Mendacious Menagerie
Morally dubious figures like James Clapper, Gen. Michael Hayden, and James Comey had already taken star turns as #Resistance heroes. Even George W. Bush, who lied the country into a devastating war and oversaw systematic torture, became a popular figure among liberal Democrats simply by signaling genteel disapproval of Trump's personal style.
These people deserve criticism, not praise. But liberal hatred of Donald Trump can be irrational. It's irrational to make heroes out of Trump's national security critics, most of whom seem more bloodthirsty than he is. It's irrational to invest someone like John Bolton with credibility, when Bolton lied and deceived us into war. And it's irrational to support militaristic policies just because Trump opposes them (or says he does).
And yet, liberals in politics and media are still elevating these characters -- as long as they engage in the pleasing exercise of criticizing Trump. This MSNBC clip is a textbook example of the genre. Chuck Todd cites four former Trump advisers turned apostates: Bolton, Gen. James Mattis, Gen. John Kelly and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. How do they stack up, credibility-wise?
"I think we need to look harder at who we elect," Gen. Kelly says in the clip, adding that we need to look at a candidate's "character" and "ethics." Well, the country got a glimpse of Kelly's own character when he spoke glowingly of the Confederates who fought to defend slavery and claimed that the Civil War was caused by "the lack of an ability to compromise." And Kelly's ethics were on display when he failed to disclose his relationships with several defense contractors on ethics forms.
Tillerson, who was CEO of Exxon Mobil, sneeringly observes that Trump "doesn't like to read." Since he's such a literacy advocate, Tillerson undoubtedly read his company's internal reports on the relationship between fossil fuels and climate change -- reports that it concealed from the public for 40 years, while publicly casting doubt on that relationship.
Mattis' record lacks the publicly-documented dishonesty of the others. But he didn't publicly reveal what he knew about the war in Afghanistan, even though (per the Washington Post):
"...senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable."
Instead, Mattis consistently put his career above the public interest.
"These are as big as it gets," Todd says of this mendacious menagerie. The biggest liars, maybe.
Unfit
Despite his record, MSNBC's Andrea Mitchel l called Bolton "credible." The reasons she offered for this assessment (besides the fact that he is "a Yale lawyer"; I kid you not) included the assertion that Bolton "understands intelligence, as a consumer of intelligence."
Contrast that with the judgement of Robert Hutchings, who was Chair of the National Intelligence Council under George W. Bush. "Anyone who is so cavalier not just with intelligence, but with facts, and so ideologically driven, is unfit to be national security adviser," Hutchings said of Bolton.
That quote comes from a ProPublica article headlined, "John Bolton Skewed Intelligence, Say People Who Worked With Him." Another article, from the New Yorker, documents Bolton's attempts to intimidate and threaten the intelligence analysts and diplomats whose conclusions undermined his call to war.
Bolton is a manipulator of intelligence, not a consumer of it.
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