P.M. Carpenter

Sing along to Trump's bouncing ball

Video tape can be so entertaining — even a mere 1.5 minutes of it.

Trump has said “the only problem our economy has is the Fed,” he has said "my biggest threat is the Fed," said "the Fed is raising rates too fast and it’s too independent," has said the Fed "seem[s] to like raising interest rates," has said he's "not thrilled" with Fed Chairman Jerome Powell, and, Trump has said, the Fed has "gone crazy."

In the video he says, "I'm not blaming anybody." 

And, speaking for Leontes in The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare said:

I am a feather for each wind that blows. 

 

When it comes to metaphors, be alert. (We need more lerts.)

Said Lindsey Graham — "the wall has become a metaphor for border security."

And Trump's tax returns have become a metaphor for ruble-washing.

And Melania's Christmas trees have become a metaphor for incredibly bad interior decoration.

And Don Jr.'s personal calendar has become a metaphor for perjury, 5 to 10.

And John Kelly's retirement has become a metaphor for "You can take this job and shove it."

And Mick Mulvaney's new job, Kelly's old one, is a metaphor for "Why not?"

And Rudy Giuliani's pettifoggery has become a metaphor for dementia.

And Mike Pence's vice presidency has become a metaphor for the metaphor of a smiley face.

And, finally, Robert Mueller's investigation has become a metaphor for righteous octopi.

 

Journalists literally have no business at White House press conferences

Already suggested by many others, the NY Times' Bret Stephens suggests a media approach that makes sense to everyone but the media: "Stop sending reporters to [Trump's] press conferences, which long ago became theaters of no information."

To students of psychiatry, the president's press conferences may be enlightening, clinical presentations of raging mental disorders — narcissism atop piles of sociopathy atop heaps of eerie dissociation — but to hired journalists and the public, they're nothing more than a wasted hour away from reruns of "Gilligan's Island."

Trying to get an honest, nonaggressive, uninsulting answer from Trump about … anything … is like expecting a root canal to be pleasant. There are some things in this world that simply will never be. An informative press conference from Trump is one of them.

So why do television networks and radio broadcasters and major newspapers insist on sending their top journalists to these presidential charades? That is a question serious people have put to media executives for nearly two years — a rather rhetorical question, to no avail.

In addition to boycotting Trump's press conferences — excepting, perhaps, interns — the same media policy should be extended to Sarah Sanders' burlesques. About a CNN story titled "Troops bringing President Trump 'Make America Great Again' hats to sign may have violated a military rule," Sanders replied, "CNN will attack anyone who supports President Trump, including the brave men and women of our military who fight everyday to protect our freedom."

In this instance her response came in the alternative form of a tweet, not a vocal reply at one of her "press secretary" parodies, but 'twas the same sort of hollow garbage — Question —> Deflection — that she also hurls during White House appearances. Was there a material connection, a substantive link, even the remotest of relationships between the CNN's headline and her reaction? Not a whit. Her reply was but characteristic of all her replies to the media: Ask whatever you like, and I'll give you a hostile, utterly unrelated answer.

This plea, too, will be futile, yet along with Bret Stephens I'll present it — again — to media executives: Please stop sending your top-tier reporters to Trump's (and Sanders') press conferences. Send interns or your children or winos off the street, but don't send respected journalists who therefore lend an air of respectability to the empty, usually theatrical proceedings. For every time you do, you license not only Trump but yourselves to further degrade the once-honored office of POTUS.

 

NeverTrumpers and the never NeverTrumpers

Writing for IntellectualTakeout.org, Deion Kathawa, a contributor to American Greatness, an online publication of pro-Trumpism, explains "Why (Most) Right-Wing Intellectuals Hate Trump." With rather pitiable seriousness, he altogether ignores the immensely self-evident explanation — because Trump is an idiot — and dives instead into what he regards as a deep, psycho-philosophical argument.

This he lifts, in large part, from the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, who once pondered the question, "Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?" Putting aside the pressing objection that Nozick's statistical premise might be flawed — Do most intellectuals really oppose capitalism? — we read that intellectuals were "schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward," so "how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority 'entitled' them?"

By "intellectuals" Nozick means the "wordsmiths" among "poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper and magazine journalists, and many professors," while great American Kathawa adds "think tank scholars" and "pundits." Intellectuals, said Nozick, are housed in "academia, the media, [and] government bureaucracy." The degree to which these intellectuals believe they're "entitled" to high social and financial status is more debatable in my mind than it was in Nozick's. I've known some "intellectuals" who believe that a PhD somehow confers intelligence — rather than the other way around, and this they believe because they're halfwitted — while other intellectuals I've known are the very model of modesty, and expect no high status merely because of an academic title.

At any rate, Kathawa tackles not anti-capitalist thinkers but "anti-Trump right-wing intellectual[s]," who, he writes, see "no substantive difference between statesmanship and academia…. Politics is just their insular conferences played out in public." And that, says Kathawa, "is obviously nonsense…. Very often, ideas cooked up in the ivory tower disintegrate on contact with reality, leaving massive casualties in their wake (e.g., Marxism). 'Nation-building,' 'globalism,' 'unfettered free trade,' and 'amnesty' also spring to mind as rotten ideas that (perhaps) look good on paper but are deeply, dangerously inimical to America’s interests in today’s world."

More in the Nozickian vein, Kathawa asserts that "the anti-Trump right-wing intellectual bristles at a political system that does not 'appropriately' value their [sic] 'expertise' and 'superior' knowledge and which, consequently, elevates a 'buffoon' like Trump to the presidency…. They resent the man who smashed their pretensions of politics-as-white-paper-drafting-session and roundly repudiated their perceived 'right to rule.'" Why Kathawa believes that intellectuals, right or left, perceive a "right to rule" is left stranded in the reader's imagination. He simply asserts it as fact.

Now to the quick. Which NeverTrumpers, pray tell, is Kathawa addressing? The most prominent of them are not academics or bureaucrats; they are newspaper columnists, magazine contributing editors, cable-news guests, radio hosts, former GOP operatives, think-tankers (or tank-thinkers) — they are David Frum, George Will, Bill Kristol, Charlie Sykes, Steve Schmidt, Jennifer Rubin, Ana Navarro, Max Boot, Bret Stephens, Andrew Sullivan. There are, of course, plenty of NeverTrump academics, not because of professional or financial jealousy, but because they are learned men and women who know a demagogic windbag when they see one.

Many NeverTrumpers are financially successful and, professionally, at the top of their game. This too destroys Kathawa's argument of jealousy borne of capitalistic competition. For example Mr. Will — called "the éminence grise of conservative opinion-makers" by the Daily Beast — detests Donald Trump only because he's the ideological antithesis of a thoughtful conservative, or a decent human being.

Kathawa's overall complaint against NeverTrumpers seems organically based in the populist, pseudoconservative fad of anti-elitism. He is positively livid at their "ivory towers," their uppity "resentments," their "pretensions," their self-perceived "entitle[ment] to rule." That Kathawa himself came from an ivory tower, that he resents intellectuals, and that their entitlement to rule is unmistakably inferior to his and to roughly one-third of the nation's, seems not to disturb him.

What instead seems to annoy Kathawa is that virtually all conservative NeverTrumpers are — as a social democrat, I write this against interest — bona-fide thinkers. They love to contemplate, write and debate. And the product of their sundry contemplations is glaring: They grasp that Trump is an idiot, a dangerous demagogue, a threat to America's welfare, and indeed the world's.

Immaterial, irrelevant or just plain wrong is that these intellectuals bristle "at a political system that does not 'appropriately' value their 'expertise' and 'superior' knowledge." In fact were I to psychoanalyze Mr. Kathawa as he does NeverTrumpers, I'd say their knowledge is the very thing at which he bristles. And if on that count I'm wrong, then my back-up analysis is that Mr. Kathawa is as absent human decency as Mr. Trump is — thus he must scurry around looking for intellectual heretics who threaten his worship of unscrupulous populism, as embodied by our corrupt, anti-intellectual president.

 

The utter grotesqueness of Donald J. Trump. Now it's dead children.

Any deaths of children or others at the Border are strictly the fault of the Democrats and their pathetic immigration policies that allow people to make the long trek thinking they can enter our country illegally. They can’t. If we had a Wall, they wouldn’t even try! The two.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2018

...children in question were very sick before they were given over to Border Patrol. The father of the young girl said it was not their fault, he hadn’t given her water in days. Border Patrol needs the Wall and it will all end. They are working so hard & getting so little credit!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2018

No sorrow, no regrets, no comforting words for the parents of the dead children. Just an unfeeling, grotesque attack on Democrats and "their pathetic immigration policies" (under which no children died).

The more rational blocs of the internet are saying that with this cold-hearted tweet, Trump has demonstrated a new and inhuman low. I'm not so sure. He has never exhibited any of humanity's higher traits; his 72 years on earth have been wretchedly defined by nothing but swindling, money-grubbing, publicity-whoring, finger-pointing, beastliness and pettiness. He is a narcissistic creature of the sociopathic dark, he thrives on whatever is sinister, he is virtue-intolerant, and the best he deserves is universal neglect by polite society.

Trump's followers possess roughly the same wrong stuff to unrecommend them. Whenever another Trumpian monstrosity is revealed, such as the negligent deaths of the two migrant children, his fans' defensive programming is set to what-aboutism: in this case, What about Obama? Here's a representative tweet sent by one of those fans the day after Christmas — a shrewish vulgarian who self-identifies as a "Police Wife, Air Force mom" and "Christ follower":

I’m honestly baffled where the outrage was when 18 children died under the @BarackObama administration??? https://t.co/yrgBR3NDjw

— Jojo Parks (@jwaters33312) December 26, 2018

This is how they console themselves. And if there were some truth in it, the aggressive defense might even have some relevant merit. But, according to Snopes.com, the online fact-checker of solid renown, there exists "no documentation supporting the claim that any migrant children, much less 18 of them, died while in the custody of the U.S. Border Patrol during the administration of President Barack Obama." Nevertheless, it's on the internet — and it's anti-Obama — so they believe it.

How does one conclude a post on the miserable existence of Donald J. Trump? That can't be done, really, because his miserable existence hasn't yet concluded.

 

Government by cynicism, cowardice, and nincompoopery

Since his return from Iraq, where he rallied U.S. troops as a kind of Hitler Youth, Trump has gone into hiding, reports the Washington Post. "[He] has had no public events, and aides offered few details about his schedule, other than saying the president was working and making phone calls."

It seems those "phone calls" are nothing but tapped-out tweets, excoriating Democrats for the government shutdown that Trump has inflicted most painfully on 800,000 federal workers." [Trump] has chosen not to use this time to engage in substantive negotiations over the budget," continues the Post, "or seize the public stage and make his case for funding the border wall."

If it appears odd that the man who so eagerly shuttered the government over $5 billion for a useless barrier would suddenly hibernate into tweeting obscurity, then think again. Trump gives not one damn about his sacred wall; as with everything he does, the wall and the shutdown are merely political weapons designed to please his base.

Said retired GOP Congressman Tom Davis, "I don’t know why he wouldn’t make this a fight. I don’t think you pay any price at this point. The election is in two years, and nobody is going to remember this. But his base will remember that he fought for a wall. I don’t see any political consequence."

Indeed. This is government by heartless cynicism. Nearly a million federal workers are anguishing over mortgage payments or even how to buy food for their kids, while the president of the United States fiddles with his phone and feasts on Big Macs. Let them eat cake, says Trump, since they're mostly Democrats anyway. As long as the GOP base is happy, the president is happy.

Meanwhile, Trump has acting staff to spread disinformation — that which the base thrives on. "My gut was that [Trump] was really interested in doing a deal and coming to some sort of compromise," said Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to "Fox & Friends" on Friday. "But the more we’re hearing this week is that it’s Nancy Pelosi who is preventing that from happening." In fact it is Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh — those buffoonish Clark Cliffords of the pseudoconservative movement — who are preventing fruitful negotiations.

These are the sadists who will prolong the pain, with no end in sight, for 800,000 Americans: a cynical, heartless president; a gutless, cowering administration; a clownish entourage of partisan nincompoops. Trump often brayed that he alone could fix "the system," although, it turns out, it takes a lot of Trumps to destroy it.

 

Interpreting truth, Trump-style

"More Americans blame President Donald Trump than congressional Democrats for the partial U.S. government shutdown," reports NBC News. Thirty-three percent blame the Dems, however "Forty-seven percent of adults in the U.S. hold Trump responsible … according to [an Ipsos] Dec. 21-25 poll."

Forty-seven percent. Rather, only 47 percent.

Let us review the words of, uh, probable responsibility — straight from the man who, it sure seems, is probably responsible for the government shutdown, since he most definitely claimed full responsibility:

I will take the mantle of shutting [the government] down.

I will shut it down for border security.

I am proud to shut down the government for border security because the people of this country don't want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country.

So I will take the mantle.

I will be the one to shut it down.

I'm not going to blame [Democrats] for it.

If we don't get what we want one way or the other ... I will shut down the government.

It's true that others see other ways in which to read those statements from Trump, but I read them as I will take the mantle of shutting the government down, in fact I am proud to shut down the government. I suppose my interpretive powers may simply be keener than others' — those others, it's true, being the ones who constitute 53 percent of the American public.

Yet in this post-reality, or post-truth, world, anything can be true, as long as one wishes it to be true. Thus it follows that it is passably untrue that Trump, in a scarce moment of truthfulness, intended to shut down the government. Perhaps I only wish that to be true, this business of Trump saying I will be the one to shut the government down. It's also true that a majority wish that that not be true, hence it's untruthful to say that Trump truly meant I will take the mantle of shutting the government down.

Philosopher and part-time poet William Shakespeare wrote ,"This above all; to thine own self be true." That's truly beautiful, for in a few words that's all we're being when we untruthfully say that which is true is untrue. Or at least 53 percent of us are. And that's the truth.

 

The one way in which the Orange Stumblebum can keep from WEARING orange

Veteran political journalist Elizabeth Drew mirrors my thinking in her misnamed NYT op-ed, "The Inevitability of Impeachment":

Facing an assortment of unpalatable possibilities, including being indicted after he leaves office, Mr. Trump will be looking for a way out. It’s to be recalled that Mr. Nixon resigned without having been impeached or convicted. The House was clearly going to approve articles of impeachment against him, and he’d been warned by senior Republicans that his support in the Senate had collapsed. Mr. Trump could well exhibit a similar instinct for self-preservation. But like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Trump will want future legal protection….

While Mr. Trump’s case is more complex than Mr. Nixon’s, the evident dangers of keeping an out-of-control president in office might well impel politicians in both parties, not without controversy, to want to make a deal to get him out of there.

I wrote that Drew's op-ed is misnamed for the glaring reason that her argument lies in the near inevitability of Trump's resignation, not impeachment. One wonders if her editor or headline writer read her piece. At any rate, there's no mistaking the merit of her argument.

As Trump's unpopularity swells and statistically significant chunks of his once-devoted base begin to splinter off — which is a real, statistically significant possibility — his congressional Republican allies will themselves begin to splinter. Democratic House votes for impeachment is nearly a sure thing, while 20 Senate defectors, on the Republican side of conviction, are at least conceivable.

Bob Mueller's final report could be — and I'd go so far as to say will be — as damning as it is appalling. So yes, in a moment of rare lucidity borne of an undying sense of self-preservation, Trump might well conclude that a somewhat artful deal of resignation, in exchange for non-prosecution, both federal and state, would be the better part of Falstaffian valor, of which he has none.

Drew's thinking and mine are admittedly loaded with mights, coulds, and mere conceivabilities. But early sketches of how the national calamity of Trump will ultimately play out are almost lapidary. We know his one indelible instinct will be to save his own skin, and there, the options are also limited to one: a stay-out-of-jail resignation deal.

 

Trump: "shattering [more] norms"

***

***

It's superficial but still essential to say that, by now, this above-the-fold NY Times headline and tease would have conveyed a noteworthy abnormality had Trump not crossed a political line and shattered norms while addressing troops overseas. It's also truthful to say that the banana-republic generalissimo and supremo autoritario probably knew no better, vacuous as he is to all things presidentially proper — not that, if he knew otherwise, he'd do otherwise. (The story's genuine abnormality was this passage: "'When that starts happening, it’s like the politicalization of the judicial branch,' said Mark Hertling, a retired three-star Army lieutenant general." How many four-star Army lieutenant generals are there?)

The Washington Post's Fact Checker reports that Trump, as president, has bleated about 7,500 lies. Precisely, 7,502. Out of the thinnest of overseas air he misinformed the troops that they hadn’t received a pay raise "in more than 10 years — more than 10 years. And we got you a big one. I got you a big one. I got you a big one.” He added, "They said: 'You know, we could make it smaller. We could make it 3 percent. We could make it 2 percent. We could make it 4 percent.' I said: 'No. Make it 10 percent. Make it more than 10 percent.'"

This wasn't the first time El Presidente lied about military pay raises. The Post observes that he blathered similar lies last May, in a speech, and again, weeks later, at the Naval Academy. The reality is that Trump agreed not to a 10 percent raise this year — for FY 2019 — but 2.6 percent. He originally proposed a 2.1 percent raise for FY 2018, "but lawmakers approved the higher 2.4 percent mark," notes the Post. Furthermore, "active members of the military have received a pay increase every year since 1983." That, according to the Defense Department.

For Trump, lying to the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces about their pay was as pleasingly effortless as lying to a condo-buyer about the unit's number of bathrooms. Whatever sounds good at the moment, is Trump's only principle; whatever will close the deal — reality, truth, integrity be damned. Nixon was a human geyser of probity compared to this inglorious, grifting embarrassment of a commander in chief.

Against long presidential tradition, Trump also crudely politicized his remarks to the troops. One ponders which was worse — his crudity or rank politicization. "The Democrats don’t want to let us have strong borders," he said. "They don’t want to fight, the Democrats, for the border of our country." Yesterday I read a stylishly damning phrase (conceived by the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, no less): "the straw men Mr. Trump keeps torching." He never runs out of them, although he forever exhausts our tolerance.

For three-quarters of a century Republicans have fiendishly demonized Democrats as being weak on national security. But at least, on occasion, they adorned their humbuggery with rhetorical elegance. One thinks, for instance, of John Foster Dulles' writing of the 1952 Republican platform: "[Democrats] swing erratically from timid appeasement to reckless bluster…. The Republican Party offers, in contrast to the performances of those now running our foreign affairs, policies and actions based on enlightened self-interest and animated by courage, self-respect, steadfastness, vision, purpose, competence and spiritual faith." Trump reminds us more of Joe McCarthy, rambling incoherently through mounds of besotted rubbish.

But Donald, you keep on lying, on perjuring and pretending. It's your only hope. For perhaps, in 2020, your domestic troops — the only ones you really care about; the ones who believe or dismiss your lies — will, on your behalf, turn out in dimwitted droves. God knows nobody but the dimwitted will.

 

"The Fall of the American Empire," by Edward Gibbon

The Washington Post:

"By making overtly political remarks to uniformed troops who were excited to meet their commander in chief, Trump risks the American public seeing the military as a partisan fan base for whatever message he is delivering … [-] an image that may play well to his base but undermines the trust all Americans put in their armed forces."

If you've read any of Rome's ancient history, you know multiple emperors became such merely by acquiring the support of Rome's muscle — its military. It was rather difficult to prevent a strongman's ascendence to ultimate power when he possessed a mass of sword-toting goons who could kill you — and gladly would, at the snap of some fat little fingers.

The governing competence of these strongmen made virtually no difference to the men who were bribed (often with land) for their "electoral" support.

And so the horse's ass of Donnie Caligula emulates, in yet another way, the unsavory decline and fall of the Roman Empire, Trump-style.

 

Biden dominates both other Dems and Trump

A fresh Suffolk University poll (rated B+ by FiveThirtyEight), finds, rather incongruently, that Democratic and independent voters prefer "someone entirely new" to run against Trump, although 53 percent "said they would be excited" if Joe Biden led the ticket.

"He has the common touch," said a Pennsylvania Democrat, who added, in USA Today's words, that "Democrats might need to nominate an older white male to defeat President Trump for re-election."

Which is why another poll accordingly finds that if the election were held today, Biden would beat Trump 42-36 percent. Beto O'Rourke would lose to Trump by 7 points (37-30); Bernie Sanders would essentially tie, 38-37 percent.

"Progressive strategist" Ruy Teixeira offered the conventional wisdom, but spurious reasoning, that "It's really early to be polling on this" — as in, too early to be polling on this. Such orthodox thinking never fails to astonish me.

First, in a granddaddy of tautologies, if it's too early to be polling on Democratic contenders, pollsters wouldn't be hired to poll the subject. Second, even somewhat unseasonable polling provides a knowable baseline of contenders' support, without which, determining who's advancing and who's stagnating (or sinking) would be unachievable.

Most important in defeating the stale conception of early-polling-as-premature polling, though, is that these surveys supply us not only a spontaneous "gut check" among Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters' preferences, they also suggest the money — of the big sort — to follow. This then reinforces top-tier status — unless, of course, one is confronting a base as volatile as it is unhinged; e.g., the GOP base. God forbid.

Absent the early Suffolk poll and others like it, we could only assume that Joe Biden is the Democratic frontrunner. But we needn't assume that, since the polling bears it out.

As Tocqueville noted, Americans love a winner (though I still love George McGovern). And if Mr. Biden can sustain his internal frontrunner status as well as his lead over Trump, then just about everybody will love Mr. Biden. I know I do.

***

Update:

A commenter raised the question, "After the 2016 presidential election, are we still reading polls?"

To which the answer is another question. Why wouldn't we?

2016 presidential polling is being misremembered. Most polls were spot on, relating a 2- or 3-percent victory for Hillary. Her winning edge, however, was within the margin of error. Where most analysts (including me) went wrong was in neglecting the undecided percentage, which, roughly, was 5 — and that broke for Trump. The voting choice of undecideds was also unpredictable, yet the polling itself was correct.

So as you read criticisms of 2016 polling, just remember — the polls read the voting public accurately. It was the readers of polls who concluded wrongly. That was human error which, after the thrashings of our misreadings, won't be repeated in 2020.

 

Two good-news ratings (but not for Trump)

A Morning Consult poll, taken just prior to Trump's shuttering of the federal government, shows his approval rating at 39 percent — 80 percent among Republicans, while 90 percent of Democrats disapprove, as do, more importantly, 57 percent of independents.

His current "popularity," notes the pollster, is the same as "in August 2017 — when Trump responded to the fatal melee between white supremacists and counter-protesters at the 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville, Va., by blaming 'many sides.'"

As the shutdown drags on — and as the markets continue to plunge (the Dow is down 419 points as I write) — Trump's current popularity may look good to him in another two weeks or so.

From a different sort of poll, the Associated Press reports that "Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity … [has] been slumping in the ratings since the midterm elections and ominous stories related to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the president.

"His show averaged 2.76 million viewers since the election through Dec. 17, down 19 percent compared to the previous month, the Nielsen company said. Among the 25-to-54-year-old demo most coveted by advertisers, he’s down 30 percent. Competitors Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and Chris Cuomo on CNN are up in each measurement."

That's one way for the Trump-fanatical troops to deny bad news: just tune it out.

"With bad news piling up for Trump," writes the AP, "Hannity frequently spends time criticizing ideological opponents in the media for the types of stories they emphasize, and discusses misdeeds by previous Democratic administrations."

To that, I can testify. I don't generally watch Hannity (good mental health comes with certain prohibitions), but I do see his show's promotional tweets, which are heavily laden with outrage at something Hillary has done, is about to do, or never thought of doing. But Hannity is on it like a chihuahua on a pants leg. And yet, said former NBC executive and Hofstra University's dean of communications school, "Even hard-core Trump fans are starting to put Hillary Clinton in their rear-view mirrors and say, ‘it’s been two years.'"

Thus Hannity's 30-percent nosedive, as well as Trump's failing blame games.

 

Just what the world needs

Although I don't recall having "ducked and covered" in elementary school, it was at least on the chronological heels of such foolishness that my generation grew up. Dr. Strangelove was less satire than a living nightmare for millions, but even then, I do recall that a nuclear "exchange" — that being the euphemism for worldwide thermonuclear destruction — seemed as likely to me as a breakout of permanent, worldwide peace.

Hence the nuclear arms race was m.a.d. in more than one sense of the word. On the upside, both the United States and Soviet Union had leaders who thought the use of nuclear weaponry was, well, unthinkable. Not once do I recall reading about a U.S. president or presidential candidate who fit this 2016 scenario: "Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump. And three times [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can't we use them."

Frightening ignorance like that would have had me ducking and covering. In fact, I may begin practicing now. The Washington Post:

"Russia on Wednesday conducted a final test of a nuclear-capable glider that flies at 20 times the speed of sound, President Vladimir Putin said, adding that the weapon will be included in the country’s arsenal next year. Putin described the successful test … as a 'wonderful, perfect New Year’s gift for the country.'"

Yes, it's a whole new missile gap, folks. "The new weapon, dubbed the Avangard, is of a type that the Pentagon has been both working on and worrying about as an arms race emerges among the United States, Russia and China." The damn thing is "so fast and agile," adds the Post, "it will be able to evade missile defenses for years to come."

And at the helm of the U.S. government is a paranoid, neurotic ignoramus who, somewhere in the darkest recesses of his diseased mind, is thinking we have nuclear weapons not to not use, but to use. Because we have them. The only thing preventing WW III, whose clock has now accelerated because of Russian ingenuity? Trump is Putin's cuddly puppet.

Should that loving relationship go sour, however, we'll be left with a paranoid, neurotic president who is always inclined, in extremis, to take the riskiest route. Under Trump's generalship, which as we know is superior to any general's, a U.S.-Russian skirmish anywhere in the world could swiftly morph into a thermonuclear crater. And it would mushroom from there.

And that is the reason I firmly hold to the opinion that impeaching and removing Donald J. Trump from the presidency is Job One. The world can't take a chance on the reining in of his inveterate impetuosity.

 

 

Cadet Bone Spurs: Somebody else suffered for him

Here's a heartwarming, patriotic story Trump can tell U.S. troops while he's visiting Iraq:

For 50 years, the details of how [his bone-spurs] exemption came about, and who made the diagnosis, have remained a mystery, with Mr. Trump himself saying during the presidential campaign that he could not recall who had signed off on the medical documentation.

Now a possible explanation has emerged about the documentation. It involves a foot doctor in Queens who rented his office from Mr. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump, and a suggestion that the diagnosis was granted as a courtesy to the elder Mr. Trump.

The podiatrist, Dr. Larry Braunstein [on right], died in 2007. But his daughters say their father often told the story of coming to the aid of a young Mr. Trump during the Vietnam War as a favor to his father.

"I know it was a favor," said one daughter, Dr. Elysa Braunstein, 56, who along with her sister, Sharon Kessel, 53, shared the family’s account for the first time publicly when contacted by The New York Times.

Elysa Braunstein said the implication from her father was that Mr. Trump did not have a disqualifying foot ailment. "But did he examine him? I don’t know," she said.

As Immanuel Kant said, with only the most minor of alterations: "Out of the crooked timber of Trump's humanity, no straight thing was ever made."