The first significant administration departure.
Karoline Leavitt is leaving her post as White House Press Secretary.
There's going to be a lot of speculation as to why she did this, but let's credit what she said. She's 28 years old, and just had a baby.
Her second.
Her husband is 32 years her senior.
Leavitt is a Catholic, as am I, but she's completely ignored the Catholic injunction against lying. Lying on serious matters is a serious sin. Personally, while I can not know her mind, I think she knows she's a liar.
I think she likely knows at this point, at age 28, that she needs to reform and repent. Her first child was born out of wedlock with her current husband, Nicholas Riccio. The second was born within the union. Her affiliation with Trump has locked her into a web of lies for which she'll always be remembered. Indeed, while this blog entry is somewhat forgiving, most pundits will not be, witness:
Karoline Leavitt Will Soon Lie Somewhere Else
From The New Republic.
I bet she knows that, and that it's time to get out while she can. Get out, confess, and get clear. Even at that, the burden she has of repenting from such a public life of outright lying is a heavy one.
I bet she tackles that. A tell all book will be forthcoming. . . it'll be out before Trump leaves office at the end of this term, if old age doesn't take him to his reward, or lack of one, before that.
Well, may she find a path to peace. She needs it.
So do her two children.
It won't be easy, overall, we might note. Lots of people eventually confront their sins and reform, but very few have to confront the public record of it, which in the modern age lasts forever. Leavitt is, as The New Republic notes, an outrageous liar and that will follower her the rest of her life.
Indeed, if you look at people who had really vile roles serving really vile people, and Leavitt's role has been vile and Donald Trump is a vile person, it's really hard to find anyone who overcomes it. Albert Speer probably came as close to it as anyone, but even he, as charming as he was, never really did. Georgy Malenkov, part of Stalin's government, completely fell after Stalin and eventually became a Russian Orthodox Lector, a sort of clerical position in the Eastern Rite churches.
The American things, of course, is to try to convert your infamy into a sort of fame, which is always sort of pathetic. Monica Lewinsky is the prime example.
Well, as noted, my guess is that Leavitt, while home raising her children, will start working on a tell all book. By the time its released she's reveal, I'm guessing, how she never loved Donald Trump.
I also bet that Trump, right now, lives in fear of what that book will reveal.
Mini Mutinies.
Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln have been trying to jump overboard to their deaths.
At least those are the reports, confirmed in at least one case by the spouse of a sailor who tried to do just that. "Big T" Pete Hegseth called the reports "fake news", with the Trump administration branding anything that is actually true as fake.
The ship, launched in 1988, has experienced food shortages, moldy showers, broken toilets, dead laundry facilities, and a lack of basics necessities such as soap and toothpaste during its ninth month deployment.
It's interesting in part because such conditions, while appalling, would not have been that much out of the norm in earlier eras. Sailors just endured it. But then, they endured a lot of similar conditions in daily life. People were, in fact, tougher than they are now.
But it's also interesting as it might reveal something else going on.
The lats time the US Navy had really serious shipboard problems of this type was during the late stages of the Vietnam War, when the USS Kitty Hawk and the USS Constellation endured mutinies the Navy has refused to acknowledge as mutinies. These were serious events and they came at a point in time at which US military morale was at its lowest point since the Mexican War, during which time it had such low morale in some quarters that troops had deserted to join the Mexican Army.
The problem had expressed itself first in the Army, with the Army starting to experience everything from quiet disobedience in Vietnam to some outright revolts in the US. The Kitty Hawk incident occured in 1972 with the Constellation event happening the following year. Nothing like that has happened since.
The Kitty Hawk had a hard Vietnam War deployment of eight months before it was ordered back into combat and the event began. That's notable, as the Abraham Lincoln has been out nine months.
Also notable for the 1972 and 1973 events is that everyone had completely lost faith in the Vietnam War by that time, and frankly in the military itself. Rarely noted during the revision of the history of the war, the Vietnam War had destroyed the American Army as a combat effective force. The US was lucky that none of our adversaries attempted any sort of additional war at the time. We likely could not have successfully contested one.
Servicemen who served in peacetime Navy before the Second World War were sort of their own breed. A lot of them were tough careerist for whom the Navy itself was their home. Set in that era, the movie The Sand Pebbles does a good job of showing what their view was like, and of course it came from a novel by a veteran who had served in that time. A sort of oddly nostalgic look at the same thing, but set in 1973, is Cinderella Liberty, one of two sort of cynical Navy movies released that year, the other being The Last Detail.
During World War Two sailors, most of whom were wartime volunteers, knew what they were fighting for. In the Cold War, for the most part, they did too. Mutinies came when that was no longer clear.
It sure isn't clear now. American servicemen aren't serving in a just cause and all of the military actions during the Second Trump Administration have been illegal, with one, the boat destruction off of South America, constituting murder of the targets. The current war shows ever sign of being endless and pointless, and the men know it.
Some honorable commanders have simply resigned. Enlisted men can't do that. Serving in an illegal war on a ship that's a craphole, they're serving an administration in which many of them are not the right kind of people, as the administration sees it. US resources are now really stretched on top of it. All in all, what's going on board on the USS Abraham Lincoln isn't a good sign.
Toy boats
Part of what's not very honorable is the insane playing along which amounts to marking time until Trump is out of office. The Navy is doing that with the Trump Class of big missile cruisers which King Donny wants built. Termed "battleships", because Trump knowns nothing about this topic and apparently thinks that battleships are nifty, rather than rendered obsolete decades ago, the CBO estimates that if built they'll cost the country $275B over 30 years.
They won't be built.
They are already costing the country money however.
Like the ballroom, this will keep dragging along until Trump is retired or falls face first in a Big Mac, at which time it'll be terminated.
Monuments to failure
On costs, it's now estimated that all of Trump's D.C. projects will cost nearly 1B.
The country doesn't have this kind of money and we know it.
Had Joe Biden proposed spending 1B on D.C. renovations, Republicans would be howling around the city crying "fiscal responsibility!" and people like Gray, Ranser, and Friess would be warning about the republic being on the verge of ending. The Wyoming Freedom Caucus would be howling.
Not one Republican is going to say a word about this.
Part of the outrageous nature of the expense is what the administration is planning on. Building is expensive and tearing down is expensive also.
The Democrats can be planned on to have angst about the expense of tearing things down as its expensive. They already are. Additionally, the Democrats remain dedicated to the law, whereas the GOP does not. The GOP knows that as well and is no doubt planning that the process of tearing crap down will be tied up by worries about the expense and legalities of it.
Well, on this one, the next President should in fact take a page out of Trump's book. Within an hour after the inauguration the Corps of Engineers should be ordered to remove whatever has been constructed of the ballroom with in 24 hours, tear down what ever has been built of an arch within the same time frame, and de-guild the bronze statues, even if it means their destruction, with in six hours. By the end of the 24 hours all the gold or gold appearing nicknacks in the White House ought to be removed to the bunker and the entire thing filled with cement. The reflecting pool should be drained and the Rhino Lining torn up.
Contracts with anyone who contributed to these atrocities should be cancelled and the entities barred from future government contracts.
Radical reconstruction.
Replacement?
People are already wondering who will replace Leavitt as Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda. Fortunately, Wyoming offers the perfect solution.
By Tony Webster - Flickr, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=169386648
Chuck Gray.
Chuck loves Donald Trump more than Karline Leavitt ever did. Chuck would never leave. And he already as experience as a spoken media figure, having had a radio show on his daddy's radio station, and he is a really experienced liar.
Leavitt said some really outrageous stuff while she was spokesman, but they don't hold a candle to the sting of accusations that Chuck retouinely hurls out. Why he'd be calling people communists, Marxist, fascist, abiogenist,dogmatist,lutist, prologistableist, dramatist, in no time.
His only disadvantage would be that he's not a woman. Most of the recent ones have been. On the other hand, he's not married and he can't get pregnant (shoot, he's never even seen with women, or men, or mammals) so he won't be going anywhere.
And this gets him out of having to pretend that he's a Wyomingite nad having to buy all that Westerware.
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