Pdog wrote on Jun 8
th, 2017 at 8:18am:
People are trading Comey tickets for U2 tickets
He's the hottest show right now!
< --------- Poi Diddy Dog Pondering .. ?! ..... !!!!!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-trump-govern-1496875130" Can Trump Govern? "
" The White House has arrived at a binary choice: Choose chaos or choose success. "
" The answer to the question—can President Trump govern?—is yes, but the window is closing.
In recent days, events outside and inside the White House have combined to produce an environment toxic to governing. The Comey circus, the internal tensions created by Mr. Trump’s tweets on the travel ban and Qatar, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s reported offer to resign: All this turbulence is pounding a ship of state that needs calmer waters if it’s going to get home in one piece.
This column raised the question in February of whether the Russia story was becoming Mr. Trump’s Watergate. Forever Trumpers objected to the analogy, arguing correctly that the legal particulars of the two events were not the same. The point, however, was not about the law or facts but about politics, which respects neither. A president’s blood is in the water, and a feeding frenzy is on.
The idea that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to defeat Hillary Clinton by now looks like a ghost story. On Sunday, Sen. Mark Warner, Democratic vice chairman of the intelligence committee, said, “There is a lot of smoke,” but there is “no smoking gun at this point.”
None of that diminishes the political threat evident in the appearance of former FBI Director James Comey before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
It is a familiar spectacle, in which a president is subjected to Washington’s version of the ancient trials by ordeal. It did it to Richard Nixon —and Lyndon Johnson, who descended into political madness from watching the evening news report his troubles on three televisions in the Oval Office.
In the Trump trial, James Comey is playing the role of John Dean, the earnest lawyer who presented himself to the Watergate Committee as the last honest man in the Nixon White House. The media’s dramaturges love to fashion political saints, thus the elevation of Jim Comey.
The dangers to the viability of the Trump presidency’s agenda at this pivotal moment should not be underestimated. Successful governing means putting multiple players in motion toward a common goal—White House staff, Congress and its staffs, and the administration’s political appointees, whose job is to push presidential policy through the bureaucratic swamps. That effort goes forward on the shoulders of a skeleton crew.
We are into the sixth month of the Trump presidency, and of 558 key positions requiring Senate confirmation, 427 have no nominee, according to the tabulation by the Partnership for Public Service. The permanent bureaucracy is running much of State, Defense, Justice and Education.
At the State Department, virtually every position below Secretary Rex Tillerson and his deputy John Sullivan has no nominee, including assistant secretaries for every region of the world.
For why this matters, look to Asia, where North Korea’s nuclear threat occupies everyone’s waking hours. Mr. Trump has met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and Mr. Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis all have visited the region to address North Korea.
But if you ask Asian governments about the status of the follow-up, they will tell you they don’t know what’s next because the U.S. has no assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs and therefore no daily liaison executing Mr. Trump’s policy goals. Much of the Trump government is close to becalmed.
The appointee holdup at State is due, in part, to the Trump White House’s virtual ban on anyone in the foreign-policy community who publicly opposed Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Presumably this is about loyalty. After this week, though, the White House’s fastidiousness may be irrelevant.
Three things happened that bear on the administration’s ability to recruit or retain good people: Attorney General Sessions’s reported offer to resign over the president’s unhappiness with his recusal from the Russia investigation; Mr. Trump’s tweet repudiating his Justice Department lawyers’ handling of the travel-ban case; and his tweet taking personal credit for Saudi Arabia breaking relations with Qatar. That required a stabilizing intervention from Secretary Tillerson because the U.S. has 11,000 troops based in Qatar. Welcome to team Trump.
One relevant footnote is George Conway’s unexpected decision to withdraw last week as Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the Justice Department’s civil division, followed by his Twitter statement supporting the department’s handling of the travel-ban litigation. Who needs “House of Cards”?
One simply cannot duck the corollary question to these events: What top lawyer or professional at this juncture will join an administration whose ability to calm the political storms, execute policy or support its own people is in doubt?
On Fox News Tuesday evening Sen. Lindsey Graham offered the president some wise counsel: “Mr. President: Your words matter now, you’re no longer a candidate for office. You’re the president of the United States and a lot of us want to help you. Help us help you.”
Normalcy is the oxygen of good governance. The Trump White House has arrived at a binary choice: Choose chaos or choose success. "