Doom Report (Week 59: Introducing: the Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas)

This week, Kristi Noem got fired ... or at least shunted off to an imaginary job that never existed before she got booted from Homeland Security.  Many people seem happy about this, but I agreed with Luke Burbank, who was a guest on this week’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me; when host Peter noted that people at DHS were rejoicing that Noem was no longer their boss, Luke replied “I mean, they’re not replacing her with Obama—just as a heads up.”

No, sadly, they are in fact replacing her with senator Markwayne Mullin—you know, the guy who said “this is war!” and then a minute later said “We haven’t declared war!” and then finally had to admit that “okay, well, that was a misspoke.”  So, a veritable brain giant.  The press has taken advantage of this opportunity (again) to note that Markwayne’s first name is just two regular names jammed together, making clever remarks like “maybe Mark thinks this is war but Wayne is like ‘nuh-unh’.”  I feel comfortable saying this is an easy joke to make just based on the number of times I heard it this week.  Personally, I think if my name were “Markwayne,” I would pronounce it “Mar-kwayne” and claim it was of African origin.  I suspect Mullin is racist enough to be offended if anyone were to call him that.  Shame, really: it might elevate him from Oklahoma redneck to worldly sophisticate.  At least until he opened his mouth.

On Strict Scrutiny this week, Leah Litman interviews international law expert Rebecca Ingber to talk about all the ways Trump is breaking international law with his war in Iran (spoiler: it’s a lot).  The quote that struck me this time around was when Leah said this:

And this is all after we were assured the manosphere’s opposition to Kamala Harris wasn’t about misogyny or misogynoir, but just about how men didn’t want to go off and fight reckless wars.  And the manosphere was obsessed with this idea that Kamala Harris would send us into wars and Trump wouldn’t.  That was part of many people’s cover stories; I mean, JD Vance had an op-ed in 2023 that said Trump’s best foreign policy: not starting any wars.  And it was transparent bullshit and utter misogyny that got us here, to an attack that includes an air strike on a girls’ school that reportedly killed 85 students.  That misogyny helped bring to power a president who literally launched a military strike against a girls’ school.  And that is one of the images that, at least to me, will be most associated with these attacks.  And the violence and depravity related to and resulting from the misogyny was just very hard for me to miss in the first 24 or so hours of this entire thing.

Note that there are many different estimates floating around of how many elementary school girls we killed.  85 is the lowest one I’ve heard.

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Other things you need to know this week:

• Colbert had an excellent summary of the war situation.

• On this week’s Coffee Klatch, returning guest W. Kamau Bell stepped in for Heather Lofthouse.  Always worth a watch when Kamau shows up.

• On Zeteo’s Mehdi Unfiltered segment, Mehdi Hasan interviewed David Hogg, Parkland school shooting survivor and founder of Leaders We Deserve (you may recall I talked about him a bit two weeks ago).  Here, he goes into even more detail on how the current Democratic party is not meeting the moment, and, in his opinion, how it needs to change to do so.

• I first heard about the incident at the BAFTAs where someone shouted the N-word at Delroy Lindo and Michael B. Jordan on Pod Save the UK, but it took Josh Johnson to really put it into context in his new Daily Show segment “In Too Deep.”  The person who shouted it has Tourette’s, causing many people to view this as a case of diversity vs neurodivergence.  But watch Josh’s excellent summary to find out why it’s much more than that.

• I almost skipped Adam Kinzinger’s week in review (again) this week, as I didn’t find it quite as incisive as usual.  Remember that not only is Kinzinger a conservative, but he’s also a veteran (as his standard intro notes, he was an Air Force pilot for nearly twice as long as he served in Congress), and he tends to be much more hawkish on military matters than I typically go for.  But I still think it’s important to highlight diverse opinions, and this one wasn’t terrible, so here you go.

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What with World War III looming, and efforts to cheat at the midterms ramping up, hope is hard to come by this week (again).  Let’s take Cristian Farias’s Legal Eagle video on ICE getting repeatedly slapped down in court as perhaps the best we can do.  Even though the Supreme Court’s decision to ban nationwide injunctions has turned ICE’s illegal deportations into a court-choking legal armageddon, Cristian underscores some of the best work from our federal judges.  He opens the video with a litany of scathing opinions from the judicial system:

“The Court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt—again and again and again—to force the United States government to comply with court orders.  One way or another, ICE will comply with this court’s orders.”

“The laws of decency condemn such villainy.”

“The undersigned will not sit idly by and allow this intentional misconduct to go on.  It ends today!”

“The court will not allow those who relied on this Nation’s promise of safety to be met instead with handcuffs!”

And that’s just a small sample.  These are federal judges appointed by Democratic and Republican presidents, including Donald Trump.  And they are fed up with the Trump administration.

Sometimes it’s hard to be satisfied with small victories when there are so many issues that are so much bigger, and they’re all going very badly.  But sometimes small victories is all you have.