appointments

The President’s Most Unethical Appointment

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

Now that we know the whole story, it’s Michael Flynn, the erstwhile National Security Advisor, hands down. That’s amazing, when one considers some of the other appointments, like the spectacularly unqualified Ben Carson, Rick Perry, appointed to lead an agency he has previously said should be eliminated (and couldn’t remember its name); and the embarrassingly unethical Tom Price, the HHS head.

Earlier this week, Flynn, who was forced to resign February 13, for lying to Vice-President Pence, filed  with the Justice Department revealing that he had done work from August to November “that could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.”  That work had netted Flynn’s firm more than a half-million dollars, and made Flynn legally obligated to register as a foreign agent.

On Election Day, Flynn’s op-ed was published  on The Hill  praising Turkish President Erdogan as an ally against ISIS. On November  18,  Representative Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, wrote a letter to  Pence inquiring about Flynn’s ties to the Turkish government. When the White House  confirmed that the Trump transition team knew before Inauguration Day that Flynn might be required to register as a foreign agent. it was stating the undeniable.

How  could  someone like General Flynn ever be appointed national security adviser? White House spokesman Sean Spicer (speaking of bad hires) has made the silly excuse that Flynn’s status as a registered foreign agent didn’t mean he had a disqualifying conflict of interest. A  top national-security aide who was under contract to lobby for a foreign government deeply involved with U.S. Middle East policy? Outrageous! Outrageous, and guaranteed to spark a scandal as soon as this became public.  Not only was this a bad appointment, an incompetent appointment, an irresponsible, reckless and dangerous appointment, it was a really stupid appointment. Continue reading →

Now THIS Is Incompetence: Healy Baumgardner, Trump “Senior Press Representative” On CNN

/ Jack Marshall / 17 Comments

HealyAmong the various forms of unethical conduct, incompetence is often the one most difficult to assess objectively and fairly. In order to set a baseline standard for what constitutes indisputable incompetence in the performance of professional duties, I offer this, the recent appearance of “senior press representative” Healy Baumgardner on CNN with Carol Costello.

I know it’s hard to watch. Just brace yourself, and hold on. It will be over before you know it.

Healy, I think you will agree, makes Marco Rubio’s disastrous stuck-needle performance (Millennials: Once upon a time, recordings were played on these things called “record” by means of a “needle” on the arm of a “record player,” and a scratch would make the needle…oh, forget it.) during a debate cross-examination by Chris Christie look like deft repartee by comparison.

Fair conclusions to be drawn from this horror show include… Continue reading →

KABOOM! My First Head Explosion Of 2014: “Management Experts” Just Realized That The President Is A Poor Manager

/ Jack Marshall / 47 Comments
Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Appearances to the contrary, this is not a post about what a weak, inept and dangerously incompetent leader President Obama is. I wrote so many of those last year that I started waking up every morning praying that there wouldn’t be another story in the news like this one (I know I’ve linked to it before), showing that our great nation is being run by a collection of arrogant amateurs and fools with flat learning curves who would run a bed and breakfast into ruin. No, this is a post composed after picking up my brains following the head explosion fused by this passage (and those surrounding it) in a hot-off-the-presses feature in Politico, the left-leaning political news and commentary website:

“To what extent do Obamacare’s early problems reflect the limitations, in experience and intellectual interest, of its namesake? The heart of the issue, many of these people say, is that Obama and his inner circle had scant executive experience prior to arriving in the West Wing, and dim appreciation of the myriad ways the federal bureaucracy can frustrate an ambitious president. And above all, they had little apparent interest in the kind of organizational and motivational concepts that typically are the preoccupation of the most celebrated modern managers. ‘No one asked you to write code or be a technical expert, but the expectation is you can set up a process,’ said Kellogg School of Management professor Daniel Diermeier. ‘Companies do it every day.'”

Ugh. Now see what you made me do? I put that in large, bold type, and it caused an aftershock explosion, and now I’m picking pieces of skull and ick out of my keyboard. Continue reading →