• Jezebel’s Lauren Tousignant has an irreverent overview of the incoming administration’s nominees for cabinet posts and other top-level jobs, “Trump Assembles His White House of Horrors.”
It ain’t pretty. At least three of his initial nominees have credibly been accused of sexual assault. It takes a lot of work to make a roster of people in which Stephen Miller — an enthusiastic white supremacist and Great Replacement Theory advocate — not the very worst of the bunch. But here we are.
Less than half of these people are even remotely qualified for the jobs for which they’ve been named. That would be encouraging — if the choice is between incompetent villains and competent ones, I’ll take the former. Except that an agenda of destruction doesn’t require much knowledge or skill. Plus, the folks at Project 2025 have a small army of underlings who do know what they’re doing, and what they’re trying to do, and they’ll be getting busy regardless of what the clown-car of sycophants and celebrities serving as cabinet secretaries does or doesn’t understand.
The good new, such as it is, is that Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general — former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz — has withdrawn himself from consideration due to pushback over allegations that he hired sex workers and did lots of drugs at a sex-party in which he also apparently had sex with a 17 year old.
The House Ethics Committee produced a report on its investigation into those allegations, but Republicans in the House, including white evangelical Speaker Mike Johnson, have prevented the report from becoming public. This prompted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to make what she thought was a threat — if this report becomes public, then the report of every investigation into members of Congress who had sex with a minor at a drug-fueled sex party will be released.
This seems to suggest that Greene is, herself, right now, cooperating with a cover-up of similar allegations against other members of Congress. And it suggests that she doesn’t understand that most people — most normal people — hear what she’s threatening and think, “Yes, please, release every such report. We need to know how many people like this there are in Congress so we can get rid of all of them, please, now, thank you.”
• Here’s a somewhat hopeful item from Religion News Service: “Rabbinical group calls for stopping offensive military aid to Israel”
A rabbinic human rights organization has signed on to a statement calling for an end to offensive military aid to Israel in light of the country’s continued blocking of humanitarian aid to the ravaged Gaza Strip.
The group, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, made clear it does not favor an end to all military aid. It still supports defensive military aid to Israel, such as the Iron Dome, the missile shields that intercept short-range rockets.
But at this time, it is opposed to further offensive weapons such as those decimating the Gaza Strip, where to date more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed with bombs and munitions that have helped to flatten the enclave and left tens of thousands homeless.
“Offensive weapons are keeping the war going, causing horrific damage to Palestinians,” Rabbi Jill Jacobs, T’ruah’s chief executive, told RNS. “It’s not keeping Israelis safe, certainly not getting the hostages back.”
Statements from religious leaders who are not white evangelicals tend to be ignored by both political leaders and the political media. But the framework for discussing this US-enabled war has been skewed by the automatic — and ludicrous — accusation that any criticism of Netanyahu’s war or of U.S. support for it is tantamount to antisemitism. It will be hard for anyone to characterize T’Ruah’s statement that way. (They’ll still try — I mean, these folks have spent the past year insisting that Jewish American college students protesting the war are radical antisemites. But it’ll be harder to paint this moderate statement from a bunch of rabbis as either radical or antisemitic.)
Maybe — maaaaybe — this statement will create space for others to raise the obvious questions about America’s unqualified support for a war of annihilation without fear of this grossly bad-faith accusation.
• The title for this post comes from a brand new song from brand new artist David Bowie.
I mean, again, this has to be a brand new song, because the current moral panic insists that any notion that gender is fluid is an ultra-recent, novel development in human history promoted by left-wing cultural Marxists and the woke mind virus.
If there were evidence that songs like this have long been part of our culture — and even our popular culture — for decades, then that entire moral panic would be exposed as an obvious lie used to manipulate people into fearing and hating their neighbors.
Basically, if there were evidence that David Bowie had existed prior to the most recent election cycle — or, really, that David Bowie ever existed at all — then the whole fraud would be proved a lie.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In