Perspective from the 19^th Hole is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

I have mixed emotions about writing about this because I am not sure I can add anything to the “open chat debate” that is roiling the federal government in D.C., as well as countries around the world.

Still, I persist because, every once in a while, something happens that is too much to pass up.

This time, it’s that Pete Hegseth, the director of the Department of Defense and his allies in the country’s national security administration, have no idea what they’re doing.

They proved it with the “open chat.”

Hegseth and company included a journalist in a group on-line chat as officials talked about what, by any standard, should have been secret plans for the United States to bomb Yemen.  In other words, on an open line, they talked about war.

To make matters worse for Hegseth, the journalist was none other than Jeff Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic magazine who has been very critical of Trump and allies like Hegseth.

Can you imagine what Goldberg thought as, all of a sudden, he was added to the list of those included in the group chat?

On one hand, as a journalist, he couldn’t imagine a better result – an inside look at military planning. 

On the other hand, he couldn’t contain his worry about this approach to violate state secrets in a way that could have put members of the American military in harm’s way.

In the Washington Post, columnist Dana Milbank put it this way:

“Since the report about top national security figures in the Trump administration sharing war plans with a journalist in a group text chat, the reaction has properly focused on the astonishing security breach.  But beyond the intelligence lapse that led the Trump aides to provide the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg with the targets, weapons and timing of forthcoming military strikes in Yemen, the contents of the Signal chat make it plain for the world to see what our allies feared and our foes hoped:  The United States is being run by a bunch of clownish amateurs.

“They misspelled the word “principals.”  They attacked Europeans as ‘free-loading’ and ‘pathetic.’  They made clear the top message they wanted to come out of the military attack was that ‘Biden failed.’”

Meanwhile, Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, criticized the Trump administration for using a Signal chat to discuss plans for carrying out bombing in Yemen, calling on officials to resign while saying others would have been fired for the same actions.

Warner noted that “classified information should never be discussed over an unclassified system.”

So, from my post in the cheap seats out West, a few perceptions:

• Hegseth, given his checkered past and lack of experience, should never have been appointed by Trump to run the Defense Department.
• He has no idea what he is doing and he proved it, though now, of course, he defends what happened and goes after the Atlantic editor, the innocent party.
• Those who joined Hegseth on the call should have wondered who the “JG” was on the call – and, of course, it was Goldberg.

• Those who serve under Hegseth ought to be very concerned that he can’t keep secrets.
• For his part, Donald Trump said he had no idea about the breach of national security.  In and of itself, this lack of awareness is a sad commentary on Trump and his top-level staff who did not keep him informed about the breach.  Plus, now that he knows about it, he defends those who conducted this charade as “good people.”
• All this raises questions of duplicity – duplicity about Trump’s attacks on Hillary Clinton for using e-mails some years ago to discuss state secrets and now Trump and his ilk doing far worse.
• Members of Congress ought to be aghast at this violation.  Some are.  Some aren’t.  One who isn’t is Speaker of the House Mike Johnson who said knowing more isn’t worth it.

A fitting conclusion I use for this blog post came from Jon Stewart in his late night Daily Show as reported by the New York Times:

“…Stewart applauded the administration for ‘once again carrying out its plans with competence and professionalism.’

“You know, back in my day, if you were a journalist who wanted leaked war documents, you had to work the sources:  Meet them in a dark garage, earn their trust, pound the pavement.  Now?  You just wait for the national security adviser to be distracted by ‘White Lotus’ while he’s setting up his ‘Bomb Yemen’ group chat.”

And the best additional conclusion comes from the columnist Milbank:

“The United States is being run by a bunch of clownish amateurs.”