze incompetence more reliably than this purveyor of half-truths and baseless medical conspiracies. Add in a few hilariously biazarre life incidents and you get an ominous combo meal: unlucky, and half-baked at the same time. Well, now he’s the nation’s health secretary. So get ready for a right-wing renissance of traveling medicine shows, Yellow Fever, measles, and whooping cough. Wasn’t the Enlightenment just another bad left-wing idea, anyway?
Next up: Roger Stone, Roy Cohn & Sidney Powell
About this series: Many stand by him, defend him, or look the other way. Others voice private misgivings yet support him in public. Politicians, appointees, lawyers, provocateurs – the powerful and those seeking power, see only opportunity and take it, hoping we’ll look the other way and someday forget those who aided and abetted his assault on democracy during and after his administration(s).
Someday, many of the people listed here will have an “epiphany,” pleading ignorance, gullibility, even temporary insanity. They will not want to be remembered as supporters of a petty, narcissistic grifter. But the truth was always in plain sight. If there must be healing so must there be truth-telling for those listed here.
Pledge that you will speak out whenever anyone defends or rationalizes their actions. Point out that every one of them has had many opportunities to push back against tyranny in defense of liberty. These are, in no particular order, the powerful Americans who helped elect and sustain a man who trashed our nation’s most precious asset, the orderly transfer of executive power, a gift he pledged to protect and defend in his Constitutional Oath of Office.
This is the generation of “leaders” who ushered America into the new Post-Fact Era when plausible deniability trumps the truth and strategic ambiguity floods our political discourse with doubt and distrust, sowing the seeds for the potential collapse of our delicate democratic way of life.