THE WORST THING WE READ™: Denial and acceptance

THE WORST THING WE READ™

Washington Post Editorial Board Endorses Election Theft, Child Sex Trafficking

CONFIRMATION HEARINGS FOR president-elect Donald Trump's cabinet have started this week. Given the chaotic nature of Trump's selection process, the Senate has a lot of material to work through, if they care to do the work. But the editorial board of the Washington Post decided to save them the effort by publishing a guide to which nominees should or shouldn't be confirmed. 

This is the same board, as Judd Legum noted on Bluesky, that saw its already written endorsement of Kamala Harris canceled just before the election, on the orders of publisher Will Lewis, acting on behalf of owner Jeff Bezos. No undecided voter, Bezos wrote, ever makes up their mind how to vote because of an endorsement. "What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias," Bezos wrote. "A perception of non-independence."

Less than three months after that declaration of neutrality, the Post editorial board decided to stamp 23 would-be Trump appointees with a green thumbs-up logo ("Acceptable") or a red thumbs-down one ("Unacceptable"). Rather than arrogantly suggesting to an undecided voter who they might want to vote for, the board was merely telling the United States Senate what to do, case by case, with its power of advice and consent—and issuing those verdicts before the Senate had even had a chance to hold the hearings that are supposed to inform its decisions.

Of the 23 nominees, four earned the red thumbs-down: Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Russell Vought for head of the Office of Management and Budget, and Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence. And those four nominees absolutely do have no business being appointed to those positions! Hegseth is a Christian nationalist fanatic with Crusader tattoos, a history of openly bigoted public remarks specifically about military personnel, a widely reported drinking problem, a detailed rape accusation against him, and complete failure in his extremely small-scale executive experience. RFK Jr. is an anti-vaccine crank whose ventures into public health already have a body count. Vought has drawn up a project to abuse and force out civil servants en masse in the hopes of breaking the federal government's ability to regulate. Gabbard is a conspiracist with a history of Hindufascist sympathies and shady foreign ties. 

The trouble was with the 19 who got the green thumbs-up.