Fired Guy Fires Guy
So long, Mark Esper, you were bad at it and you should feel bad.
Poor Donald Trump. Everything is out of control, and he just lost an election to Sleepy Joe Biden, and the American people just fired his orange ass before staging a worldwide dance party to celebrate his imminent departure. Sad!
Since none of the lawsuits to overturn the election are actually going to work, we guess Trump felt the need to do something to convince himself he's still a big man in charge. So he fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper today on Twitter. Esper had already prepared his letter of resignation, so we doubt he was real upset about it. He didn't like that he was getting a reputation for being known as "Yesper" (GET IT?), and we guess he's one of the few Trump officials who really understands just how hard Trump lost the election, and would like us all to forget that he was a loyal Trump sycophant for so long.
We would have been interested to read Esper's resignation letter, if only to see if it did everything but call Trump a fascist piece of shit, like General Jim Mattis, Trump's last confirmed SecDef, did in so many words in his resignation letter.
To make himself feel better, Trump wrote on Twitter that Esper had been "terminated."
...Chris will do a GREAT job! Mark Esper has been terminated. I would like to thank him for his service.
— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump) 1604944490.0
Whatever. We guess Christopher Miller will have a good time being SecDef for 72 days, until President Joe Biden disinfects every moron Trump political appointee from the entire DC metro area.
Oh wait, is it even legal for Chris Miller to become (acting) SecDef? Unclear :
There’s currently a Senate-confirmed Deputy Secretary of Defense — David Norquist. Under 10 U.S.C. § 132(b), *he* i… https: //t.co/PJfVfbwWrn
— Steve Vladeck (@Steve Vladeck) 1604944944.0
So we'll keep our eye on that one!
If you'll remember, Trump was Big Mad that Esper started squealing that he didn't support using American troops to attack American citizens peacefully protesting after the murder of George Floyd. Indeed, he didn't appear to be fully on board with Fascist Bible Photo-Op Sparkle Motion, even though he at one point referred to attacking innocent Americans protesting as "dominat[ing] the battlespace." If you are unwilling to enable Trump's fascist wet dreams, then you are probably controlled by Hillary Clinton and the Deep State and must be terminated.
Esper was a really bad SecDef for about a hundred reasons. If you want to read more about it, the Daily Beast did a good tick-tock of all Esper's fuckups.
Before the election, it was reported that if Trump won, he was going to fire Esper, and also CIA DIrector Gina Haspel and FBI Director Chris Wray. (He hates Wray sooooo much.) Oh yeah, and he told one of his COVID rally crowds just before the election that he was going to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, which is all the more possible after he signed an executive order in late October stripping career civil servants like Fauci of many of their protections.
Of course, Trump did not win, but rather lost, like a loser, a fact he clearly hasn't accepted. But sure, why not burn it all down and fire everybody, if that's what makes the manbaby feel better? It's what he's doing everywhere else.
We imagine the Chris Wray and Gina Haspel FIRED! tweets are being written right now.
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I'm reading about the invasion of Poland to finish up the second volume of my day-by-day history of World War II, which runs from September 1, 1939 to December 31, 1939.
A LOT happened in the Phoney War....Russia invaded Finland, the RAF got hammered raiding Heligoland, FDR pushed for "cash and carry," and there was definitely no "Phony War" in the Atlantic Ocean or in China, for that matter. Ask the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who were slaughtered by the Japanese.
I read an excellent Soviet diplomatic history in grad school, Haslam on "The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933-39." They were keen on containing Hitler, and took collective security seriously.
But the approach of Paris and London to Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, and especially Czechoslovakia changed their minds. It might not have been official policy, but the Kremlin saw that important elements there wanted to use Germany to destroy the Bolsheviks. That element was strong enough to prevent any real cooperation with the Soviets against the fascists.
So Stalin tried to buy time with the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement. I think the prior runaround he got from Whitehall factored into Stalin dismissing the intelligence he got from the West about the impeding build-up for Barbarossa. His vaunted suspicious nature failed him; he was more suspicious of London than Berlin, and that was an error.
Still, the gamble worked well enough -- he bought some space and time (not as much of the latter has agreed) and used it to prep. Notably by ending hostilities with Japan in the East, freeing up troops that proved critical to the defense of Moscow.