DL Open Thread: Saturday, August 23, 2025
Fascism ON THE MARCH–Pretty much all the defense experts are gone because disagreeing with the Tangerine Tyrant is a firing offense:
The Pentagon has fired the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a senior defense official and a senator said on Friday, weeks after the agency drafted a preliminary report that contradicted President Trump’s contention that Iran’s nuclear sites had been “obliterated” in U.S. military strikes.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse is the latest senior Pentagon official, and the second top military intelligence official, to be removed since Mr. Trump’s return to office. Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, the head of the National Security Agency, was ousted this spring after a right-wing conspiracy theorist complained about him.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also fired Vice Adm. Nancy Lacore, who was chief of the Navy Reserve, as well as Rear Adm. Jamie Sands, a Navy SEAL officer who oversaw Naval Special Warfare Command, a Defense Department official said on Friday. The Pentagon offered no immediate explanation why.
I’ll spare you the mealy mush-mouthed response from Sen. John Warner. He finds it ‘troubling’.
You all saw the Ghislaine Maxwell stuff, right? Says she never saw Trump in a compromising position, gets moved to country club resort masquerading as a ‘prison’. Pardon coming soon…
Why Dems Suck To Infinity And Beyond–MAGA Occupies Major American City, Dems can’t muster a collective shrug:
As Washington, D.C., enters a third week of federal occupation ordered by Donald Trump, Democratic Party leaders have been absent from demonstrations against the president’s latest power grab.
Residents of the nation’s capital have seen armed federal agents deployed to the streets of their city to purportedly combat a nonexistent crime problem. National Guard troops have been deployed to locations like subway stations, clearly in sight of Capitol Hill staffers and likely the politicians that they work for. The takeover is a very visible attempt by Trump to exercise power in an authoritarian style.
But House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with other senior Democrats, have not been a part of any concerted effort to voice opposition to the occupation. (‘B-b-but our polling suggests…’)
Apparently Gavin Newsom is effectively ‘trolling’ Trump. Don’t know, don’t care.
A ‘Whole-Of-Government Retribution Campaign’:
The Trump administration’s campaign of vengeance against perceived political enemies escalated Friday morning when the FBI raided the home and office of former national security adviser John Bolton, a vocal Trump critic.
That search follows Attorney General Pam Bondi directing federal prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into whether former President Barack Obama and his aides concocted evidence about Russia’s efforts to help Trump in the 2016 election. Last month, the Justice Department said it was separately investigating former CIA Director John Brennan and former FBI Director James Comey, without specifying the allegations. Meanwhile, loyal Trump underlings— including DOJ official Ed Martin and Bill Pulte, a real estate heir running the Federal Housing Finance Agency—are using government power, along with social media gimmickry, to allege wrongdoing by frequent Trump foils.
The various investigations may differ in their legitimacy. But they are all the manifestation of Trump’s promises to use the White House to prosecute his enemies. The threat of an authoritarian president using his office and control of federal law enforcement to try to imprison critics is not hypothetical. It is happening, as Trump advisers race to please him by launching probes aimed at his foes.
These efforts are predicated on concocted claims that it was the administration’s Democratic predecessors who misused federal agencies for politics. The Trump administration is politicizing intelligence, law enforcement, and other government functions while pretending to be punishing politicization, as with the ironically named “Weaponization Working Group” that Martin now leads. That can feel a bit confusing, but it is more easily understood as a string of efforts by individual Trump advisers to their please boss by helping him crack down on dissent and deliver retribution.
‘South Park’ To The Rescue. Its creators have true guts:
So how is it that South Park’s revived anti-Trump blows this season have managed to land? A big part of it is precisely Stone and Parker’s allergy to clapter (time to get out my dictionary…) and the grandstanding that inspires it. They obviously resent anything they read as putting on airs and sometimes in the past, this came across as its own form of preachiness, with “everybody chill”-style speeches at an episode’s end that would secretly sound just as prescriptive as the self-righteousness they wanted to send up. With their most recent Trump parody, though, there isn’t much moralizing – just gratifyingly mean caricatures of deserving figures such as Trump, JD Vance and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem. Some (not all) of their past roastings have verged on point-and-laugh bullying; here are targets worthy of that derision.
Some of this derision speaks through the language of South Park itself. Trump isn’t vocally or visually imitated; he’s depicted in a series of repurposed photos, with the same voice and animation technique that Parker and Stone used to bring Saddam Hussein to life in the South Park movie. He’s also given the same sexual partner: a muscled-up and put-upon version of Satan, who has found himself in another toxic relationship. Calling Trump a wannabe dictator doesn’t break new ground, but there’s something satisfying in Stone and Parker using their personal toolkit to draw a line between Trump and Hussein; if they thought it was a histrionic comparison, they’d be making fun of it instead of making it. Similarly, there’s real spite animating the depiction of Noem as a dog-murdering zealot whose glamorous face needs to be repeatedly lacquered and reaffixed to her head as she commands an army of Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs.
I hope they’re safely ensconced in, say, Canada. Satire may be dead, but we don’t wish the same fate for satirists.
Gotta cut it short today. I’ll be knocking doors for a great legislative candidate in just a bit–need to make myself semi-presentable to the public.
What do you want to talk about?
In re: to Maxwell “I never saw Trump in a compromising position.” Syntax is important. She didn’t see what she wasn’t in the room to see.
Exactly. All she did was to close the door and to leave him to his own, um, devices.
The KHN Revenge Tour?
https://www.karenhartleynagle.com/de-reassessment-issues
Over the past 8-10 years, I’ve learned not to put great stock in Karen Hartley-Nagle’s comprehension of and leadership on the main issues facing New Castle County, and I suspect that many DL readers would agree with that evaluation.
However, she has recently launched her own website and has filled it with dozens of connect-the-dots breadcrumbs related to reassessement, Tyler Technologies, Amazon and a lengthy list of county and state officials who she suggests were involved in behind-the-scenes shenanigans that led to this year’s reassessment debacle.
Merely sprinkling the breadcrumbs amounts to little more than dispensing bowlsful of insinuendo. It’s going to take some real reporting — checking the linked documents and talking to the names she mentions — to show what really happened.
There may well be a story here, but there’s one undeniable fact to consider: In her time as county council president, how come KHN didn’t ask any of the questions that she’s now raising on her website?
I don’t know anything about this woman but this website reads like someone with serious mental illness wrote it. There’s definitely some big psychosis vibes.
That’s a strange website. I hope she’s ok.
That doesn’t look like something she could produce on her own. I only gave it a quick read, but the recaps of facts look accurate, and in places it gets deeper into the weeds than KHN has the mental capacity to understand.
Whether all those facts add up to something is another matter, because without some kind of quid pro quo somewhere, all the author is alleging is that officials made official decisions. If you’re saying they’re playing footsie with Amazon, so what? They play footsie with any corporation that promises to bring jobs.
As for KHN being OK, she needs a job, and somebody has convinced her she can get back in the game by riding anger about higher taxes.
My favorite part of the website is the button for donations. Maybe she’s trying to replace that stuff that keeps getting stolen during her campaigns for office.
She needs a new junker to park out front (no engine necessary) to enable her to file those stolen car reports with the police.
I remember when Gene McCarthy came to Rutgers New Brunswick in the spring of 1970. Nixon had announced the incursion into Cambodia. We responded by meeting collectively and going out on strike the next noon. We emphasized non-violence and no destruction of property. Someone tried to light the ROTC building on fire, but we put it out. Fortunately for us, the Rutgers University president declared an immediate amnesty on our behalf. Fortunate because police were arriving in tactical gear and were lining up in an adjacent park. McCarthy came the next day and congratulated us on our involvement. That was when he was a mere senator. The strike went nationwide, and dissolved as soon as we left campus for the summer.
I remember that period well.
In hindsight, I think it would’ve been better had the universities not shut down, which dispersed the activists away from the (more-or-less) safe harbors of the campuses.
I think you mean Mark Warner. John died in 2021.
I’d just read something about Elizabeth Taylor. No doubt it influenced my, pardon the expression, thought process.