Fox News Fiddles While Rome Burns

It’s amazing really that Trump manages to keep his Fox News toadies in line. Makes me wonder whether Trump and Rupert Murdoch speak each night, or perhaps each morning to make sure the Murdoch pseudo-newsies continue to toe the line.  And I wonder even more, are the Foxies simply actors making great salaries for repeating the lines written for them by Murdoch hired guns?

Yeah, it really does seem like Rome, or in this case Washington, DC, is burning down as the Foxies fiddle away madly. My wife and I have been watching a new series called “Designated Survivor”. It is a story of a massive bombing of the Capitol, which kills the President, the Vice President, all of Congress, SCOTUS, and most of the Cabinet. The Designated Survivor is a system put into place at some time in the past, which has a list of officials who are called “designated survivors” and who constitute the “next in line” after the normal list of successors are killed. In a Wiki definition, we read the following:

“In the United States, a designated survivor (or designated successor) is a named individual in the presidential line of succession, chosen to stay (at a secure and undisclosed location) away from events such as State of the Union addresses and presidential inaugurations. The practice of designating a successor is intended to safeguard continuity in the office of the president in the event the president along with the vice president and multiple other officials in the presidential line of succession died in a mass-casualty incident. The procedure originated in the 1950s during the Cold War with its risk of nuclear attack.

If such an event occurred, the surviving official highest in the line of succession as delineated in the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 would become acting president of the United States. Consequently, the individual named must be eligible to serve as president. In practice, the designated survivor is usually a member of the president's Cabinet, and is chosen by the president.”

 As we watch in both horror and fascination, I keep thinking, “well, we did not have a bombing kill off everyone, but we have the nearest equivalent”. In this case, Donald Trump has killed off everything that was considered normal before his election—people of normal intelligence and normal ethical/moral behavior standards acting in the interests of the American people, as they perceived it, and directing policies and actions that at least appear remotely normal. Everyone he has appointed, seemingly without exception, is aberrant in some way.  Either they also seemingly possess subnormal intelligence, or possess such bizarre views of the country and of our accepted approaches to domestic and world affairs that they are way outside anything we might view as “normal”.

We have never before Trump seen such a parade of people being appointed and then fired from key positions. Mostly, Trump seems to know nobody who is remotely normal. If we look at his close associates, his press secretaries, his lawyers, his personal advisors, and even his cabinet, they all appear fatally flawed as human beings, and utterly without any redeeming virtues in the positions to which they have been appointed.  When he inevitably fires them, it is almost always that they have proven incapable of making him, Trump, appear normal, or competent.  And mostly, his appointees to important government positions are classic Foxes in the Hen House.  He appoints industry lobbyists to run agencies charged with overseeing industry. Or he appoints people to positions they have spent a lifetime battling against—see Betsy DeVos.

So, this is now a “New Normal”, which has nothing to do with the pandemic.  This normal is a world of subhumans, who pretend to act in the best interests of America, but who in fact act, always, to protect the status of those few Americans lucky enough to be billionaires.

And if that “New Normal” is not terrible enough, then we have daily Trumpisms roaring out of the cloud of Twitterati. He must sit in bed at night, or early in the morning, having absorbed the daily Fox stupidities of the previous day, and sends out his Twitteratisms of the day.  He apparently tweets 10-20 times per day, depending on how outraged he is about some subject. One estimate was that from his announced candidacy through the first 2 ½ years of his reign, he tweeted over 17,000 times. Now that is just not normal.  That is ABNORMAL, by almost any definition.  Now were he some frustrated 13 year old bleeping on about high school rejections, one might say, ok, that kid needs some parental advice or some counseling.  But for the President of the United States to go on like that, we are in a different realm. Yes, clearly, he needs psychological counseling, but he may also need to be institutionalized and under daily, if not hourly, care. The White House is not such a place.  Think of what his Cabinet meetings must be like.  Are staff folks sitting there suppressing amazed giggles?

He really seems terminally stupid almost all of the time. And apparently, his KKK/Neo-Nazi supporters continue to love him.  I guess they don’t mind having someone that stupid with the launch codes to nuclear oblivion in his possession.

And over the past three plus years, we have all grown used to having President Stupidhead at the helm of our government, and the subject of daily late night comedy humor.  He is a never-ending source of comedic horror and general humor.

But lately, I think he seems to be slipping out of even his weird definition of “normal”. He is now almost full time racist, seemingly turned on by the Pandemic, by Black Lives Matter and by the Confederacy.  Anyone and anything associated with Black people in America appear to offend him and give rise to bizarre tweets. His speeches seem barely in adult English any longer. Whenever I listen to him speak for more than a few moments, I wonder if perhaps he never really learned English at all.  And I also am drawn to wondering whether he is either on some psychedelic drug, or that his mind is merely slipping away from him. I know he doesn’t drink alcohol, although he seems vaguely drunk most of the time. Most adults will orate better than Trump even after three martinis.

And in the midst of this bazzaro world he defines, this Pandemic is killing literally thousands of people almost daily, and he refuses to act, claiming that we have defeated the virus, and that it is 99% harmless.  It is as though the Russians have been dropping bombs on our major cities daily, and Trump is preoccupied with Tweeting about people he hates.

So, what are we to make of this bizarre behavior, even by his own bent standards? Is there no one to stand up and announce that Trump is now completely broken and needs full-time in-patient psychiatric care? Would it take, really, for Trump to literally take out a gun and start shooting people he doesn’t like?  And if he did that, would anyone finally step in and do something to remove this horror show from our country? Is there any someone capable of doing that?  I have seen no evidence that anyone within the White House or on Capitol Hill is capable or willing to take any action. And so, we the people, are left to observe and to live in fear that this madman is going to try to destroy our upcoming election process, and that nobody would stop him. And that, were we to have an actual election and he lost, he might still declare victory and refuse to leave.  He does not live in the real world. Perhaps he has never lived in the real world. But he has always gotten away with it. Will that continue? Or will the world simply end because COVID19 kills off everyone?