Really, GOP?

Is stacking the courts with larval Scalias for the next 30 years really worth dragging the presidency through the mud until it ends up as an alibi witness for a reported atrocity murder? Are tax cuts worth it? From CNN:

The source said that Mutreb was fully aware of "the plot" of the operation. Mutreb, who was the first secretary at the Saudi embassy in London and has been described as a colonel in Saudi intelligence, is closely connected to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. "He was seconded to an elite protection brigade within the Royal Guard to serve as the personal security force of [the crown prince]," a Saudi source told CNN. Mutreb appeared in photographs alongside bin Salman during the crown prince's tour of the United States earlier this year. Several US officials have told CNN that any operation involving members of the crown prince's inner circle could not have happened without his direct knowledge.

Of course, it couldn't have. MBS is a competent dictator—unlike his friend, our president*. You could sell the Resolute desk out from under him and replace it with a TV tray and he wouldn't notice. Anyway, as we have seen, MBS is good at being a dictator and he seems to be cleaning things up apace.

One of the passport scans appears to belong to Salah Muhammad al-Tubaiqi (spelled Salah Mohammed A Tubaigy in the document), listed as the head of forensic medicine at the Saudi Ministry of Interior. In a 2014 interview with Asharq al-Awsat, a London-based Saudi newspaper, Tubaiqi lauded a mobile clinic designed to carry out autopsies in a record seven minutes as the first of its kind in the world. Tubaiqi, who was working as the forensic consultant and supervisor of the clinic at the time, told the newspaper it was his idea to design the clinic to allow coroners to perform forensic examinations and dissect bodies at crime and accident scenes.

Seriously apace, it seems, especially if this story from Business Insider is accurate.

Mashal Saad al-Bostani of the Saudi Royal Air Forces, who was named by pro-government Turkish media as one of 15 suspects in the alleged murder of Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi, has reportedly died in a car accident on return to the kingdom.

What are the odds.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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