REPUBLICAN RESISTANCE TO TRUMPISM SEEMS AWFULLY SELECTIVE

This is good, I guess:

Republican-led committees in the Senate and the House say they will amplify their scrutiny of the Pentagon after a Washington Post report revealing that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken order to kill all crew members aboard a vessel suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea several weeks ago....

Late Friday, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), the committee’s top Democrat, issued a statement saying that the committee “is aware of recent news reports — and the Department of Defense’s initial response — regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels.” The committee, they said, “has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”

The leaders of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Alabama) and Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington), followed suit late Saturday.

If Hegseth ordered a "double tap" in order to kill people on the vessel who were no longer capable of doing harm, that's a war crime -- or, since we're not officially at war, a simple murder. If this is a law-abiding, civilized country, there should be agreement across the political spectrum that it's unlawful to issue orders of this kind.

But I don't think the public gets it. As I noted yesterday, in a recent CBS poll that was terrible for President Trump otherwise, respondents said they approved of using the military to attack boats suspected of smuggling drugs into the United States by a 53%-47% margin.

If Americans want drastic actions taken to deal with the problem of substance abuse in America, I'm not surprised. Here are some numbers from a 2023 Kaiser Family Foundation survey:

... a majority of adults say they have felt the impact of the substance use crisis facing the country. Two-thirds say either they or a family member have been addicted to alcohol or drugs, experienced homelessness due to addiction, or experienced a drug overdose leading to an emergency room visit, hospitalization, or death.

Three in ten U.S. adults (29%) say they or someone in their family have ever been addicted to opioids, including prescription painkillers and illegal opioids like heroin.

I think ordinary Americans feel that the widespread availability of opioids and other bad drugs is evidence that people in power don't care about them -- and as a result, many Americans are inclined to take Donald Trump at his word when he says he's cutting through the bullshit and actually solving the problem. It's worth pushing back against this, but it won't be easy.

If Americans approve of boat bombings that aren't legal, that's no surprise. We've all consumed many hours of film and television featuring cops and soldiers who flout the law because, the plot tells us, it's the most effective way to get the bad guys.

In Washington, I'd like to see some bipartisan concern about Trump's corruption, and his warm embrace of high-rolling criminals, like this clemency beneficiary:

President Trump has set free a private equity executive who had served less than two weeks of a seven-year sentence for his role in what prosecutors described as a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of victims.

David Gentile, 59, a onetime resident of Nassau County, N.Y., had reported to prison on Nov. 14, and was released on Wednesday....

More than 1,000 people submitted statements attesting to their losses, according to prosecutors, who characterized the victims as “hardworking, everyday people,” including small business owners, farmers, veterans, teachers and nurses.

“I lost my whole life savings,” one wrote, adding, “I am living from check to check.”

I'd also like to see bipartisan outrage about the pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández. The New York Times tells us in a rare pull-no-punches headline that Hernández "flooded America with cocaine."

He once boasted that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.” He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him.

At the federal trial of Juan Orlando Hernández in New York, testimony and evidence showed how the former president maintained Honduras as a bastion of the global drug trade. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America’s poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries.

That's a drug story and a story about Trump's love of high-level corruption -- his own and other people's.

I know that the president's pardon power is all but absolute. I know that it's a lot easier to target Hegseth, whom many Republicans might want to drive from office even though they remain loyal to Trump.

But if, as the conventional wisdom now tells us, Republicans are slowly breaking with Trump and looking ahead to a post-Trump future, I'd love it if they'd focus on the way Trump wallows in corruption and hands out pardons because he likes the recipients -- or because they've done something for him.

And because the AI and crypto industries own virtually everyone in our government, I assume it's unreasonable to hope that there'll ever be oversight of this corruption:

Since January, [David] Sacks, 53, has occupied one of the most advantageous moonlighting roles in the federal government, influencing policy for Silicon Valley in Washington while simultaneously working in Silicon Valley as an investor. Among his actions as the White House’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar:

* Mr. Sacks has offered astonishing White House access to his tech industry compatriots and pushed to eliminate government obstacles facing A.I. companies. That has set up giants like Nvidia to reap an estimate of as much as $200 billion in new sales.

* Mr. Sacks has recommended A.I. policies that have sometimes run counter to national security recommendations, alarming some of his White House colleagues and raising questions about his priorities.

* Mr. Sacks has positioned himself to personally benefit. He has 708 tech investments, including at least 449 stakes in companies with ties to artificial intelligence that could be aided directly or indirectly by his policies, according to a New York Times analysis of his financial disclosures.

I guess I'll take whatever bipartisan oversight we can get, but I want more.