Commentary

What is it about retired generals and bureaucrats who can’t just take their pensions, honorary degrees, and Washington think tank board positions and enjoy life out of the limelight?

Former general, CIA director and National Security Advisor Michael Hayden is the latest.  He simply couldn’t resist responding to a fellow Twitterer, @PSHredmen, who wrote, “Can we send the MAGA wearing unvaxxed to Afghanistan, no use sending that plane back empty?”

“Good idea,” Hayden responded @GenMhayden, not a fan of President Trump.

Hayden always reminded me of the Looney Tunes character Elmer Fudd in appearance and in character.  Fudd’s life was all about hunting that wascally wabbit Bugs Bunny, but he always wound up seriously injuring himself or another cartoon character.

The arrogant Hayden, who saw himself as the leading intelligence authority, often felt compelled to criticize Trump, as a CNN contributor or in one of his op-eds. He came from the Jim Clapper and John Brennan spook branch of the Deep State.

Hayden disliked Trump because he didn’t always accept the advice of his intelligence people.  The fact is, Trump could see through them and their multi-page briefs.  Hayden didn’t appreciate Trump’s insight and “gut feelings.”

While conceding that he didn’t support the policies of Joe Biden, he endorsed him, because with Trump, “I don’t know what happens to America.”

Like Elmer Fudd, who repeatedly injured himself or another in his failed attempt to get Bugs Bunny, Hayden diminished his long military and intelligence career with his ill-conceived attacks on Trump.

Today, as he takes a cheap shot at Trump supporters with his two-word Tweet – “Good idea,” he is witness to another failed foreign policy plan of Biden and his intelligence people that have humiliated America. 

A Trump withdrawal would not have humiliated America.

A LOOK AHEAD

In an op-ed Michael Hayden wrote for the New York Times back on April 28, 2018, he discussed a meeting his brother had arranged with several dozen Trump supporters to meet with him in the back room of a Pittsburgh sports bar.

“I knew many of them, indeed had grown up with several, but we could have been from different planets.  They were angry.  They work hard, pay taxes, and struggle to raise children, but feel neglected by their government.  And Donald Trump is still their guy.”

He recalled them saying “he is genuine,” “he is an American,” and he doesn’t filter everything or parse every word.”

“They didn’t seem very interested in facts … or at least my facts,” Hayden wrote. [

Rereading that three-year-old piece by Hayden was a perfect lead-in to Glenn Reynold’s USA Today opinion piece on New York Times columnist David Brooks.

You may remember Brooks from my May 31, 2020 kramerontheright “Special: David Brooks Still in Love with Himself.”  It was Brooks who said he could tell Barack Obama would make an excellent president by his sharply creased pants.

In Brooks’ column, “The G.O.P. Is Getting Even Worse,” he sees signs of the Trumpian base radicalizing into party divisions.  “It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top, and now that’s gone.”

I cannot count the times I wrote that Trump won because of Obama. Yet there are those like Reynolds, who I admire incidentally, admit “we expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough.

“Brooks is, of course, horrified at Trump and his supporters, whom he finds childish, thuggish and contemptuous of the things that David Brooks likes about today’s America. It’s clear that he’d like a social/political revolution that was more refined, better-mannered, more focused on the Constitution and, well, more bourgeois as opposed to in-your-face and working class.”

“For me,” Reynolds notes, “it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.”

Don’t expect left-leaners like Brooks to change his stripes.  He’s still calling the January 6, 2021 protest as an “insurrection,” even though the FBI has said it wasn’t.

Likewise, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, who wrote @JRubinBlogger of those “Americans charged with executing the (Afghan) evacuation as noble, selfless and deeply patriotic, who saved untold lives and alleviated a good deal of human suffering,” but then felt compelled to concoct a tale that they are “often reviled by an ignorant public, smeared as the ‘deep state’ by right-wing.” Democrats choose when to like the military.

Now, more than ever … may God continue to bless the United States of America.