I should think that Omarosa Manigault Newman must be weeping bitter tears and sticking little pins into a voodoo doll of John Brennan all this weekend, for he has stolen just about all of her publicity thunder in the end-of-week headlines and newscast coverage. A good few things are now obvious about her to that apparently small portion of the public (including myself) who didn’t watch reality TV series. One of those things is that she is a back-biting, vicious witch who blithely assumed that playing one for the cameras on a TV reality show would of course translate perfectly into a job at the White House, and another that taping conversations right and left to produce a tell-all inside book on the Trump administration would be just like secretly taping conversations for a tell-all book on the behind the scenes maneuvering on The Apprentice. Why on earth was she hired in the first place?
Aside from being an old pal, for whom the President presumably felt at least a smidgen of loyalty and trust, it may also have been that he was channeling LBJ, who is supposed to have said of J. Edgar Hoover, “It’s probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.” General Kelly never did a job so well as that of giving her the official sack, as is proved in her own tape of the matter: polite, professional and implacable. Of all the people in the world I’d not like to have professionally pissed off at me, General Kelly is in the top five. And as it has now developed Ms. Manigault Newman’s credibility is pretty much in shreds among those who otherwise might have been inclined to lend an ear to her tales of Trumpindysfunction. When Piers Morgan (Piers Morgan of all personalities!) calls you a “…relentlessly loathsome … a vicious, duplicitous, lying, conniving, backstabbing piece of work,” there is nothing much left to do except for counting up the advance (and hopefully investing it well) from your publisher and gibbering about your geometric logic and steel marbles. And sticking pins in the voodoo doll of John Brennan.
Ah, yes speaking of another good job, well done; the mass pulling of security clearances from Mr. Brennan and a handful of others, whose political animus against the current administration is so marked as to have become a regular news feature. A security clearance is not a civil right. When you are no longer performing those duties which required such either through retirement, career change, or getting the sack (see above) than the security clearance goes buh-bye. No exceptions for the inside-the-Beltway elite. Discuss, if you can bear it. There is some discussion in this thread at NeoNeocon’s new place.
She has probably been sucking up to Trump for years. I never watched any of his programs but I understand she has been with him a long time.
Reminds me a bit of Anita Hill and Thomas.
I remember the good old days when we were reassured that women were inherently better than men — if we could just get more women in positions of power in politics, business, media, the military, then the world would be a better place.
Omo is yet another reminder (as if any were needed after Hillary!, Merkle, May) that the average woman is like the average man — average.
Like everyone else, I wonder why Trump brought her to the White House in the first place. It isn’t like he wouldn’t know what he was getting. It is kinda comical though to hear the media first harp on Stormi Daniels and now Omarosa. Two star witnesses without vice or fault.
Am I the only one also wondering why someone still has the security clearance when he leaves the job? I had a secret clearance which ended the day I left my unit in Germany.
No, Bill – not the only one. Practically everyone who was ever in the military and had a clearance is wondering why-the-hell also.
“Practically everyone who was ever in the military and had a clearance is wondering why-the-hell also.”
…everyone who has ever been a contractor also. It’s a shame that the MSM is composed of folks who know nothing about anything.
Now, my recollection is that you don’t actually lose your clearance the moment you change jobs. You still have it until the end of the time it is good for–usually 5 years, when you’re supposed to be re-investigated, etc. That’s so you can switch jobs, and/or start a new one, and not have to start the process from scratch. So I think what is going on is that senior folks still have an active clearance, and that is being revoked.
That being said, my main objections are:
1. These political pukes in many cases would NEVER have been granted clearances if they were just random folks. They are serving at the pleasure of the president, and when their sponsor leaves, there is no reason they should maintain their clearances. None.
2. It sounds like these people are given lifetime clearances, which is lunacy, and should be stopped immediately.
3. They leak like crazy, and everyone knows it. It’s an outrage that low-level workers can lose their careers, and their freedom, for inadvertant security breaches, and these trash face no consequences whatsoever for their actions.
4. People act like Trump is some game-changing norm-breaking president, but it is undeniable that the Obama administration was a far more fundamental breach with long-running norms of American policy and behavior. The way they have actively sabotaged Trump from the day after the election (and even well before…) should be an outrage to everyone, if we lived in a sane country.
Omarosa had a very short tenure in the Clinton White House so I suspect that in addition to her prior association with Trump she played on this.
Christopher, you win the five cigar rating for that factoid. Reality TV is where you go after that tenure. Apparently she hadn’t learned how to tape personal encounters during those early years of her career.
Sorry, it just struck me as ironic.
Death6
I ran a small business for about 20 years. At the end, I had come to the realization that the difference between the people I hired and those I didn’t was that the ones I passed by weren’t going to cause me any trouble. While I thought at the time that this just indicated that I wasn’t very good at this, my subsequent experience as a bystander seems to show that a lot of people aren’t much better.
I’ve never known any of the decent people I’ve worked for or with to be anything less than extremely troubled to have to fire someone, even for the most blatant cause. Every one acknowledged that cutting ties quickly when the mistake became apparent was best, it rarely happened.
I find it ironic that after all of Trump’s “YOUR FIRED”, he seems unable to shed some of his ineffective hires. This whole episode defies reason. Apparently, we have stopped enforcing security laws on a wholesale basis, just recording in a classified location should see her on the inside, looking out.
Hadn’t actually thought about this, but the regs evidently have changed regarding security clearances. When I left (Class of 72) it was gone before you got fully discharged. My sons, who were in the recent unpleasantness 10 years ago, got out with 10 year clearances. The younger one got a job based on, he had a clearance, and therefore didn’t need to get one to go to sites where he works (strangely enough, chemical plants).
BTW, the same younger one, was a combat medic, med tech, and worked the Ibn Sina hospital in the Green Zone (ran the #3 OR in 28th CASH). He was technically a NCOIC above Bradley Manning (a dotted line on the chart) but says he never actually met him. Manning was not an ‘intelligence analyist’ as the media described him, he was simply a clerk in a field hospital. The medics have full access to top secret; when they bring somebody wounded in, the docs need to know everything about the soldier’s service and field assignments to make a safe assessment. My son demonstrated this to two JAG investigators who came to ‘interview’ him about Manning.
The Sherman wasn’t as bad as commonly thought, except for a period of time in Normandy. There, the vast majority still had the short-barreled lower-velocity gun, thinner armor, lack of “wet” storage for ammunition, and until the breakout of Operation Cobra, there was little room for maneuver. Normandy was terrible tank country. Thanks to the escape hatch in the hull bottom, they were easier to escape from than other tanks. In North Africa, Shermans weren’t outmatched by most German armor. After the Normandy breakout, the Germans were on the run until the German border. By then, late-model Shermans were reaching the front and the Germans’ quality and quantity of both tanks and tankers was declining (lower quality armor, hand-cranked turrets rather than electric drive, etc.).
The Sherman could’ve been a much better tank much sooner than it was historically. The Pershing should’ve been coming on line a lot sooner than it did, too. A lot of it was due to defective doctrine.