The horseshoe is real: Trump diehards and socialists morph into one in disdain for competence

The formal transition to President-elect Biden's administration has begun, as has the alliance of the horseshoe political extremes to derail it. The alt-left and the alt-right are matching their criticisms of the emerging Biden administration as if the alliance was pre-planned and choreographed.

On Tuesday, Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris announced a slate of cabinet and cabinet-level national security picks. Anthony Blinken, a longtime Biden aide and former deputy Secretary of State, was chosen to be Secretary of State. Alejandro Mayorkas, former head of Citizenship and Immigration Services will become the first immigrant to head the Department of Homeland Security. Mayorkas is also a former deputy secretary of the department, in a familiar theme. Avril Haines, former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Obama, will become the Director of National Intelligence, the first woman appointed to that position.

Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a 35-year career veteran of the foreign service will be the second Black woman to become America's ambassador to the United Nations, and President Biden will elevate the post to a cabinet-level position. Jake Sullivan, Biden's national security advisor when he was Vice President will take the helm as the President's National Security Advisor, and John Kerry, former Secretary of State under President Obama and the architect of the Paris Climate Accord, will serve as the President's Climate Envoy. Kerry will have a seat at the National Security Council, marking, for the first time in history, the creation of a climate level position whose sole job is to put climate change at the forefront of the national security agenda.

For the most part, they have been praised as superbly prepared public servants prepared to guide the new president - who is himself a national security and foreign policy giant - in a non-ideological fashion. The announcement also sent a clear signal that under President-elect Biden, the United States would be prepared to lead the world again. Biden said as much in his own interview with NBC's Lester Holt - that the era of America alone under the guise of 'America first' was over.

So what could possibly be wrong with this group of historic choices filled to the brim with unimpeachable credentials, qualifications, and competence? According to the far left and the radical right, they are guilty of being 'corporatists' and of not being anti-semites.

Even before the announcements were formal, Rep. Rashida Tlaib - who played a productive role in the losing campaign of Bernie Sanders for president by booing Hillary Clinton - randomly expressed fears that Tony Blinken, whose stepfather was a Holocaust survivor, would interfere with her free speech to criticize Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Blinken has never had a history of silencing speech, let alone speech about Palestinian rights. There is no reason for Tlaib to think that he would, except the fact that Blinken is Jewish. This would not be the first time Tlaib will have polluted the political discourse with deep-seated antisemitism.

Leaving aside the deep undercurrents of antisemitism on the alt-left and the radical right, the theme of attack that both ends of the horseshoe are settling on for the competent incoming people in the Biden administration is the vague, undefined moniker of 'corporatist' and 'war enthusiasts'.

Socialist group Justice Democrats launched an effort - cosigned by Socialist members of Congress Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Ilhan Omar - seeking to block Biden from appointing seasoned federal budget veteran Bruce Reed for the crime of believing that the $400 billion a year the United States spends on interest on the national debt would be better used elsewhere.

The alt-right's criticism of Biden's appointments sound uncomfortably close to the alt-left's.

Marco Rubio mocked Biden's picks for being educated and qualified.

Josh Howley said this:

If you did not know that Howley is an up-and-coming far-right senator from Missouri, you could have easily mistaken him for an AOC, Bernie Sanders acolyte.

Howley is wrong, of course, much like his close friends on the political extremes. Blinken, for example, was Biden's top aide when President Obama had put then-Vice President Biden in charge of drawing down 150,000 American troops from Iraq, which Biden accomplished by December 2011.

A coalition of radical alt-left groups hosted by the leftist media company Kos LLC has launched its own petition drive to demand that Biden fill his cabinet and White House staff with leftist ideologues - rather than qualified, competent technocrats who have committed the grave sin of making money, and in the likely event those nominees may run up against a Senate resistant to socialists, they demand that Biden continue Donald Trump's tradition of bypassing the Senate on appointments by using the Vacancies Act.

Just like the right, the alt-left's problem with Joe Biden appears once again that Joe Biden is not, in fact, Donald Trump. That Biden is willing to govern with compassion rather than rule with fear, that he's willing to rebuild rather than break the country apart farther, and that Biden wants to be a president for even those who did not support him at the ballot box bothers the alt-left as much as the alt-right.

If anything, it bothers the alt-left more.




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