Credit where it's due

It's no secret that many of the appointments in the new Administration have ranged from risible to disastrous. But in appointing LTG H.R. McMaster to the post of National Security Advisor the new President lay just, possibly, have gotten one right.

McMaster is a genuine rarity among U.S. Army general officers; a leader who actually thinks about and studies his craft. His reputation among his peers was as something of an iconoclast dating back to the 1990s when he wrote a dissertation (and then publishing in book form) that broke with the Army's conceit that the Vietnam War was "lost" through civilian mismanagement and popular demoralization to point out that the then-leaders of the Army knew that their means and methods were not solving the problem that was the RVN's shambolic government. In the Oughts McMaster was part of a group of senior field-grade officers that made a similar point about the occupation of Iraq.

Obviously - since this is always the question about Trump - the real problem is that we don't know yet what the constraints on McMaster will be and how effective he can and will be in pounding geopolitical sense into the granny's attic that is the Tangerine Toddler's head. The candidate before him 86ed the offer because of too many strings Trump attached to the post, including, supposedly, retaining political oxygen-thieves like K.T. McFarland.

Trump's boast is that he's assembling the "best people" for his administration.

Betsy DeVos is a walking refutation to that nonsense.

Still. In tapping LTG McMaster for NSA even a skeptic like me has to admit; he has, indeed, got one of the best people for this job.

Ummm...well, gee, Dad, I wasn't...no, really...but...I...

I think the thing about this ridiculous Flynn Fiasco that gets me right in the giggy is that this joker was once the head of one of the United States' major intelligence agencies.

I mean, this guy isn't some Christopathic Amway chisler like DeVos or a greedy robosigning bankster like Mnuchin or even a neo-Nazi stooge like Bannon. Mike Flynn was not just boss of the DIA but "...commander of the Joint Functional Component Command for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, chair of the Military Intelligence Board, Assistant Director of National Intelligence, and the senior intelligence officer for the Joint Special Operations Command."

A noted nutbar conspiracy theory aficionado, too, but, nevermind. Point is, this guy's been in the snoop-and-spy game for donkey's years.

And yet, apparently, so fucking stupid it's pretty amazing that the gomer can walk and breathe at the same time.

I mean...think about how he got into this mess.

Guy calls the Russian Embassy. Chats with Ivan, good times, blah-blah-blah...hangs up and then proceeds to lie his little ass off about it like a teenager caught slipping into the house after midnight with his panties in his pocket when asked about what they said.

And never, not once, does he think "Gee...I bet the NSA has a recording of what we talked about because the NSA taps everybody's goddamn phone but double-secret-taps every Russian diplomatic phone 24/7 so lying at this point isn't just useless but is actively damaging to me and everybody else in the Fraudulency Administration that's gonna stand up for me..."

WTF?

Maybe it's the old GI in me, but the thing that gets me about this - more than the lying, more than the playing-footsie-with-the-Russians, more than the probable-taking-emoluments-from-a-foreign-power - is the goddamn, stomp-down, pure-D, bone-stupid of it.

This guy, this guy who was so freaking stupid as not to think that the NSA was listening in on his dumb ass chatting with the Russian Ambassador, was for 24 days His Fraudulency's - a guy whose foreign policy knowledge can be summed up by the phrase "bag of hammers" - go-to guy for "national security".

Just sit and think about that for a moment.