The Democratic National Committee is throwing a hissy fit after President Donald Trump fired acting attorney general Sally Yates for refusing to enact his executive order on immigration and refugees:
DNC response to Trump’s firing of Sally Yates: “Tyrannical” (h/t @BennettJohnT) pic.twitter.com/k8MxCJPsGO
— Todd Ruger (@ToddRuger) January 31, 2017
Actually there was nothing “tyrannical” about Trump firing Yates, as she refused to do her job. Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro has more on that here. But the DNC is also being incredibly hypocritical, because there are plenty of instances in which Democrats have fired people who answered to them. Here are seven times where this has happened.
1. Barack Obama fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal in 2010 for criticizing him and Joe Biden. McChrystal said the following about Biden in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine:
Last fall, during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as “shortsighted,” saying it would lead to a state of “Chaos-istan.” The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One. The message to McChrystal seemed clear: Shut the fuck up, and keep a lower profile.
Now, flipping through printout cards of his speech in Paris, McChrystal wonders aloud what Biden question he might get today, and how he should respond. “I never know what’s going to pop out until I’m up there, that’s the problem,” he says. Then, unable to help themselves, he and his staff imagine the general dismissing the vice president with a good one-liner.
“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal says with a laugh. “Who’s that?”
“Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite Me?”
McChrystal also said this about Obama:
The general first encountered Obama a week after he took office, when the president met with a dozen senior military officials in a room at the Pentagon known as the Tank. According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked “uncomfortable and intimidated” by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn’t go much better. “It was a 10-minute photo op,” says an adviser to McChrystal. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.”
And then McChrystal was fired. Obama tried to spin it the firing as necessary for the war in Afghanistan, but a source from the administration at the time told the New York Times, “A lot of us were arguing that the message of letting McChrystal’s comments roll off our backs would be enormously harmful.” The fact that McChrystal was fired shortly after making those comments also makes it clear that the comments were why he was fired.
McChrystal later said in an interview with ABC News that his firing was “surreal.”
“My whole career I’d thought that I could be fired for incompetence, or I could be killed, or I could have any number of things happen, but I never thought I could be painted with any brush of disrespect or disloyalty, because I didn’t see myself that way,” McChrystal said. “And I still don’t.”
2. Obama fired national security aide Jofi Joseph for tweeting out criticisms of Obama’s staff that were…colorful. Joseph, who had served on the National Security Council, had tweeted out the following from an anonymous account:
“I’m a fan of Obama, but his continuing reliance and dependence upon a vacuous cipher like Valerie Jarrett concerns me,” he once reportedly tweeted of the president’s senior adviser.
Summing up his colleagues, he once reportedly tweeted, “‘Has shitty staff.’ #ObamaInThreeWords.”
Joseph was subsequently fired.
3. Bill Clinton fired surgeon general Joycelyn Elders for suggesting that children learn about masturbation. Elders was asked in 1994 if masturbation education would cause unprotected sex to decline.
“I think that is something that is a part of human sexuality, and it’s a part of something that perhaps should be taught,” Elders said. “But we’ve not even taught our children the very basics.”
She was fired shortly afterward.
4. Clinton also fired FBI director William Sessions for reported ethics violations. Sessions, a holdover from the Reagan administration, was alleged to have “improperly used government money to build a $10,000 fence at his home” and “had taken numerous free trips aboard F.B.I. aircraft to visits friends and relatives, often taking along his wife,” among other ethics violations. Sessions refused to resign, so Clinton simply fired him.
5. Clinton fired all of the U.S. attorneys but one after taking office in 1993. Fox News’s Brit Hume reported in 2007:
News stories reporting that the Bush administration had considered firing all 93 U.S. attorneys across the country failed to mention that that is exactly what Bill Clinton did soon after taking office in 1993.
The only sitting U.S. attorney Clinton did not cashier was Michael Chertoff, now the Bush Homeland Security Secretary. At the time Chertoff was U.S. attorney in New Jersey and then Democratic Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey intervened to save Chertoff’s job. None of this was noted, even in passing, in front-page stories today in The New York Times and Washington Post, or in the AP’s story on the subject.
6. Jimmy Carter fired four department secretaries in 1979. Presidential historian Michael Beschloss told National Public Radio in 2013 that Carter “wanted a new start” by firing those secretaries due to the rocky circumstances facing his presidency at the time.
“That was a time in which inflation was roaring, there was an energy crisis,” Beschloss said. “He wanted to show that he was changing the terms of his administration. It completely backfired. His polls plunged. People thought that that was a confession of the fact that Carter was saying that he was going down in flames.”
7. Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur over disagreements on how to proceed with the Korean War. Truman reluctantly agreed to MacArthur’s plan to completely eradicate the communist threat in North Korea despite concerns that it would prompt China to get involved in the war. The move did in fact cause China to intervene, which resulted in “driving the U.S. troops back into South Korea.”
“MacArthur then asked for permission to bomb communist China and use Nationalist Chinese forces from Taiwan against the People’s Republic of China,” notes History.com. “Truman flatly refused these requests and a very public argument began to develop between the two men.”
The argument eventually ended with MacArthur’s firing.
Follow Aaron Bandler on Twitter @bandlersbanter.