Welcome to Donald Trump's Bizarro World Cabinet Picks
As low as my expectations might be for the Donald Trump presidency, he finds new ways to drop the bar even lower.
Take his cabinet nominees. Please.
They aren't all bad. Retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, the president-elect's choice for secretary of defense, comes well-recommended by old guard defense experts like Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and turns out to be nowhere near as nutty as his nickname implies.
And it's hard to dislike the bipartisan appeal of Gov. Nikki Haley (R-S.C.), although Trump's choice to name her U.N. ambassador is a puzzlement. She has little experience in foreign relations but she opposes President Obama's Iran nuclear deal, so maybe that's good enough for Trump.
But some of Trump's other choices illustrate how dramatically an election can swing our government's executive branch into a Bizarro World version of its former self -- like the fictional planet in DC comics where everything is the reverse of life on Earth.
This is particularly true when government appointees don't seem to care very much for government.
For secretary of labor, Trump wants Andrew Puzder, a fast-food executive with a negative attitude toward additional overtime pay for workers and raising the minimum wage.
To head the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump proposes Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma's attorney general, a climate-change skeptic, who is currently engaged in the latest in a series of lawsuits he's filed against the agency Trump would now like him to head.
And I can't leave out Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL). A tough critic of the Voting Rights Act, Trump has tapped him to be attorney general, a move that, aided by a Republican Congress, puts him in an excellent position to launch a Reconstruction-style collapse of civil rights enforcement with the enthusiasm of a fox guarding a henhouse.
Still, the prizewinner for puzzling choices may well be Trump's naming of Dr. Ben Carson, his former rival for the Grand Old Party's presidential nomination, to be secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
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