Friday Trump dump

*  Vox talks to 3 experts who outline the defence Buzzfeed would have to any defamation action by Trump.  Sounds pretty convincing to me that we aren't going to see Trump try.

*  I was reminded this week by Tim Blair's linking back to a post of mine in 2006 that I used to defend the Bush administration from Leftie panic merchants worrying that he was a Christian fundamentalist who thought the US was inevitably going to have to nuke the evil out of the world.   I still take that view:  George W never struck me as that kind of Christian, and, of course, nor did his neocon advisers.  (Does anyone dispute that they were motivated by misplaced, mistaken and self-interested idealism about the ease with which Western-friendly democracy would organically arise in the Middle East if you only knocked over a dictator or two?)

That said, it has slipped under the radar somewhat that Trump is installing as CIA head someone who really does hold the ideas that both secularists and sensible Christians fear.  From Slate:

In June 2015, Rep. Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman, headlined a “God and Country Rally” at Wichita’s Summit Church. “To worship our lord and celebrate our nation at the same place is not only our right, it is our duty,” he began. Pompeo’s speech was a mishmash of domestic culture war callouts and dark warnings about the danger of radical Islam. He cited an inflammatory prayer that a pastor named the Rev. Joe Wright once delivered before the Kansas State Legislature: “America had worshipped other Gods and called it multiculturalism. We’d endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle.” He lamented government efforts to “rip faith from our schools” and then segued immediately into a discussion of the jihadi threat: “This evil is all around us.” Pompeo concluded by describing politics as “a never-ending struggle … until the rapture.”

Donald Trump has appointed Pompeo to head the CIA; his confirmation hearings begin on Thursday. If a normal Republican president had nominated a figure like this to head the country’s major foreign intelligence agency, there likely would have been a lot of attention paid to his apocalyptic religiosity and Manichaean worldview. Amid the fire hose of lunacy that is the Trump transition, however, Pompeo’s extremism has been overlooked. It’s worth pausing to appreciate the fact that America’s CIA will shortly be run by a man who appears to view American foreign policy as a vehicle for holy war.

Great.

*  Fake news spread by the hit team of stupid and dishonest gay right wingers - Gateway Pundit and Drudge.    And no, Trumpkin dimwits, what they did is not the equivalent of Buzzfeed - which published a document noting its content was unverified and contained some mistakes and should be taken with a great deal of caution.  Remember, fake news is the deliberate dissemination of disinformation that asserts its truth, or knowingly doesn't care about its truth.  Like Drudge running the story of Bill Clinton's black son during this election campaign, and not mentioning that Drudge himself had years ago run the stories showing the medical evidence that this couldn't be true.

Now, I must post something other than Trump stuff....