First of all, before we get to the meat of the Schiff endorsement, a warm and grateful Happy Thanksgiving to you, our loyal and distinguished PJ Media audience.
Thanksgiving came early to Asia, being a dozen hours ahead of the East Coast, unfortunately to no fanfare — not a turkey in sight, one of the pitfalls of expatdom being a complete lack of interest in Western holidays aside from Christmas, which has been stripped of all its original meaning and is, to Asian proprietors, an excellent opportunity for shopping malls to market various consumer products under the auspices of a holiday.
Anyway, on to the story:
Adam Schiff has stepped out of the closet as a huge fan of Trump’s State Department nominee — gushing, in fact, endless praise from his corporate talking-point mouth hole.
Related: Corporate Media: ‘Trump Defies the #MeToo Movement With Cabinet Picks’
Schiff explains his respective stances on Trump’s crop of nominees in the video below.
Pam Bondi? Schiff’s not a fan because of her support for something called “The Big Lie” — by which he presumably doesn’t mean #Russiagate, arguably the biggest government lie since the Iraq War invasion.
Tulsi? She obviously is “problematic” because she is a Putin tool — or, in Bari Weiss’ characterization, “an Assad toady.”
But Marco Rubio?
The MarcoBot 3000, which has dutifully served its masters for decades now, is “enormously well-qualified,” per Adam Schiff.
I think Marco Rubio is enormously well-qualified for the job for which he’s been nominated. I still want to ask questions. I’m not going to completely prejudge even him, but he’s unquestionably qualified and there are others as well, but some really stand out for the risk they would present to the American people.
Related: Trump Really Screwed the Pooch With His Surgeon General Nomination
This kind of bipartisan Swamp unity is very touching and patriotic, obviously. It warms the heart to see Democrat and Republican come together to tap one of their donors’ favorite boy-toys to run American foreign policy.
But — just to rain on the parade here — does this not give one pause to stop and wonder: why would Trump’s most ardent critic and persecutor go out of his way to praise a nominee, even before the vaunted, all-important vetting process has even begun, for what is arguably the most important cabinet position of them all?
I humbly submit for consideration that the following litmus test is not overly contrarian or simplistic: if, as incoming president, Adam Schiff is praising your nominee, somewhere along the way you went horribly awry in your decision-making and you should re-evaluate your selection ASAP.
Unless, of course, Trump is yet again playing that ultra-cagey 4D Chess we are always hearing about, perhaps to extract Rubio from the Senate and then toss him in the dumpster like last week’s casserole — in which case, carry on, good sir.
But let’s not put our eggs in the 4D chess basket; even if you like him — and there are aspects of his presidency I admire — we should acknowledge for the sake of honesty that Trump doesn’t play chess at all, let alone 4D.
Nominating Marco was him getting walked into a political landmine by one of the many snakes he still has circling him, most likely Jared Kushner.
Put another way, in the infamous words of Marco-Bot 3000 in his debate malfunction against the Cookie Monster, “let us dispel the fiction” that Trump plays 4D chess.
