Honestly, I don’t know how this woman can look at herself in the mirror.
Much of the American public is fed up and disgusted with what I call the Four W’s: the woke, the weak, weenies, and weasels. All are labels for ethical voids. The woke are incompetent and irresponsible. The weak lack the “enabling virtues,” the character traits that permit one to be ethical: courage, fortitude, valor, sacrifice, honor, humility and forgiveness. Weenies lack integrity, and weasels, in some ways the worst of the bunch, are dishonest and untrustworthy, as well as operating under the unethical delusion that the ends justify the means. If one wants to objectively comprehend why so many people support Donald Trump for President, despite his dazzling array of disqualifying character traits, look no further than the Four W’s. For a current day politician, he is remarkably free of those crippling characteristics, not entirely and not in all cases, but substantially, and impressively in comparison to almost any other public figure.
Yesterday, Nikki Haley said she would be voting for Trump in the upcoming election. Let’s see [This is a corrected version of what I first posted: I missed some twists and turns]…first she was Trump’s U.S. Ambassador, and apparently a booster. She resigned in 2018 for mysterious reasons, then, after serving on the Boeing board just long enough for that to register as a black mark, she initially defended Trump after the rioters hit the Capitol in January of 2021 (saying it was not “his best” moment—you know how I hate that rationalization). Then, just bit later in the same month, told an interviewer, “We need to acknowledge he let us down. He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”
What is “we can’t let that ever happen again” supposed to mean, if not “Don’t support this man”?
Then, as Biden’s slow-moving car crash proceeded and it looked like Donald Trump wasn’t finished as a political force yet, Haley started trying to edge back into his good graces…until she thought she saw an opportunity to be the GOP nominee herself. Then she was again condemning Trump, insulting him relentlessly, questioning his mental fitness, saying that he is, like Biden, “too old,” and calling Trump and Biden “equally bad.” She accused him of having disrespect for the military, indicating that “he’s not qualified to be the president of the United States, because I don’t trust him to protect them.” After signing the required GOP pledge to support whoever was nominated by the party to run in November as a condition predicate to participating in the debates (and criticizing Trump for not signing the pledge and boycotting the debates himself), Haley then reneged on that pledge once it was clear that nobody would stop Trump. She argued that she wasn’t bound by it (au contraire: lawyers are ethically obligated to be true to their pledges) because the party she thought she was supporting wasn’t what the Republican Party now is in its embrace of Donald Trump, or something.
Why all the flip-flopping, back-tracking, reversals, double-talk and hypocrisy? She makes John Kerry look like Sir Thomas More. She makes Bill Clinton look like George Washington, and if Bill was asked who chopped down the cherry tree, he would say, “It depends what you mean by ‘chopped’.” But Haley now thinks she has a shot at being chosen as Trump’s running mate: after all, she never shot her dog. Nikki Haley has made it clear that she will say anything at that she thinks will benefit her ambition and quest for power. No one should ever believe her, trust her or rely on her, ever.
She would have been the perfect running mate for Trump, about five reversals ago. Trump has a flat learning curve, but he was betrayed by so many so often since 2016 that he would no more tie his fates to Nikki Haley than shoot a nail gun into his skull.
Nikki Haley is indisputably a weasel. I can’t imagine a worse one.
Ethics Alarms 
She can vote for him all she wants but that won’t mean a hill of beans to Trump. His learning curve is not as flat as many believe. Sure he makes similar mistakes about people he needs to trust but when you must trust some it stands to reason that some political will betray you if they think you are on a losing side. When it comes to people, we all make errors based on initial perceptions.
The left like to point to all those generals who are dismissive or harbor significant antipathy toward Trump. That also stands to reason when these same generals are looking forward to well paying board seats at Boeing, McDonnell Douglas or Raytheon. We cannot have a president that wants peace around the world because that will make profits fall. For Trump, peace is required for economic development globally. So, if he is in it for the money do we want those who are in it to make money from war or peace. I will take the latter. I don’t care if the development takes place in Russia, South Sudan, or anywhere in the west.
I have great respect for grunts, non coms and officersall who put their lives on the line but those like Bolton, McMaster and Mattis who want to be involved in perpetual armed conflict and simply want to reap the rewards of massive military spending not so much.
One point. I don’t think you can lump in HR McMaster with Bolton and Mattis. He’s a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute and I’ve listened to a number of podcasts he has participated in. He’s certainly proud of his military service and of what the US military has accomplished, but I don’t see him as a warmonger or someone who wants perpetual conflict for its own sake. That said, he does see the need to armed forces and I think is a believer in “If you would have peace, you must prepare for war.”
McMaster was also one of the members of the USMA’s board of visitors that Biden decided to remove when he was trying to pack all the institutions with Democratic pols.
As you may recall, i liked Haley and would have preferred her as the nominee over Trump.
But, that is no longer an option. The ongoing lawfare kicked open the barn door, and the horse scampered out.
At this point, the primary thing concerning me about Trump’s VP pick is whether it will either a)Help him marginally in the election or b) Not hurt him.
Ability, integrity, charisma, a double digit life expectancy would all be nice too, but you take what you can get. I assess our current VP as having one of those four, so the bar is pretty low.
If Haley can help the ticket, then great. Heck, if Ramaswamy can help, I’m for it (but ick).
Utilitarian, sure. But we’re in for four more years of craziness, regardless, I fear. I think the craziness under Trump will be more survivable for the nation than that under Biden and then Harris or potentially Hakeem Jeffries.