Donald Trump had an opportunity to get intelligence briefings once he won the Republican Party’s nomination. He mostly blew that opportunity off, probably because early meetings didn’t go too well, For example, right after Labor Day, this happened:
Six current and former senior officials said they were aware of friction between retired Gen. Michael Flynn, one of the advisers Trump brought to the briefing, and the officials who conducted the briefing. Four sources with knowledge of the briefing — including two intelligence officials who spoke to people in the room — said Flynn repeatedly interrupted the briefers until New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie intervened…
…Meanwhile, four people with knowledge of the matter told NBC News that one of the advisers Trump brought to the briefing, retired general Mike Flynn, repeatedly interrupted the briefing with pointed questions.
Two sources said Christie, the New Jersey governor and Trump adviser, verbally restrained Flynn — one saying Christie told Flynn to shut up, the other reporting he said, “Calm down.” Two other sources said Christie touched Flynn’s arm in an effort get him to calm down and let the officials continue.
Subsequently, Chris Christie has been sidelined and publicly humiliated, while Michael Flynn has been elevated to be our next National Security Adviser. That should work out very well.
Back in 2012, when Flynn took over the Defense Intelligence Agency, he made it clear that he’s not interested in being contradicted. The following is an excerpt from a December 3rd profile on Flynn in the New York Times.
During a tense gathering of senior officials at an off-site retreat, he gave the assembled group a taste of his leadership philosophy, according to one person who attended the meeting and insisted on anonymity to discuss classified matters. Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his. The room fell silent, as employees processed the lecture from their new boss.
So, it seems natural that Flynn won’t want pesky intelligence briefers putting sane and contradictory ideas in the president’s head. There will be no more Daily Presidential Brief, at least not one with an actual briefer who can answer questions or be tasked with follow-ups. Officially, Trump says he doesn’t need to be briefed daily because he’s smart and doesn’t like to be told the same thing every day. So, instead of getting intelligence briefings, he reads about leaked intelligence in the chyrons of cable news channels and asks his follow-up questions to his nation of Twitter followers.
If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2016
So, my suggestion is that we just go ahead and put Barney Frank in charge of answering any and all questions Trump may develop during the presidency.
When Trump asks a question like “If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act? Why did they only complain after Hillary lost?”, there’s no reason to respond with obvious answers like “John Podesta’s emails didn’t send themselves to WikiLeaks” or “if you’d taken us up on our offer to inform you, you might have a clue” or “did you seriously not notice during the campaign that the administration was talking about Russians hacking into the DNC?”.
Instead, we’ll just have Frank interject with some variation of this:
“When you ask me that question, sir, I’m going to revert to my ethnic heritage and ask you a question: On what planet do you spend most of your time?
“You stand there with a picture of Obama defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis … As I said before, it is a tribute to first amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Sir, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.”
This can be a kind of all-purpose response to anything, like explaining why it’s not a good idea to let ISIS take out the Assad regime in Syria or maybe why the Mexicans still won’t cut us a multi-billion dollar check for a wall they don’t want.
Alternatively, the Intelligence Community can just continue to do what they’ve always done for the president, with the sure knowledge that none of it will matter because Michael Flynn is always right and a dining room table doesn’t even want to know.
Conspiracy theorists are always 100% convinced of their correctness, facts be damned. I can’t think of any worse position to install one than National Security Advisor.
(out of both academic and personal knowledge/experience) the close parallels and resemblance between clinical paranoid delusional disorder and gullibility towards conspiracy theories (CTs), and especially really far-fetched ones (e.g., Moon-Landing “Hoax”; though at least here in my corner of the Reality-Based Community, 9/11 Inside Job, Pizzagate, Birtherism, Global Warming “Hoax” could all stand in just as well).
The parallel in fact looks so strong to me that CT gullibility looks realistically like just a milder, non-clinically-psychopathological manifestation of the same tendencies. For example, I know a guy . . . a good guy, an intelligent guy, a guy I like in all other respects, a guy who functions professionally at a normal-to-high level . . . who is a 9/11 Inside Jobber. I haven’t discussed that with him, though I’ve seen his bumper sticker (we’ve mainly shared and talked about Real Football[TM]), but a mutual friend has, and described to me the frustration from the impossibility of dissuading him from nonsense with the facts-in-evidence comprising Reality.
Though it’s been a long time, my recollection from undergrad Abnormal Psych is that the approximate line whose crossing constitutes clinical psychopathology (i.e., diagnosable as “mental illness” or “mental disorder”, “cognitive disorder”, etc.) is that ability to function relatively normally within society (though that’s pretty obviously an imprecise, fuzzy line).
A remarkable feature of the clinical disorder (I’ve had real-life personal experience with one diagnosed case, and on-line interaction with one I just strongly suspect was clinical) is exactly what you stated:
With emphasis on the “facts be damned” bit.
Except it’s not quite that it’s impossible to persuade a delusional paranoiac that some perceived “fact” that’s integral to their delusion is in fact false. With immense effort and patience, this can sometimes be accomplished. It’s what happens next that’s pathological.
The problem is, that factual refutation just doesn’t matter. It doesn’t lead to re-assessment of the overall CT, nor to self-questioning along the lines of ‘gosh, if that “fact” underlying my belief was actually not a fact, but in fact false, I wonder if other crucial “facts” underlying it may be false, too?’ Doesn’t happen.
The best illustration I know for what happens instead is an industrious spider. If you sever one strand (or even many) of the large, intricate web it has constructed, it doesn’t abandon the web! Rather, it secretes new web material into new strands (the CTist finds/invents new supporting “facts”) that quickly close any gap created by the severing of the original ones.
Problem solved!
(Of course, I’m completely convinced that a very substantial proportion of Rightwingnuttia isn’t really “nutty” at all, just cynically unethical and dishonest. E.g., they don’t really believe [if they consider it at all] that Global Warming is a “hoax” . . . they just don’t care! What they care about is that doing anything meaningful to slow/mitigate it [stopping/reversing is out-of-the-question at this point] might lessen their short-term self-enrichment or political power prospects, so they’re against it. So they either keep themselves willfully ignorant of Reality, or they actually understand the Reality, but pretend not to out of perceived self-interest.)
P.S. Occurred to me while writing this how reminiscent it all is of what we learned from the Downing Street Memo, which revealed that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” by the Bushies to “justify” the War Crime of invading Iraq under false premises, and
Appreciate your analysis. I have several acquaintances who have solved and are convinced of Hillarys criminality several times over. Or at least they say they have. Convince them some story is bullshit, they ignore it or find another one. And It is willful, no doubt. But in fact they are truly invested in the bullshit. I have come to think there is no point talking about some subjects with them. They live a good part of their life on some other planet for sure.
conundrum.
I’m torn, too, between the unacceptability of allowing the tsunamis of bullshit to go unchallenged . . .
. . . and the seemingly utter futility of trying to bring the facts that comprise Reality to bear to refute that bullshit.
I’ve been following with some (horrified) interest latest memes in the media and commentariat re: “fake news” and the new “post-fact”/”post-truth” era (horrified in substantial part by the blase-ness of the discussion . . . as though it’s just the latest political trend or phenomenon that must be taken into account in the “horse-race handicapping” political “analysis” that so enraptures the Worse-Than-Useless Corporate Media, instead of the existential crisis for the American democratic experiment that it is).
Yes, it is troubling. We now have an administration who will tell us what reality is or fix it so. It means they will not be sidetracked from their goals. I noticed on HP today a story about NC and how they are planning to hamstring the incoming democratic governor. That’s authoritarian government in action. Democracy is irrelevant to them. It could be hard to defeat. Mix this with Trump’s obvious hate directed at all who cross him and you have a very bad outlook for an open society. I find myself wondering if we will ever get it back in my lifetime.
You guys / gals are all ridiculous, yourselves, of course, you know? Yes? You spout psycho-bullshit from memories of mid-level psych classes you took in college, recall your own prejudices, and selectively cite “facts” to suit your whims of the moment with little regard for or interest in larger truths, actual realities. Clinton, for some of you, was a wonderful woman, a queen of sorts entitled to the presidency, cheated out of it by the FBI and Russians.
The larger truth, for which none of you have any reasonable rebuttal is she lost. Twice now. The more recent loss was to Donald Trump, of all people. And the larger reality is that if she had won (at best it seems by a whisker if the relatively few votes needed for her to win in WI, MI, and PA had gotten out of their own rabbit holes and voted) we’d be in more-or-less the same situation we’re in now where it’d be all psycho-bullshit analysis and lies relentlessly from all directions.
So, not that it’s any more on-topic than the post that raised this idiotic series of observations, what’s the point? ounabanagita especially…what is your point? You never declare clearly what it is you’re trying to say, so (as Booman has pointed out to you himself in one of his rare, clearheaded replies to your commentary here) no one ever knows what you mean.
nalbar, marduk, ounabanagita, oh my. Blah, blah, blah, bullshit without end. (Well, marduk usually has little to say, he just robotically downrates folks here that do and retreats like a cockroach back into the woodwork.)
Barnie Frank is an ass. Has been since I first became aware of him when I lived in Boston in the late 70s. His insults to a citizen asking a question is no model for behavior by any politician. His family, his upbringing must have been just as abusive. His style is bullying, unhelpful, and especially in his case, hypocritical. His insults aren’t good, either. They’re not funny. They’re not incisive, and pleading excuse by admitting reversion to an ethnic stereotype makes it even more reprehensible. His behavior is rude and his arguments are those of a third grader. I suppose it passes as entertaining to other little punks like him. I’m embarrassed that he is often accepted as a representative of the gay community. He’s a dizzy old queen; always has been.
Oh, yeah, and to top off his failed career as an elected politician, he was also a big supporter of that other old wannabe queen, the near-70-year-old, deceitful, unpopular flake of a woman the Democratic establishment nominated to be President. In other words, like her, like you guys / gals, he’s a loser. Put that fact in your bullshit grinders and eat it.
Yes, this.
Although I tend to simply summarize it as cognitive dissonance. You can give people actual facts that undercut what they believe, but they’ll either hand-wave it away, or double-down on the bullshit they already believe.
And the reason why cognitive dissonance is so strong, is because people don’t like to look like fools to other people, and especially themselves.
And nothing makes a person feel like a fool than admitting out loud that they’ve been a useful idiot who has bought into all the lies and bullshit for their entire political life.
So whether you call it paranoid delusions that don’t interfere with daily life, conspiracy theory gullibility, or cognitive dissonance, it’s all the same in the end. These people aren’t interested in facts and evidence, because what they believe needs to be true in order for them to continue functioning politically. And let’s face it, for some people, politics are a matter of faith and identity, that if undone, would leave the person feeling like a gullible idiot without an identity. And that’s scary for anyone.
My dining room table, about 100 years old, is actually quite knowledgeable.
I’m sure it has the highest IQ and went to the best school.
I have noticed that IQ doesn’t count for much for those who dwell too long on some other planet.
Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right. His staff would know they were right, he said, when their views melded to his.
Well, OK then. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
In fact in Trump world nothing ever goes wrong. Just ask Kellyanne Conway.
Frank” was that you’d go with one of my favorite Barney Frank anecdotes: during that time when gay rights were making such rapid progress (I don’t recall the specific issue/proposal in question), Frank was accosted by some “reporter” for some rightwing “news” outlet (iirc), asking with transparent personal horror (though whether real or feigned I don’t know), didn’t Frank realize the proposal could lead to straight men having to be naked around gay men in showers and locker rooms at gyms?!?!
Barney looked at him with a combination of disbelief, contempt, and bemusement and asked (paraphrasing) “do you go to gyms and use the showers and locker rooms there? [“Reporter” acknowledges doing so.] And you don’t think you’ve ever been naked in a shower or locker room with a gay man???”
Don’t recall that Frank went on to ask “on what planet do you spend most of your time?”, but if not, it would have fit perfectly.
parroted that a/the main appeal of Trump for them was how he allegedly “tells it like it is” (when in fact he usually does just the opposite) actually meant it (and also possessed the prerequisite ability to discern how “it is”), . . .
. . . they’d have mounted a Draft Barney for President movement instead!
“Mr. Flynn said that the first thing everyone needed to know was that he was always right.”
I don’t think it matters where you are on the political spectrum – when you hear someone say this, you can be sure the speaker could get a lot of people killed.
This isn’t an appointment subject to congressional review, right?
Errr… Letting ISIS take out Saddam was Hillary’s idea, not Trump’s