I understand that the Trump administration is eager to find a soft landing spot for K.T. McFarland since her number two position on the National Security Council became untenable with the departure of Michael Flynn. But someone should tell them that there are Muslims in Singapore:
K.T. McFarland, a former Fox News analyst brought in as the No. 2 at the National Security Council by the fired national security adviser Michael Flynn, has been offered the post of US ambassador to Singapore, sources familiar with the situation tell CNN.
McFarland is also being considered for a senior role at the State Department, according to a source familiar with her plans, but it is unclear whether any concrete offer from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been made. One source close to McFarland says she could also opt to remain at the National Security Council.
McFarland’s future at the NSC has been uncertain since Flynn resigned in February amid a controversy over his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak, during the transition.
Don’t think the people of Singapore won’t know that McFarland is closely associated with Michael Flynn or that they won’t learn how Flynn feels about Islam.
Donald Trump’s pick to be national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, called Islamism a “vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people” that has to be “excised” during an August speech.
Flynn, who has called Islam as a whole a “cancer” in the past, made the comments during a speech to the Ahavath Torah Congregation in Stoughton, Massachusetts. Video of his speech is available on YouTube and was reviewed by CNN’s KFile.
“We are facing another ‘ism,’ just like we faced Nazism, and fascism, and imperialism and communism,” Flynn said. “This is Islamism, it is a vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people on this planet and it has to be excised.”
And even if they didn’t care about her connection to Flynn, they’d be unimpressed with this:
Trump saw her on TV which is always a top recommendation in his book. It turns out that McFarland shares a similar worldview with Flynn and Trump, believing that the US should seek a close relationship with Russia and put everything it has into the battle against Islamist terrorism. She likes torture, likes it a lot and considers failing to profile Muslims to be “political correctness.”
The purpose of diplomacy is to improve relations with foreign countries, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to send an ambassador to Singapore who is on the record approving of the torture and profiling of Muslims, who happen to make up about 15% of the population there.
A better position for her, given her communications background, might be as a potential replacement for Sean Spicer, who looks to me to be on the verge of spontaneous combustion.
How about Siberia? It’s part of Russia after all…
I hear Yakutsk is wonderful this time of year.
On the bright side, at least they’ll appreciate her views on torture. And authoritarian regimes.
This is the one part I agree with. A real shame that most of the liberal/Dem left has gone over to the McCarthyite dark side on Russia, with only a small percentage of us trying to sound the voice of reason while we find ourselves awkwardly in accord on this issue with a number of conservatives and even Trump (Russia, Nato).
Priority #! should be improved relations w/Russia, working with them as a partner if short of being buds. Next priority is to join forces in a new Grand Alliance with them to destroy ISIS. The world would be a far safer place with a new detente with the Russkies, and we’d likely be much further along in destroying the ISIS cancer which still threatens many and shows no signs of giving up.
(As I’ve noted before, there likely won’t be a successful outcome against Islamist terrorism/ISIS/AQ in the world absent cooperation w/Russia. And the effort should include military from a number of other countries, a true multinational military force and one not led by the US. Several hundreds of thousands of troops will be needed.)
The frog begs to differ:
Nah, we’re just actual anti-imperialists. Well some of us, anyway. Turns out you don’t object to the war on terror, imperialism, or war at all. Defending dictatorships, equating “anti-intervention” with regime change, and supporting drone strikes against “terrorists” who aren’t doing the vast majority of the killing. And all of this under the context that Russia supports a lot of this behavior for enthonationalist and religious reasons.
You’re fucking damn right I’m going to oppose that agenda.
Btw Christopher Hitchens would agree with your formulations. Lol, supporting Chris Hitchens FP, but from the left. Amazing.
Aren’t you supporting Mr & Mrs Lindsey McCain’s FP (and I’m sure many other cons and neocons), except from the left?
No, because I don’t agree with a lot of what they want to do even if I agree with them that Putin is a fascist. They want more bombing of ISIS and more military build up.
Anyway who says we want close relations with Russia without stipulating that Putin has gone into retirement is a prime candidate for a lobotomy.
The fact that they objected so vociferously to Clinton’s foreign policy, but treat Trump’s as it is actually happening with kid gloves — or even agree with a significant amount of it — tells the tale. Even in the face of a ramped up war, which the administration is now concealing how many troops will actually be there.
Remind me of Putin’s popularity among Russians today. Not just one poll but many, consistently over the years, and valid ones (not just state-backed) that even western critics acknowledge as sound.
And if not Putin, who? Would he have the backing of the Russian people as Vlad does? And would Russians be on board with another regime change adventure by the US, this time against their own leader?
Laughable. Before any ousting could occur, the Kremlin would likely have it well sussed out and react rather aggressively to begin to defend their interests. That would mean the situation would devolve rather quickly to at least Cuban Missile Crisis dimensions. Congratulations, Dems.
We’re not likely to see better than Putin in our lifetimes.
It’s stupid to suggest it all must be either/or — we can have better relations but only with Putin gone. Stupid and, the way things are going, dangerous.
You’d need a million bucks and someone to spot you two vowels before you could afford a clue.
This one isn’t a useful idiot. He willingly drinks the kool-aid.
Plus.. it’s evident he’s one of those folks who thinks Western civilization is under threat from Muslim takeover. That and the Putin love affair and he’s already more than halfway to being an alt-right loon.
with “Vlad”!
WoT: I’m against it as it’s been carried out the last 16 yrs, by R and D alike. That includes drone strikes that do little or nothing, or possibly worse, to get at the actual problem.
Where did you get the idea that just favoring improved relations w/Russia and calling for an entirely different war on ISIS/AQ means that I support your list of horribles? Straw man time.
As for war generally, I’m against. Did you miss the thousand or so posts I’ve made here on war, VN War in particular, as I’ve discussed warmonger LBJ at great length?
But re ISIS/AQ, it’s not possible to negotiate, ever, and so the only solution is to take them out. I’ve proposed a solution. I believe not only would it work, but it may be the only way to achieve a good, lasting outcome, without the risk of creating still more terrorists, which has been the US’s stupid policy for years.
As for supporting dictatorships, not sure who you’re referring to. The political situation — contra people like you and the US corp media — is quite a bit more nuanced in Russia for instance, as Putin is hardly a Stalin. Not even a Khrushchev or Brezhnev.
More like a Gorbachev actually. Neither a weak Yeltsin type virtual puppet of the US nor a strongman dictator cartoon figure you’d prefer to imagine.
It’s not a straw man, Brodie. If you want a war on ISIS, it’s either going to be carried out how Obama has with limited drone strikes that for the most part the president personally approves, or a “bomb the shit out of them and give the military boots on the ground more autonomy to call the strikes in.” The latter will have enormous civilian loss of life, and will be similar to Putin’s barbarism in Aleppo. We are already seeing it in action; Trump is outpacing Obama 3-1 on drone strikes, and they’re becoming deadlier. What you’re callin for with a significant escalation of troops is actually more in line with Vietnam that you opposed.
Support for dictatorship is supporting Assad, I wasn’t extending it to Putin who I’m not quite sure is a “dictator” but he controls enough of the political economy that if he is not one yet he easily could be turned into one if he felt sufficiently threatened. It’s one thing to think intervening in Syria would have extended the life of the Syrian civil war — which is why I opposed intervention in the beginning — but it clearly hasn’t. Obama’s policy might be the worst and most cynical of all: enough weapons to keep it going, but no decisive victory. Point is, there will be no peace until Assad goes.
C’mon. The US is known famously for picking and choosing which dictator to oppose sanctimoniously while at the same time quietly backing/working with/trading with all sorts of dictator types around the world. Some of the most brutal govts (Saudi comes to mind) we call our allies.
We have had Syria-Assad on our Deep State radar screens for removal since at least the PNAC list of states to topple in the last century. And the neocons who back this insanity are still in charge. Obama, for whom I and millions of others had hope, was ultimately too weak to oppose them.
As for ISIS, your limiting the options to help your weak argument only shows how limited your thinking is on this. Of course, if we continue with the anti-Russia/Putin hysteria over here, the options will be severely limited. But if a true multinational military force were to come about, no Vietnam redux: with multiple countries contributing troops, each roughly in proportion to their size, the risk is widely spread so no one country’s troops take huge casualties.
Vietnam was clearly a US war of choice that was 98% American military involvement (some Aussie troops in small numbers), that reasonably had only implications for who would govern VN. Not so with ISIS/AQ and their desire for a region-wide, then world-wide caliphate. They represent a grave risk to civilization. And so does playing cute political games full of wild charges and nonsense against Russia create a sobering risk to civilization.
Don’t be stupid. ISIS is not the threat to civilization that you seem to believe it represents. They have lost the vast majority of their territory and will soon lose all of Mosul, their most important stronghold outside of Raqqa. They have lost thousands of fighters and have seen their recruiting dwindle as a result of their failures on the battle-field.
They are a nuisance, at best in the West, capable of sporadic, but spectacular, attacks. They are primarily a threat to other Muslims.
moment of sanity and rationality.
Obsessing over ISIS/”Radical Islamist”/Other terrorism at the expense of meaningfully addressing the actually existential threats that actually confront us is the very definition of irrational.
Climate change is the existential threat that should have all of us worried right now. When we look at what is happening to long-existing ice caps in the Arctic and Antarctic as well as news about the outcomes of climate change in the short and intermediate terms, we have plenty to be worried about. Climate-related refugees? We need to be planning to prepare for them now. Not later. Now. We long ago crossed the Rubicon. At best, we as a species can mitigate the damage a bit, and that would mean drastic changes. tRump’s election was a definite setback given that the US still has enough power in the world to gum up climate treaties and whatnot. Nukes worry me. The notion that the Cold War would end and we could all stop worrying seemed silly at the time and seems silly now.
Terrorism in one form or another has been with us for a while. But in the scheme of things that is a problem that can be contained, if not prevented entirely. As long as we remain a symbol manipulating animal and one that has to seek meaning in life, we’re going to have at least a few among us who become fanatically devoted to one cause or another, and who commit destructive acts in the name of those beliefs. Fortunately those tend to be localized. Right now there is some limited threat posed by various religious fanatics (Islam is not the only one) and political fanatics (mostly right-wing at this time – the Weathermen and Red Army Faction days have long since passed, thankfully). Making unholy alliances to deal with a minor threat when something considerably larger looms is just plain insane.
Not “obsessing” just acknowledging. ISIS has been vastly underrated before — recall Obama’s unfortunate remarks several years ago about ISIL being the “junior varsity”.
The JV then managed to control large swaths of Syria and Libya, and control major cities in Syria and Iraq. Yeah, some JV.
Had Russia 18 months ago not stepped in to, you know, actually effectively go after ISIS in some of their strongholds and areas of known activity, they would probably be about to topple Damascus right now.
Acknowledging reality, adjusting one’s pov to accommodate the new evidence before one’s eyes, as Obama had to do, is acting rationally.
And acknowledging that fact doesn’t necessarily prevent acknowledging and dealing w/other real existential threats. Such as nuclear holocaust — something we now once again have to worry about thanks to the hysteria here over bogus Russiagate charges and the resulting New Cold War, which one Russian official (and Prof Stephen Cohen) deems more dangerous than the last.
sigh
Actually, there are not enough nukes left on earth to even begin to have a Nuclear Winter, let alone a Nuclear Holocaust. I even wrote a diary on this a few weeks ago.
Second of all…
You know what? I’m not even going to bother. You are who we thought you were. Just another troll.
Meanwhile, actual fascism continues apace as a result of “Vlad” over there, who is definitely someone I want my own leaders to emulate:
Authorities Reportedly Detaining and Killing Gay Men in Chechnya
I hear Trump’s other chum has an answer for the the drug war:
Thousands dead: the Philippine president, the death squad allegations and a brutal drugs war
“The voice of reason”: “what I think”
“Sean Spicer, who looks to me to be the verge of spontaneous combustion”. What a great description of Spicer! He is so belligerent on most days.
she’ll be perfectly positioned to encourage/enable/oversee some needed ethnic cleansing!
Where could be the problem with that? It’s all the rage these days.
Who invited the glibertarian troll into the pond?
O sing a song of Singapore,
Where life is such a crashing bore
That bureaucrats must while the days
By fingerprinting dogs;
And Government (in full control)
Can ding you for each foot you roll
And issue electronic shoes
To everyone who jogs.
But I (for one) will not believe
In any progress they achieve —
No matter what great strides they make
In registering cats —
Until they have a census done
And checked, down to the smallest one,
Of all that island paradise’s
Roaches, snakes, and rats.
Trump has asked McFarland to say hello to his good friend Lee Kuan Yew.
Agree. SE Asia, including Singapore is my area of regional expertise and the fact is that the government will not appreciate a right-wing, pro-Russian ideologue as Ambassador, especially since Singapore is pretty important to regional to US trade and security interests and is an important international news media hub (ever since Hong Kong got turned over to China 20 years ago). I agree that Spicey does look like he is about turn into a ball of flame but there is a tiny part of me that empathizes with him in what has to be the crappiest situation facing a Presidential press spokesman in any modern Presidency.
There is one point that is being ignored: foreign countries get a vote in the person we send as ambassador. The sending country is required to get the receiving government’s consent (called “obtaining agrement”) for proposed ambassadors; and the receiving country can decline (“refuse agrement”). We’ve done that ourselves on occasion. It’s a fairly drastic step, of course, and not commonly done; but the process does exist. If Singapore doesn’t want Ms. McFarland (for which there are plenty of reasons) and is willing to make a point about it, she won’t be going there.
Done deal.
Morons.