Dear Reader (especially those of you going bananas),
Namaste.
On the one hand, I have plenty of time to write this “news”letter. Delhi is 10 1/2 hours ahead of Washington, D.C. On the other hand, it’s after 10 p.m. in Delhi and I just concluded a festive dinner with some really impressive Indian dignitaries. This is one way of saying I’m really not all that prepared to dive into a lengthy G-File. So we’ll just see how this goes.
I want to save up my observations about India until I have more of them, but I will say that I have already learned a great deal. I’ve learned even more about how much more I need to learn. In other words, I have acquired in my short time a modest amount of knowledge, but I’ve acquired a vast amount of awareness of the knowledge I am lacking.
Not to go all Zen koan on you, but one way in which my knowledge has been expanded is the discovery of the lack of knowledge of others. Last night, I watched an English language news—or perhaps “news”—channel in my hotel room. An anchor was interviewing what appeared to be an Indian correspondent in the U.S. via Zoom or some such. The topic was Tulsi Gabbard’s nomination to be director of national intelligence. At one point the host asked whether her appointment would lead to a change in America’s posture toward Israel and the Gaza war.
“I don’t think so,” their man in Washington (I think it was Washington) said. He then went on to say (quoting from memory), the incoming Trump administration “remains dominated by Presbyterians and Methodists” who are still very supportive of Israel.
The anchor just nodded with an “Oh, that makes sense” expression.
Look, I was jet-lagged, brushing my teeth, and half-listening, so I might have missed some nuance. But I was dumbstruck. From my perspective, the guy could have said, “I don’t think so because Trump surrounds himself with people who don’t like vanilla ice cream as well as people who were born on odd-numbered days.” In short, I think he was wrong, and if an American-born-and-raised expert said something like that I would leap at the opportunity to say “that’s ridiculous” at great length.
But I was more interested in why he was so confident he was right, or even mostly right. If he’d said “evangelical Christians” or some such I’d have an easier time understanding what he was getting at, right or wrong. But Presbyterians and Methodists, specifically? I think it’s fascinating that foreign students of America think this makes sense.
I’ve run into a lot of that in the short time I’ve been here. And in doing my homework, I’ve found a lot of Americans have a similarly odd view of India—from the perspective of Indians.
Again, I don’t want to go too far down this road, because my trip is really only just beginning. But the opportunity to get pulled outside the categories of politics that seem obvious and natural to me is a welcome break. More on all this to come.
Outside the fishbowl.
It is very weird watching the Trump administration take shape from 7,480 miles away. It’s also more than a little embarrassing.
At the inaugural Dispatch Summit—a smashing success, if I do say so myself—Paul Ryan and Mike Pence were pretty upbeat about the appointments so far. Of course, about four hours after the summit, Trump announced that he intended to name Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. And the next day he announced his plans for Tulsi Gabbard. Not long after came the news about Matt Gaetz and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
There’s a robust discussion on the right about how bad these picks are, and I’ll say this in defense of Hegseth—he comes out as the least bad. I don’t think he’s a good choice. But that’s mostly because I don’t think he has the skill sets to run one of the largest, most complicated and important organizations in the world. And while I have plenty of issues with Hegseth, I am confident that he starts from defensible, patriotic assumptions about America that make him the least objectionable of the group. I don’t like his effort to seek—and get—pardons for accused war criminals. But if you stipulate that his version of the facts was correct—which I believe he believed—it was defensible.
Some folks think Gabbard is the worst pick. She’s a seriously unserious person with a penchant for blame-America-first arguments and flip-flopping like a wounded moth trying to find the limelight. The director of national intelligence should be a stolid, solid man or woman in a gray suit, an answer to a tough trivia question, not a political and ideological exotic.
Others think Kennedy is the worst pick. I have to agree that he’s the worst person of the bunch, and I say this even if all of the allegations against Matt Gaetz are true (and I’m open to the possibility that some aren’t). Kennedy is a profoundly dishonest and dishonorable man. In 2001 alone, he cheated on his wife 37 times. This isn’t gossip. This is his own account. And it wasn’t bragging. That number comes from his own diary. His wife found the journal, and it apparently played a role in her suicide.
We can come back to his shoddiness in a moment. But I am happy to concede, as an intellectual matter, that an adulterous sleazeball could make for a competent Health and Human Services secretary. His grotesque personal behavior should be a reason to disqualify him from any honored role in public life—yes, I’m one of those judgy conservatives—but reasonable people can disagree about such things. But it is his “professional,” public behavior that should make him unacceptable.
For starters, there’s nothing in his résumé that qualifies him to oversee 1 in 4 dollars spent by the federal government. Then there’s the fact that he’s a crank and fabulist who insists, to name just two examples, that cell phones and Wi-Fi cause cancer. Think about how much you’ve been exposed to Wi-Fi and cell phone signals over the last 20 years. It’s certainly true that massive exposure to electromagnetic radiation is best avoided. But if he was right, you’d think we’d see an increase in the cancers he says are caused by moderate exposure. There has been none. The Heritage Foundation and others think he’s a hero because of his anti-vaccine crusade in the COVID era. I think that’s all nonsense for the most part. But he was anti-vax when conservatives were mocking anti-vaxxers as left-wing loons. His anti-vax group directly contributed to the deaths of 83 Samoan children from measles, and the supposedly science-driven Kennedy simply lied about it.
Kennedy is an intellectual lightweight hungry for respect as an expert. So he talks like an expert with the hope that people won’t notice that he’s just making stuff up. In a secret recording, he just made up nonsense about COVID being bioengineered to target black and Caucasians while sparing Jews and Asians. It was all nonsense. So by all means … let’s give him a $2 trillion budget?
And then there’s Matt Gaetz. Personally, I think he’s the worst pick, because the attorney general is a lodestone of the executive branch. I totally get how under the theory of the unitary executive, the attorney general is just an extension of presidential authority. But there’s a longstanding expectation that the attorney general is supposed to be a de facto—if not necessarily a de jure—check on abuses of executive authority. This is why conservatives complained so bitterly about previous attorneys general being too chummy with the president, starting in the modern era with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s father.
Over the years, thousands of right-wing op-eds and cable news diatribes have excoriated Janet Reno, Eric Holder, Merrick Garland et al. for too much water-carrying for Democratic presidents. The factual merits of those indictments vary, but the principle they invoked was correct. The only argument for Gaetz boils down to “we should do it too!” If you believe that overly politicized AGs are bad, if you wax righteous about the rule of law, and if you decry politicized prosecutions (accurately or not), arguing “now it’s our turn” is not an honorable, moral, or patriotic argument. But that is the only argument for Gaetz.
America can handle a flibbertigibbet in the DNI’s office. It can handle a dangerous loon at HHS. It can even handle an anti-woke cable news host as defense secretary. But an attorney general whose only “qualification” is to be a MAGA version of the Hand of the King, makes the burden of handling those other things infinitely more burdensome. Gaetz would not see getting to the bottom of executive branch excesses as part of his portfolio—he would see defending and enabling those excesses as central to his mission. Trump wants a Roy Cohn to run the Department of Justice, and that alone is reason to reject his preferred choice.
Indeed, that’s the real problem with all of these picks: the picker. Trump wants loyalists, enablers, and TV pitchmen to staff his administration. There’s nothing we can do—now—to change that. He was legitimately and decisively elected president. But every senator was elected to be a senator, too. And, according to the Constitution, their job isn’t to “support the president,” but to protect and defend the Constitution and, with that in mind, to advise and consent to presidential appointments. I understand that the unwritten commandment of the GOP is to empower Trump, but that is not the oath these people took.
Various & Sundry
Canine Update: It’s hard being away from all of my girls (bipedal and quadrupedal). It particularly stings to see all of the stray dogs here in Delhi. If I could, I would give them all treats and a bath. Speaking of baths, Pippa rolled in some foulness earlier this week. Kirsten yelled at Pip and Zoë got very concerned that the shouts of “bad dog” were aimed at her. Zoë has a very acute sense of injustice and took offense. She demanded reassurance that she was, in fact, a good dog. Meanwhile, Pippa got a vigorous bath and, after zooming around the backyard afterward, she conked out. The Fair Jessica turned her into a spaniel burrito. This picture is not an AI rendering or photoshopped. But it weirdly looks like a painting. Reports from home are that they’re doing fine. Before I left, I tested out my new Meta Ray-Bans and played some two-handed, hand(s)-versus Dingo.
The Dispawtch
Owner’s Name: Bill Dyer (AKA Beldar)
Why I’m a Dispatch Member: I’m a longtime fan of both Mr. Hayes’ and Mr. Goldberg’s work. Mr. Goldberg earned my undying affection in October 2004 for posting a favorable comment with a link to my blog’s photos of my dog-before-last, an all-white Husky-Chow mix named Weiss, on NRO’s “The Corner.” Becoming a life member of The Dispatch was the single best investment I can recall ever having made.
Personal Details: My goal as a semi-retired lawyer and Dispatch comment section know-it-all is to be worthy of the opinion of me that my dogs seem to hold. The gap remains wide, but their encouragement and inspiration are constant.
Pet’s Name: The Dyerwolves: Tux and Scout.
Pet’s Breed: Tux is a blue-eyed, black-and-white husky female who’d very much enjoy pulling my sled from Houston to Fairbanks if we only had the snow. Scout is your basic hound dog of unknown provenance, although her DNA testing says the largest pluralities are German shepherd, pit bull, and Rottweiler.
Pet’s Age: Tux will be 3 next February and our vet estimates that Scout is just over a year younger.
Gotcha Story: My last husky, Cyber, died too young at age 8 after a short illness. I knew he wouldn’t want me to be dogless, so I found a family who breeds husky dogs and had a litter coming soon; Tux was my choice. They told me when I picked her up that Tux had a “unicorn personality.” She was the largest of a litter of five females, dubbed “The Moose” because she’d shoulder her siblings aside at mealtimes. She has the dominant confidence of her father, the pack alpha. Husky dogs tend to be vocal and indeed argumentative—Cyber sure was! Although Tux can bark and argle-bargle, she simply chooses not to. She only ever vocalizes to me at my mealtimes when she judges me too selfish with my food. She is the most incredibly chill dog I’ve ever met, and I can always be sure that my Tux fits me perfectly.
Scout was a rescue—given to me to foster after being saved from the brink of death by a friend of my daughters. He found Scout huddled—completely abandoned, dehydrated, starving, and worm-infected—in a bayou drainage pipe next to a used car lot in Houston’s mid-July 2023 heat. Tux immediately concluded that she’d been given a new puppy as a present, and while I got her healthy, Tux trained her up appropriately. Last Christmas, Scout officially became a “foster failure,” which is the best kind of failure I’ve ever been associated with. Scout has become Robin to Tux’s Batman, and they are inseparable.
Pet’s Likes: Tux likes all dogs and people and will persistently charm all new acquaintances of either species until she’s won their friendship. She was the only canine friend of the ancient blind-and-deaf dog next door before he passed over the rainbow bridge last month. He drove off all other dogs with his snapping and barking, but she would just lie motionless and silent along the chain link fence that separates our yards so that he could sniff her to his contentment. They would even canoodle after a while. She’s completely charmed every human whose property adjoins mine, and so too their dogs.
Scout likes to volunteer for extra guard duty. Doggy doors give her and Tux constant access between my house and backyard, and unlike Tux, Scout will bark at strange things or people. She’s managed to avoid the neuroses and health issues that plague many rescue dogs.
Scout and Tux stage silent mock battles at 2 a.m. with flashing fangs and leaps that make them appear to be wolves fighting to the death, but they’re just engaging in “bitey-face” for fun. Tux is still the superior wrestler. They are both high-energy dogs and quite formidable, and I am fortunate to have a large yard across which they race at joyous top speed many times every day.
Pet’s Dislikes: The backyard is known as Tuxarkana, and neither dog will permit squirrels or birds to wander it unmolested. A few have pressed their luck and learned the doggy equivalent of FAFO, because as Scout matured, Tux taught her cooperative hunting techniques. Their most passionate objections are to possums, whose death-fakery fools them only sometimes.
Pet’s Proudest Moment: For Tux, it was when she learned that she could use the doggy doors to go out and come in at will the first day I brought her home. For Scout, it was realizing somewhere in the first few days that she didn’t have to live in the drain-pipe anymore and that she had found a big sister and a human to love her.
Moment Someone (Wrongly) Said Pet Was a Bad Dog: This is a null set. Tux sometimes goes by the nickname of “Klepto-Husky” because she steals socks and other items that smell like me and will take them outside to sniff and sometimes chew at her leisure. However, the only fault here, of course, is mine. I know it’s a sign of her love for me, and I was the one who left the socks on the floor; she hasn’t yet learned to open the hamper. Scout only ever does what Tux is doing, and this keeps her out of trouble, too. They are astonishingly good dogs—well-adjusted and healthy and affectionate—and this is immediately obvious to all who see them.
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