Response to "A Simple Matter of Principle"

(See: Just Above Sunset : A Simple Matter of Principle)

We seem to be back in the days of Hurricane Katrina, back when it took President Bush Jr. a long time to realize that the states were waiting for his help, and when the time came when he would have liked to lecture them on the Conservative theory that was, one could say, “instead of waiting for the federal government to do it, states should clean up their own messes, messes that wouldn’t have happened in the first place had they the sense to not choose to live in a hurricane zone!” —  but then he lost his nerve, and instead turned to “Brownie", the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and told him he was doing a heckofa job, which everybody pretty much knew by then was not all that true.

Remember Brownie? Some background:

Up until 1992, under President George Bush Sr., FEMA had been, according to a congressional report at the time, "widely viewed as a political dumping ground, a turkey farm, if you will, where large numbers of positions exist that can be conveniently and quietly filled by political appointment …” The agency was overseen by Wallace Stickney, who somehow was connected to White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, and was described by the report as “weak" and "uninterested in the substantive programs of FEMA”.

Then when Bill Clinton became president, he appointed James Lee Witt, a guy who had run Arkansas’s version of FEMA, and everything changed. "How did Witt turn FEMA around so quickly?” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution asked.

"Well, he is the first director of the agency to have emergency-management experience. He stopped the staffing of the agency by political patronage. He removed layers of bureaucracy. Most important, he instilled in the agency a spirit of preparedness, of service to the customer, of willingness to listen to ideas of local and state officials to make the system work better.”

"Witt's eight-year term in office saw approximately 348 Presidentially declared disaster areas in more than 6,500 counties and in all 50 states and the U.S. territories.” Clinton elevated his position to cabinet rank.

In other words, Witt knew how to do the job, because he had experience doing it before coming to Washington.

But when the Republicans took over again in 2000 under GW Bush, FEMA was removed from the cabinet, and things went back to the turkey farm. Bush appointed Michael D. Brown to the job.

Brown’s experience was essentially nil. His resume said he had “emergency services oversight” experience as assistant to the city manager of the city of Edmond, Oklahoma, back while he was in college, but that position was later described by the city’s head of PR as “more like an intern.” While attending law school, he also served as a staff director of the state senate Finance Committee, and after graduation, went into private practice where his boss described him as "not serious and somewhat shallow”.

According to Wikipedia, "Before joining FEMA, Brown was the Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association from 1989-2001. After numerous lawsuits were filed against the organization over disciplinary actions that Brown took against members violating the association's code of ethics, Brown resigned and negotiated a buy-out of his contract."

When Bush Jr. took office in 2001, Brown secured a job as FEMA's general counsel through his longtime friendship with Bush’s campaign manager, fellow Oklahoman and new head of FEMA Joe Allbaugh. Allbaugh’s tenure at the agency was somewhat marred by his publicly questioning whether taxpayers should pay to repair flood damages in flood-prone areas, but also complained when Bush proposed cuts to FEMA and the National Flood Insurance program, a dispute that may have helped bring about his resignation, leaving Brown, who had since been confirmed as deputy director of the department, in the post as administrator.

Brown’s handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 has gone down in the annals of infamy, although, to be fair, he was also made the scapegoat by a bunch of conservatives who didn’t deeply believe that Acts of God such as Katrina, nor the at least 1,245 people who had died as a result, were the responsibility or the proper mission of the national government.

Yes, on September 1, Brown admitted to CNN that he didn’t know that the city was housing thousands of refugees in the Convention Center, and that they were running out of food and water, even though the TV networks had been reporting this for over 24 hours, but I remember hearing Secretary of Homeland Security Michale Chertoff himself learn of this during a live NPR radio interview that same day, and thinking that America was watching a deadly governmental debacle play out live, in real time, before its eyes.

After he was forced out in disgrace, Brownie turned on the White House, blaming them for not listening to his warnings, and pretending not to be aware of the situation. In fact, he also blamed handling of the disaster on FEMA having been folded into Homeland Security, a department whose War on Terrorism focus was ill-suited for saving lives in a natural disaster. There’s reason to argue that Trump’s reorganization of pandemic preparation in the NSC in 2018 had a similar effect, in that hiding it inside the bureaucracy of some other department made whatever warnings of impending doom end up going unheard for too long by those who needed to hear them. Seems to be a Republican form of governance.

Meanwhile, when Obama came along, he returned to the Democratic habit of picking people who took emergency management seriously. In fact, Craig Fugate, his choice for FEMA director, has started training as a volunteer firefighter back when he was in high school, then attended fire college and paramedic school while growing up in Florida, where he went on to serve the state in an emergency management capacity. Rescue was in his blood.

And so Trump waffles between asking the states what’s taking them so long in getting medical supplies, protesting that he’s not some “shipping clerk”, and then whining that he isn't getting the credit he deserves for all the good he's been doing. 

And yes, Trump's “task force” is giving us the impression of competence, that they’re working very hard at getting the tests and masks and respirators and whatnot to where they have to be, they’re also urging us not to get tested "just out of curiosity", so that they can reserve the tests for people who absolutely need to be tested. But in fact, if all the planning that needed to happen had happened the way it should have, everyone in America should be able to be tested, "just out of curiosity”, and in fact, get tested two or maybe three times.

(And while we’re at it, we’re told not to wear a mask unless we’re already showing symptoms, but then also told that maybe four out of five cases of transmittal of the disease comes from persons not showing symptoms, so shouldn’t that mean that everyone should wear masks, just in case they’re sick? But yes, that’s only possible if there are enough masks to go around. Maybe we’ll be ready by the time the next pandemic rolls around. Or maybe not.)

And the fact that Trump seems to think the White House has only a tiny roll in all this pandemic stuff, but somewhat short of “shipping clerk"?

That could be, one might think, a good topic for debate in the upcoming election, unless it once again turns out that not enough of us really care about how good he is at this presidenting stuff after all, since nobody, not even his base, thought he would be all that good at it in the first place.

Isn’t it strange that once everybody realizes you're a congenital and hopeless liar, from that point on, you can do no wrong?

In a White House press briefing the other day, NBC’s Peter Alexander threw Trump a softball, which good reporters usually try not to do because the press isn’t supposed to pander to the president, but then Trump dropped that ball. Trump may think Alexander isn’t a good reporter, but he’s certainly a better reporter than Trump is a president, since the president doesn’t seem to understand that when you insult a reporter for asking some question, you’re simultaneously insulting the public that he or she represents.

And the fact that he doesn’t feel this in his bones is an indication that he’s no good at his job, just like all those Republican FEMA administrators who didn’t get their job because they knew something about how to do the job, but because they knew somebody or other in a high enough place.

In Trumps’ case, his lack of leadership experience has to be the natural result of going through his whole misspent life without ever having to apply for a job, and in turn, never having had to answer to anybody of real power above him — except maybe his own father, which just isn't the same thing.

I hope I eventually survive this pandemic, but strangely, I absolutely have faith that the country will — although I’m still not so confident the country will survive Donald Trump.

Response to No Thanks

(See: Just Above Sunset : No Thanks )

"And it may be time to let this go.”

Why should they do that? Isn’t the Republican bullshit machine working for them anymore? But it is still working, which is why they have no incentive to “let this go”.

In fact, Truth is not the Trumpy-headed Republican's best friend. Their ability to synthesize  chaos out of nothing but the moldy darkness inside their own brains has been working for them just fine, thank you!

The fact that these people can trick even ONE person into believing that this annual “War on Christmas” silliness is actually being launched by liberals instead of themselves is a skill they have no earthly reason to abandon. So good luck with that.

The one thing everyone needs to learn and remember from all this from one holiday to the next is that, when the “Political Correctness Police” show up at your door to stop you from saying something or other, (1) they'll be wearing MAGA hats, and (2) what they bully you to stop saying won’t be “Merry Christmas” or “Happy Thanksgiving” — nobody, anywhere, cares if you say that! — it’ll be “Happy Holidays”.

Trumpies are trying to change America for the worst, and so, now it's -- Whoops! There goes Freedom of Speech!

Ever since, in my memory (I think when I was ten years old), some people started browbeating us on how to celebrate Christmas by demanding that we not "take the Christ out of Christmas”, I’ve considered starting a group to urge everyone to “keep the ‘X’ in ‘Xmas!’” Maybe I need to revive that.

One of our ad campaigns could say, “If anyone doesn’t like the way we celebrate our holidays here in America, maybe they should move to the North Pole to live with Santa Claus!”

And I'm thinking that could be followed by this parenthetical tagline:

“(SUGGESTION: Bring a houseboat!)"

Response to Our Neighborhood Now

(See: Just Above Sunset : Our Neighborhood Now )

I really enjoyed the way CNN summarized the breaking news of Monday's court ruling, which was that a federal judge informed the White House that “'Absolute Immunity’ is ’not a thing’!”

Sooner or later, it was bound to come down to someone explaining the way things really are to Donald Trump in the go-to language of a Middle Schooler. I love it!

I have two suggestions, plus one comment:

(1) I’m more and more thinking lately that Nancy Pelosi is wrong to narrow the focus of the impeachment to just the one article, concerning the famous phone call, which for some reason too many Americans find not necessarily all that impeachable.

Still, how anyone can think that a U.S. president, casually and for his own personal reasons, betraying one of our close allies, and one that we’ve promised to protect, putting them at risk of being swallowed up by one of America's long-time adversaries, is not the commission of a huge crime, is a mystery to me.

(In fact, I’m at a loss. I need these people to tell us what sort of crimes they think would be impeachable. I suppose the reason we don’t hear any Republicans coming up with any of those right now could be because they’re afraid of coming up with something Trump might have actually already committed, or that he might accidentally commit soon, god forbid. That could be very embarrassing! But if so, I have to agree, given that you never know if Trump will zig when you zag, they're probably right to be cautious.)

All we need in the Senate trial is one guilty verdict on one article, and I suppose threatening to hand Ukraine over to Russia is a better candidate for a guilty verdict than most, but it’s not the only thing he’s done wrong. 

In fact, I imagine that failing to fulfill one's oath of office to protect the Constitution (such as ordering his people to not cooperate with impeachment proceedings, a remedy spelled out the same Article Two of the Constitution that he cites as authority that he can do any corrupt thing he wants) is another. After all, we have so many misdeeds to turn to here, maybe we really should increase our odds by piling on.

When if comes to other crimes we could bring up, we can draw inspiration from Max Boot’s list of giveaways included in the price paid by Republicans when they chose to sell their souls to Trump:

When the Republican Party sold its soul to Trump in 2016, the price included overlooking his attacks on Mexicans and Muslims, on Gold Star parents, on a disabled reporter, even on John McCain; his abysmal ignorance of basic matters of public policy (he had never heard of the nuclear triad); his open collusion with Russia (“Russia, if you’re listening”); and, of course, his boasts about sexually assaulting women. ... 

Trump has dramatically escalated the cost his supporters must pay to stay in his good graces as we approach his fourth year in power. The price came to include overlooking his racist rants (e.g., telling congresswomen of color to “go back” to where they came from); putting kids in cages; kowtowing to Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other tyrants; abandoning America’s Kurdish allies; obstructing justice and stonewalling Congress; declaring a state of emergency to spend money that Congress has not appropriated for a border wall that we don’t need; lying nonstop; using the presidency to enrich himself; and disparaging the press as “the enemy of the people.”

There are, of course, many many more, but I suppose there is a point at which America will simply stop paying attention and drift off to sleep.

(2) Also, we need to push back on this idea that maybe we should just skip the impeachment, and let the upcoming elections decide the impeachment question.

The problem with that is that elections and impeachments are not the same thing, and serve two totally different purposes.

Elections ask the people to choose who (and also who’s vision) they want to run the country, whereas impeachment asks the government to determine whether the president committed any “crime” or “crimes” against the country, and should be removed from office because of it. Just as a priest who sexually molests a child should be fired and reported to the police, even if the Bishop likes the guy’s work, a president who commits a serious breach or law or rule should lose the job and shouldn’t even be allowed to run for future office, no matter what the voters think. (And by the way, part of the impeachment process includes an option allowing the Senators to vote to bar him from serving in any elected office in the future.)

(3) And finally, only because I haven’t heard anyone else mention this particular thing having to do with that Trump tweet, "We train our boys to be killing machines, then prosecute them when they kill!”:

Trump, of course, having never served in the military (rumored to be because of bone-spurs — maybe on his brain, one might guess), never learned first-hand that America does NOT train its boys and girls to be “killing machines”. In fact, soldiers and sailors and Marines are not machines of ANY kind, they’re human beings, and when did it become anything but an insult to say someone is NOT a human being, but is, instead, some sort of machine, without a brain?

Trump has, once again, unknowingly stepped into doodoo of his own creation, thereby insulting the noble heritage of our military that traces itself back to George Washington, and also misrepresented the values of the country it serves. Trump has never understood that America's power comes from its goodness, or at least from its attempts thereto.

So I suggest that Trump's reckless destruction of the American command structure should also be included in the articles of impeachment, as should Trump's unilateral betrayal of our allies, the Kurds, even if Republicans decide these crimes are no big deal.

(4) Okay, I lied. Here’s one last thing that the Republican sock-puppets need to realize about us “Never-Trumpers” (which, for my money, is a way-the-hell better thing to be than an “Always-Trumper”) whenever they accuse us of trying to impeach Trump "simply because [we] don’t like him!”

First of all, they’re exactly right: I’m for impeaching Trump simply because I don’t like him.

But why don’t I like him? I’ll give you a hint, it’s not because I arbitrarily flipped a coin to decide whether, “Heads, I like him”, and “Tails, I don’t like him”. The real reason I don’t like Donald Trump can be summed up thusly:

President Trump is a stupid shit-head, and keeps doing stupid shit-head things.

In fact, being an annoying and stupid shit-head was essentially his whole campaign. He promised to do things to piss off the good guys and please the bad guys. And he kept those two promises. 

But who are the good guys and who are the bad?

The good guys tend to be people, trying to do good things for people in need. The bad guys are the ones trying to undo what the good guys do.

I didn’t used to believe in “Evil”. I saw it as too religious for my liking. But with the success of this president and his “Always-Trumpers” followers, I changed my mind. I became an empiricist. I now realize there are good people in the world, trying to make the world a better place, and there are bad people in the world, whose goal is to undo all the good done by the good people.

During the campaign, Trump promised all his followers that he’d annoy the establishment, a promise he kept, but now he’s whining that the establishment is trying to impeach him! And for what reason are they trying to impeach him? Simply because “they don’t like my policies!”

That’s true, we don’t like your policies, especially the ones having to do with destroying America’s place in the world, trying to undo all the good it’s been doing, and replacing it with evil.

But also your policy about you being a stupid shit-head.

Response to Shuffleboard in Florida

(See: Just Above Sunset : Shuffleboard in Florida)

Re your "In 2016, Donald Trump turned the world upside down. In 2019, the world returned the favor – his world was just turned upside down.”

I wish.

In truth, Michael Gerson is right. Unless something like a huge meteor hits the earth, then nothing will stop the GOP dinosaurs in the Senate from acquitting him.

I think the idea of Trump shooting someone dead on Fifth Avenue, without losing any of his Republican support, is literally the case. It's a good bet that the truth of whatever the House of Representatives charges him with will take a back seat to the question, “Seriously, who do we want as president -- on the one hand, Donald Trump, as hideous as he is, or on the other, whichever so-called way-too-serious 'woke progressive' candidate the Democrats offer up?”

Those Democrats who have been demanding impeachment from way back will all be shocked and disappointed, of course, but they just can’t place themselves inside the head of anyone in the opposition to figure out why we failed. They probably think Republicans are putting party above country, failing to realize that Republicans may actually believe retaining a president who nominates judges of their own conservative persuasion, instead of judges who won't try to repeal Roe, is putting country first, and that it might be actually EASY for them to see that holding up aid to Ukraine, in exchange for investigating whatever the Bidens may or may not have done, is no big deal -- and certainly not worth all the fuss of replacing Trump with Pence.

And even if the country DOES fall apart? No problem! They'll just start another one, only this time, one more to their liking!

We’re doomed. What can we do to change this? Nothing. Maybe pray for a meteor.

And about that line, “I have been treated very badly by…” Guess who always says that?

Exactly! President Whiney-face! He seems to use that phrase at least once a day, and sometimes two or three times!

Is there anyone anywhere who, at some point or other, hasn’t treated him "very badly"? Hardly a name comes to mind, which comes as no surprise since, being such a world-wide jerk, there's hardly a soul HE hasn't shit on first.

He’s the planet's biggest victim! What's so weird is that whiners of Trump's ilk, who are so often heard complaining about being mistreated by others, so often turn out themselves to be the biggest thugs and bullies.

And why does anyone vote for bullies?

Because there's this odd belief, mostly but not exclusively among conservatives, that the world is too rough to be run by nice guys. They seem to forget that the tough guys who attempt to create thousand-year reichs tend to find themselves at the end of their lives in underground bunkers, forced to marry their girlfriend just before putting a bullet in their own head.

And something else worth noting:

If you remember the playground bullies from your youth, they were all about process and no substance. It's not WHAT they say, it's THAT they say it, and that they say it totally out of any context, and they say it over and over and over, ad nauseam. In fact, their success usually depended on their overpowering reality with their own nasty nonsense. Some things never change.

Also, much of their power over their victim is derived from the acquiescence of whatever crowd of toadies happen to be nearby. Why are toadies so obsequious to bullies? It may be that they're afraid of him, or at the very least, they see no percentage in taking the side of some goody-goody who is likely to end up being humiliated.

A typical bullying session back then might have looked like this:

Bully: They tell me your mother is a whore.
Toadies: Whoooa! HA! HA!
Victim: What?!? My mother's not a whore! Where'd you hear that?
Bully: Your mother is a whore.

Victim: My mother's NOT a whore!

Bully: Yeah, she is. Lots of people say your mother's a whore.

Toadies: HA-HA! Your mother's a whore! Your mother's a whore! HA!
Victim: No, she's NOT! Stop saying that!

Bully: Your mother IS a whore.
Victim: If you must know, my mother died when I was in kindergarten.
Bully: Yeah, yeah, your mother's a whore.
Toadies: HA-HA! Your mother's a whore! Your mother's a whore! HA!
Victim: In fact, before she died, my mother was awarded a Nobel Prize for finding a cure for some disease that had killed millions of people in Asia! She wrote several novels, all on the New York Times best-seller list! She was famous! She used to date Warren Beatty! She was friends of kings and queens and presidents, was always being interviewed on Entertainment Tonight, and used to spend her holidays with the Beatles!
Bully: Your mother's a whore! Everybody says so!

It could go on and on like that, with the bully and the toadies just repeating some random lie over and over, paying no attention whatsoever to whatever the victim says, until the victim just gives up and walks away, secretly wondering if there's anything to the rumor that his dearly-departed mother actually WAS a whore.

But the good news is, years later, the bully will end up in the gutter, with no actual friends and no woman who would ever admit to ever knowing him, much less having slept with him, and finally, the day will come when someone on the school's Facebook page posts the news that he has fallen on hard times, is penniless, has moved to Florida, and they even post a photo of him, flabby, no longer sporting that phony swoosh of blond hair, struggling with his walker outside a McDonald's, trying to bully his way to the head of the line, hoping to make it in before they shut down the "Early Bird Special".

Or at least that's my sincerest hope.

Response to So Sue Me

(See: Just Above Sunset: So Sue Me )

Three thoughts:

(1) Of course, this is not really a “return to normal”. Normal was back when reporters and anchors would never call ANYONE, much less an elected official, much less an American president, a liar. Trump changed all that, and there may be no going back.

(2) Also, something that may or may not quality as irony here is, if Trump really wants to “end the endless wars”, he should start by ceasing his destruction of all the institutional war-ending mechanisms the world has studiously created since the First World War, including the UN, NATO, and yes, even the EU. Famously not a very learned man, he doesn’t seem to even realize that all these, and many other peace-mongering instruments of international order, have been working quite stealthily to keep the planet in relative peace for about a century.

(3) And finally, maybe someone at CNN should countersue TRUMP for false advertising every time he brags in public about Trump Doral, while including mentions neither of (a) the resort's famous bedbug problems, nor of (b) how hot and uncomfortable it is in Miami in June.

And that’s all I have to say. For now.

Response to A Government of One

(See: Just Above Sunset: A Government of One)

Some things that we are missing here:

Although it may have already been widely known before this whistleblower blew the whistle, it seems that by promising to release Congressional funds to Ukraine in exchange for help “getting” Biden — if, indeed, that is happening — Trump is attempting to bribe Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

That may not seem like a big deal but it is bigger than merely breaking election laws (which is something else he is doing), since “bribery”, aside from being a “high crime or misdemeanor” in itself, in that it is wrong-doing specific to Trump’s high position in the government — that is, something you or I would not be capable of committing due to our not having that power — it is also the second of two specific grounds for impeachment listed in the Constitution:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Also, the fact that he may be involved, through “his" justice department, in blocking the Intelligence Inspector General from releasing information to Congress, and thus impeding its Constitutional responsibility of investigating the executive branch, means he may also be obstructing justice.

And when you think about it, remember the Mueller team looking into whether Donald Trump committed “collusion” with a foreign government to interfere in America's elections? If it turns out he indeed prodded Ukraine into damaging the electoral chances of candidate Joe Biden, as suspected, then it’ll be pretty hard for him to get away with that “No Obstruction, No Collusion” stuff this time, since that will be obvious to all that this is exactly what he’d be doing.

And by the way, something that is also not being much talked about is the fact that Trump seems to be reluctant to fulfill our traditional role as “protective umbrella” of oil in the Gulf, such as in the Saudi raids, which may be sending a message to Russia that we will also not fill the similar role, under NATO, of protector of former Soviet members from being reclaimed by Russia. If this too happens, we will have even more evidence of Trump’s collusion, “after the fact”, with Putin.

It seems amazing that the founders hadn't anticipated what we should to do with a president like this one, but apparently the 1787 Constitutional Convention was dragging on into an unusually uncomfortable summer, and in the hot hall, with the windows shut to keep curious outsiders from hearing what was going on, rather than work any longer on creating an office of the chief executive, everyone just decided to go back home.

Still, at some point in our not-too-distant future, we need to somehow find a way to make changes to the Constitution, in order to provide ways to prevent any American president — especially one ignorant of how America came to be the way it is, but is still determined to rid it of its distinguished history — from flushing his country down the crapper.

Response to Constructive Disbelief

(See: Just Above Sunset: Constructive Disbelief)

I like your theory, that Donald Trump is asking Americans for their "willful suspension of disbelief" in exchange for him supplying them with more excitement than they’re used to receiving from their supreme leader.

Of course, he’s gotten used to his audiences doing that, having performed in so-called "reality television", and while it probably did work on those people out there who chose to watch his show, he forgets that for most of us out here didn’t watch it. He’s relying on a deal made with a receptive but relatively small audience, forgetting that it’s an agreement that doesn’t come with the unwritten social contract implied in Democratic governance, which is the contract that most of us have with him.

In short, the American people didn’t hire him to entertain us, we hired him to execute the policies that we, the majority, through our elective representatives, want him to do.

He seems to be making the mistake that virtually all his predecessors had the decency to avoid, which is playing to the peanut gallery that elected him instead of using the opportunity provided by his accidental victory to build on his base and to govern for all Americans, even those who didn’t vote for him. And if he thinks that pleasing the minority instead of the majority of the country is the proper thing to do in this situation, he should stop and examine how he’s destroying the country, and then do the decent thing by just resigning.

And while he’s up and reexamining his abilities, he should stifle that silliness about him being an “artist” at making "great deals” — a reputation apparently birthed from somewhere inside his own skull and popularized by his former alter ego spokesman, “John Barron”, back in his New York City days — since it’s becoming more and more evident to everybody that his deal-making skills rival, say, those of the late Yasser Arafat, which is to say, "Lots of whiz-bang excitement, but in the end, nothing worth bragging about.”

He may think the public doesn’t mind his constant bullshitting, but he’s wrong; we do. All he need do is ask us.

Response to The Fog of Doubt

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Fog of Doubt)

So in the original “The Emperor’s New Clothes” story, nobody in the empire had the guts to tell him he’s naked, but in our version — that is, the one the planet is being forced to endure presently — EVERYONE is telling him what he needs to hear, but he just refuses to hear us!

And so what’s the moral of this version?

The lesson here is, President Fruitcake — who not only imagined someone told him Dorian would probably hit Alabama, but is now imagining that he heard the so-called “fake” news media apologize for doubting his word! — is even more delusional than we originally thought! Maybe someone should start dusting off those “25th Amendment Remedies”. 

Have you noticed that just about everything everyone has been observing lately about Trump only serves as evidence that he’s suffering from some mental disorder? For example, those words of Barbara Res: "To him, all the watching TV and tweeting is work, so he believes he’s on the clock 24-7, 365.”

Do totally bonkers people even know they’re bonkers?

He seems to never be in touch with reality. He seems to act on the assumption that there is no actual reality until he himself creates it, such as the whole business that all the experts were 95% sure the hurricane would hit Alabama. Doesn’t he realize that this sort of thing can be checked out? No, he doesn’t, because in his mind, all that’s needed is for him to say all these people were saying this back then, and Presto! They were saying it!

No joke, this guy is seriously ill!

But you know, his mental health notwithstanding (I don't like the idea of picking on mentally ill people), I might be persuaded to favor the nuking of those hurricanes, but only if it could be guaranteed hat Trump himself would be personally hand-delivering the bombs.

And as for the great stock market that Trump is riding to victory in 2020?

I’m surprised that nobody's talking about today’s economy as being a huge bubble, kept afloat by speculators who are misplacing their faith on all these Trump-supporting Tinkerbells who naively believe, for example, that coal is coming back, and so is manufacturing, and that Donald Trump, being a highly experienced businessman, not to mention a “stable genius”, will WIN the trade war he's waging on the rest of the planet!!

Our fate, once again, totally depends on the Wall Street Bubble People! We’d like to think they don’t know what they’re doing, but they do! The Bubble People only pretend to be ignorant of the fact that they’re invested in a bubble that will sooner or later burst. In truth, they are only gambling that they’ll know how to time it so they can sell out before the high prices come tumbling down.

As for me? It’s the same thing! I’m just hoping that our financial guy, the man in whose hands my family's investments are trusted, will know what to do once that long-overdue Apocalypse finally comes to town.

Response to Not Wanted

(See: Just Above Sunset: Not Wanted)

I hear what Charles Blow is saying here, but have to kind of disagree.

He implies that if you’re not a minority, you have a choice that minority folks don’t have about whether to either look the other way, or even to get into line to follow Donald Trump. But that would assume everyone values only their own skin and the skin of their own kind.

My deep-seated beef with Trump and his followers is that he and they are trying to destroy my country, to which I have no choice but to fight him, and to make sure that either it doesn’t happen or I go down fighting.

If it feels inevitable, and doesn’t at all seem like a choice I get to make, then in effect, it isn’t one.

In fact, I can’t help but suspect that most of those complaining about an "Hispanic Invasion”, including the El Paso shooter and those like him, come from families who arrived here in the 1800s or later, which would make them the real invaders, not the Latinos.

And even from the perspective of myself, someone whose family arrived here in the early 1600s, a decade or so after the Mayflower, I myself might regard not only the shooter but the whole Trump family and administration, from the president on down — and certainly all the cretins who show up at his rallies to cheer and sneer — as recent invaders of my country who, rather than understanding and appreciating the American values that greeted them on their arrival, are threatening to abrogate them, without serious consideration of the history of their new-found home, and they all wear stupid red hats to prove it.

In  short, maybe all these late-coming whiners should just pack up their silly hats and go back to their own miserable countries!

----

But other than that, Blow is outraged by the same things that I am: 

It is still unfathomable to me that the federal government took children away from their parents without a system for reunification, that some of those children may never see their parents again. 

Even if this were only one child it would be outrageous and egregious. Unfortunately, it is more than one.

Ironically, Trump started his hideous "family-separation policy” — which is, at the very least, Nazi-like — down in El Paso:

From July to October 2017, the Trump administration ran what the DHS called a "pilot program" for zero tolerance in El Paso. Families were separated, including families that were seeking asylum, and children were then reclassified as "unaccompanied" and sent into a network of shelters with no system created to reunite them with their parents.

If that doesn’t shock you, maybe you need to read it again. Here, let me help you:

The United States, under this president, ran an unpublicized program of kidnapping children from Immigrants trying to cross the southern border, at least some of them legally seeking asylum, then deliberately changing the status of the children to hide the fact that they had parents, and then hiding the kids in a "network of shelters with no system created to reunite them with their parents.”

The intent seemed to be scare the crap out of any invaders from the south into staying away from us, and especially not to bring their children, at least if they wanted to ever see them again.

And by the way, how’d that “deterrence” theory work out?

Government data from 2018 suggests that the family separation policy did little to deter migrants from crossing the US border illegally.

Yet it's still going on today, whether by pretended or actual incompetence.

And where does it all stand now? How many kids remain un-reunited with their families?

A followup government report released in January 2019, revealed that while HHS had previously said that the total number of children separated from their parents was 2,737, a new investigation revealed that the actual number of separated children was several thousand higher, with the exact number unknown due to poor record keeping. 

HHS is not able to identify or count children who were released from the government’s custody before officials started identifying separated families. 

Following a court ruling in 2019, government officials stated that identifying all children would require a joint effort of 12 to 24 months duration led by a team of officials representing HSS, ICE and CBP.

In other words, nobody seems to know right now how many kids were separated, but they promise to have the answer within maybe a year or two.

I guess the people who need to be outraged about this, the people who, one would think, would be demanding heads roll, are out sick, suffering from Trump Fatigue. Score Trump 1, and the rest of us 0.

Meanwhile, what is the administration doing about it in response to critics?

We’ll start with one such critic, Elijah Cummings, Democratic chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, blasting Kevin McAleenan, Trump’s Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, about living conditions of migrant mothers and children in border camps:

Outlining additional areas where McAleenan has offered a different account than government watchdogs, Cummings said he was troubled to hear DHS painting a rosier picture of its work at the border. 

“And therefore, I guess — you feel like you’re doing a great job, right?” Cummings asked. 

McAleenan responded his department was “doing our level best,” before being cut off again. 

“What does that mean? What does that mean? When a child is sitting in their own feces, can’t take a shower?” Cummings said, his voice shaking. “Come on man. What’s that about? None of us would have our children in that position.”

Then, on Saturday morning, Fox News Channel attempted to change the subject by countering Cummings's rage with a “what-aboutism” report from some young woman appearing to be a Baltimore local “citizen’s journalist” who showed us a video of trash outside and inside an abandoned apartment in Cummings’s home district.

Trump happened to be watching, and his resulting tweet was the start of his campaign against Cummings, apparently calculated to weaken the influence of one of his main congressional critics.

All of which should remind us of what Trump wanted us to forget, that all the damage from the White House’s family separation policy is still out there!

Thanks to Trump and his evil minions, some kidnapped kids are still sitting in their own feces and being denied a shower, while others have been placed in American foster homes, and while others, for all we know, are being rented out by human traffickers.

Yet, not only did the criminals say it may take one to two years to find out how many kids they sucked into their clutches — meaning, some of the kids they stole are gone for good, whether through simple incompetence or evil intent, and nobody seems to be seriously considering putting the bastards behind this in prison.

Maybe we need to — right now, while we’re thinking about it — take the names of any government employees who were involved in the commission of these crimes (who are possibly assuming they will get away with it on the grounds that "they were just following orders”) for use in whatever trials will be held after this crowd of thugs eventually loses power.

Response to The Man’s Word

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Man's Word)

“The cognitive linguist George Lakoff said the word 'invasion' was a potent one for Mr. Trump to use because of what it allowed him to communicate. 'If you’re invaded, you’re invaded by an enemy,' he said. 'An invasion says that you can be taken over inside your own country and harmed…'”

The weird thing is, we think of “invaders” as people who want to break into the country to do it some harm, whereas, in this case, the invaders are apparently families, coming here to improve their lives and contribute to the country’s well-being, while the people who are doing harm to the country are already living here. (And you know who you are!)

Daryl Johnson is right about Trump, as was Charles Blow in yesterday’s column. You can demand that Trump stop talking about “invaders” and such, but trying to convince him to be more careful of what he says kind of misses the point.

For one thing, I actually don’t want Trump to wake up some morning and become a good guy, since everybody will still know he got to be president of the United States by being both a lamebrain and a self-centered jerk, so-to-speak, and that will set a bad example for future generations, who need to know that you shouldn’t expect that doing bad stuff is the best way to get good stuff done.

And, in fact, it’s not necessarily Trump's rhetoric that keeps the alt-right active, it’s his very existence!

Since the very day after his election, American white power has found an environment much more welcoming to them, the most blatant example being news stories of white school students suddenly aware of the overnight change in America, openly harassing kids of color, shouting they should go back to where you came from.

White Supremacists now know they have a substantially friendlier audience for trying stuff they wouldn’t have been as likely to have tried under Obama.

But did Donald Trump make force them to be that way? I think that Charles Blow’s viewpoint covers this — that these two malevolent forces have been traveling on parallel roads, each just happening to look over and derive encouragement from seeing the other. To paraphrase the poet, neither of them needed a weatherman to tell them which way the wind was blowing.

Racists and the other deplorables are, for their own survival, a duplicitous group and so they easily overlook an equally disingenuous  president Trump occasionally disparaging them as he reads robotically from a teleprompter (so much so as to suggest that he’s mocking), since they know he’s being forced by circumstances to lie. If that weren’t the case, Trump wouldn’t do it, since it would risk losing his base. This is how evil survives in a world that’s mostly hostile to them.

Is Trump actually a racist? And am I suggesting that he’s a closet racist?

Sure. Why not. All we need to make that call is to remember one example of many.

Back in May of 1989, when he lived in New York City, Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in all four of the cities major newspapers, calling for the return of the death penalty after five minority teenagers, none of whom he knew from Adam, were accused of raping and badly beating a female jogger in Central Park:

"Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer ... Yes, Mayor Koch, I want to hate these murderers and I always will. ... How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits? Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!"

Maybe partly because of Trump’s ad, the five African Americans and Latinos were found guilty and served several years in jail, but twenty years later, were all exonerated by DNA evidence after another man confessed. They then sued the city, and settled for millions.

Was Trump ready to apologize? Nope. In fact, he doubled down, calling the settlement "a disgrace." "Speak to the detectives on the case and try listening to the facts”, he wrote. "These young men do not exactly have the pasts of angels.”

Has he ever apologized in the years since? No. If you add up all the cases like that one showing his attitude about minorities, you’re justified in concluding that Trump is indeed a racist, and whatever he says, with or without TelePrompter, doesn’t really matter. What matters is what he believes and what he is while in office, which is a racist, and if he’s trying to convince America he’s otherwise, he’s not doing a very good job.

And as for the trade war, I find it hard not to side with China.

Yes, they’ve been getting away with their shit for years, but I hate to reward our leadership for thinking that being an asshole is a way for our country to deal with it.

It just goes to show you, and it never occurs to you until it happens, that when you live under a tyrant, it's hard to know who your friends are.

Response to Extraordinary Loyalty to a Malicious Man

(See: Just Above Sunset: Extraordinary Loyalty to a Malicious Man)

Really, why does Donald Trump act like such a jerk?

He apparently does it on purpose. There's actually a whole philosophy about this, that the bigger an asshole you are, the more successful you’ll be, and Trump has openly hinted at believing in it. He may be the first card-carrying proponent of “assholeism" to ever be elected president of the United States, but he’s not the first human being ever to think that pissing people off is the most effective way to make them do what you want.

For example, maybe Mexico would, without any prompting at all from anybody, work a little harder at keeping refugees from coming to the United States, but why not threaten them with a possible border closure, just to make sure? Just think of the quote, “You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone”, which either originated with Al Capone or possibly Professor Irwin Corey, nobody knows for sure.

But an even better question is, why do all these Republicans, with all their piety and talk of morality, allow Trump to get away with being such a jerk?

I think the answer is, mostly, they’re afraid of the dark. And when I say “the dark”, I mean they’re afraid of the unknown. Trump may be a big arrogant brat — very sure of himself, although near-totally clueless — but these Republicans, although equally clueless, are all stumbling around, while somewhere in the dark, they seem to have lost possession of their moral compasses.

Although they may have learned as kids, maybe in Sunday school or even from Hollywood movies, that "you should always do the right thing”, once they grew up and found that doing the right thing was rarely a winning strategy, they learned to improvise — which, often as not, meant not being a goddam “goody-goody”. Nobody likes good people. Nobody wants to admit it, but good people are weak, and nobody is afraid of them, because they’re too nice. As famous tough guy Niccolo Machiavelli once said, "It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.” And you can’t.

When it comes to political discourse, I think of it as having two levels:

The best known of these is what some call “the horserace”, but what I prefer to call “the game”, since the object of the game is to win, and when it comes to elections, everybody seems to think that winning is all that matters.

That’s one of the reasons you pretty much only hear “the game” being discussed on TV, rather than serious seminars on history or civics, or even science. After all, it’s safer to form an opinion about who will win an election, and what it takes to do it, than to opine about, say, whether we should raise the minimum wage, based on whether it would be good for the economy or not.

Which brings us to that other level, which is, “The way things ought to be”. (I need to find a pithy one- or two-word description for this level, but for the time being, this is all I got.)

And the most important thing to remember is something sort of surprising, and this is that the second level — “the way things should be” — is the top level, and "the game" discussion belongs below it.

An example?

What would happen if, say, in an NFL game, one player took out a gun and just shot to death the opposing quarterback?

First of all, is there anything in the NFL rulebook that says he can’t do that? Maybe “unnecessary roughness”? I’ve seen the rules on this ("Penalty: For unnecessary roughness: Loss of 15 yards. The player may be disqualified if the action is judged by the official(s) to be flagrant”), and take my word for it, there’s nothing there about not being allowed to shoot another player to death.

But, of course, it doesn’t really matter. The refs don’t need to get in a huddle to discuss what to do about this, since the cops will eventually come in and arrest the guy. And this is as it should be. You can't get away with saying that all that matters is the game, and that “the way things ought to be” doesn’t figure into it at all.

So if you believe in morality, or maybe even in some God that determines right from wrong and how humans should behave, then doesn’t that take priority over the rules of some stupid game?

We need to give conservatives something to think about. But still, what if they still don’t come around and help us do something about America’s only (to date) asshole president?

Well, then screw it! In that case, we just crush ‘em!

Response to A Constitutional Reality Show

(See: Just Above Sunset: A Constitutional Reality Show)

I think the secret password that Chief Justice John Roberts is asking the administration to figure out before he’ll let them include the citizenship question on the census form is, “Open, Sesame!!!”

But to make sure it works, they’ll need to say it really, REALLY LOUD!!!

(Or was it “ Rumplestiltskin”? I forget.)

My problem with this SCOTUS decision is that Roberts has turned a court case into some sort of children’s fairy tale.

Instead of giving the White House another chance at coming up with a more believable rationale, he should just be saying “No!”, followed by, “You have failed to explain why this thing should be done — and by the way, there is at least one obvious reason it should not be done. End of story. Go away.”

Their argument needed, from the get-go, to include both (a) an explanation of the problem that they seek to solve, and (b) an explanation of their proposed solution to the problem.

Furthermore, these two things need to be presented concurrently! — not making the solution independent of some non-existent, random, last-minute, thunk-up-out-of-thin-air problem — or maybe some possible unconnected explanation that some parallel White House might have accidentally concocted in an alternative universe. The Chief Justice shouldn’t be hinting that he might be open to changing his mind, depending on whether Trump's team can come back in a few days after having captured some wicked witch’s broom.

Another meme for what Roberts is doing — as if one is needed — might be that of the headmaster of the local university, in a quiet room, reluctantly retesting the star football player on his botany final, hoping, along with the whole student body, that this clueless thug, who happens to have bean-dip where his brains ought to be, can finally pass the course, thus allowing him to play in, and indeed win, the state championship game this coming Saturday, and by so doing, also saving the institution from the wrecking ball.

As engaging as all of this is, I’m tired of living in a drawn out Hollywood fantasy. Can’t we just go back to the boring old days of not having to pay so much attention to all this crap?

Response to The Enterprises of Ambition

(See Just Above Sunset: The Enterprises of Ambition)

I guess most people, including Donald Trump, never wondered why there has been so little previous celebration of American military might in our observances of July 4th, 1776, a day when leaders of the American colonies (most, if not all of them unarmed!) finally met in a room somewhere to jointly declare those colonies no longer colonies of Britain.

Except for sometimes having a few old war veterans march down Main Street of our hometown, this holiday has traditionally skipped over all the military stuff and correctly focused on the independence stuff. In fact, Washington’s army probably had less to do with winning independence than our militia, who, unlike the regular army, rarely seemed to lose their battles.

Although I doubt that’s why we don’t do all the tanks and flyover stuff on the 4th. It may have more to do with such hardware display reminding people of such dog-and-pony shows as Moscow’s Red Square on May Day, with its huge ICBMs on wheels and giant portraits of the current top mucky-muck of the party, the kind of foolishness that most of us tend to giggle at when we see it on the news, but with which Trump is apparently infatuated — which is sort of ironic because of that whole bone-spurs thing.

But if Trump says one goddam thing in his speech that’s partisan, we need to send a bill for the whole shebang to the RNC. I always wonder, come to think of it, if we are charging him for his use of Air Force One, et al, every time he flies off to a rally in some gymnasium where he mocks everyone who disagrees with him, which he seems to do often. We should.

And maybe for next year's Independence Day, America could collect dimes and pennies to rent a secret venue somewhere to celebrate the 4th the old fashioned way — with music and fireworks, but no Sherman tanks and no military flyovers — and best of all, we don't invite Donald Trump.

Response to Trusting the Truth

(See Just Above Sunset: Trusting the Truth)

Contrary to popular opinion, I think Bob Mueller did, in his vague and taciturn way and through logical deduction, clarify what at least Trump opponents needed clarified. In fact, unless Congress decides there is more it needs him to say about certain classified matters behind closed doors, I no longer see the necessity of subpoenaing him.

What Mueller clarified:

(1) First, something I wish Mueller had stated out loud, for everybody to hear, back before his investigation got started — that, because of DOJ policy prohibiting an indictment of a sitting president, we should not anticipate that this probe will end up charging Trump with any crimes, even in a sealed indictment that would be unsealed after he leaves office. Had Mueller made that clear from the beginning, he would have made it impossible for Trump to claim the report vindicated him.

(2) And second, if they thought they had evidence that definitely cleared him, they would have said so, and since they didn’t do that, it’s just possible Trump is guilty of something that they can’t charge him with.

(3) And yes, the ”legal" authorities don't have jurisdiction over whatever wrongdoing Trump did, if anything, (and this runs counter to so-called White House thinking, such as it is) but the “political" authorities in Congress, under the Constitution, do have jurisdiction!

And as for the “legal” matters, this all leaves open the question of what might happen to Trump after he leaves office. For that, we’ll just have to wait and see.

As for some saying Mueller’s statement is a "referral to impeach”?

Yes, it is, but that doesn’t mean Congress has an obligation to do it if they don’t think they have the votes in the Senate to convict.

Too often, we tend to confuse the “political horse race” with “political principles”, usually by our yielding priority to the horse race, but this is one of those rare cases where many are arguing that we should stand by our principles, whether or not that does damage to whatever cause it is we’re fighting for.

In this case, maybe Congress should consider making the point that the president is playing loosey-goosey with America’s values by censuring him, but only if they think they can get the votes in the Senate. Maybe later, if he hasn't gotten the message (and assuming we have the votes), we can always impeach.

I do sort of favor the idea of just launching “inquiries” into impeachment, if that would help enforce subpoenas, but in any event, it's Congress's call if they think it would do more harm than good, and on this, I trust Nancy Pelosi’s judgment more than that of those who would rush to impeach, such as the Trump campaign, Charles Blow, and dare I say it, even my wife. (Please don’t tell her I said that.)

But there’s one more thing we have learned from all of these recent events, possibly without yet realizing it:

You know that phrase we often hear, that “In America, nobody is above the law, even the president”?

It's just not true. The president of the United States, at least when he’s in office, is untouchable by the law. The law can’t charge him with a crime, can’t arrest him, apparently can’t stop him from doing anything he feels like doing, and the law can’t remove him from office.

Someday, when we get around to it, we’ll have to find the time to do something about that.

Rick