Views from Crestmont Drive

• Today’s big news is about the security breach by Pete Hegseth, and if he or anyone will face consequences;
• Heather Cox Richardson on the 15th anniversary of Obamacare;
• And my reflections on the motivations behind the debates between capitalism and socialism, and why some conservatives think government workers are useless scum;
• And how in the 21st century there’s a White House Faith Advisor scamming people for $1000.

Can you imagine what Republicans would have said if Biden or one of his officials had done this?

The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg, 24 Mar 2025: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans, subtitled “U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.”

The world found out shortly before 2 p.m. eastern time on March 15 that the United States was bombing Houthi targets across Yemen.

I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing.

This is going to require some explaining.

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CNN explains:

CNN, Zachary B. Wolf, 24 Mar 2025: Trump intentionally hired amateurs for top jobs. This is their most dramatic blunder

I was already writing an edition of the “What Matters” newsletter Monday about how President Donald Trump’s choice of businessmen and political allies to shake up and downsize government work has also created an amateur-hour atmosphere.

But all the examples I’d gathered pale in comparison to the revelations in a new story published Monday by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg with the headline, “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans.”

More specifically, the official doing the texting of the war plans to a journalist appears to be Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who was confirmed by the Senate despite serious questions about his lack of official experience – Hegseth’s most recent job before taking charge of the US military was as a Fox News host.

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David French reacts:

NY Times, David French, 24 Mar 2025: If Pete Hegseth Had Any Honor, He Would Resign

I don’t know how Pete Hegseth can look service members in the eye. He’s just blown his credibility as a military leader.

On Monday, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published one of the most extraordinary stories I’ve ever read. President Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz, apparently inadvertently invited Goldberg to join a Signal group chat (Signal is an encrypted messaging app) that seemed to include several senior Trump officials, including Stephen Miller, JD Vance, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth.

A National Security Council spokesman told The Atlantic that the chat “appears to be authentic.”

No one apparently noticed Goldberg’s presence, and he had a front-row seat as they debated Trump’s decision to attack the Houthi rebels, an Iran-backed militia that had been firing on civilian shipping in the Red Sea.

Then, at 11:44 a.m. on March 15, the account labeled “Pete Hegseth” sent a message that contained “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying and attack sequencing.”

This would be a stunning breach of security. I’m a former Army JAG officer (an Army lawyer). I’ve helped investigate numerous allegations of classified information spillages, and I’ve never even heard of anything this egregious — a secretary of defense intentionally using a civilian messaging app to share sensitive war plans without even apparently noticing a journalist was in the chat.

There is not an officer alive whose career would survive a security breach like that.

I’m guessing Hegseth will not resign, and Trump won’t ask him to, and MAGA folks won’t care. White men can be forgiven anything, seems to be the track record, while non-whites and women are automatically assumed to be guilty of something, and fired or deported or erased.

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Heather’s column today is about Obamacare.

Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, 23 Mar 2025: March 23, 2025

Fifteen years ago today, President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare, into law. In addition to making healthcare more affordable, the law eliminated lifetime limits on benefits, prohibits discrimination because of pre-existing conditions, and allows young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance policies until they are 26. In 2024, about 24 million people signed up for Obamacare coverage for 2025, while another 21 million adults were covered by the law’s expansion of Medicaid. The ACA has increased the number of Americans covered by health insurance and slowed the rise of health care costs across the board.

Republicans immediately vowed to get rid of the ACA because they object to government regulation of business, provision of a basic social safety net, and promotion of infrastructure. Such a government, Republicans argue, is essentially socialism: it prohibits individuals’ ability to control their businesses without government interference, and it redistributes wealth from the haves to the have-nots through taxes.

This is a modern-day stance, by the way: it was actually Republican president Theodore Roosevelt who first proposed universal healthcare at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Republican president Dwight Eisenhower who first tried to muscle such a program into being with the help of the new department created under him: the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which in 1979 became the Department of Health and Human Services. Its declared mission was “improving the health, safety, and well-being of America.” In contrast to their forebears, today’s Republicans do not believe the government has such a role to play.

Followed by a 2014 quote from Bill O’Reilly about Republicans’ opposition to the law:

“Obamacare is a pure income redistribution play. That means President Obama and the Democratic Party want to put as much money into the hands of the poor and less affluent as they can and the healthcare subsidies are a great way to do just that. And of course, the funds for those subsidies are taken from businesses and affluent Americans who have the cash…. Income redistribution is a hallmark of socialism and we, in America, are now moving in that direction. That has angered the Republican Party and many conservative Americans who do not believe our capitalistic system was set up to provide cradle to grave entitlements…. Obamacare is much more than providing medical assets to the poor. It’s about capitalism versus socialism.”

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The more I reflect on George Lakoff’s characterizations of conservatives and progressives and their different views of government, the more I see his ideas applying everywhere. (I confess I’m a little slow in putting these pieces together. When you live within a system all your life, if can be difficult to see it from a different perspective. Reading books helps.)

So: What’s so important about capitalism? It’s to allow certain people to make lots of money. What’s wrong with socialism? It’s giving certain people free stuff that they don’t deserve; it’s income redistribution. (But of course it’s the system that allowed the rich to become rich, not because they genuinely worked harder, or were smarter. Trump and Musk inherited.) What’s the difference in outcome? On the one hand, a nation of extreme inequality in which oligarchs now have managed to take over the government… and want to privatize everything, taking things out of government hands into private hands, to make those private hands, and themselves, wealthier. (We noted this earlier re: the California prison system.) On the other hand, socialism ideally organizes everything at a higher level, reducing the inefficiency of reproducing similar functions 50 times in every state, and thus reducing inequality — and costs. Primary example: America’s health care system, much more expensive and inefficient than those of all the other wealthiest, and ‘happiest,’ nations. That’s why the animosity against insurance companies, who are out to make money (for their shareholders), not to actually provide healthcare.

And of course, capitalism is about individuals, socialism about society. Back to that moral divide between the tribalists and cosmopolitans. Capitalists, conservatives, reject any notion that would make society as a whole wealthier and healthier, for the benefit of all, including themselves. They’re in it for themselves only.

Another point. I just heard about this the other day, on NPR or perhaps CBS Sunday Morning, but I can’t find the link. You hear conservatives ranting about government employees as useless scum who don’t deserve their jobs. It seems there was a time when that was closer to the truth — an era of 100 or more years ago, when it was routine for US presidents to appoint family members and croneys to government positions, whether qualified or not (mostly not). Then in the late 1800s a motion was passed in Congress to discourage this, by establishing minimum requirements for government positions. Was it the Peterson Rule? Something like that. I’ll find it. Of course this rule, whatever it was, hasn’t prevented Trump from installing non-qualified amateurs into government roles. And so we see the traditionally anti-intellectual Republican party dismissing experts right and left, in order to install amateurs, as long as they’re *loyal* to Trump. And here we circle back to the lead story above, about Peter Hegseth.

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Again: liberals are about a government that provides protection and empowerment; conservatives are about maintaining traditional business and religious interests, in spite of evidence that those interests are, in the long run, counter-productive. Conservatives don’t understand, or selfishly dismiss, long-term thinking.

And so here we are. This is the current White House Faith Advisor.

JMG, 24 Mar 2025: WH Faith Advisor: Send Me $1000 And God Will Cure Your Sickness, Assign You Angels, Smite Your Enemies

And I’m reluctantly concluding this is why humanity is doomed. We can’t seem to get past this nonsense.