2017 May 21^st

A few minutes ago I happened upon Chris Wallace of Fox News interviewing Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson. I expected to hear more of the typical Fox News slant about how wonderful it is to have a president like Donald Trump who makes nice with the Saudis and is really, really hostile to Iran.

Well friends, I heard nothing of the sort. Wallace spent his interview giving Tillerson a very uncomfortable time. It was a very un-Fox News sort of interview, Right out of the box came a question about the content of Trump’s big speech, to wit, why was there not a word in that speech about human rights, or about women’s rights? If Tillerson was taken aback by this question he showed no sign of it. He passed it off by saying that if terrorism could not be squelched then there could be no human rights. That is nonsense of course. What does having elections, or allowing women to drive, have to do with permitting terrorism? Wallace never brought up Wahhabism, a source of terror the Saudi’s themselves are happy to export and Trump never mentioned. Even so, it was surprising to see a Fox News anchor push Tillerson as far as he did…and it didn’t stop there.

Next up Wallace asked Tillerson about his boss’s remark to the Russians about his firing of FBI director Comey. Tillerson was in the room and Tillerson heard Trump tell the Russians, both Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Kislyak, the ambassador, that “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job, I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”  Wallace asked Tillerson if that little Trump speech didn’t sound like he was relieved that he no longer had to cover up his Russian activities.

Oh no, Tillerson said, “That’s not what I heard at all.” What Tillerson heard was that Trump could work with the Russians without having to worry about an investigator looking over his shoulder. That’s very slick and that’s why Tillerson is a multimillionaire; the man is unflappable.

The Saudi red carpet treatment of the Trump entourage continues; to make things with the Trump family even cosier, the Saudi government and the United Arab Emirates will donate 100 million dollars to a women’s charity supervised by Ivanka Trump. If money can buy allegiance, and it certainly can, the Trump administration and the Saudi Kingdom are even mpre tightly bound.

Now we’ll see how things go when Trump gets to Israel. If Netanyahu and Trump have a disagreement I’d bet on Netanyahu to come out ahead. If there is a disagreement between these two, I doubt that we will hear much about it. A discussion of it would help neither of them.