Donald Trump offered the role of national security adviser to retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, The New York Times reported Thursday.
Flynn is best known for his vocal insistence that Islamist militancy poses an existential threat to the United States. The former intelligence officer has said that fearing Muslims is “rational,” falsely claimed that Shariah law is taking root in the U.S., and claimed that Islam is a “malignant cancer.”
If he accepts, Flynn, a stalwart supporter of the President-elect who served as his primary national security adviser during the campaign, will play an essential role in shaping Trump’s military and foreign policy.
Flynn was fired by the Obama administration in 2014 after serving two years as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. While the retired general wrote in his 2016 book “The Field of Fight” that he was forced out by “censors” unhappy with his intent focus on the threat of Islamic terrorism, CNN reported that his combative management style led to his dismissal.
This bombastic personality prompted a few mini-scandals during the presidential election.
Flynn said this summer that Islam is a political ideology disguised as a religion, shared fake news stories, and issued an apology after retweeting a blatantly anti-Semitic post.
Smooth move, U.S. and A. You’ve reDubyafied your country at best. Remember how awesome that was the first time? Evidently not, you stupid fucks. God help us all, as if we deserved it. We’re getting what we want, like Mencken said, good and hard.
"General Flynn …has said that Shariah, or Islamic law, is spreading in the United States (it is not). His dubious assertions are so common that when he ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, subordinates came up with a name for the phenomenon: They called them ‘Flynn facts.’”
‘Post-truth’ named 2016 word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries
https://www.washingtonpost.com…
It is time for for everyone to stop being cute, trying to create the next meme. We have a perfectly good word in our language, “lies.”
I support not using pointless new words, but we really do have something new going on here. People today can believe any kind of crazy thing they want and find verification for it that looks and feels exactly like the verification for things you found back when we mostly agreed upon a common set of facts. And very often you can trace the misinformation to its source and never find anyone who consciously attempted to deceive anyone by spreading it. So nobody is lying in the dictionary sense. And nobody can be forced to admit they can’t back up what they say. You can live comfortably in whatever little belief-bubble you care to.
It’s Bill Maher’s “Zombie Lies” and “Lies are the New Truth” all over again.
There was some speculation that Trump’s right-wing bluster was an act, that really he might be merely without any firmly held beliefs, and that he just says what he think “sells”. That may be true; but the downside of that appears to be that since he has no firmly held beliefs, he can happily hire extremist right-wing nut jobs apparently based on their loyalty to him, without any thoughts as to the possible outcomes.
That, or the formerly pro-choice and only tepid supporter of the Iraq War really has developed a set of firmly held beliefs, and they are ugly as hell. Either way, we’re screwed.