Two-thirds of Trumps national security team doesnt get it

[DonViejo]

By Jennifer Rubin May 22 at 11:30 AM

Compared with President Trump’s grab bag of extreme, inexperienced billionaire domestic advisers, he has a dream team on foreign policy. That does not mean the top advisers are doing well. To the contrary, we are seeing a secretary of state oblivious to the range of U.S. foreign policy interests and a national security adviser who has allowed himself to get swept up and even participate in an evolving scandal.

Beginning with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s widely panned speech at the State Department and continuing through his TV appearance on Sunday (not to mention his failure to alert the U.S. press he was giving a news conference in Saudi Arabia), he has demonstrated contempt for human rights and for open, transparent government. He is still acting like a CEO who is solely interested in the bottom line, not someone with an obligation to the public at large or a duty to tout American values on the world stage.

On Sunday, he repeated his insistence that human rights can be dispensed with as we fight Islamic terrorism:

CHRIS WALLACE: But — but, sir, I’ve seen a draft of the president’s speech, the big speech this afternoon. Not a mention of human rights, not a mention of women’s rights. You say he wants to speak concretely and frankly about these things — he’s not doing that today.

TILLERSON: Well, Chris, I think the way you address those human rights issues and women’s rights issues is to improve the conditions in the region. And today conditions in the region are under a lot of stress because of the threat of terrorism, the threat that Iran poses to instability in the region. And these subjects are being discussed as well, and there are efforts under way to, I think, improve the rights of women, the participation of women in society throughout the region.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/05/22/two-thirds-of-trumps-national-security-team-doesnt-get-it/

[Squinch]

1. Its a very old argument: Everything else has to be solved before we can begin to

address human rights issues and women's rights issues (because, you know, women are a different category from humans.)

It's just a way of saying, "We don't really give a rat's ass about human rights, but we don't want to say that outright, so instead we'll say that terrorism and Iran have to go away before we do anything about those pesky human rights."