New Orleans   I made sure on Valentine’s Day that I was covered with my companera, my daughter, and my mother, but turns out I should have figured out a way to send a card to the Washington Post and former acting Attorney General Sally Yates, because if they had not done their jobs in such a stellar fashion none of us could celebrate the early Valentine’s present from the President of finally forcing the resignation of former General Michael Flynn as National Security Council adviser.

It turns out the President had known Flynn was off the rails for weeks and weeks, and did nothing, including letting some of his gang know he was sitting on solid evidence of Flynn’s dissembling over his contact with the Russian Ambassador. He was only provoked to action first by a column in the Post that revealed that there was a transcript of the conversations he had with the Russian Ambassador picked up in packets of intercepts by the NSA, and the transcript was at odds with his claim that he had not discussed the sanctions prior to Trump’s inauguration. That column wasn’t the final straw though even as the story unraveled. The final trigger was the White House’s knowledge that yet another story was coming out in the Post on Monday. And, then and only then did Trump demand and receive Flynn’s resignation.

As the story finally dribbles out, Trump had known about this mess since shortly after the Inauguration, when Acting Attorney General Sally Yates after discussion and a greenlight from the head of the FBI reached out to the White House counsel and shared with him the information they had had since late December. The FBI had asked Yates to wait until then in order to do more investigation and interviewed Flynn within days of Trump’s taking office. The White House lawyer immediately informed President Trump that there was a discrepancy in Flynn’s version of his contact with the Russians. This is the same Sally Yates, friends, neighbors and fellow countrymen and women, who was forced out after instructing the Justice Department not to enforce Trump’s travel ban because it was inherently flawed unconstitutional, as numerous federal judges and the 9th Circuit Appeals Court have now held. We lost a good one, when she left the building.

The Post wonders now how far out of the loop Vice-President Pence was as well since he was having to carry water for the White House and Flynn’s credibility throughout the period when Trump was sitting on a powder keg in the Oval Office with Flynn’s name stenciled all over it. Heck, Trump and another loose cannon, Stephen Bannon, were already interviewing candidates to replace Flynn during this period as well.

There’s disruption and then there’s just plain reckless, and that’s what we’re getting now. Trump spent more time thinking about assistants on the “Apprentice” than he seems to have thought about the impact of letting wild men near the steering wheel of the ship of state. There’s no way that Flynn as a former head of Defense Intelligence, before being fired by President Obama, didn’t know that the NSA routinely monitors the phones of the Russian Ambassador, so Flynn clearly was arrogant and foolhardy in assuming none of this would matter, or he was a good soldier doing what he was told to do by his Commander-in-Chief. Either way, this is bad. Very bad.

All of this goes way past any standard notion of dysfunctional, and this is involves national security, which the Trumpsters claim is their top priority, so I hate to think how badly they are dropping the ball on domestic policy. In fact, it seems they have not picked up the ball there at all, since there has been no legislation proposed by the White House on any measure yet, leaving us clueless of the chaos over there.

Any relief has to be short lived in a time of dread.