Want extra stupid with that?

It is not a simple thing to select the stupidest statement of the day from the rightwing. The competition is fierce.

But on some days, the fog clears. Such a day was last Friday. The defense ministers of the United States and South Korea met in Hawaii. The American, Mattis, said something so spectacularly stupid that it is hard to imagine anything stupider:

“The international pressure campaign [against North Korea] must continue,” Mattis declared, adding that “our aim remains a complete and verifiable and irreversible de-nuclearization (CVID) of the Korean Peninsula.”

I think it is adorable of the general to enshrine his stupidity in an acronym. 

You're cute when you're stupid

It should not be necessary to state what is so stupid about this, but since the statement seems to have been received complacently, perhaps it is.

The North Koreans could scrap their atomic bombs, and the South Koreans are not supposed to have any.

Now, it happens that by official county policy, Maui County is a nuclear-free zone (not that the national government pays any attention). But as we saw with the missile alert, the point of being safe from atom bombs lies not in the launching point but the landing point. The North Koreans are aware that the CVID of Korea itself means zip, since the United States has thousands of missiles in America and on submarines that are just as much a threat as if they were parked at Osan, (the big American air base in South Korea).

Perfectly safe here

What the North Koreans heard Mattis say was, "Our policy is that North Korea must disarm unilaterally." 

Drunk and disorderly

The Financial Times, of all people, reports on bad behavior at a London charity fundraiser for men only.

I have a number of things to say about it, but all inside baseball, if my readers will indulge me.

First, this shocking behavior is no more than what the women at Maui's hostess bars experience all the time. (Aside: I have been told that Maui's Korean bars are slowly expiring for lack of business. My informant could not tell me if the customers have found something new or whether they are just dying of old age, without the younger men's being inclined to spend money drinking that way.)

Second, if anyone is going to lose his (or her) job over this, it ought to be the editors of Britain's famously salacious tabloids, who somehow missed this juicy story.

Third, the Financial Times surely needed some tabloid help in presentation. The racy bits were buried many paragraphs deep.

Fourth, I am astonished that the lineup of hostesses was all hostesses. Is there a like event for presidents who prefer good-looking boys? In England, I would think that would attract more donors.

All you need to know about Republicans in 13 words

Republicans think that allowing sick children to receive medical treatment is a concession.

Live free or die

The New York Times has a piece on a drug addict in New Hampshire. The live free or die state. So this is ironic:

 In Patrick’s home state of New Hampshire, which leads the country in deaths per capita from fentanyl, almost 500 people died of overdoses in 2016. The government estimates that 10 percent of New Hampshire residents — about 130,000 people — are addicted to drugs or alcohol. The overall burden to the state, including health care and criminal justice costs and lost worker productivity, has ballooned into the billions of dollars.

Maybe the Russians have it

Another NSA screw-up, unless it was deliberate.

The National Security Agency destroyed surveillance data it pledged to preserve in connection with pending lawsuits and apparently never took some of the steps it told a federal court it had taken to make sure the information wasn’t destroyed, according to recent court filings.

Long ago, in Esquire, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote about beng offered a job in British intelligence during World War II. He said he turned it down because intelligence never attracts really first-rate people. That isn't always true. Alan Turing was as good as you get, and R.V. Jones probably nearly as good.

(These happen to be English examples. Despite Britain's much more stringent spy laws, we know more about Britain's intelligence work than we do about America's, thanks [I think] to Britain's clubby and gossipy old-boy network.)

The evidence, as far as we know it,  does not suggest that U.S. intelligence agencies are,  by and large, run by competent people. It is impossible to say whether on balance it would have been better not to have had them at all or not,  but they have unquestionably done enormous damage to us.

Unguarded comments

Just when the Trumpeters were, somewhat languidly, pushing back against their fuehrer's latest racist imbroglio, out tumbles the audio record of one of WBD's appointees, in this case a spokesman for the agency that runs AmeriCorps.

Not the highest gift within the presidential patronage portfolio, but a frontman is necessarily a bit elevated in his public role. This one, Carl Higbie, was known for, well, his known-ness; he was one of several appointees (the Sam Clovis affair leaps to mind) whose only apparent accomplishment is having opinions and blurting them out.

I mean, when the reviewers reviewed Higbie's resume, what what on it? He's never done anything.

Query: Trump minions do review appointees before recommending them? Don't they?

So, how did they overlook Higbie's baroque racism?

Two possibilities come to mind.

One, the reviewers are just as racist as Higbie so it did not occur to them that anyone would find anything to object to.

This is the kind of "tell," in the current Beltway lingo, that allowed RtO to refer to the Tea Party as 100% racist. Numerous TP leaders sent out email blasts including the vilest kind of racist jokes. Now, that doesn't make the recipients racists, but it does prove that the leaders assumed that all their members are racists. You never send out an email blast unless you think everyone on the mailing list is on board.

And if they stay on board afterward, then you, the sender, were right. And that is how RtO can say without chance of contradiction that the TP was and is 100% racist. If it ever had any non racist adherents (which I doubt), they are gone.

Possibility two is that Higbie's record never was reviewed, that the same care was taken over his appointment as punters give to tips about a sure thing in the third at Pimlico.

I am unable to choose between these alternatives. There's  lots of evidence for pervasive racism in the Trump coterie.

But there's lots of evidence for the Trumpeters acting without checking, too.

The missing tweet

Several polls purport to find that even WBD's supporters wish he would tweet less. Yet there was one tweet we were more or less promised that has not been sent.

That would be the one that calls out Gregory Hayes, CEO of United Technologies, for sending jobs offshore. We were told that Trump would use what Politico calls his "Twitter cannon" to discipline executives who killed off American jobs in order to improve their bottom line.

Hayes in particular should have been called out because he made WBD look like a chump by promising to keep Carrier jobs in Indianapolis but instead sending them to Mexico.

Hayes is crying all the way to the bank. UTX stock is up 12.5% since the election he helped WBD to win, and the market value of UTX is over $13 billion higher than it wa s then.

The $7 million deal worked out by WBD and Pence to fleece the taxpayers was change lost in the sofa cushions for Hayes, and a few hundred jobs -- who cares?

It does show how stupid Trump voters were and, it appears, still are.

I used to have a saying when I was a reporter, a saying that I used even more often after I became a pawnbroker: some people are hard to help.