Doubling down on stupid: Today's news for February 24th

McClatchy DC:

With new anti-ISIS plan due next week, Pentagon considering U.S. troops in Syria

The top U.S. military officer declined repeatedly on Thursday to rule out committing U.S. ground troops to battle the Islamic State in in Syria, stressing that the Pentagon will present President Donald Trump with “a full range of options” to combat the terror organization.

Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the comments at a Washington research center as the 30 days that President Donald Trump gave military leaders to develop a strategy to fight the Islamic State are almost up.

“I’m in the business of providing the president with options,” Dunford said several times at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C. when repeatedly pressed on whether those choices would include conventional ground troops.

It is good to know that doubling down on stupid is an option. We can only hope it is an option that President Trump rejects, since the "War on Terror" has been nothing but a tremendous waste of lives and resources, with nothing to show for it.

Speaking of Trump...

CNN:

FBI refused White House request to knock down recent Trump-Russia stories

The FBI rejected a recent White House request to publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump's associates and Russians known to US intelligence during the 2016 presidential campaign, multiple US officials briefed on the matter tell CNN.

But a White House official said late Thursday that the request was only made after the FBI indicated to the White House it did not believe the reporting to be accurate.

White House officials had sought the help of the bureau and other agencies investigating the Russia matter to say that the reports were wrong and that there had been no contacts, the officials said. The reports of the contacts were first published by The New York Times and CNN on February 14.

The direct communications between the White House and the FBI were unusual because of decade-old restrictions on such contacts. Such a request from the White House is a violation of procedures that limit communications with the FBI on pending investigations.

Late Thursday night, White House press secretary Sean Spicer objected to CNN's characterization of the White House request to the FBI.

"We didn't try to knock the story down. We asked them to tell the truth," Spicer said. The FBI declined to comment for this story.

There are two aspects to this story.

First, the White House is being honest here. If the FBI believes the reports are inaccurate, then why aren't they saying that?

Second, the White House did NOT break any laws in contacting the FBI directly, contrary to how the story makes it seem:

The Trump administration's efforts to press Comey run contrary to Justice Department procedure memos issued in 2007 and 2009 that limit direct communications on pending investigations between the White House and the FBI.

All they "violated" was Justice Department procedures established under the previous administration. One can question whether it was ethical, but it was not illegal.

In other news...

Fox News:

Remembering Alan Colmes, a liberal who could laugh

It’s somehow fitting that Alan Colmes got his start in standup comedy, since he needed a strong sense of humor—and equally strong debating skills—to spar with Sean Hannity and other conservatives at Fox News.

The unabashedly liberal commentator, who died this morning at 66 after a brief illness that has not been disclosed, gained national fame as one-half of the “Hannity & Colmes” show that launched when FNC did in 1996. But his roots were in radio, working for such powerhouse stations as WABC and WNBC in New York. Colmes remained a Fox News contributor and Fox radio host after the channel ended the prime-time partnership and made Hannity the solo host just before the start of the Obama administration.

Colmes faced a difficult challenge in his heyday as Fox’s most prominent left-wing voice, doing battle not just with Hannity but with Bill O’Reilly and other hosts. His views were not popular with much of the Fox audience, but liberals sometimes criticized him for not being more forceful against Hannity.

That was actually his charm: Colmes was not an angry liberal. He was soft-spoken and spoke less from the heart and more from the head. In the eternal Left-Right debate, Colmes will be missed.