Dear Reader (especially those of you with divine birthrights),
There are people who believe they were abducted by aliens and probed. And there are people who haven’t been abducted and probed, but nonetheless believe the folks who say it happened to them.
In the spirit of fairness, I should note that not all of the probing is anal probing. But it sure does seem like that is high on the aliens’ list of priorities, after building ancient pyramids and making circles in cornfields. Maybe there was a miscommunication along the way and some aliens misunderstood the instructions to check up on the status of earth’s corn circles as orders to investigate earth’s corn “holes.” The words are similar, and who knows how intergalactic messaging can get garbled.
Regardless, I don’t believe these stories. I am open to the idea that aliens have visited us. Those videos of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena—the new term for what we used to call UFOs—certainly arouse curiosity. But I don’t buy the popular-yet-fringey stuff about aliens and Area 51, crop circles, cow mutilations, lizard people, Atlantis, Elvis, the popularity of Carrot Top, etc. But let’s stipulate that one or all of these stories might be true.
Hold that thought.
Now let’s imagine something much easier to get your head around. NORAD, NASA, and the FAA have been badly run in recent years. They’ve made statements that turned out to be wrong. They overstepped their roles and pursued policies outside of, or contrary to, their core missions. NORAD moved on from tracking Santa to stalking the Easter Bunny. Whatever.
Also imagine that Americans are pissed off about it. They’ve lost faith and trust in these institutions.
Now, do you think that someone who has been going around claiming that alien proctologists gave him the business should be put in charge of NASA? Should a rancher who claims he lost 50 cows to alien mutilators be put in charge of NORAD?
No, no, of course not, most reasonable people would say.
Okay. Good. But what about someone who made money peddling these stories? Should some advocate for alien victims be put in charge of these agencies?
The answer to this question is the same whether it turns out that the anal probing or lizard people stories are true or false: Of course not.
Let me put it this way: I think Washington, D.C., manages traffic horribly. The bike lanes are out of control. And so are the bus lanes. The bus lanes are more defensible, but in combination with the bike lanes we have a pas de deux of dysfunction. I think I am right. I think it can be proven that I am right. But you know what doesn’t flow from that? “Jonah Goldberg should run the District of Columbia Department of Transportation.”
And that’s if I’m right. If I’m completely wrong, the argument for me getting that job makes even less sense.
And here’s the really relevant point: If I spent my days knowingly making false claims about how the current occupant of that job is part of a conspiracy—alien or terrestrial —determined to harm America or to help China or Chad, I’m even less qualified for the job.
I hope all of this is pretty obvious. But I have my doubts. Because if you follow the arguments for the confirmation of RFK Jr., Kash Patel, or Tulsi Gabbard, you’ll hear lots of people say things like “Americans don’t trust the FBI” or “the American people have lost faith in public health,” etc.
These things can be true—heck, they largely are true—without lending any credibility to the case for confirming these people.
Kash Patel is a “Critic” or “Opponent” of the “Deep State,” according to countless headlines. For the purposes of this discussion, I will stipulate that the “Deep State” is a thing. Just because you’re a critic of something—real or imagined—doesn’t mean you’re the logical person to run the institutions associated with it. In my life I’ve met countless people with passionate criticisms about the Federal Reserve. Some of them are serious people with serious arguments. A lot of them are cranks, goldbugs, crypto bros, preppers, and unclassifiable weirdos. Most fall somewhere in between. But only a tiny fraction of the serious people are remotely qualified to run the Fed. None of the others are.
Go to any sports bar in America and listen to people complain about the coaching of a football team. How many of them are qualified to be an NFL coach? Maybe one in 100,000? A million?
In short, whether the criticisms are accurate or not, criticism alone is not a qualification.
Part of the problem is the brain rot of whataboutism. I say, “RFK Jr. has no business being HHS Secretary,” and the response from some folks is, in effect, “But what about what Anthony Fauci did?!?” I can concede all manner of criticism of Fauci without lending an ounce of weight to the case for Kennedy. We can agree for argument’s sake with everything fans of Gabbard or Patel have to say about the Russia investigation, the Iraq war, Hunter Biden’s laptop, etc., without making their nominations an iota more credible.
We also hear that these people need to be confirmed in order to “restore trust” in these institutions. But what if one of the reasons so many people have lost trust in these institutions is that these people have been lying about them?
A real reformer doesn’t lie about what the problems are. And a sincere reformer doesn’t distance himself from his claims when under oath. Kash Patel claimed he had little involvement with the January 6 Choir and didn’t have anything to do with its song. But he apparently forgot that he had previously boasted to Steve Bannon and others that he was chiefly responsible for making it a Billboard chart-topper.
RFK Jr. has said about vaccines, “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.” And: “They can put anything they want in that vaccine and they have no accountability for it.”
He said the polio vaccine “killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did.” He insisted that a drastic decline in polio cases as a result of vaccines to be “a mythology” that is “just not true.”
But now he says he’s not anti-vaccine.
But yes, a guy only willing to move off of his literally deadly lies for political expediency is precisely the guy we need to restore trust in public health.
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been lying about vaccines being unsafe for years, therefore he needs to run the agency that oversees vaccine policy” is a brain fart, not a serious statement. The fact that he lied about some of these lies in his confirmation hearing is not evidence that he’s actually trustworthy, but proof of how deep his untrustworthiness goes. It’s like America’s foremost Jeremiah on alien anal-probing said during his confirmation hearing, “I’ve never said aliens were probing Americans.”
Oh well, in that case, put that guy in charge of NASA.
Finally, there’s the argument that these people need to be confirmed because they’re part of the Trump coalition and to reject them would be an insult to the new voters he brought into the GOP fold.
As Vice President J.D. Vance puts it, “In their own way, both Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. represent parts of the new coalition in our party. To say they’re unwelcome in the cabinet is to insult those new voters. To reject their confirmation is to reject the idea that President Trump decides his cabinet.”
Now, I get what Vance is doing here. He’s signaling to senators to get with the program or face a backlash from Trumpworld. Fine, that’s his job. But this is a really weak argument. First of all, Vance likes to invoke the Constitution a lot, but the Constitution actually says that the president decides on who his nominees are. The Senate decides whether they actually get confirmed.
Moreover, if you think RFK Jr. is a disgraceful lying grifter, or a well-intentioned left-wing loon, or a combination of the two, or if you think Gabbard is prone to sympathize with America’s enemies—foreign and domestic—and will hamper intelligence sharing with our allies precisely because they think she’s unfit and untrustworthy, saying they represent new factions of Trump’s coalition is not a very compelling qualification.
If the goal was to restore faith and trust in government, whether public health, law enforcement, or national security, you wouldn’t pick people with wildly controversial views or a deep history of deceit. You’d pick people that even Trump’s critics would have to concede are qualified for the job and can be trusted to do it. They might be less MAGA than the MAGA faithful would like, but they’d still be more MAGA than the vast swaths of the country who rightly think these people are unfit for the job. But restoring faith and trust is a pretext, an opportunity to engage whataboutist arguments and spout off about Trump’s right to have whatever he wants. And what he really wants are loyalists. That’s it.
How else, by the way, to interpret reports that the administration plans to fire career FBI agents who worked on the January 6 cases? Even before senators vote on his FBI nominee, the administration is signalling that if you do the work assigned to you or follow the law in ways that are inconvenient to Trump, you will lose your job. If the reports are true, you can be sure the loyalists will hide behind more whataboutism and more non-sequiturs about “restoring faith” in the justice system. What Trump means by that is his faith in the loyalty of the justice system – to him.
That’s the most telling thing about the first weeks of the Trump administration: Nothing is more important than loyalty. All presidents are entitled to have loyal political appointees. But every principle has its limits. Loyalty is a qualification but it can’t—or shouldn’t—be more important than any other qualification – like fitness for public office and ability to do the job, or take precedence over the greater loyalties to the Constitution, the rule of law, or, I don’t know, the truth.
I think it speaks volumes that one of the key loyalty tests for anyone who wants to work for this administration is one’s willingness to say that the 2020 election was stolen. Trump’s nominees have been allowed to backtrack on many things, but not this.
This captures the real dynamic here. We hear so much about restoring faith and trust in government, national security, democracy, etc. But at the testing point, the real qualification for this administration is whether you’re willing to lie for the current president about the biggest bruise to his ego: his entirely legitimate defeat in 2020. If they’re all willing to lie about that, what aren’t they willing to lie about? And if they’re willing to lie about that, how much of your faith and trust in government is likely to be restored?
Various & Sundry
Canine Update: So I’m in Belize for a Gavora family get-together. We had to leave the beasts behind yesterday morning and they were not happy about it. Poor Pippa literally fought with me as I was carrying the luggage out the door, like she was trying to escape a house fire. It broke my heart. But they weren’t “abandoned”—as they would put it—for very long. Kirsten came to the rescue and brought them to her house for an extended sleepover. Indeed, they will be staying with Kirsten for a long while, because after we get back, we’re leaving again. Long story. But suffice it to say, they will be well taken care of. Whether they will ever forgive us is another matter. Meanwhile, Gracie is being well taken care of by our house-sitter(s). The earlier part of the week is a blur, because I was so sick. But I seem to recall the girls having a good time, when they weren’t taking care of me—or the couch’s structural integrity.
The Dispawtch
Owner’s Name: Elizabeth Hanvey
Why I’m a Dispatch Member: The Dispatch offers balance in a world of chaos. I feel like it is a home for the politically homeless. I get factual news with a bit of humor mixed in.
Personal Details: I’m a social worker in Michigan who loves the outdoors and endurance sports.
Pet’s Name: Louie
Pet’s Breed: Portuguese Water Dog
Pet’s Age: 6
Gotcha Story: Before Louie, I had a Standard Poodle. My poodle had become elderly and I knew that I wanted another dog, but couldn’t bear to get another poodle because of my grief. I thought the PWD would be like a poodle, but not a poodle… NOPE!! I sought and found a breeder. I visited dog shows and thought the PWD were quite cool! I adopted Louie at 9 weeks from his breeder in Bryson, Michigan. I fell in love with this challenging brat dog who really gave me a run for my money!! He’s fun but a strong-willed working dog. He’s taken a lot of training to become a good family pet. He’s my heart dog.
Pet’s Likes: Food. Walks. Food. Destroying the yard. All water, except bath water. Playing with toys, playing tug, and sitting on my feet. He loves me. I am his person. Did I mention food?
Pet’s Dislikes: Baths, getting his nails clipped, and going to the vet. He also hates to be left alone.
Pet’s Proudest Moment: I think he’s really proud when he swims. He loves swimming and has endless energy. He’s not so great at retrieving what I throw, so I get to swim too. My proudest moment is when he earned his Canine CGC award. We worked hard for that!!
Moment Someone (Wrongly) Said Pet Was a Bad Dog: Probably when he ate the Christmas lights! He had an expensive trip to the vet and Christmas poop for days.
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