New Orleans  Make a note: running a television reality show where you get to fire people abruptly is NOT good training for how to fire big-time government officials! Make a couple of notes that when your administration is being investigated by the top cop in the government, it’s going to look bad, very, very bad if you fire him abruptly in the middle of his investigation, with or without cause.

I don’t want to write anything about this. I don’t even want to think about it. In fact I can’t believe it’s really happening.

How is it even possible that the White House was so inept and tone deaf. Reports, though possibly self-serving indicate that Vice-President Pence, son-in-law and confident Jared Kushner, and press czar Sean Spicer, all green-lit this calamitous move, although Spicer to small credit did so after raising some cautions. Stephen Bannon, chief strategist and resident flamethrower, seems to have been the only one consulted in his small circle who advised waiting before firing. How could that not have been a clue? If it’s too hot for former Breitbart Bannon, it’s a scalding firestorm coming.

What do we really know in average Joe Citizen land, but James Comey as head of the FBI seems to have been moving from one bad judgment to another. The fact that he indicated in recent Congressional testimony that thinking he may have thrown the election to Trump through his various inexplicable actions about emails and investigations had made him “slightly nauseous,” pales in comparison to the life-support level of illness much of the country still feels over the election.

There is just so much smoke flying around all of this, especially with these latest shenanigans, that, it is becoming harder and harder not to believe there’s a smoldering fire that could burst out at any time. The cover story is one that would embarrass young children caught with their hands in the cookie jar, especially given that the letter seems undoubtedly written by the President himself to claim that he had been assured on three occasions by his former employee that he was not personally under investigation. Who in their right mind would write that? Who would see the draft and not raise a flag that this was the trigger to a bomb that would blow up in the White House’s face.

This to will pass. There will be peace in the valley some day. There will be happy days again in the future.

In the meantime it’s clear Trump and his hapless crew have now guaranteed that there will have to be an even more serious investigation of the Russian ties to the campaign and his staff, whether through a special prosecutor or some other mechanism. Sadly, that’s little comfort. Even as we might disagree, we desperately need to believe that competent, sober souls have their hands on the wheel of the US government, and sadly the lack of any continuing evidence that that exists has all of us walking with the dread of total panic ever present.

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Please enjoy Santiago by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Thanks to KABF.