Trump’s attempts to appoint what appear to be the world’s biggest losers to his revolving door cabinet are going down in flames. He responds by attacking the congress that must approve these losers as well as the media that in all honesty cannot accept them. He would like congress to approve the likes of Ronny Jackson, a sycophant, drunk and pill popping “Doctor Feelgood,” as head of the VA, the second biggest agency in the government. Just as a sidelight, besides his obvious deficiencies, Jackson has no experience running anything with more than a dozen or so employees. A truly Trumpian choice!
Jackson would fit right in with such clowns as Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior who repeatedly tells anyone who will listen, that he is a geologist despite never having been one. Yes, he studied geology in college. So did I, but that doesn’t mean either of us can tell schist from shale.
Then there’s Scott Pruitt, Administrator of the EPA, who has stated publically and repeatedly before being appointed, that he thinks the agency shouldn’t exist and that there’s nothing wrong with the environment that a little more oil and coal wouldn’t fix. Pruitt has wasted his agency’s already significantly reduced budget funds by throwing them away on perks and protection. A paranoid nut case, he has hired an army of bodyguards to protect him from some phantom assassin and has flown around the world on the taxpayer’s buck.
Trump has stated that the accusations and attacks by congress and the media against these three clowns and all the others like them aren’t fair. But the problem is really that Trump continues to appoint unqualified idiots for whom there has been no vetting and whose only qualifications for their jobs are that Trump took a liking to them after they praised him.
The problem with the Cabinet isn’t that the people infecting it, most of whom aren’t even qualified for minor bureaucratic paper pushing jobs. The problem is, Trump doesn’t know what these jobs entail, so he doesn’t have any idea what qualifications are necessary to fill them and wouldn’t know a functional individual if one bit his nose off.
Choosing a Jackson because he liked him and because Jackson was okay about lying about Trump’s weight or stating that he is in massively great condition because of good genes is pure stupidity. What we need in our Cabinet posts are functional human beings, not sycophants whose most glittering attribute is the ability to kiss the President’s ass in public.
The problem of Trump and his minions not doing due diligence on nominations didn’t start with Ronny Jackson. It goes all the way back to the start of the administration. Trump is lazy and venal. He makes decisions off the top of is head, not bothering to do his homework. This can be seen in every function of the administration from not paying attention to what is being said in intelligence briefings to not bothering to read what is put in front of him about government planning and problems. He just doesn’t seem to understand that the job takes actual work.
Probably the shining example of this problem is the mess Trump is fighting in the justice department; all caused by people he appointed without knowing anything about them except that they were Republicans. That’s right; he appointed all the guys who are now breaking his balls. The problem for Trump is; he has no experience in hiring anyone but crooks so when he mistakenly hires someone with some sense of honesty or morality he doesn’t know how to deal with him or her. He expects everyone to do exactly what he wants. He doesn’t understand there are people out there who have values or a sense of morality and won’t go along with his crooked schemes. Trump doesn’t understand that just because a thing is good for him, that doesn’t make it good for the country. Actually he may understand it but he just doesn’t care.
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A while back the Mueller Team called in the president’s lawyers and gave them a list of 49 topics they would be discussing with Trump in an interview. Last weekend the NY Times released those topics. How come all of a sudden, after almost two years of a leak free investigation, stuff suddenly makes its way out of the Mueller team’s investigation? What has happened? What’s new? What’s new has nothing to do with Mueller’s team and a lot to do with the White House.
The answer is surprisingly simple. A new cockroach has been inserted in the crevice of incompetence that is currently called the Trump legal team. Its name is Rudy Giuliani. Only one week after Rotten Rudy joined Trump’s sinking ship, he has already punched another hole in the boat. It has to be him; he’s the only new element to be introduced into a previously leak-proof equation.
Legal work aside, Rudy would love a job, any job in Trump’s rotating Cabinet. God knows why, because Trump’s Cabinet has firmly established itself as a career graveyard.
Of course the script never remains stable, This weekend sources in the White House leaked the information that Chief of Staff H.R. McMaster had been denigrating Trump and calling him an “idiot who needed to be saved from himself.” Shades of Rex Tillerson and the President being called a “fucking moron!” But this is just another example of the dis-function of the White House and the disaster that is the Trump administration.
For what seemed like the millionth time this morning the media was awash with the story of a President shtupping a porn star. This time it was brought about by a senile ex-mayor of NYC who blundered and bumbled his way through an interview with neo-Nazi Sean Hannity, a fellow traveler who was so shocked by the inept statements that he couldn’t get it together to help dig Rudy out of his self induced hole. Or could he?
But that’s not the point. The point is that his story, just like all the stories about Trump’s boorish, misanthropic, bigoted, racist behavior are not the story. There weren’t enough Americans that cared enough about his criminal, perverted lifestyle to elect someone else to the Presidency so now, how the Pig-in-Chef presents himself is really beside the point. The real news is about what this blustering fool is doing to our nation and this planet. If you really think Trump screwing Stormy Daniels is as important as the fact that by reducing Obama’s emission control levels he is poisoning the planet hen you will never understand what important is. The folks that found a reason to vote for this petty, would-be dictator even though he wants to appoint a family doctor to run the second biggest bureaucracy in the government, don’t want to hear this because they don’t understand how it has anything to do with them. It’s like all the other stuff Trump is doing including destruction of our legal system, our environment and our economy, not to mention encouraging wars across the world. Will those not affect them either?
A small sidelight! Both Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani have referred to our law enforcement officers as Nazi Storm troopers and Gestapo. I find that both interesting and amusing when one considers that Donald Trump the man they are supporting is, himself the epitome of a Nazi dictator in the making. Trump isn’t into the law or democracy; all he cares about is what he can gain from the office of the President and how he can enlarge his ego and his bank account..
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I was writing the piece directly above this one this morning when a friend called me to shoot the breeze. In the course of the conversation he began to kid me about how lucky I was to be writing a column at a time when there is so much news happening and.eHen though I knew he would cheat on me, I should want to marry Trump. That’s when I bit his head off. Even as I was speaking to my friend the story that I had been working on a good part of the night, the one on which I had done a great deal of research had been turned completely on its ass.
I had been attempting to explain the legal jeopardy into which Trump had been putting himself by lying about facts in the Stormy Daniels case that appeared to already be in evidence but in the course of one evening Trump again lied about those facts, his lies were backed up by Rudy Guiliani who had already spoken about them on Sean Hannity’s show and then before even a few hours had gone by Trump was out on the lawn repudiating Rudy’s lies and his own with fresh ones. In the course of a few hours Trump had lied about a lie, about which he had lied, in a previous statement that had been about a lie. How does one write understandable material about such slush?
Actually, that is the problem with our President. There is absolutely nothing that he says that can be relied upon to contain any element of truth. And this is nothing new. This isn’t some ailment that has attacked him since he entered the White House. He has spent a lifetime lying and cheating, conning and stealing. This is who he is. He got elected by a group of followers that already knew this and worse about him and they didn’t care as long as they got what they saw as a new kind of cheater and thief in the White House but this is bigger than their desire to drain the swamp that is already overflowing with Trump’s detritus.
This is about a man running our country who has no affinity for the truth, a man who doesn’t recognize it and wouldn’t care about it if he did. This is a man who by actual count from Fact Check has lied while speaking in public over 3000 times from the beginning of his time in office through the end of April 2018. In the beginning he lied an average of 4.9 times a day but now it has increases to 6.5 times a day. That is outrageous! That is certainly not acceptable for the President of the United States. At least within our national borders there is some control of how the lies affect us. State governments can to some extent balance the chaos this man attempts to create on a daily basis but it is overseas that he is really doing our nation and the rest of the world unacceptable harm.
Since the end of WWII, for the last three quarters of a century, the United Sates has been accepted as the leader of the free world. As such we have certain responsibilities. Foremost among them is to be honest with the rest of the world. But we are being led by a man who has no familiarity with veracity; a man we know is lying just because his lips are moving. He has already trashed the word of the United States by pulling out of the TPP and the Paris Climate Agreement. Now in a week he will be in a position to trash the Iran Nuclear Treaty, a document that he has constantly attacked. If he does that, where will it leave us with the North Korea talks? Is there any way Kim Jung Un can believe anything that Trump says when all he does is lie? Is there any reason he should? Is there any reason why his base should believe him? Has he ever told them the truth? But hem how could they? Sheep, after all, are made to be shorn and it seems that these sheep will enjoy the process. The problem is that the rest of the world isn’t going to stand still for it. They will not follow a leader they cannot believe and that’s why Trump will lead America into the dumpster. He has made America hate again. Why should the world follow that?