Important edit: "From my observation, it is {DEMOCRATIC} women who are demonstrating leadership, integrity, patriotism, and wisdom in this hearing. Republican women are an embarrassing disgrace to their gender.
Republican women with the exception to a couple are kiss ass to Trump. They have no guts to take the reins and do what they were elected to do: serve our Country.
That goes times two for Maine's senior Senator, Susan Collins, who is a doormat for every male Republican and a complete embarrassment to herself and all Mainers.
Amen to that!! Suffigists unite. Senator Duckworth sent a message loud and clear to every senator in the room and young women everywhere. My young neighbors in their late twenties/early thirties have been in tears - no more - we fight. And believe me, Susie Wiles is doing her part, as well. This is not about democrat or republican, this is about integrity, honest, and supporting the longest standing democracy in human history. We are all trying to figure out how to be on a planet with 9 billion other humans. This is all new in relationship to geological time and our time on the planet. We fight with common sense and knowledge and for each other.
I've had the pleasure of meeting and chatting freely in a small-group context for an hour or more with Elissa Slotkin and can promise you that Hegseth could not carry her boot laces. He wouldn't even know where to find the boots so as to remove the laces. She would make a solid candidate for SecDef. He is an embarrassment to rational human beings with integrity, veterans and non-veterans alike.
And Duckworth... Wow. You go. I'm bolstered by watching an unafraid person tell it like it is, tear strips off a bullshitter, and call him a bullshitter to his face.
To all you senators busily playing Please Don't Primary Me and Where's My Next Billionaire Check Coming From and Which Part of That Big Orange Ass Do You Want Me To Kiss, grow some balls or ovaries, as the case may be, and watch Sen. Duckworth in action. Take notes. She's all about courage and integrity and service and commitment to our country. She puts all you cowards and hypocrites and sycophants and mealy-mouthed grifters to shame. Pure shame.
You are the bomb!! Said so incredibly perfectly. I want to cut and paste this for the front page of the New York Times. May be you’ll consider sending this in as an OpEd. Thank you!!
Jennifer, I love your new venture, all your previous editorials and your intellect. I have already subscribed to The Contrarian and sent gift messages to friends. But I have now had 4 communications from you today and am afraid of the volume of posts. What is your plan?
I love your work, Jennifer, and I also signed up for The Contrarian immediately, but I am getting too many communications too. You’re not the only columnist I recently subscribed to!
I believe you can control the amount of notifications you receive under your settings. However, I don't know if those adjustments can be indivualized for each subscription or if it's a one size fits all approach.
I just answered my own question. If you go to settings, and then click on the "subscription" that you are concerned about, you can control the email notifications you recieve. Perhaps, though, you are receiving other kinds of notifications...if that's the case, hopefully someone else can help.
I think you do NOT want to unsubscribe. Go to Settings, choose on the "subscription" that you are concerned about, and change the Notifications settings.
You could handle it different ways, I unsubscribed from the emails using the unsubscribe link and choosing which, if any emails I wanted to receive. It does not affect your subscription here (it actually reassures you of this during the unsubscribing).
Excellent interview. And will add that it is the perfect length!
I am personally so grateful to all of you for launching The Contrarian. I cannot turn on TV news, other than CSPAN. Haven't watched since 11/6. I get my news from people like yourself, and your colleagues here, who I can trust.
One observation - I don't think that Trump's nomination of Hegseth is a statement about the value he places on the DoD. He knows it is important, and that there's a HUGE budget there for the taking. This is all about him having people who will do his bidding, look away from the grift, and are as bat shit crazy as he is in positions of grave importance and power.
Jennifer, I was a faithful follower of you at the Post, and regretted missing your insights when I canceled my subscription to that rag. This is the best move you've ever made. Proud to be a subscriber, and have sent numerous gift subscriptions.
It is clear that Hegseth is unqualified to serve as Secretary of Defense, which raises the question of who will in fact be running the Defense Department if Hegseth is confirmed; he will serve merely as its public face. That should alarm Senators weighing his nomination; a vote for Hegseth will be a vote for an unvetted Sec of Defense, whose aims, ethics, character, priorities, and allegiance to the rule of law, to the Constitution, and to our military are unknown. Who will run the Department of Defense if Hegseth is confirmed? We don’t know; we can be sure that it won’t be the weekend Fox News host running the department, a man flummoxed by Senator Duckworth’s good questions.
Agreed, but as the public face he is going to be firing a bunch of generals and subordinate officers, thereby throwing sand into all the gears of the chain of command.
The perfect opportunity for adversaries to join up and threaten us on multiple fronts.
Cassandra was right, and so are current-day doomsayers: we might not be able to recover from the wake-up call when it comes.
I too want to commend Senator Duckworth for her straightforward, to the point questioning.
She was relentless. It made me sick to listen to Mr. HegSeth dodge questions by pontificating w.r.t. to Donald Trump. Mr. HegSeth has absolutely NO integrity
I just called Senator Duckworth's Washington D.C. office and left a message telling her what a great job she did in questioning Pete Hegseth today. She's not my senator, but I was so impressed I wanted her to know there are citizens all over America who are proud and appreciative of her skilled and forceful questioning of a shockingly inadequate candidate to be Secretary of Defense.
I wish I'd waited for this post to comment on the Senate confirmation hearing on Pete Hegseth's nomination to be Secretary of Defense. Instead, I attached my comment to a Norm Eisen post this morning, in which he wrote that "[w]e must work, litigate, and strive ... for the functioning of our democracy across the board."
Apropos of that observation by Norm Eisen, I think Senator Elissa Slotkin also deserves high praise for her pointed, sustained questioning of Hegseth about whether he'd follow illegal orders from Trump, whether he (Hegseth) would facilitate use of the military for law enforcement purposes, and whether he'd interfere with implementation of the U.S. Code of Military Justice. With this line of questioning, Senator Slotkin carried the flag for American democracy! I don't think it's possible to overstate the value and importance of the Senator's contribution to the Hegseth confirmation hearing today.
It’s so sad that the GOP Senate Majority will approve of him, despite that everyone can see he’s unqualified for any public service job period. This is all about sucking up to Trump.
They may approve him but it will take all of them and the more obvious it is made that he's unqualified the more they will try to find ways not to approve him. Some will be back up for reelection so they have to weigh the approval of their constituents who may have less regard for Trump in two years after some of the policy chips fall, against the likelihood that Elon will still be enough in favor to still want to adhere to his promise to fund a competitor to run against anyone who fails to vote for Trump's nominees. The more obvious the D questioners can make it that the nominees are unqualified and awful, the more likely R constituents will forgive or even favor them in a primary even if they veto a nominee, while Elon's longevity is uncertain.
We are entering a high stakes period, where both Russia and China are testing our alliances and our boundaries. I fear that Hegseth actually represents Trumps' intention to mimic the behaviors of our foes. Trump doesn't want integrity or competence; he only wants blind loyalty and obedience.
The best interests of the United States and its allies are NOT on the menu. Trump's ego is. In service of that ego, he may actually attempt to violate the Posse Comitatus Act ---- and Hegseth would be his tool to unleash the military against civilian opponents, protesters, etc.
The reality is, Trump owns the GOP and has the donor base this time around to pressure any Republican holdouts to comply with Hegseth's approval. The numbers likely will be there for a narrow partisan victory. At this point, the Democratic party's valid complaints about Hegseth's unfitness for the job are going to fall on a lot of deaf ears. Democrats failed to create a compelling counternarrative to Trump's disruption message. If anything, Democrats erred on the side of caution repeatedly over the past four years, from Garland's year-long wait to go after Trump to the party's choice of Biden to run almost unopposed.
I want to know what Democrats are going to do differently to respond more effectively to the issues of the largest voter constituency that they lost. Just telling the well-educated and financially stable how unfit Trump's loyalists are to serve is not going to solve it. You are preaching to the choir while half the congregation has gone elsewhere.
What Democrats have already done to respond to the issues of the fearful White voter is: reduce the rate of inflation dramatically; preside over the largest oil and gas production of any nation, anywhere, at any time (keeping gas prices crazy low), gotten child care tax credits and free school lunches to people whose budgets have been strained to the max, subsidized the construction of affordable housing that benefits the construction industry as well as those seeking a safe place to live, reduced the rate of increase in pollution of all kinds while cleaning up polluted waters and soil nationwide, gotten child-poisoning lead pipes out of many communities, with more to come...
It is not on Democrats that MAGA cult members pay no attention to any of those things. The cult is mesmerized by the lure of shiny things. Shiny things they've been promised and that cannot be promised. But with a core group of "evangelicals" who hold a hodge-podge of spiritual "beliefs" (to be kind to the fantasies they spin), why wouldn't they believe that the con man felon has magical powers to solve all their ills?
That "congregation" ain't coming here for enlightenment, I can guarantee you that.
MAGA cult members weren't the only ones voting for Trump. Working- and middle-class voters comprised part of that majority, and they used to be in Democrats' column. If Democrats did such a great job of messaging about what they did accomplish, it clearly didn't change the public's perception of Biden. You can dismiss a majority of voters for choosing Trump, but the failure of Democrats to present a compelling argument to maintain its own base, failed.
Realizing that I'm late to the party, I still feel compelled to comment.
Many seem to have settled on Democrats' messaging as the reason for loss of the presidential election. Yes, it was a factor, but no, it was not THE factor.
After a few weeks' reflection, here is my observation. The fact is that Trump's win was the slimmest in U.S. electoral history, so a mere handful of small influences could have tipped the election in either direction. And we have to consider ALL of them because only one wouldn't have carried enough weight to change the outcome. Here is my list, not necessarily in order:
1. Both Corporate and Social Media, all owned by oligarchs, chose and promoted Trump because he's good for audience share (revenue) and will reduce the owners' tax liabilities.
2. Given the Social Media's owners' choices, they created an environment where adversarial trolls and disinformation were allowed to run rampant.
3. President Biden is a good man. He presided over many improvements in America's fortunes, but he was not solely responsible for those accomplishments. The U.S. constituency is ignorant of how legislation and the economy work; they give the sitting president too much credit – and blame – for the way things are. Biden became enfeebled during his term and party powers concealed this fact until it was too late. Also, Biden's indulgence of Netanyahu's self-serving, genocidal campaign turned off too many Democratic voters.
4. Racism and misogyny are part of the collective American DNA. Conservatives and a significant number of progressives privately, secretly believe a woman – especially one of color – cannot lead a nation. The numbers show that millions of voters, including some Democrats, would rather vote for an elderly white man than for a woman of color. Given a choice between a demented old autocrat or a woman of color, they stayed home.
5. As an extension of racism, gerrymandering enables political candidates to choose their voters, rather than the other way around. It has got to go. The Electoral College enables Minority Rule. It has got to go. Neither will be eliminated because they are the only devices that allow the Republican minority to maintain power.
That failure was entirely engineered by the domination of far-right media, swarms of trolls and bots on social media and comment threads, and incessant both-siderism by the corporate media.
The deck was stacked against anyone hearing the Democratic "message" except progressives, intelligent moderates, and the few remaining actual conservatives who can stand reading things they don't always agree with.
I don't dismiss the PLURALITY (not majority) of voters who fell for the con, but I don't harbor the fantasy that some other kind of "message" is going to penetrate their armor.
From my observation, it is the women who are demonstrating leadership, integrity, patriotism, and wisdom in this hearing.
From Sen Hirono, to Slotkin and here Duckworth.
No wonder he doesn't want women in service with him - - they show how completely unqualified he is.
Important edit: "From my observation, it is {DEMOCRATIC} women who are demonstrating leadership, integrity, patriotism, and wisdom in this hearing. Republican women are an embarrassing disgrace to their gender.
I hadn't yet seen Sen Joni Ernst's performance - that's what it was - when I wrote the original post.
So disappointing. And so on brand for the GOP in the Trump era.
Ernst is too afraid of being primaried by the Iowa version of Josef Goebbels.
The fact that she is a vet cuts no ice with me. Americans need to stop blindly venerating anyone who has served in our all volunteer military.
She's announced that she will vote for him. I'm so disappointed.
Republican women with the exception to a couple are kiss ass to Trump. They have no guts to take the reins and do what they were elected to do: serve our Country.
That goes times two for Maine's senior Senator, Susan Collins, who is a doormat for every male Republican and a complete embarrassment to herself and all Mainers.
Susan "I'm concerned" Collins
America would have a better chance of carrying on with more women in congress....
Amen to that!! Suffigists unite. Senator Duckworth sent a message loud and clear to every senator in the room and young women everywhere. My young neighbors in their late twenties/early thirties have been in tears - no more - we fight. And believe me, Susie Wiles is doing her part, as well. This is not about democrat or republican, this is about integrity, honest, and supporting the longest standing democracy in human history. We are all trying to figure out how to be on a planet with 9 billion other humans. This is all new in relationship to geological time and our time on the planet. We fight with common sense and knowledge and for each other.
This is the first year the number of women in Congress fell, sadly.
I've had the pleasure of meeting and chatting freely in a small-group context for an hour or more with Elissa Slotkin and can promise you that Hegseth could not carry her boot laces. He wouldn't even know where to find the boots so as to remove the laces. She would make a solid candidate for SecDef. He is an embarrassment to rational human beings with integrity, veterans and non-veterans alike.
And Duckworth... Wow. You go. I'm bolstered by watching an unafraid person tell it like it is, tear strips off a bullshitter, and call him a bullshitter to his face.
To all you senators busily playing Please Don't Primary Me and Where's My Next Billionaire Check Coming From and Which Part of That Big Orange Ass Do You Want Me To Kiss, grow some balls or ovaries, as the case may be, and watch Sen. Duckworth in action. Take notes. She's all about courage and integrity and service and commitment to our country. She puts all you cowards and hypocrites and sycophants and mealy-mouthed grifters to shame. Pure shame.
You are the bomb!! Said so incredibly perfectly. I want to cut and paste this for the front page of the New York Times. May be you’ll consider sending this in as an OpEd. Thank you!!
Very nicely stated!
Sen. Jack Reed, from RI, a West Point graduate, said that Hegseth is “unqualified and lacks character”. Spot on.
But Hegseth is a serial adulterer— so it’s going to be difficult to break the GOP’s support.
This is so true, but these are the kind of men he likes. Those that would rather grab pussy than work with competent women.
And how dangerous to the welfare of all.
Jennifer, I love your new venture, all your previous editorials and your intellect. I have already subscribed to The Contrarian and sent gift messages to friends. But I have now had 4 communications from you today and am afraid of the volume of posts. What is your plan?
I love your work, Jennifer, and I also signed up for The Contrarian immediately, but I am getting too many communications too. You’re not the only columnist I recently subscribed to!
I believe you can control the amount of notifications you receive under your settings. However, I don't know if those adjustments can be indivualized for each subscription or if it's a one size fits all approach.
I just answered my own question. If you go to settings, and then click on the "subscription" that you are concerned about, you can control the email notifications you recieve. Perhaps, though, you are receiving other kinds of notifications...if that's the case, hopefully someone else can help.
You can also choose to not receive other notifications like chats, etc.
You can change what emails you get by going to Unsubscribe at the end of an email without it affecting your subscription.
I think you do NOT want to unsubscribe. Go to Settings, choose on the "subscription" that you are concerned about, and change the Notifications settings.
You could handle it different ways, I unsubscribed from the emails using the unsubscribe link and choosing which, if any emails I wanted to receive. It does not affect your subscription here (it actually reassures you of this during the unsubscribing).
Truth: “You are not qualified, Mr. Hegseth. You're not qualified.”
No beating around the bush from Tammy!!!
And they ALL know it. This isn’t hard - do what is right.
Excellent interview. And will add that it is the perfect length!
I am personally so grateful to all of you for launching The Contrarian. I cannot turn on TV news, other than CSPAN. Haven't watched since 11/6. I get my news from people like yourself, and your colleagues here, who I can trust.
One observation - I don't think that Trump's nomination of Hegseth is a statement about the value he places on the DoD. He knows it is important, and that there's a HUGE budget there for the taking. This is all about him having people who will do his bidding, look away from the grift, and are as bat shit crazy as he is in positions of grave importance and power.
The compromised are easily manipulated.
Hegseth made that abundantly clear.
Jennifer, I was a faithful follower of you at the Post, and regretted missing your insights when I canceled my subscription to that rag. This is the best move you've ever made. Proud to be a subscriber, and have sent numerous gift subscriptions.
It is clear that Hegseth is unqualified to serve as Secretary of Defense, which raises the question of who will in fact be running the Defense Department if Hegseth is confirmed; he will serve merely as its public face. That should alarm Senators weighing his nomination; a vote for Hegseth will be a vote for an unvetted Sec of Defense, whose aims, ethics, character, priorities, and allegiance to the rule of law, to the Constitution, and to our military are unknown. Who will run the Department of Defense if Hegseth is confirmed? We don’t know; we can be sure that it won’t be the weekend Fox News host running the department, a man flummoxed by Senator Duckworth’s good questions.
Agreed, but as the public face he is going to be firing a bunch of generals and subordinate officers, thereby throwing sand into all the gears of the chain of command.
The perfect opportunity for adversaries to join up and threaten us on multiple fronts.
Cassandra was right, and so are current-day doomsayers: we might not be able to recover from the wake-up call when it comes.
He can do a great deal of damage, I agree. His lack of qualifications is sadly no protection against that.
Elon will be running the Defense Department. There are lots of fat, juicy contracts.
a friend of mine commenting on Trump's cabinet picks says these are people you should not let within 100 feet of a schoolhouse,
I too want to commend Senator Duckworth for her straightforward, to the point questioning.
She was relentless. It made me sick to listen to Mr. HegSeth dodge questions by pontificating w.r.t. to Donald Trump. Mr. HegSeth has absolutely NO integrity
I just called Senator Duckworth's Washington D.C. office and left a message telling her what a great job she did in questioning Pete Hegseth today. She's not my senator, but I was so impressed I wanted her to know there are citizens all over America who are proud and appreciative of her skilled and forceful questioning of a shockingly inadequate candidate to be Secretary of Defense.
Duckworth for SecDef in 2028. That's the actual election.
I’m on it tomorrow morning.
Lipreader here. Captions would be helpful.
Pete Hegseth : DUI hire.
Hah! I see what you did here!
I wish I'd waited for this post to comment on the Senate confirmation hearing on Pete Hegseth's nomination to be Secretary of Defense. Instead, I attached my comment to a Norm Eisen post this morning, in which he wrote that "[w]e must work, litigate, and strive ... for the functioning of our democracy across the board."
Apropos of that observation by Norm Eisen, I think Senator Elissa Slotkin also deserves high praise for her pointed, sustained questioning of Hegseth about whether he'd follow illegal orders from Trump, whether he (Hegseth) would facilitate use of the military for law enforcement purposes, and whether he'd interfere with implementation of the U.S. Code of Military Justice. With this line of questioning, Senator Slotkin carried the flag for American democracy! I don't think it's possible to overstate the value and importance of the Senator's contribution to the Hegseth confirmation hearing today.
Besides Duckworth, she was the only one who competently managed his filibustering.
I subscribed today and I already can see that this is the best subscription money I have ever spent. Thank you!
It’s so sad that the GOP Senate Majority will approve of him, despite that everyone can see he’s unqualified for any public service job period. This is all about sucking up to Trump.
They may approve him but it will take all of them and the more obvious it is made that he's unqualified the more they will try to find ways not to approve him. Some will be back up for reelection so they have to weigh the approval of their constituents who may have less regard for Trump in two years after some of the policy chips fall, against the likelihood that Elon will still be enough in favor to still want to adhere to his promise to fund a competitor to run against anyone who fails to vote for Trump's nominees. The more obvious the D questioners can make it that the nominees are unqualified and awful, the more likely R constituents will forgive or even favor them in a primary even if they veto a nominee, while Elon's longevity is uncertain.
I hope your right
We are entering a high stakes period, where both Russia and China are testing our alliances and our boundaries. I fear that Hegseth actually represents Trumps' intention to mimic the behaviors of our foes. Trump doesn't want integrity or competence; he only wants blind loyalty and obedience.
The best interests of the United States and its allies are NOT on the menu. Trump's ego is. In service of that ego, he may actually attempt to violate the Posse Comitatus Act ---- and Hegseth would be his tool to unleash the military against civilian opponents, protesters, etc.
Excellent! Go get him American women patriots! Hegseth is contemptible.
The reality is, Trump owns the GOP and has the donor base this time around to pressure any Republican holdouts to comply with Hegseth's approval. The numbers likely will be there for a narrow partisan victory. At this point, the Democratic party's valid complaints about Hegseth's unfitness for the job are going to fall on a lot of deaf ears. Democrats failed to create a compelling counternarrative to Trump's disruption message. If anything, Democrats erred on the side of caution repeatedly over the past four years, from Garland's year-long wait to go after Trump to the party's choice of Biden to run almost unopposed.
I want to know what Democrats are going to do differently to respond more effectively to the issues of the largest voter constituency that they lost. Just telling the well-educated and financially stable how unfit Trump's loyalists are to serve is not going to solve it. You are preaching to the choir while half the congregation has gone elsewhere.
What Democrats have already done to respond to the issues of the fearful White voter is: reduce the rate of inflation dramatically; preside over the largest oil and gas production of any nation, anywhere, at any time (keeping gas prices crazy low), gotten child care tax credits and free school lunches to people whose budgets have been strained to the max, subsidized the construction of affordable housing that benefits the construction industry as well as those seeking a safe place to live, reduced the rate of increase in pollution of all kinds while cleaning up polluted waters and soil nationwide, gotten child-poisoning lead pipes out of many communities, with more to come...
It is not on Democrats that MAGA cult members pay no attention to any of those things. The cult is mesmerized by the lure of shiny things. Shiny things they've been promised and that cannot be promised. But with a core group of "evangelicals" who hold a hodge-podge of spiritual "beliefs" (to be kind to the fantasies they spin), why wouldn't they believe that the con man felon has magical powers to solve all their ills?
That "congregation" ain't coming here for enlightenment, I can guarantee you that.
MAGA cult members weren't the only ones voting for Trump. Working- and middle-class voters comprised part of that majority, and they used to be in Democrats' column. If Democrats did such a great job of messaging about what they did accomplish, it clearly didn't change the public's perception of Biden. You can dismiss a majority of voters for choosing Trump, but the failure of Democrats to present a compelling argument to maintain its own base, failed.
Realizing that I'm late to the party, I still feel compelled to comment.
Many seem to have settled on Democrats' messaging as the reason for loss of the presidential election. Yes, it was a factor, but no, it was not THE factor.
After a few weeks' reflection, here is my observation. The fact is that Trump's win was the slimmest in U.S. electoral history, so a mere handful of small influences could have tipped the election in either direction. And we have to consider ALL of them because only one wouldn't have carried enough weight to change the outcome. Here is my list, not necessarily in order:
1. Both Corporate and Social Media, all owned by oligarchs, chose and promoted Trump because he's good for audience share (revenue) and will reduce the owners' tax liabilities.
2. Given the Social Media's owners' choices, they created an environment where adversarial trolls and disinformation were allowed to run rampant.
3. President Biden is a good man. He presided over many improvements in America's fortunes, but he was not solely responsible for those accomplishments. The U.S. constituency is ignorant of how legislation and the economy work; they give the sitting president too much credit – and blame – for the way things are. Biden became enfeebled during his term and party powers concealed this fact until it was too late. Also, Biden's indulgence of Netanyahu's self-serving, genocidal campaign turned off too many Democratic voters.
4. Racism and misogyny are part of the collective American DNA. Conservatives and a significant number of progressives privately, secretly believe a woman – especially one of color – cannot lead a nation. The numbers show that millions of voters, including some Democrats, would rather vote for an elderly white man than for a woman of color. Given a choice between a demented old autocrat or a woman of color, they stayed home.
5. As an extension of racism, gerrymandering enables political candidates to choose their voters, rather than the other way around. It has got to go. The Electoral College enables Minority Rule. It has got to go. Neither will be eliminated because they are the only devices that allow the Republican minority to maintain power.
That failure was entirely engineered by the domination of far-right media, swarms of trolls and bots on social media and comment threads, and incessant both-siderism by the corporate media.
The deck was stacked against anyone hearing the Democratic "message" except progressives, intelligent moderates, and the few remaining actual conservatives who can stand reading things they don't always agree with.
I don't dismiss the PLURALITY (not majority) of voters who fell for the con, but I don't harbor the fantasy that some other kind of "message" is going to penetrate their armor.