Summary
President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence has sparked intense criticism over her lack of intelligence experience and perceived pro-Russia stance.
Critics, including intelligence officials and Democrats, fear Gabbard’s appointment reflects Trump’s prioritization of loyalty over competence, potentially politicizing the intelligence community and straining trust with foreign allies.
Gabbard, a former Democrat who left the party in 2022, is controversial for her isolationist views and criticism of U.S. support for Ukraine.
While her confirmation is likely given a Republican Senate majority, significant resistance is expected during hearings.
Well, while I agree with you, his term is also only 4 years. Maybe this will be a lesson to us and we can move on. I’m not saying that’ll happen, I’m just being optimistic. Of course, there’s just as high a chance we’ll just keep voting in more and more braggadocios psychopaths’ and truly bury this nation once and for all. And unfortunately I believe the odds are actually not in my favor. But we gotta hope right?
I abandoned hope years ago after fighting the good fight for a couple decades. Partly because hope and its close sibling fear are by far the easiest vectors bypass a person’s reason and manipulate them, and partly because holding on to hope with increasingly dire data points and increasingly disappearing paths for a societal reformation just led to never ending anxiety and depression for me.
There is peace in understanding and acceptance, at least that’s been my experience. I still vote out of harm reduction, but not out of hope. That’s about who I am for me, you know, “to that starfish it mattered,” not about hoping it will be effective, because in 24 years of voting, it’s yet to do anything but perhaps slightly slow down our nation’s and our species’ march to avarice motivated self-destruction, and by slow down I mean we keep driving towards the capitalist made climate apocalypse cliff at 87 under someone like Obama instead of 90 like Bush or 110 like Trump.
If a candidate being taken seriously started talking about reducing manufacturing solely to medical, ecological housing materials, and food production and basically ending pointless consumerism and winding down to more reasonable, agricultural way of life for the sake of the habitability of Earth for humans, maybe I’d reconsider my stance on hope. Better chance of being struck by lighting 10 times in an hour though.