The Washington Post:
Veterans Affairs Secretary David J. Shulkin’s chief of staff doctored an email and made false
statements to create a pretext for taxpayers to cover expenses for the secretary’s wife on a 10-day trip to Europe last summer, the agency’s inspector general has found.
We are overwhelmed by the countless and necessarily briskly noted corruptions of this administration.
Andrew Jackson's was virtually paralyzed for a couple years by "The Eaton Affair," a morally antique episode in which cabinet officials' wives ostracized the secretary of war's wife because of her controversial past and free-spirited present. Lyndon Johnson's entire presidential tenure was haunted by a former Senate aide's influence peddling (Bobby Baker). Bill Clinton experienced a few exceptionally enjoyable minutes with an exceptionally caring intern, and a year was consumed in partisan outrage. One could go on itemizing the many time-consuming scandals, both petty and momentous, of assorted presidential administrations.
With Trump's? There's no time, really, to stop and ponder any one scandal, for there are simply too many. They come at us like a fierce barrage of artillery fire; just as one bombshell lands, another is launched. Some have theorized that it's Trump's evil genius to stack scandals like cordwood, so that we'll be too swamped by them to sort any one scandal out.
With this theory, I disagree. I instead believe that multitudinous, coexistent scandals are merely the substance of Donald Trump's corrupt, miserable little life. He's surrounded and deluged by scandals for the simple reason that he creates them; some out of greed and some out of untethered megalomania, but mostly out of stupidity. Yesterday I quoted a White House aide as saying that in the Trump administration "we don’t even have a coherent strategy to obfuscate." Trump can't plan beyond one move (e.g., he actually thought that firing FBI Director Comey would put an end to his Russia troubles) only because his mental capacity limits him to that number.
His administration officials copy his short-sighted behavior, knowing that presidential veniality loves company. VA Secretary David Shulkin's crime? It'll be out of the news by tomorrow. For we, and journalists, are overwhelmed.
"Some have theorized that it's Trump's evil genius to stack scandals like cordwood, so that we'll be too swamped by them to sort any one scandal out."
This would be a foolish strategy anyway, even if it were real. Mueller won't be distracted, and voters will be exhausted. Come election day, people will be really tired of this stuff and looking to vote for those who can clean things up.
Posted by: Infidel753 | February 16, 2018 at 07:19 AM