Cavalcade of Mammals

Gosh, the earnest talk by Republicans on the paramount importance of scrupulous by-the-book handling of classified information was just a show for the TV cameras and gullible Republican votes.

“More than 130 political appointees working in the Executive Office of the President did not have permanent security clearances as of November 2017, including the president’s daughter, son-in-law and his top legal counsel, according to internal White House documents obtained by NBC News.” link

And for most of these folks, ‘does not have’ means the FBI checked them out and won’t approve clearance because they are a security risk. Some of these guys are known to have worked for hostile foreign powers.

Intelligence chiefs to Senate: Nope, Trump doesn’t care about Russia by Heather Digby Parton, Salon

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., asked a simple question that sent shockwaves through the hearing room. He asked the assembled intelligence leaders if the president had ever urged them to address the threat of further Russian interference.

He has not. When pressed, NSA Director Admiral Rogers said, “I can’t say I’ve been specifically directed to blunt or actually stop” future Russian attacks. CIA Director Mike Pompeo tried to defend Trump, but the best he could come up with was to say the CIA takes “all kinds of steps to disrupt what the Russians are trying to do.” FBI Director Wray said he had not been specifically tasked to combat Russian interference by the president. Coats said the same. When asked if the president has ordered an inter-agency strategy, he replied, “We essentially are relying on the investigations that are underway.”

Link to Senate Intelligence Committee hearing with the directors of national intelligence, the CIA, and the FBI. C-SPAN

What exactly was the “threat of communism”? As an economic system it is inferior to government regulated capitalism. Communist states grow their economies slower every year than capitalistic states, so they become less of a threat every year, and the comparison pushes their people toward capitalism. As a political system, communism was a variety of dictatorship or oligarchy, and not particularly stable or appealing.

Post-WWII in the European colonies, the threat of communism is that the people will be better off, at least in the short and medium terms, so there was a threat to European control, and then to the minority white government or the local satraps.

In the West, the threat of communism is that workers would insist on a pay raise, and the opportunity of communism was that it was a cudgel to destroy unions and the left.