Freak Out Friday – August 11, 2017

Posted By: Peter DavidPosted On:

On Comedy Central, they have a weekly sitcom in which a comedian imitates Donald Trump. It’s called “The President Show” and the announcer always declares Trump to be, at the top of the show, “the 45th and last President.” With what’s going on this week, I’m beginning to wonder just how accurate that may be.

1). Yeah, I can totally imagine Hillary doing this. As Trump glides us toward nuclear war with North Korea, I am reminded of all the idiot voters who saw no difference between Trump and Clinton. “Each,” we were told, “is equally bad.” Okay, I would like a show of hands. How many people can imagine Hillary Clinton threatening Kim Jong-un with “fire and fury, the likes of which no one has ever seen.” Well, yes, we have seen it. We saw it in Hiroshima and Nagasaki exactly seventy-two years ago. We’ve seen it in a variety of movies in which humanity was stupid enough to unleash Armageddon upon itself. And the odds of us seeing it in our lifetimes is rapidly escalating. Because Trump, rather than relying on diplomacy and sanctions and keeping one’s head screwed on as we have been doing for decades is instead basically daring Kim Jong-un to take his best shot and see what happens. So what we’re now in the position of hoping is that North Korea’s man-child of a dictator is actually mature enough to realize that Trump is nothing but a thundering oaf who should be ignored. That’s a pretty vague hope upon which to hinge the prospect of no-nukes continuing.

I mean, it’s always a given that the President has access to the nuclear football, but I don’t think on a daily basis that we gave much thought to the notion that he would actually use it to fire missiles. Yet now I can very easily imagine Trump hearing on Fox News that North Korea is preparing to shoot a missile in the direction of Guam and decide that a pre-emptive strike is the only way to deal with it. “I Warned him; he brought this on himself,” Trump would declare, and suddenly the missiles are flying. I wonder how China would feel about that? Or Russia? If China and Russia team up to retaliate against us, do we think we can win that war? Does ANYONE win that war? Or do those few of us who are left wind up in a Mad Max movie?

I think what it comes down to is this: Trump believes, and rightfully so, that he is a joke to the rest of the world. Other leaders ignore him or make jokes about him. For a control freak like Trump, that is intolerable. So he needs to make people afraid of him by endeavoring to take charge of something–anything. Preferably anything that doesn’t involve Congress. So he decides that North Korea is the perfect target and starts threatening the country with nuclear annihilation. Suddenly the world leaders are no longer laughing. Because they realize that they’re dealing with a serious nut bar who is perfectly willing to kill millions of people in order to prove that he’s tougher than anybody.

You know what? God knows I have no love for Mike Pence, but there’s a big difference between him and Trump: I don’t think he’s insane. I think they need to implement the 25th amendment and get Trump out of office in order to prove to the world that America is able to realize when we’ve made a mistake and are willing to do something about it.

But would Pence really initiate that? Probably not. But I know who might.

2). Making friends and then betraying them.. We already know that Trump’s MO is to make friends, use them for a time, then turn against them the moment they no longer serve his purpose. But now he’s taking on Mitch McConnell and that may well backfire spectacularly.

See, he can’t fire McConnell. He can’t throw him out. He can’t get him unelected. All he can do is make pissy tweets about him and say that McConnell should resign his position as the majority leader. Yeah, that’s not happening. Trump can blame McConnell for their inability to repeal and replace Obamacare, and there’s some validity to that. But let us not forget that Trump promised for months that he had a much better plan in mind that he was going to start running on Day One. He didn’t mention any specifics, though. I wish I could have been there the first time McConnell finally asked him what he had in mind and Trump naturally came up with zip. So yes, McConnell didn’t get it done, but Trump did nothing to help, and now he’s blaming McConnell entirely. I’m sure McConnell isn’t thrilled about that, and I’m positive that every day he contemplates how much better his life would be if Trump wasn’t in it. The 25th amendment would be his way of turning around and saying to Trump, “You’re fired,” and if he wasn’t considering it before, I’m sure he is now. His obsession with holding on to power is one thing, but if McConnell believes that Trump’s dementia could result in missiles rocketing toward D.C., you can bet your ášš he’s going to want to do something about it.

3). National Lampoon’s Vacation.. Barack Obama, who Trump mercilessly accused of being a lazy, elitist bášŧárd because he played golf, didn’t hit the links for the first four months of office. Trump waited exactly two weeks before fleeing D.C. for the golf course, and he’s been at it ever since. Since taking office in January, he has bene to golf clubs on forty days, which has cost American taxpayers somewhere around $55 million dollars according to the website Trump Golf Count. When one adds in his visits to Trump facilities, he has spent nearly a third of his time in office…out of office. This from a man who couldn’t snark about Obama’s golf habits enough and repeatedly declared that he would never set foot on a golf course during his presidency because he would be working too hard for the American people. No, he’s really not. He has passed no major legislation. He has endeavored to ban transgenders from the military, a move that was not recommended by his people and has not yet been implemented if for no other reason than that they can’t figure out how to do it without being sued. And now he’s off on a seventeen day “working vacation,” which is amusing because he hardly works when he’s at the White House.

Hey, Donald: how about going on a permanent vacation?

PAD

19 comments on “Freak Out Friday – August 11, 2017”

  1. I honestly believe that McConnell would rather be 100% sure of being Speaker than being 100% sure of there being anything to be Speaker of. He really seems that short sighted. And so far the voters have agreed.

    So once again we turn to Our Saviour, Mike Pence…

    1. A clarification: McConnell is not Speaker. Paul Ryan is. McConnell is Majority Leader of the Senate.

      1. Yes. Thank you.

        I wish I could try and write it off as “All the GOP begins to blend together after a while…” But quite frankly, nearly everyone who seeks power through national elected office, regardless of Party, all begin to sound the same. (Nancy Pelosi is still not an Old White Guy, right?)

  2. You really think he would use nukes? I suspect the joint chiefs will just use conventional bombing to take out NKs nuke capability…

    1. Remember, this is a guy who already had a hissy fit about not being able to use nukes. He sees it as being one of the perks of the job, and he’s looking for an excuse. He also has no understanding of MAD and thinks that there won’t be any (pardon the pun) fallout if he does.

    2. I sincerely hope, should Trump ever give an order that would start World War III, that the people who have sworn an oath to follow those orders would have the courage and patriotism to refuse to do so.

      1. There are a lot of stories (unconfirmed, I think) of high-up military officials in the last days of the Nixon administration having a quiet agreement to double-check any orders to that effect with someone other than the frequently-inebriated and very-depressed president.

        The country wasn’t as polarized then politically as it is now (scary, that), but I hope some level of competence would still apply.

  3. When I worked in Wichita at the beginning of this decade, there was a group of people in the break room who seriously believe Barack Obama was the Anti-Christ. I believe that got that one president too early.

  4. Time to go back and check the “How long will he last and how will he go?” pool. I think I had 9 months and nuclear fireball. My odds are looking pretty good right now.

    1. I hope you will not take offense at the fact that I am hoping you lose that bet. I had him quitting after a disastrous 2018 mid-term elections. I also stated that although that was my official entry, I really believed that he would serve out his first term and then quit. I thought that was a pessimistic prediction back then…

      1. No offense taken. It’s not the outcome I want either. It just seemed likely at the time and even more likely as time goes by.

  6. Our friend David Gerrold has made the point, that I agree with, that Pence is Lawful Evil, Trump is Chaotic Evil. As such, while Pence is dangerous, he plays within the rules. And should be preferable.

    However, I’m starting to come around a little on this. Trump’s done damage on a number of fronts, but nothing that so far has been critical. {I’m sure victims of some of the regulation repeals and immigrants would disagree, but I’m speaking of the broader ‘can the U.S./developed world survive him’ context). The transgender tweet has demonstrated, so far, that he’s becoming pretty impotent. No one’s acting on it, or is going to voluntarily. If Kim and Donald just keep saying nasty things about each other, and everyone just agrees to ignore them and get work done, all the better.

    My current worry is that the new Chief of Staff actually CAN get the White House organized, so they’re not paralyzed by their own incompetence and infighting, and actually enables Trump to start achieving some of his objectives.

  7. “I wish I could have been there the first time McConnell finally asked him what he had in mind and Trump naturally came up with zip.”
    .
    McConnell never would have asked him that because McConnell, like anyone with half a brain, knows that the answer would have just been a blank stare.
    .
    Trump, of course, never had any plans beyond “Say you have a great plan.”

  8. Well, we’ve already got Nazis in the White House, so we should only be surprised that it took this long for them to start marching openly in American cities as they did last night.

  9. The saddest part of all of this, however, is that you can’t tell his constituents ANY OF THIS with any hope of a change. Zero results. Fifty percent of Republicans just nodded and smiled when polled and asked whether they would agree to postpone the 2020 elections if Trump demanded it.
    .
    FIFTY PERCENT. FIFTY @#$%ING PERCENT of Republicans would openly disregard the fundamental principle of the democratic process and skip the next election. This cluster@#$% of a presidential administration, where he has accomplished NOTHING, and his negative impact can be demonstrated with countless facts, from countless sources, on ever front . . . and 25% of the voting public not only continues to support him, THEY WOULD BE FINE WITH HIM BEING PRESIDENT INDEFINITELY.
    .
    Frankly, I’m starting to think we DESERVE the nukes.

  10. I don’t know if the news made it to the U.S. media, but reports have emerged from Red China of a [so far] un-official statement to the effect that the leadership have informed Kim Il Idiot they would stand by him if the U.S. (or anyone else) attacked first. However, if he was stupid enough to attack the U.S. on his own, they’d sit back and watch him – and his country – turn to radio-active glass. We can but hope this is true and that it just might nudge some sense in that loon. (And in the North Korean ‘Dear Leader’ as well.)

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