FREAK OUT FRIDAY – FRIDAY the 13th, 2019

People screw up. They just do.

No one goes through their life without making mistakes.  It is part of the human condition.  I’ve made some whoppers in my time, and so have you.  And when you make a mistake, what you are supposed to do is admit the mistake, apologize if necessary, and move on.  Unfortunately we live in a world where doing so frequently isn’t enough.  If you screw up and apologize, there will always be those who refuse to accept it.  Who will feel that an apology doesn’t suffice for the depth of your error and instead you must be punished into oblivion:  fired from your job and shunned by all right thinking people until ideally you kill yourself.  So the fact is that our current environment doesn’t make apologizing the easiest thing to do.

But sometimes that’s what you have to do.  Admit you messed up and move on.

However if you have an extremely fragile ego, that presents a different problem.  A fragile ego will preclude the ability to admit that you were wrong.  You are literally incapable of saying, “Whoops.  My bad.”  Instead you will do anything to avoid it.  You will lie.  You will urge others to lie.  You will break the law.  You will warp reality, bend it to your will in order to force it to comply with the world as you are restructuring it.

This is why so many people have been wrongly convicted and sent to jail, some to death row, on mistaken eyewitness testimony.  Fortunately enough the rise of DNA evidence has cleared the records of some wrongly convicted felons, even saving them from death.

And yet people with fragile egos whose wrong testimony put them in jail will oftentimes refuse to admit they were wrong.  They won’t say the reasonable thing:  “Thank God science caught my error.”  No, they will insist that they were right.  That the DNA evidence isn’t reliable.  That someone else in the chain of testimony screwed up  Something, anything went wrong but they themselves were correct.

That is what we have from the current resident of the Oval Office.

I know of one time when he admitted he was wrong:  In 2016 when he copped to the fact that Barack Obama was a US citizen, after he had ridden his racist I-Doubt-It to the GOP nomination.  

He has never admitted that the alleged muggers of the Central Park jogger, whom he asserted should receive the death penalty, were innocent.  He has never admitted there were not thousands of Muslims celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers.  He has not admitted any of the thousands upon thousands of lies that he has foisted upon his followers, who blindly accept everything he says as true.  Or at least no worse than any other mistruths that have been spoken by other politicians.

His most recent screw up however, may well have set a new record for stupidity and subsequent ramifications.

It began, naturally enough, with a tweet.  He stated that Alabama was one of the states in danger from hurricane Dorian. Which it had been….several days earlier.  By the time he tweeted about it, though, Alabama was safe.  His posting alarmed residents of Alabama and the weather bureau corrected him twenty minutes later.  If he’d done a subsequent tweet thanking the bureau for stepping in, that would have been that.  It wouldn’t even have made mention on Colbert.

But because his ego is so fragile that he cannot admit when he is wrong, he had to double down and triple down.  He even went so far as to remodel a weather map with a sharpie to include a small piece of Alabama in the hurricane’s projected path, which is—by the way—a crime.  And then claim that he had no idea how the map got marked up. And then order his people to threaten to fire any meteorologists who said he was wrong.  And then deny ordering them to do that.  

And when any of his lies are pointed out to him, he claims that they are false stories planted by the “fake news” media to make him look bad.

Meanwhile under his direction the EPA continues to roll back environmental safeguards installed by the Obama administration.  It’s hard to say whether he’s doing it because it suits the will of big business and makes other millionaires/billionaires happy, or whether it’s just because he likes to do away with anything that Obama did. It’s really rather impressive. Anyone who declared that Obama didn’t accomplish anything during his administration is certainly seeing the lie put to that assertion.  He accomplished so much that it’s taken Trump several years to undo much of it. 

There is one thing that has become abundantly clear:  

Trump is insane.

That may be overstating it.  Not raving psychotic insane.  Rather he is a low-ego narcissist whose word cannot be trusted.  Who sides with despots over allies.  Who ignores the warnings of the intelligence agencies. Who owes a debt to Russia for screwing with the election that placed him in office.  Who profiteers at every opportunity, whether he is having his vice president stay in his Ireland hotel (and then denying it was his suggestion) or having $30K parties at another of his establishments, or accepting money from foreign dignitaries staying at his DC hotels.  He is, in every sense, a traitor to this country, as is any member of the GOP who continues to support him.  

And yet despite his repeated breaking of the law, the Democrats still refuse to impeach him. It’s still considered the third rail of the election.  Why impeach him when the 2020 election will get rid of him, certainly. Because between the Electoral college and Russian hacking, we can definitely count on that, right?

As of this point, he should be impeached because he’s broken the law repeatedly, and impeachment exists specifically for that reason.  We all know that if we were laying the specifics of this situation out to any of the Founding Fathers, it would be a no brainer for them.

Why isn’t it for us?PAD