Monday roundup

 It's November now, and it's off to a glorious start where I live. I'm taking pictures of the trees like crazy. We haven't had this kind of splendor, certainly not this late, for several years. It's one thing that's going right in a world that is tainted in so many ways.

Several entries in today's roundup have to do with the global climate.

Stanley Young of the Heartland Institute has filed suit against the federal government for dismissing all seven members of the Clean Air Advisory Committee.

The desires of the climate alarmists notwithstanding, coal is still vital to the energy mix:

Although the COP26 virtuous don’t want you to know it, rebounding economies and the ongoing global energy crisis have vaulted much-maligned coal to the top of the energy food chain, once again.

President Biden’s energy-climate policies have apparently been more friendly to coal than those of President Trump. 

New federal data has U.S. coal-fired power generation leaping 22% in 2021 to 945 terawatt-hours - the first annual increase for coal since 2014. 

Coal will generate nearly a quarter of U.S. electricity this year, with competitor natural gas prices doubling since June to over $6.00. 

The demand boom has U.S. coal companies now offering miners six-figure salaries. 

Not too shabby for a commodity that the media has loved to leave for dead for well over a decade now. 

“Coal’s burnout,” The Washington Post declared on January 2, 2011. 

Personal politics permeating “journalism” continues to leave us energy-climate stupid. 

And with President Xi Jinping not expected to attend the upcoming COP26 climate summit, the world’s top consumer is hardly “getting off coal.

Even Europe is starting to see that its goofy skittishness about normal-people forms of energy is becoming prohibitively costly.

Good old coal is still great stuff:

Only ~20% of global coal usage is internationally traded, making coal a largely domestic resource with huge energy security advantages for consumers.  

By comparison, ~33% of gas and ~75% of oil are swapped from country to country. 

Coal is a foundational resource in all-important Asia, so demand typically grows as the population and economy expand. 

Globally, coal is still easily the main source of electricity at 37-40% of all generation. 

Coal accounts for 60-65% of the electricity generation in China and 68-73% in India – the two most significant incremental energy users that hold ~35% of humanity.

Vijay Jayaraj of the Heartland Institute takes offense at a tweet from a woman whose Twitter profile lists as her creds "trying to save the planet, got good green ideas, just need someone to help me . . . get them done," and understandably so:

n this age of green craze, the most likely response to legitimate concerns about the lack of access to energy for the world’s poor is advocacy for so-called renewable technologies such as wind turbines and solar panels.

As embarrassing as that suggestion should be to the advocate of such unreliable and impractical energy sources, there are sometimes even more cringe-worthy replies that verge on the inhumane.  A recent tweet of mine prompted one such response.

The tweet was directed to attendees of COP26, a United Nations climate conference that gets underway this month at Glasgow.  The annual conference seldom addresses third-world energy poverty, which deprives billions of people of basic needs like clean water, lights, and modern medical care.  Many of these people are subjected to indoor pollution from cooking and heating with wood and animal dung while bureaucrats and politicians preach the banning of the very fossil fuels necessary to alleviate their suffering.

When I questioned in a tweet the evident lack of empathy for poor people in developing parts of the world, a person responded that India has too many people.

“I want COP26 attendees to ask themselves a simple question,” my tweet stated.  “What are they going to do about those in the third world who still do not have access to affordable & reliable energy — both for cooking and for electricity? We need gas, oil, and coal. Do not enforce energy apartheid on us.”

The response tweet said, “India is seriously overpopulated, they need to breed less.”

Breed less?  How can an Indian like myself not be insulted by such an anti-human suggestion?  Are the 1.3 billion people of India lab rats with no right to procreate as we see fit?

Hoover Institution senior fellow and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster gives a great interview to Deseret News. A taste:

Deseret: In foreign policy, are you a realist or an idealist? 

McMaster: Those labels aren’t that useful. That polarization is rooted in what I call strategic narcissism, defining the world only in relation to us, and assuming that what we do or choose not to do is decisive in determining the outcome. On what might be called the self-loathing far left, many believe that America is the problem and therefore disengagement is good. And on the far right you have neo-isolationism, driven by a mild form of bigotry. But what they both fail to recognize is that others also have agency and authorship over the future, including our adversaries, rivals and enemies. As G.K. Chesterton observed, the best way to settle differences is to ensure they’re not settled for you.

Deseret: But should the United States be trying to export democracy and engage in nation building?

McMaster: I don’t believe we were trying to turn Afghanistan into Denmark. It just needed to be Afghanistan. That country needed a government consistent with their traditions, with their culture, with their decentralized nature. At the same time, we needed to establish a political order that was hostile to jihadist terrorists. And that’s what we had developed, and that’s what we gave up. Their society had been transformed since 2001, but not into a Jeffersonian democracy. We wasted a lot of effort based on unrealistic assumptions about Afghanistan. 

I watched Dave Chapelle's The Closer yesterday, and when I read this, I found myself resonating with its take:

Dave Chappelle is right about transgender ideology. He’s right about the disproportionate control that gender ideologues wield over pop culture and public discourse. And he’s also right that most of the people greatly upset by his jokes are white liberals who are more than happy to drop their racial consciousness at the sign of any conflict between minorities and LGBTQ activism. 

But this doesn’t, or shouldn’t, add up to conservative sympathy for him. Chappelle is not a hapless victim of a crushing ideological agenda; he’s not Barronelle Stutzman or James Eich. Chappelle is, like many before and many after him, a Robespierre of the very revolution that’s after him now. His fortune was made inside the same progressive sensibility that threatens him, and it is precisely Chappelle’s (and many other comedians) skill with which he dismissed any notion of the sacred that has taken root in the people who are walking out on his un-PC act.

Chappelle is a supremely talented comic. His timing is often sublime, and his blending of absurdism with biting observational humor is dazzling to watch. But Chappelle’s comedy, like so many others, depends critically on an “lol nothing matters” mentality. There’s an undercurrent of nihilism to his routine, a low-level hopelessness about daily life that comes through especially when he takes on those “edgy” topics like male rape or pedophilia. Chappelle has a point when he observes that nobody boycotted him for these jokes until he started saying that men are not women, but one major reason no one boycotted for those jokes was the delivery. Chappelle is a master at eliciting laughter in the face of meaninglessness.

Eric Boehm at Reason shows that Josh Hawley and his lame attempt at addressing the supply-chain dilemma is silly:

Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) has a plan to address the current supply chain issues bedeviling the American economy.

He wants to make them permanent.

In an op-ed for The New York Times published Friday, Hawley uses the temporary supply chain problems as an excuse to push for a permanent expansion of federal power over the affairs of private businesses. We must "fundamentally restructure our country's trade policy," Hawley demands, and that means injecting both the Pentagon and Commerce Department bureaucrats into companies' purchasing decisions. Under the terms of a bill that Hawley is proposing, any product determined to be "critical for our national security and essential for the protection of our industrial base" would have to have at least 50 percent of its value made in the United States.

Why is it necessary for the government to get significantly more involved in the system of global trade that's allowed Americans to enjoy unparalleled prosperity in recent years? Because "the global pandemic has exposed this system for what it is—a failure," Hawley writes.

One must assume that if the lights in his home went out due to a storm, Hawley would respond by declaring electricity to be a mistake and demanding that the government require homes to be lit with candles and gas lamps. After all, what is the electrical grid but a complicated supply chain that leaves Americans woefully dependent on production and distribution systems (power plants, substations, and lines) that they do not fully control? Better to produce your own lighting, right? If that means you have to live without television or the internet, well, those are just the trade-offs required to achieve self-sufficiency.

A storm—or a pandemic—can create temporary problems in the highly complex systems that run so much of the modern world. That's hardly a reason to abandon them. If Hawley is imagining a world in which the United States is wholly self-sufficient, then he's asking you to accept a scenario in which the United States is significantly poorer than it is today.

A piece at Spiked by Sean Collins entitled "Loudoun County and the Cruelty of Trans Ideology" asks where Scott Smith, the father of the girl raped in a school restroom by a dude wearing a girls' outfit, goes to get his reputation back. 

But then it's late in 2021 post-America and a school in Florida has taken students on a field trip to a gay bar.

 

From the I-probably-won't-vote-in-2022-or-even-2024 file: The chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party adamantly insists here in November 2021 that the Very Stable Genius won the election a year ago. 

 

 

 

 

 

Three not-exactly-reassuring foreign policy moves by the VSG

Maybe this could all work out well, but I'm not betting the mortgage payment on it.

The administration has inked an agreement with the Taliban that is supposed to result in  fundamental exchange in its behavior for a withdrawal of US troops:

Per the report, the hinges on the Taliban meeting several major commitments. These include breaking with al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other terrorist groups, and maintaining the reduction in violence seen over the last week as well as negotiating a separate power-sharing agreement and cease-fire with the Afghan government. If the conditions are met, the US will make an initial troop reduction from about 13,000 to 8,600 soldiers.

On March 10, the Taliban, called the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” in the agreement, will begin negotiations with the Afghan government. On that date, the US will also review its sanctions on the Taliban with the aim of eliminating them by August 27. If the Taliban meets its commitments, the US would withdraw all of its troops within 14 months.

While most Americans are understandably tired of the 19-year war, in its rush to declare victory and leave, the Trump Administration seems to be making the same mistakes that the Obama Administration made in leaving Iraq. Back in 2011, just ahead of presidential elections, Barack Obama unilaterally withdrew American forces from Iraq. The Obama Administration failed to negotiate a status of forces agreement that would have allowed an American contigency force to stay in the country. Three years later, American combat soldiers were back in Iraq to fight a growing ISIS insurgency.

And the clumsy handling of another situation may have ramifications beyond the immediate region:

Tensions had been building for weeks in Syria by late January when forces loyal to Bashar al-Assad launched an offensive on the towns surrounding the last rebel-held stronghold in the country, the city of Idlib.

The Russian-backed Syrian government offensive represented, according to Turkey, a violation of the “ceasefire” agreement Washington helped broker between the nations and non-state forces competing over Northwestern Syria. The attacks had unleashed a new wave of refugees streaming toward the Turkish border, numbering now almost 1 million strong and once again threatening to destabilize Europe. More importantly, Turkey warned, its positions were at risk of being targeted by Syrian forces, and they would retaliate if necessary. And on February 3, six Turkish soldiers were killed by Syrian artillery. Turkey responded, striking 54 military targets inside Syria, reportedly killing at least 76 Syrian soldiers.

But the fighting did not stop. The cycle of attacks and retaliatory strikes between Syria and Turkey accelerated. Five Turkish soldiers were killed on February 10, to which Turkey responded by shelling Syrian targets. Two more soldiers loyal to Ankara lost their lives on February 20, yielding another proportionate response. On February 22, Turkey destroyed 21 “regime targets” after it lost its 16th soldier this month to Assad’s forces. All the while, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned both Assad and his logistical partners in Moscow that his country would not tolerate these attacks forever, and Turkey would be “everywhere in Syria” if it needed to be.

This violence may have climaxed on Thursday in a staggeringly brazen escalation when at least 33 Turkish troops died and 30 more were wounded in an airstrike. Once again, Erdogan’s retaliation was proportionate, attacking Russian and Assad regime strongholds near Latakia with missiles. But the time for proportionality may be coming to an end. Since the collapse of the 2019 ceasefire in January, Ankara has warned the Syrian government that it has until the end of February—this weekend—to halt its advance on Idlib. “We plan to free our besieged observation towers, one way or another, by the end of this month,” Erodgan said this week. The slaughter of scores of Turkish forces has surely only hardened his resolve.

Turkey claims that the strike was attributable to the Assad government, but Russian warplanes supporting the advance of Syrian forces are more likely to blame. You can see why Erdogan would run reluctant cover for Moscow. There are no guarantees that a low-intensity conflict between a member of the NATO alliance and Russian forces won’t spiral into a more dangerous series of increasingly violent confrontations.

This is now the most dangerous period of the conflict since Turkey shot down a Russian warplane in 2015 in the earliest days of Moscow’s military intervention on behalf of its besieged client in Damascus. As it did in 2015, Turkey immediately invoked Article IV of the NATO alliance treaty—a provision that compels member states to enter into emergency consultations, a prerequisite for triggering NATO’s mutual defense provisions in Article V. The Atlantic alliance was able to talk Turkey off the ledge in 2015, but the West can produce few inducements that might convince Ankara to endure these deadly assaults on its soldiers and sovereign dignity indefinitely.

None of this should come as a surprise. This is what American disengagement looks like. The United States beat a hasty retreat from Northern Syria last year—a political, not strategic, decision that seemed justified only by the president’s frustration with America’s modest footprint in that lawless part of the world. In its wake, America left behind a fiction of a “ceasefire” arrangement, the fragility of which was apparent to most observers even as the administration was celebrating its achievement. Even if the deal was doomed to fail, said its more candid supporters, so what? This was not America’s fight; it’s time to let the rest of the world fight its wars and get America out. Well, mission accomplished. 

And let's review the recent history of how the DNI / acting DNI position has been filled. Joseph Maguire was deemed insufficiently personally loyal to the VSG because he wouldn't finger the whistleblower during the impeachment proceedings last September.  He was recently replaced by Richard Grennell, who most recently has been the US ambassador to Germany, and prior to that was a political operative. No intelligence credentials on his resume. But he's about as yay-rah-VSG as you could ask for. Alas, he only has a few weeks left in the position, due to the provisos written into the "acting" status. So who has Trump put forth for the permanent position? Another unfailing loyalist: 

The concern about Ratcliffe is that he’s not just a yes man but is being chosen *because* he’s a yes man. He was nominated for this job once before, you may recall, seemingly for no better reason than that he’s an aggressive advocate for Trump during Intelligence Committee hearings. He doesn’t have any field intel experience, just what he’s gleaned in five years as a member of the Homeland Security and (later) Intelligence Committees, plus some limited work on terrorism cases when he was a U.S. Attorney. (He was accused last year of padding his resume on that point.) That’s why he ultimately withdrew last summer: Even Senate Republicans were concerned that he had been nominated not because there’s good reason to think he’d be effective in the job but because he’d be a yes man, the sort of person who’d eagerly carry out political vendettas for Trump against “disloyal” intelligence deputies and clean up, or even suppress, intel that the president found “unhelpful.” Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, reportedly dialed up Trump last summer and urged him to rethink the Ratcliffe nomination.

In naming Texas Rep. John Ratcliffe to be Director of National Intelligence, Trump ignored a warning from Republican Sen. Richard Burr, the chairman of the intelligence committee, according to Congressional aides familiar with the matter. Burr told the White House last week that the move would inject more partisan politics into the work of the intelligence agencies, said the sources, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

Last year it looked like Ratcliffe would be DOA in a confirmation hearing, so he withdrew. The Senate’s composition hasn’t changed meaningfully since then so presumably he’s still DOA. So why renominate him?

Here’s where the cunning comes in. Trump knows that this is an election year. He knows that his approval rating, both within his own party and across the population, is about as high right now as it’s ever been. (Coronavirus may change that soon, but never mind.) He knows that Republican voters just circled the wagons around him on impeachment and are ready to circle those same wagons tighter as we proceed towards the general election. All of that being so, Senate Republicans may be materially less likely to cross him on Ratcliffe’s nomination now than they were eight months ago. Does Romney want to cast another “traitorous” vote against Trump so soon after the Senate trial? Does Susan Collins want to piss him off with his voters in Maine watching her closely? Does Burr want to cause a rift with the president in North Carolina, one of the most important swing states this fall?

The odds of the Senate meekly confirming Ratcliffe have improved and Trump knows it. So he’s calling their bluff. I dare you to reject him.

But here’s where it gets even more cunning. Trump may be viewing this, correctly, as a “heads I win, tails I win” situation thanks to a loophole in federal law on executive branch vacancies. The law was written in the belief that presidents would always prefer permanent appointees as a matter of basic stability and sound constitutional practice. You want someone at DNI or DHS or HHS or wherever? Just send the nomination over to the Senate and they’ll vote up or down. And until Trump, presidents did approach the matter that way. Trump doesn’t care about stability, though; if anything, he appears to enjoy volatility in government. He seems to prefer acting directors since they can be shuffled around according to his whims. They may even be more prone to behaving like yes men than permanent appointees are because there’s a chance that the president will formally nominate them to the permanent position if they’re especially obsequious.

These are classic examples of the fact that Trump's only core principle when it comes to the conduct of policy of any type is unwavering personal loyalty. He doesn't think about alliances, geographic regions, tapping the nation's best expertise, or what the national interest is beyond a fourth-grade notion of "winning."

Hey, as he is fond of saying, we'll see what happens.

 

Yet another figure who has seen the VSG's machinations up close

The admiral takes great umbrage at what was done to his friend, and is gravely concerned for what it portends:

Retired four-star Admiral William McRaven, who orchestrated the SEAL raid that killed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, staunchly defended acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire while warning that Donald Trump could be jeopardizing national security to satisfy his own “presidential ego.”

In an Washington Post op-ed, McRaven explained how his personal relationship with Maguire, a former SEAL, goes back for more than four decades and he praised his friend’s honor and integrity. Maguire was reportedly “berated” by Trumprecently, when he briefed the president as well as House Democrats that Russia, as it did in 2016, was already conducting clandestine interference in the 2020 election.

Maguire’s tenure as acting DNI has been complicated ever since he took over the agency last summer in the wake of the resignation of Dan Coats, who was effectively forced out by Trump for frequently contradicting the president’s narrative. Maguire, as acting intel chief, also testified during the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry last fall, where he refused to say if he had discussed the Ukraine whistleblower with Trump.

“Like most of these good men and women, he came in with the intent to do his very best, to follow the rules, to follow the law and to follow what was morally right,” McRaven wrote about Maguire. “Within a few weeks of taking the assignment, he found himself embroiled in the Ukraine whistleblower case. Joe told the White House that, if asked, he would testify, and he would tell the truth. He did. In short order, he earned the respect of the entire intelligence community.”

McRaven then turned to call out Trump.

“But, of course, in this administration, good men and women don’t last long,” he added in a not so subtle shot at the president. “Joe was dismissed for doing his job: overseeing the dissemination of intelligence to elected officials who needed that information to do their jobs.”

The retired admiral then unleashed the big guns.

“As Americans, we should be frightened — deeply afraid for the future of the nation,” McRaven warned. “When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security — then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.”

What do you want to bet the VSG has already tweeted about this? I cringe with hesitation about checking my Twitter feed?

 

What's the most important qualification for any job in Trumpworld? Loyalty to the VSG

This appointment of Richard Grennell as acting director of national intelligence is not going over well:

President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he has named Richard Grenell, a staunch loyalist, as acting spy chief.

"I am pleased to announce that our highly respected Ambassador to Germany, @RichardGrenell, will become the Acting Director of National Intelligence. Rick has represented our Country exceedingly well and I look forward to working with him," Trump tweeted. 

Trump also thanked outgoing acting director Joseph Maguire "for the wonderful job he has done, and we look forward to working with him closely, perhaps in another capacity within the Administration!"

News of the pick, which was first reported by the New York Times, comes as Trump faces a March 11 deadline to nominate a new director of national intelligence or name a new acting spy chief as federal law prevents Maguire from serving beyond that date.

Even in an acting role, Grenell's lack of intelligence-related experience is likely to unsettle the US intelligence community, which has endured repeated attacks from the President since his 2016 election win over the Russia investigation and later the whistleblower complaint that gave way to the Ukraine impeachment inquiry, which made Trump just the third president in American history to be impeached.

But it does not appear that Trump is looking for someone with deep intelligence experience in the role -- a former senior White House official described Trump's decision as "filling the gaps" following the impeachment acquittal, sensing disloyalty in Maguire, and filling that position with somebody he sees as sufficiently loyal. Trump is "looking for a 'political' who will have his back," the former official said.

However, the move is raising concerns even among Trump allies who have been quick to point out that Grenell's primary qualification appears to be his loyalty to the President. 

One source close to Trump told CNN they were surprised by the pick, noting Grenell has zero intelligence-related experience.

And another Trump adviser described Grenell as "out of his league" for the acting DNI job, adding that some in the administration are "embarrassed by his behavior." Previous holders of the DNI job have served in the intelligence community, the US Senate and senior levels of the military. Grenell, on the other hand, does not boast a resume with similar credentials despite his stint as the US ambassador to Germany. 

"Everybody came into (the DNI job) with a relevant understanding, of which this guy has none," said Bob Litt, former ODNI general counsel, who called the move "extremely dangerous."

"This is a President who has loathed and feared the (intelligence community) since before he was inaugurated and he views them as a deep state hostile to him seeking to undercut him and he'll seek to undercut them," he said. "Clearly the important thing here is the President feels Grenell will do his bidding."

He seems like a sharp enough fellow, and before the Trump phenomenon occurred, he seemed to have a skill for articulating conservative positions on whatever the topic of discussion was. But it's true he has nothing of an intelligence nature on his resume. He's been a political consultant. That's it.

 The above-excerpted CNN story alludes to "[h]is track record in Germany [having] raised some concerns." I wanted to find out a little more about that, and his Wikipedia bio gets into some of the details:

In May 2018, within hours of taking office in Berlin as US Ambassador, Grenell offended diplomats and business leaders when he tweeted that “German companies doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.”^[29] The tweet was widely perceived as a threat, with the Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, Jean Asselborn, commenting that "This man was accredited as ambassador only yesterday. To give German businesses such orders … that’s just not how you can treat your allies.”^[30] The leader of Germany's Social Democratic Partystated that Grenell "does appear to need some tutoring" in the "fine art of diplomacy", while the Die Linke party urged the Merkel government to summon Grenell to explain his comments.^[30]

In June 2018, Grenell stirred controversy by telling Breitbart News, "I absolutely want to empower other conservatives throughout Europe, other leaders."^[31] It was viewed as anti-establishment.^[32][33] This was described as a breach of diplomatic protocol and a breach of Article 14 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which requires ambassadors to be politically neutral in the domestic politics of the countries where they serve.^[34][31] Prominent German politicians called for Grenell's dismissal.^{[35][36][37][38]} Martin Schulz, former leader of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, said, "What this man is doing is unheard of in international diplomacy. If a German ambassador were to say in Washington that he is there to boost the Democrats, he would have been kicked out immediately."^[35]

Grenell was a regular contributor on Fox News's Tucker Carlson Tonight during the first few months of his Ambassadorship in Germany. In November 2018 he made an appearance where he repeated his criticism of Angela Merkel's immigration policies and compared her unfavorably to the recently-elected Chancellor of Austria Sebastian Kurz, whom he claimed "won in a very big way" because of his strict stance on immigration. The magazine Der Spiegel called it a "thinly veiled call for a change of government in Berlin".^[34]

In December 2018, during the affair surrounding Der Spiegel journalist Claas Relotius, Grenell wrote to the magazine complaining about an anti-Americaninstitutional bias ("Anti-Amerikanismus") and asked for an independent investigation.^[39][40] Grenell wrote that "These fake news stories largely focus on U.S. policies and certain segments of the American people."^[41]

In January 2019, Grenell told Handelsblatt that European companies participating in the construction of Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline are "always in danger, because sanctions are always possible". The Trump administration has long opposed the Russian-backed Nord Stream 2 — a pipeline for delivering natural gas from Russia to Germany.^[42] Within that context he also sent letters to German companies involved in the construction of said Nord Stream 2, threatening sanctions.^[43] In response, Angela Merkel's successor as leader of the Christian Democrat Union, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, stated that "The American Ambassador operates in a, shall I say, somewhat unusual diplomatic manner."^[44]

Der Spiegel published a profile of Grenell on January 11, 2019, using interviews with 30 “American and German diplomats, cabinet members, lawmakers, high-ranking officials, lobbyists and think tank experts". The magazine claimed that "Almost all of these sources paint an unflattering portrait of the ambassador, one remarkably similar to Donald Trump, the man who sent him to Berlin. A majority of them describe Grenell as a vain, narcissistic person who dishes out aggressively, but can barely handle criticism." The profile claimed that Grenell is politically isolated in Berlin because of his association with the far-right Alternative for Germany Party, causing the leaders of the mainstream German parties, including the Chancellor herself, to avoid contact with him.^[34] The sources claimed that Grenell "knows little about Germany and Europe, that he ignores most of the dossiers his colleagues at the embassy write for him, and that his knowledge of the subject matter is superficial."^[34]

A disrupter in the Trumpian mold.

And I doubt that the search for someone to officially fill that position is going to turn up a lot of first-tier possibilities.

The whistleblower / Ukraine-intrigue situation - initial thoughts

I'm writing this before I've checked out what is sure to be a barrage of observations and commentary out there.

But the basics are that

• Trump seems to have told Ukranian president Zelensky that he could count on $250 million in military aid to fight pro-Russia separatist rebels if Zelensky's government would look into the matter of Hunter Biden serving on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company.
•  At the time Hunter Biden was appointed to that board, then-vice president Joe Biden was, in his official capacity, trying to steer Ukraine away from dependence on Russian energy
• Hunter Biden's personal life is pretty messy. He's had a cocaine problem. He left his wife to dally with his late brother's widow. They split and now he's married again. He has been named as a customer of Ashley Madison, the cheating website.
• A member of the intelligence community has filed a complaint with the community's inspector general saying that Trump made some kind of promise to a foreign leader that was out of line. At this point, it looks like the promise may have been the assurance to Zelensky, but that's not been determined for certain.
• Adam Schiff says the acting director of national intelligence is keeping his committee, the House Intelligence Committee, from seeing the complaint.

As I say, I have only checked out two news stories and one opinion-site piece on all this so far. I just wanted to get the basics on the table before my mind got pulled every which way by the inevitable avalanche of hot takes and desperate attempts at turf protection.

Given Trump's style of dealing with foreign leaders - dangling the carrot of an economically robust North Korea in good international standing before Kim Jong-un, as if that were a high priority for Kim, and his back-and-forth way of dealing with Chinese president Xi, saying they have a good relationship and then turning around and saying he's really going to squeeze China with more tariffs - it seems quite feasible that he told Zelensky a better US-Ukraine relationship was possible if Zelensky would launch this investigation.

But the Leftists and the Trumpists are both going to be insufferable over this. The Leftists will be in full gotcha mode. The Trumpists will probably, after attempts to spin it start looking pretty feeble,  turn to an argument along the lines of "Do you really think any of these radical wackos is a viable alternative?", and on that they'll actually be on quite solid ground.

That's the snapshot of the present moment. LITD has no position, for two main reasons: there is much yet to learn, and everyone running for president in both major parties is unfit for the office anyway.

Coats leaving as DNI and possibly being replaced by Ratcliffe: a regrettable situation

Coats has been a straight shooter from the get-go.

While he probably personally felt that the JCPOA was a bad idea, he reported that Iran was complying with its terms when Trump pulled out. Conversely, Coats poured cold water on Trump's coziness with Kim by telling Congress that North Korea would most certainly keep bolstering its nuclear capability, which it has.

(By the way, here's a great op-ed in the Washington Times by retired CIA officer Charles Faddis inviting us to consider that, given that Iran and North Korea are kindred spirits with a documented partnership, Iran may be looking at just buying some nukes off the shelf from NorKor.)

I'd like to see more specifics about this claim, but it does fit with so many people's observations about the Very Stable Genius's style of presiding:

In a sign of how dysfunctional President Trump’s relationship with the intelligence community has become already, some senior spies and analysts say having a political ally as DNI may not make much of a difference at this point. Trump, these senior officials point out, pays only sporadic attention to his daily briefings, routinely ignores analysis that contradicts his own views, and in many cases pursues policies that analysts have concluded are fruitless or misguided.

And given that Ratcliffe, whose background is as a Texas prosecutor and whose experience with intelligence is limited to seven months on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and given that he has an established track record as a Trump devotee, there's not likely to be a dissenting voice when push comes to shove in various world-stage situations.

So far, other great people in intelligence, national security and diplomacy functions seem likely to stick around for the tim being. It's just a matter of them getting the president's ear before any sycophants do.