Don't buy books from crooks

Let's let Mike Pompeo explain why.

Donald Trump’s secretary of state Mike Pompeo is right now banging the drum for his just-released book, “I Am Going to Hell and I’ll Save You A Seat” (or something like that) and he has reminded me of my long-held belief that you should never give hard-earned money to:

• Fascists

• Liars

• Haters or

• Assholes

That’s an incomplete list and you may add more categories, if you’d like.

I can save $20.99 based on this new book’s segment where the tragically-challenged Pompeo criticizes journalist Jamal Khashoggi for having the temerity to be brutally murdered under the approving eye of Saudi leader Mohammad bin Salman, whom the U.S. decided to shield. Khashoggi was dismembered and killed, and in his tome, Pompeo wrote and dismissed him as an activist and said, from CBS News:

…that while Khashoggi’s brutal murder was “ugly,” it wasn’t “surprising” to him because it was the type of behavior he expected from the Middle East.

“I’d seen enough of the Middle East to know that this kind of ruthlessness was all too routine in that part of the world,” he wrote.

In 2018, Pompeo, as secretary of state, said Khashoggi’s killing “violates the norms of international law,” while still stressing a “strategic” relationship with Saudi Arabia.

So that’s a bit of a turn-around, but ol’ Mike may run for president in 2024, and he needs to establish his bonafides with the basest of the GOP base. Meanwhile, we can all wonder at the lies he tells about the dead man (he was not, in fact, “cozy” with Muslim Brotherhood, just one of the many fabrications in Pompeo’s book) and hope to see his book in a bargain bin soon. Or under a rock.

The slain journalist, Jamal Khashoggi