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Feigning Ignorance [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-15
Attorney General nominee Pam Bondi is being asked about her opinions on current events in her confirmation hearing but claims or feigns ignorance. Ignorance of President-elect Donald Trump’s statements, rally cries, media posts, and what were once called tweets has become the GOP hip-swiveling dodgeball game that has confounded me and other Americans for years. By all accounts, Bondi is an accomplished lawyer and former Florida Attorney General but is a devotee of the Sarah Palin School of never reading a magazine, book, or newspaper. When asked her opinion of Mr. Trump calling the convicted felons “hostages and patriots” who ransacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, she responded by saying she was unfamiliar with his repeatedly making the comments on the campaign trail. When read the remarks by Hawaiian Senator Mazie Hirono and again given a chance to respond to the statements of the President-elect, she again said she was unfamiliar.
When asked about Mr. Trump’s promise to instruct the Department of Justice, which she would head, to go after his political enemies, Bondi once again feigned ignorance; her answers before the lunch break were filled with phony outrage, filibustering avoidance, and claims of obliviousness of current events. Yesterday’s farce with the wholly unqualified and toady hire Pete Hegseth (nominee to head the Defense Department) was a view into what to expect from the incoming administration. Hegseth and the Republican Senators on the committee played a game of euphemistically attacking women and black people. Anyone of color or female in the United States is familiar with disguised epithets and insults ranging from “you people” to “unqualified hires’ couched in a cloak of we respect all people, black or white, male or female. Yet Hegseth yesterday tried his best to revive the CRT discussion and the latest racist boogieman ‘woke’ and DEI hires with the help of willing Senators.
When asked by Republican Missouri U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt about the Pentagon’s culture of “weakness and wokeness,” Hegseth took the opportunity to revisit CRT. Saying he would remove CRT and DEI from the process. Hegseth went on to say, “Equity prescribes some sort of outcome based on differing attributes that we have that divide us. What skin color are you? What gender are you? And then infuse that into institutions that manifest in things like quotas, formal or informal. Which does what to morale? Sends it down and it makes people feel like they’re being judged by something other than how good they are at their job, which is poisonous inside institutions.”
On the face of it, Hegseth’s answers sounded reasonable. Still, he and Schmitt ignored the reasons and need to reexamine hiring practices in both the government and the private sector. I have long told people and will continue to say and write, as did Mr. Hegseth, “Equity is a very different word than equality.” Black people and women never needed the white male definition of equality; both groups were born equal. The problem has always been and remains the practice of acknowledging the need for equity by the ruling class. The efforts by both Bondi and Hegseth to whitewash (pun intended) past racial transgressions and the current lawlessness of the President-elect are all a part of the fear—mainly by white males—of losing and maintaining a sense of superiority. Donald Trump may be the most unqualified person ever to occupy the White House’s Oval Office. If ever the importance of equity were on display, his defeat of a more qualified white woman and a more qualified black woman is a flaw of not Mr. Trump but the American people.
Your Vote is Still Your Voice.
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