First, before I begin, let me supply some calming music so my blood pressure doesn’t give me a stroke.
Okay, that’s better.
Now, I’ve spent a lot of time researching our intelligence community and I’m hardly an unqualified fan of the job they’ve done for our country since the Japanese surrendered in 1945. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t think that most of what they do is important. I think they need good solid leadership from a president with a good moral compass. If provided that, they will give us much less reason to worry and go about their job of providing us with good analytical research and an early warning on threats we may face.
They’re a force to be reckoned with in their own right, as are sophisticated spy networks in all the countries that have them. Managing them is not a task for a coward or a simpleton. President Obama’s record has been mixed, better than any president since Carter, but disappointing in many ways, too.
But Trump is completely out of his depth and it already shows.
Only one member of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team is dealing with the CIA and the 16 other offices and agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, four U.S. officials said Wednesday.
Geoffrey Kahn, a former House intelligence committee staffer, is the only person named so far to Trump’s intelligence community “landing team,” they said. As a result, said one senior career intelligence officer, briefing books prepared by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Agency, the National Counterterrorism Center, and 13 other agencies and organizations are “waiting for someone to read them.”
This is not how a nuclear-armed nation with soldiers stationed is dozens of countries handles a transition of power from one government to the next. This is absurd.
People want us to remember Pearl Harbor and remember 9/11, which are things we should obviously do. It’s hard enough to guard against sneak attacks when you’re trying. Who knows what are in all those briefing books?
And the Trump team is all geared up to humiliate President Obama by voting to destroy the Affordable Care Act before he can even leave office, but they can’t read what the intelligence community has to say about the state of the world?
Trump on Tuesday received only his third intelligence briefing since he won the Nov. 8 presidential election, despite an offer from President Barack Obama of daily briefings, three of the officials said.
Trump can’t even be bothered to have a briefing. Will that change once he’s inaugurated?
“It seems like an odd time to put issues like cyber security and international terrorism on the back burner,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.Previous administrations, the official said, were quicker to staff their intelligence teams, in part because they considered intelligence issues critical to setting foreign policy, defense and budget priorities.
So, a pattern is being set early on. Act quickly and spitefully with no plan and no intelligence.
This is dangerous enough that people should really try to focus on it rather than on what Trump is tweeting about at the moment.
If something happens because Trump is leaving our guard down, he’ll use it to crack down on minorities and break more laws. It seems like every time a Republican becomes president something catastrophic happens within months. Reagan survived an assassination attempt. Under Poppy, the Soviet empire began to crumble and we wound up in Panama. With Bush we had 9/11. What will it be with Trump?
Whatever it is, he’ll never see it coming.
Trump has ADD — short attention span. This is not snark, it’s reality.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/donald-trump-attention-span-214223
Plus, at his first intel briefing back in September, Trump and Flynn managed to piss off the briefing team.
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/u-s-official-donald-trump-s-body-language-claim-doesn-
n644856
Brad Heath
One thing we can all be sure of is that something will happen. Terrorists depend on over reaction. It’s how they ‘win’.
Trump is a walking over reaction, and someone somewhere has noticed.
.
My understanding is that Pence is getting the daily security briefings. Much as I dislike Pence, he’s probably better equipped and prepared to deal with and handle this information.
Frankly, from where I sit, I think it’s almost better if Trump doesn’t get the security briefings. He’s a clueless idiot as far as that kind of information is concerned. Pence is far from ideal but seems to have the ability to focus and hopefully make some rational decisions.
This whole shit show is just ludicrous, and all I see is Trump hastening the demise of our standing in the world. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. The election of Trump is like having someone like Caligua in charge – woefully unprepared for this job; incompetent; stupid on many levels; unable to learn; a narcissist with ginormous hubris.
What could possibly go wrong?
the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief-elect.
pls use less offensive language
you’re talking to the wrong person (direct your offended sensibilities to the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief-elect hizownself — it’s his confession I’m citing, after all; important not to let it be disappeared down the Memory Hole). Certainly it’s offensive! That offense should be hung around his neck permanently.
I guess you can use the N word too if you like, if the world offends you. you needn’t use hostile language on this blog.
other suggestion – grow up
I’ll refrain from offering an earned counter-suggestion re: what you can do with your (“offensive”!) mis-direction (“N word”?!?! what a ridiculous comparison) and presumptuously lecturing condescension.
(But who’d’ve guessed you’re such a delicate flower? Not me.)
I think quoting Trump to keep front-and-center his nature and character is both needed and appropriate. (And it can’t be done by disappearing his words.) GOPers, with media enabling, are already far down the road of “normalizing” him as it is.
and you understand how completely off base my comparison is because you are Black? a girl? Quentin Tarentino?
Now that I look at it from a different angle, sure, there ARE analogous circumstances in which quoting a vile racist using “the N word” to document, highlight, and keep front-and-center his/her vile racism would likewise be reasonable, appropriate, and needed.
I stand corrected. Didn’t catch that that was your drift on the first read.
it wasn’t my drift – my drift was that the hostile degrading language goes to us readers on this blog, not to Trump your supposed target or whatever media is normalizing him – send a letter to them. For that reason I find it juvenile. I wrote because I think porn language and language hostile to readers of the blog does not belong here. I will troll rate, just thought I’d explain why
Regardless of its inaptness, if it’s “porn language”, it’s Trump’s “porn language”, and, repeating myself, needs to be hung around his neck permanently, which can’t be done by disappearing his putative “porn language”.
Also too, you look ridiculous trying to make this unmakeable “case”.
But whatever, troll-rate away. (Astonishing you’d imagine that would matter to me.) Knock yourself out.
Well, I suppose Christian Dominionist Pence is “better equipped and prepared” than ADD Trumper to read a two page memo and sit through a 30 minute briefing without feeling compelled to send a tweet to his minions. Pence has at least been an elected public official (of sorts).
But Pence is obviously a very dim bulb. And he knows not too much about anything, like most of these conservative ideologues. So disaster is pretty much a certainty here, IMO.
The Madman or the Dummy. Take your pick…
Well you hit the nail on the head. I think Pence is dim bulb, too, but I do believe he can read and possibly process intel and perhaps even come up with a decision that’s not a complete disaster. Yeah, that’s where we’re at here.
And agree that Pence isn’t going to immediately turn on his phone and start twitting out some nonsense.
Egad. What a miserable state of affairs.
The dummy or the mad man?? Great choice.
And of course, when the catastrophe happens, they’ll blame it on Obama, and the worthless MSM and punditry will dutifully chin-stroke and agree.
Geoffrey R. Kahn appears to be a current or former staffer for Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel, who represents a Westchester-Bronx district. Engel is (or was) ranking member on the House Foreign Relations Committee.
If this is the same Geoffrey Kahn, that assignment is very interesting.
As I understand it, the transition team will be conferring with the current political and senior intelligence service administrators to identify how the Trump administration will plug its national security and foreign policy staff into the current operations of the 16 agencies. Kahn should already understand the current players in the intelligence community.
Pence, acting as prime minister already receives the briefings that Trump would get without the embarrassment of Trump telling the briefer the Trump equivalent of “Get along, sonny boy. You’ve covered your ass.”
So far Trump is behaving as if he does not trust the conventional channels to bring him accurate information. He is rooting around with out-of-channel calls to foreign leaders and conversations with out-of -the-national-security-establishment, generally business, figures about national security and foreign policy. No doubt, he has been picking the brains of the many candidates for Secretary of State that he has interviewed. These seem to offer Trump a minimalist frame of buzzwords to cover his disinterest and ignorance of context. He’s one who thinks unpredictability is the best and only strategy. It seems to have worked for him so far, which makes him double down on it.
It is dangerous if that is all there is to the institutional action of the Trump Presidency. That is, if Trump retains the final decision and runs his own foreign and national security policy and operations. He creates the image that he’s a very hands on executive. But is he? The fact that we do not know how he operates is where we sense danger along with his public persona of distraction.
Trump is not President until shortly after noon on January 20. Until, the Obama administration will have the challenge of running foreign policy with Trump as a loose cannon talking directly to foreign leaders and the image of Trump as not honoring commitments.
Interesting times.
the reputed Chinese curse (“May you live in interesting times”).
Well everybody knows 9-11 was Clinton’s fault
Not Bush’s so yes Obama will be at fault
With Trump, it’s really simple. What would Putin want him to do? That’s what he does. Almost every time.