Boeing announced today that CEO Dennis Muilenburg has been fired. Boeing probably decided somebody had to be sacrificed to appease the public relations god.
Speaking of sacrifices, you’ve probably heard that Saudi Arabia has sentenced five people to be executed for the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The trial was closed, so we do not know for certain how these five people were connected to the murder, or even if they were connected at all but were just expendable.
The Wapo editorial board writes, the “two men who are known to have directed the operation, former deputy chief of intelligence Ahmed al-Assiri and Saud al-Qahtani, a top aide to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, were exonerated. Most likely they were excused at the direction of the crown prince, who, according to the CIA, is the real author of the crime.”
In the Some Things Are Certain category — Maggie Severns writes for Politico that grifters gonna gift:
As President Donald Trump raises money for his reelection campaign, he’s competing for cash with a growing mass of pro-Trump PACs, dark money groups and off-brand Facebook advertisers neither affiliated with nor endorsed by Trump’s campaign. And they have pulled in over $46 million so far.
The groups mimic Trump’s brand in the way they look and feel. They borrow the president’s Twitter avatar on Facebook pages, use clips of Trump’s voice in robocalls asking for “an emergency contribution to the campaign” and, in some cases, have been affiliated with former Trump aides, such as onetime deputy campaign manager David Bossie. But most are spending little money to help the president win in 2020, POLITICO found.
The article goes on to document lots of money being raised and paid to “consultants” and staff, but not so much for anything directly related to Trump’s re-election.
Paul Waldman writes that this is part of a pattern that has infested the Right since the 1960s.
In those days, the resource was lists of addresses, and the pitch came in direct mail, both with urgent appeals to save the country from godless liberals and in offers for a thousand different products. What those early right-wing go-getters learned was that miracle arthritis cures and requests for donations to fly-by-night political groups were merely different varieties of the same snake oil.
Each new political movement on the right, whether it was the rise of the religious right in the 1980s or the tea party in the 2000s, brought with it a new set of grifters looking to cash in. Sometimes they have something to sell, such as former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee hawking “biblical” cures for cancer. But there’s no easier grift to pull off than the one Severns documents, because the donors don’t expect anything for their money apart from the warm feeling of knowing they’re helping Trump get reelected.
So all you need to do is come up with a name that sounds legit (“Trump MAGA 2020 Committee” or some such); buy yourself a list with email addresses of marks (or, ahem, leads); start blasting out emails begging for donations to hold off the despicable Democrat secularist socialist elites who want to destroy America; and watch the money pour in.
See also House Floats Possibility Of More Impeachment Articles If It Gets McGahn’s Testimony. Then see Trump administration says courts shouldn’t weigh in on McGahn testimony.