What Mike Pompeo Leaves Out
What Mike Pompeo Leaves Out
Plus, Biden Critics Lie Themselves into Knots Defending Pence.
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GABRIEL SCHOENFELD: What Mike Pompeo Leaves Out.
“My Mike” was the nickname that President Trump bestowed on Mike Pompeo, who served first as his CIA director and then as his secretary of state. The appellation was fitting, for among Trump cabinet appointees no one was more faithful to the boss. As Pompeo notes in his new memoir, Never Give an Inch, while his peers were being dismissed by tweet, he prospered and thrived. “In the end,” Pompeo writes, “I was the only member of the president’s core national security team who made it through four years without resigning or getting fired.”
Now Pompeo appears to be preparing for a presidential run himself. To that end, he has produced a volume that sets the stage for the campaign, rehearsing the accomplishments of his term in government, offering maxims for leadership, and projecting an image that combines ostentatious Christian piety with profanity-spewing alpha toughness. He hopes this will propel him to the Republican nomination and, beyond that, the White House.
Republicans are so out of touch, their public brand is in trouble. Plus, MTG is Queen of the GOP, Schlapp is too sleazy for Gaetz, and party types are praying for a Trump heart attack. Oh, and Tim Miller tells Charlie Sykes he wants to hang with Kari Lake. Your weekend pod.
The George W. Bush Institute’s David Kramer joins Beg to Differ to consider the decision (at last) to send tanks to Ukraine.
Eliot and Eric welcome Constanze Stelzenmuller, the Director of the Center on the United States and Europe and the Fritz Stern Chair on Germany and Transatlantic Relations at the Brookings Institution.
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MARGARET MCMULLAN: Republican Lawmakers Might Not Be Able to Handle the Truth, But Kids Can.
This month, on her first day in office, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued an executive order banning the teaching of critical race theory in her state’s K-12 public schools. She joined the parade of other mostly Southern Republican lawmakers and governors who have banned teaching CRT in their states’ schools.
Ironies abound in the CRT controversy, starting with the fact that “critical race theory,” properly understood, is an area of academic legal study not actually part of K-12 education. But for the last three years, conservative activists have been using the term as a catch-all for a variety of subjects they don’t want taught in schools.
WILLIAM SALETAN: Biden Critics Lie Themselves into Knots Defending Pence.
Do the Justice Department, the FBI, the National Archives, and the media apply a partisan double standard to politicians who wrongly retain classified documents? That’s what Republicans have alleged since Jan. 9, when CBS News reported that President Joe Biden, like former President Donald Trump, had stored records with classified markings in an unsecured location.
The two cases were significantly different: Trump had kept many more documents than Biden had, and Trump had long resisted the government’s efforts to recover some of his documents. But Republicans insisted that the government was treating Trump more harshly than Biden—in particular, by searching the former president’s estate to recover documents he had withheld—because Trump was a Republican, not because he was a scofflaw.
🚨OVERTIME 🚨
Happy Friday! Especially if you’re Ronna Romney McDaniel. You get to run the RNC for two more years! Fun times are ahead for her fourth term.
🎵 On the Jukebox… Into the Shadow by bleachers on a bus.
24 hours… On an Amtrak train from Boston to Chicago, and what new funding might mean for the midwest.
Have we been doing rest stops all wrong? Some ideas (like bringing the autogrill back, and I have to agree.)
The specter of 2016… Timothy Snyder’s must read on Charles McGonigal.
Formula for a crisis… How supply chain issues, regulatory problems and protectionism contributed to the infant formula shortage.
Fifteen stories underground… The LIRR comes to Grand Central Madison. (But it’s not that much faster.)
Midwest Siri? You betcha.
Failures in Fox booking. Hard to spin an alternate reality when it’s on the screen. Whoops.
Bake me a cake. A baker refused to bake a pink cake with blue frosting because the customer was transgender. A court found that’s not protected speech.
Meanwhile… 40 Republican lawmakers are “demanding answers” from DirecTV on why it doesn’t want to pay the far-right television channel Newsmax carriage fees.
Messy Marie Kondo… The joy was the friends we made along the way.
That’s it for me. Tech support questions? Email members@thebulwark.com. Questions for me? Respond to this message.
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Editorial photos provided by Getty Images. For full credits, please consult the article.