Pierce: Not Even Republicans Are Buying This Latest Trump Tale
Not Even Republicans Are Buying This Latest Trump Tale
Of course, it remains to be seen whether Lindsey Graham will stay on the Russian bounty case.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
JUN 29, 2020
The first American frontier, which is to say everything west of Richmond, was settled partly by the practice of collecting the scalps of dead and dying Native Americans. It began in Massachusetts, quickly spread to New York and Pennsylvania, and, by the 1750s, when the revolutionary spirit was beginning to stir among the upper classes, it had become general throughout the British colonies in America. As the country expanded westward, so did what became known as “hair-buying.” The laws governing bounty scalping—and “governing” is too nice a word entirely—were on the books long after the infamous practice faded. (Nova Scotia had one as recently as 2018.) It took an awfully long time for this country to decide that putting any price on human beings—even piecemeal—was not exactly consonant with the ideals that the United States proclaimed in its founding documents and its prideful memorials.
Comes now this historical moment, in which those ideals and memorials are facing an overdue tide of revision and honesty. And, at the same time, the news came last Friday that the President* of the United States knew that the Russian Federation was arranging the payment of bounties to Taliban fighters who killed American soldiers in Afghanistan, and that the President* of the United States has done nothing about it. The story broke in The New York Times late Friday and, by Sunday night, it had been confirmed through independent reporting from every outlet from the Washington Post to SkyNews. The White House spent three days trying to decide whether its most effective defense was that the Commander-in-Chief was actively negligent in this regard, or that the Commander-in-Chief was as plainly ignorant about this as he is about every other part of his job.
It seemed by Monday to have settled on the latter, with the president* himself tweeting out that his intelligence community had told him that there was no “credible” information regarding the bounty program, which is almost certainly a lie, and which undoubtably will bring a cascade of new leaks from Spook Central designed to counter the president*’s threadbare alibis. It also has been denied by both the Russian government and by the Taliban, both of which possess roughly the same credibility as the president* at this point. Not even Republicans are buying this tale. Congresswoman Liz Cheney already is raising all kinds of hell and, prior to getting together on the links with the president* on Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham insisted that it was “imperative” that Congress get to the bottom of the situation. Whether Graham will stay on the fairway in this regard is beyond my poor analytical skills.
If true, of course, this is a horrible dereliction of duty that raises all kinds of questions (again) about the president*’s relationship with Vladimir Putin and, frankly, about the president*’s loyalty to this country. Day by day, it becomes more and more clear that this president* doesn’t give a goddamn about his fellow citizens, in uniform or out. I fear the next few months are going to provide us with examples that grow more and more garish. We are in the hands of a madman.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a32999221/russia-bounty-american-soldiers-afghanistan-trump-republicans/
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