Trump Starts Appointing the Trumpeteers: Mike Pompeo Trump’s Dream Candidate.

mike-pompeoThe squealing and commotion has begun. Trump has begun making his appointments to the cabinet and other high level positions. He is showing us that he was serious about many of the things he campaigned on. I mentioned before that I thought he would back off some of his ideas but rather than doing that he is doubling down on them. I’ve taken a quick look at some of them.

CIA Director Mike Pompeo – you are not going to find anyone more interested in protecting America in any way possible than Pompeo. He is both tough and smart. He graduated number one in his class from West Point which is something to be admired. He served five years in the Army; then went to Harvard Law School. He went out to the mid-West and started his own aerospace company which he later sold.

I assume it put a lot of money in his pocket to give him a comfortable life style. He decided he wanted to do more public service. He ran for Congress at age 47 or so during the Tea Party surge. I suggest he has the type of background we want in Congress: military service, private business, courageous and smart.

He has positions on many things but I will mention those that will involve his job.

He wants to tear up the Iran deal (within the week he wrote: “I look forward to rolling back this disastrous deal with the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism”); go back to torturing people perceived as enemies, (our military and our intelligence warriors — are heroes, not pawns in some liberal game being played by the ACLU and Senator Feinstein); reauthorize the gathering of all types of intelligence information on American people; thinks Snowden should be put to death (“you cannot encourage “the very lawnessness he exhibited and the ongoing distortion of the truth that he and his media enablers have engaged in since the release of these documents – undermines the very fairness and freedom tha SXSW and the ACLU purport to foster”); strongly supports Israel; has criticized Muslims leaders who fail to condemn terrorism,( Mr. Speaker, it’s been just under two months since the attacks in Boston, and in those intervening weeks, the silence of Muslim leaders has been deafening.”);  and will probably push for America to move its embassy to Jerusalem recognizing it as the capital of Israel.

He is the ACLU’s worst nightmare (“His positions on mass surveillance have been rejected by federal courts and have been the subject of several lawsuits filed by the ACLU.”) or other privacy groups who suggest he wants to create a dossier on every American.

He is exactly what Donald Trump wants. He is what Donald Trump voters sought to get.

We’ve tried lots of different approaches to intelligence but few like this. Clearly he is a war hawk who will push for the aggressive use of American power rejecting the Obama soft approach to world affairs which he finds hurts American interests. He will throw down the gauntlet: “you do it America’s way or feel America’s wrath.”

No Nobel Peace Prize for him. This is speak loud, bluntly and carry a big stick type of American policy. It is predicated on the idea that no one will call America’s bluff.

Time will tell what the consequences of this new approach will be. I’m sure we have done it in the past. I do not have a good grasp of prior CIA directors positions so it is hard to know. He will though be a strong follower of the Trump positions and will provide the backing for Trump’s strong approach.

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32 Comments

  1. Rather :

    For chrissake just learned to shut the f****** up, rather than editorializing by following his asinine squib with this inanitie. Disappointed in you. John

  2. Abie :

    THAT WAS YOU ???
    … LET ME STICK YOU BACK IN THE LOCKER …. YOU INSIST ON SLAMMING THE DOOR WHENEVER YOU COME BACK OUT 🙂 TURKEY!

  3. Ben Carson…..wants to help make America Great Again.

  4. I just read through this post post stuff. I got thrown out of Milton High in 1969. If I made it to graduation I could have been an intellectual arse-lick, too? Now I’m REALLY depressed.
    Thanks for the great reading!

    • NO ABE … YOU WOULD JUST REMAIN THE ARSE LICK THEY ARE TELLING ME YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN …GO FIND THE BACK OF A DARKENED MOVIE THEATER …I KNOW THE JUDGE TOLD YOU TO STAY OUT OF THEM ….BUTTTTTTTT … 🙂

  5. LIFE IS A DREAM … Calderon

    Who needs Freud to live it. Who needs the INTERNET to experience the Akashic Record or Oceanic Consciousness ? We deal kindly and in kind with you. They don’t call it THE WEB for nuthin’ btw … WELCOME 🙂

  6. Come on in, said the spider to the fly. Stick around, awhile. (See how commas work?)

    We’ll build a poem, if you are cool with that?

    • Wa-llahi! Everyone, please, join in the creative moment! There’s a certain connection between Feud’s idea of an oceanic conscious, and, the possibilities of the INTERNET. The meter of this poem has not, as, yet, been revealed.

    • Khalid :

      You are morphing from my favorite Happy Communist to Unhappy Comma- munist. Yep , Keep those commas working. I abstain from further comma- dy in matters of :

      WHAT IS THE SOUND OF ONE ERASER CLAPPING? 🙂

      Peace to you Old Warrior .

  7. When, I say “not a cut” I mean it. If I was going to cut you, I’d compare your production to Alex Jones’s fine body of work, which, I’m not. Mr.Jones is in a class all his own.

  8. …. Bob Shetterlee, Right ? . 🙂

  9. Ms. Freeh …btw 🙂

    Open the yawning jaws of your voracious mawing mind … and let me slip some … HOAGLAND ….in for a taste. That of course the immemorial writer/essayist Edward Hoagland. Now how’s this for some name dropping …a slinkily familiar suit for you Ms….from his essay ON NOT BEING A JEW : “Sumptuous Harvard was next, where I learned that Pepy’s was pronounced ” peeps ” and studied with several extraordinary teachers– MacLeish, Wilder, Ciardi, Kazin for instance — though I spent an inordinate amount of my hours hanging around Fish Pier and the East Boston docks and the Revere Oil Refinery. I went to the railroad bridge above the Charlestown State Prison to be enveloped in diesel smoke , and to Copp’s Hill, Where there was a red light whorehouse next to the famous burial ground. I used to scuttle by it three or four times in an evening, never able to nerve myself up to go in , until the girls stopped calling to me …. ”

    William Cowper Pepys is perhaps my favorite author Ms. and is the ” peeps ” referenced. Copp’s Hill burial ground is in the North End and the place where a worthy contemporary of mine Richie ” Nine Lives ” Gillis, got shot up in the eighties . Have you ever been shot Ms. Freeh ? Well I have and it sucks …. It reallllllyyyy sucks Ms.Freeh. Richard was subsequently shot through his cheek sitting in a car in East Boston with the animal Richie Devlin when Devlin was assassinated around ‘ 95 when Jimmy B. left town. Devlin was wearing a bulletproof vest at the time . Ironic . When the police caught up to ” Nine Lives ” He was spitting his teeth out . He had nothing to say to them . He is a stand-up guy .

    Yes Ms. … This is a world that you understand and have participated in .Right ??? …. Have a Happy Thanksgiving Ms. … Your misdirected spamming of a blog dedicated to deconstructing murders most foul and official corruption most vile has been enlivened at times by your wit. But more generally it is a exercise in precious condescension from a scion of the same social background of Hoagland, but without his genius of experience in the … Arena. It is WIT WITHOUT THE GRIT Ms Freeh.

    I trust that fellow natives, and you know who you are , on this block have enjoyed Hoagland’s reminiscences . They resonate differently down here than up at flying Pond variety Ms. Freeh. But you know you are not the worst sort of dilettante , And my friends and I have developed a sort of cockeyed affection for you .

    So I leave you with a passage from one of Hoagland’s great books , CAT MAN, wherein he chronicles his time spent working with the big cats in the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus : ” .. I for my part was once fired from a good job for climbing into a mountain lion’s cage . I took care of a row of retired MGM lions at the World Jungle Compound in California. MGM adopts as its own one particular lion every year, the year of his clinical prime, which is three to four. there was also a mountain lion, a female in heat who called to me at night in my boardinghouse across the fields with a sound like a pigeons coo . When I crawled through her door, she went to the back of her cage, turned, and then sprang at me; I simply froze! She darted her football sized paw into the pale bullseye of my face with the claws withdrawn like a lady’s muff. ( this was in 1953, and Trader Horn, who was the boss, happened to be passing by , and fired me .) ” …. THE MYSTERY DIRECTOR 🙂

  10. Ed Tatro is a speaker at this event
    He sent me this email

    I’M THE LAST SPEAKER–APPROXIMATELY THE SIX HOUR MARK:

    This is the 1st 6.5 hrs. of the conference. As you might expect the major issue is with the microphone.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxLN-d0D-zA

    Judyth Baker presents JFK Conference Live
    http://www.youtube.com
    Please Visit http://JFKconference.com for more information. This streaming video production is FREE –but you can say ‘thank-you’ and help keep it online by going to …

  11. Hopefully Pompeo from West Point will be the good soldier behind Trump’s deal making peace policy. Trump delegates playing the hands to others while still dealing the cards himself. He as President will hold the deck.

  12. ….. Yes Ms. …. you surmise correctly …. that would indeed be the LEFT WING 🙂

  13. Now Now Ms. Freeh … No one is claiming that you are off your rocking chair on this one, but Elbows Wychulis is reportedly manouevering to have Flying Pond Variety accredited as a Federally licensed Loon Sanctuary.

    WHAT IS THE SOUND OF ONE LOON WING CLAPPING 🙂

  14. Wa-llahi! What will come of Nosferatu, Trump’s earliest, and, loudest, courtier? What plum will GL bestow upon the hero of 911? If Trump want to do a solid for the wheel chair bound crew, watching the action at the bocce-ball court, he’ll give Guilianni nothing.

    • K,

      You left off an “s,” and added an extra “n.”

      “If Trump want(s) to do a solid….”

      “Guilian(n)i”

      Maybe the “n” was intentional?

      : )

  15. Poesy King McDonald has done to our minds
    what Tourettes Syndrome has done for Trump

    We now think like Shelly Duvall looks

    and yes Virginia Santa Claus will
    investigate how the CIA /FBI whacked
    JFK 53 years ago today.

    Consortiumnews
    Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995
    Failed Investigations of JFK’s Murder
    November 21, 2016

    More than a half century later, John F. Kennedy’s assassination still resonates not only because of its historical importance but because the investigation was more a cover-up than a pursuit of truth, says researcher Gary Aguilar.

    By Gary Aguilar

    November 22 marks the 53rd anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. If history is any guide, it’s likely some mainstream outlet will commemorate that dark day with reassurances that the Warren Commission was right that Lee Harvey Oswald did it alone, and that most doubters, who have been in the majority since the mid-1960s, are randy conspiracy theorists. That is the essential message by one of the experts likely to be cited this year, attorney Howard Willens.

    President John F. Kennedy in the motorcade through Dallas shortly before his assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. (Photo credit: Walt Cisco, Dallas Morning News)
    One of the few still-living Warren Commission staffers, Willens followed up his 2013 book, History Will Prove Us Right, with a spirited defense of the Commission in the summer, 2016 issue of the journal, The American Scholar, which he co-wrote with another Commission staffer, attorney Richard Mosk. The piece, “The Truth About Dallas,” is a celebration of the work and conclusions of the original investigation.

    But Willens’s and Mosk’s defense of the work of the Warren Commission they served on is more notable for what they omit from the official record than what they include. “What the critics often forget or ignore,” they write, “is that since 1964, several government agencies have also looked at aspects of our work,” (p. 59) as if the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had reviewed and applauded the Commission’s work.

    Indeed, they did look at it. But rather than plaudits, they issued stinging rebukes, principally for the Commission’s having been rolled by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and to a lesser extent, by the CIA and the Secret Service.

    “It must be said that the FBI generally exhausted its resources in confirming its case against Oswald as the lone assassin,” the HSCA concluded, “a case that Director J. Edgar Hoover, at least, seemed determined to make within 24 hours of the of the assassination.”

    In essence, the experienced investigators concluded that Hoover had divined the solution to the crime before starting the inquiry, and then his agents confirmed the boss’s epiphany. The intimidated Warren Commission went right along.

    FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
    And with good reason, only part of which Willens and Mosk tell. They admit that the “FBI had originally opposed the creation of the Warren Commission” and that Hoover “ordered investigations of commission staff members.” But they don’t tell that Hoover deployed one of his favorite dirty tricks to deal not only with support staffers, such as Willens and Mosk, but also with the commissioners themselves.

    “[D]erogatory information pertaining to both Commission members and staff was brought to Mr. Hoover’s attention,” the Church Committee reported. (emphasis added)

    Hoover’s Spy

    Willens and Mosk also forgot to mention that Hoover had a personal spy on the Warren Commission, then Rep. Gerald Ford, who tattled on Commissioners who were (justifiably) skeptical of the Bureau’s work.

    “Ford indicated he would keep me thoroughly advised as to the activities of the Commission,” FBI Agent Cartha DeLoach wrote in a once secret memo. “He stated this would have to be done on a confidential basis, however he thougt

  16. Just the ” Pompeo ” and Circumstance we should expect from this unreconstructed megalomaniac eh? Good Appointment! Now Heaven save us from Mitt Romney and Starbucks Nation .

  17. Another West Point grad, Eisenhower, stopped wars in the Middle East, halting the British-French-Israeli invasion of Suez. Hopefully, Mike advises Trump to mimic Ike.

  18. Matt: Pompeo was an editor on Harvard Law Review and his first job was with Williams & Connolly, ranked as the top law firm in D.C. “the most difficult law firm to be hired at in the United States.” I do hope his counsel to the President will lead to less U.S. interventionism.

  19. The big war in the Mideast was two years out, if Hillary won. Now, with Glorious Leader at the helm, it’s about six months out. If you have teenage children or/and grandchildren, it’s time to worry. It won’t be rich kids doing the fighting. Trump voters are going to pay a terrible price in the most precious of coin for electing a dictator.

    Trump needs a war to take total power. Read about how Hitler consolidated power (Study in Tyranny) during his first year in office. Trump is accelerating the fuhrer’s timetable. Glorious Leader wants to refurbish the American autobahn, and, put people to work, but, the war will catch him up before he can get started. Think about how crazy it got when Bush revved up the propaganda organs to push his Iraq invasion. Glorious Leader won’t miss the opportunity to clamp down on dissent. We’re headed into a fascist dystopia.

    • I am convinced you could not resist wanting to write ” Fascist Dystopia ” more for its lyrical quality Professor than actually being convinced your street soldiers would ever allow this to happen . Time wills all!

      • John:

        Use more commas. It’s hard to make out what your point is. No cut. Just a style point. Commas help to segregate your thoughts into related groupings. Not using them, lends a stream-of-consciousness ( William James) effect to your writing. It’s fun, but, difficult to read. If your message is affective, designed to elicit an emotion, as in poetry, and, fiction writing, stream-of-consciousness is fine, but, if your intention is connotative, delivering a factual message, clarity requires commas (Roman Jakobson).

        • Khalid,

          I believe I lectured you back in the thornier days of our correspondence upon your chopping up your prosody with too many commas. So, here, you, simply resurrect, an old , sryle manual , argument, between us. 🙂

          Now K Man … I rendered that last sentence deliberately in a grammatical ly doctrinaire punctuation punctilio to the N’th, that I have ascribed to your writing of … certain … passages in the past. My admonition and friendly injunction to you at that time was to let the … musicality … in your prose manifest itself, unfettered by excessive punctuation . For there is music, and you are also a Pro.

          I recollect that at that time, several years past now, you mentioned you had been an English instructor at some point. My rejoinder was that I graduated with a 3.9 in an English Major with more Harvard graduates on its English faculty than any University except Harvard, UMass, Boston. I do not find you pedantic in this matter, just perhaps a little bit carping as I believe you do indeed read me closely … find me effective as well as affective … and trust that I do indeed regard you the same. Chuck D. and Public Enemy send their ungrammatical regards to the Very gritty Professor, and I wish you and the rest of the bon vivants on this ” Whacky ” blog a Happy Thanksgiving!

          … btw….these semaphoric dots … regularly substitute for commas … in my prose. In an extremely select Professional community, Khalid, I am reknowned for my semaphoric ” Dot ” . 🙂

          • ★ …3.9 in an English Major from a school with more Harvard graduates on its English Faculty than any University except Harvard, UMass Boston .

            HOLLLLLLLAAAAAA 🙂

      • Khalid,

        OK 🙂 … You piqued my interest as to just what triggered your alarm, and struggle to determine just exactly what my ” Point ” was. That construction is a monolithic one, with or without commas, as I do not consider that there is any such ” Point ” at which the denotative and connotative can always be as seamlessly seperated as you suggest. There is no point in our battling as to this as it is a difference in approach .. rather than style … in writing, creative and factual, and creatively factual as well as factually creative.

        But I confess to feeling flattered that you had the … Kung Fu … literally translated as Time and Energy … to make an honest critique.

        So, detective that I am, I sez’ to myself ” Just what has gotten the Old Radical bolting up out of his lectern and shaking his fist out of the College Green window here. And I’ve got it! And I was amused to find it. I will share it with you of course as it offers an insight , perhaps , into the workings of my mind when I genuinely respect a good strong intellect. ( Btw, I just offset ” perhaps ” in the previous sentence with commas as a humorous nod, but I think you know that I do not find them absolutely necessary there, and feel the sentence reads just as effectively, and affectively , without them. )

        That said : I direct your attention to the post preceding your post about this style difference between us. And here I own that … Yes Indeedy … I absolutely wouldn’t normally offset the word Professor with commas in that sentence . However here is the Insight regarding my thought processes at times . And yes of course my amazing sensitivity towards and regard for people whom I like . In that particular instance I had originally inserted commas . And then removed them . I removed them because I did not want you to infer that the honorific that I had bestowed upon you was anything less than sincere . I felt that offsetting it with commas would underscore it in a way wherein my wickedly sarcastic wit might be suspected of being deployed in all of its subtile coilings ! 🙂

        Let’s lay down the cudgels on this one now, Khalid. We have better grist for the Mill.

        ANARRRRRRCCHHYYY

        • * Yes Indeedy …. I absolutely * WOULD normally offset the word , Professor , in that sentence with commas. 🙂

  20. So good to see a preview of the opposite of the Obama approach. It’s certainly the right direction.