Detroit What’s that famous Hunter Thompson line? Something like, “when the going gets weird, the weird turn profession,” I think. But, there I was, like much of the rest of America, with a 3 AM wake-up for a 515 AM flight, but unable to not read one article on-line after another in the Times, Wash Post, and Journal about the latest meltdown of government, as we have come to know it in good times and even bad, as we watch with our mouths open, the devaluation of the United States to the level of a banana republic except with bombs and one of the largest armies in the world. OMG!
In one day, still reeling from the political obtuseness and self-delusion that Democrats and the country would applaud his firing of FBI Director James Comey in the middle of the FBI’s investigation of his own political campaign, which has been a story spinning around in one version or another so much we’re all dizzy, we find out that President Trump in his braggadocio has blurted out secret intelligence about ISIS. Boom, the loose cannon fires at the White House!
And, he doesn’t blurt this out to the White House custodial staff or in the White House kitchen where the chef is frying him up a big, fat burger to go. Oh, no, he does this foolish chest thumping to the Russian Foreign Secretary and the Russia’s US Ambassador in the Oval Office in an oval office meeting where he had even barred any photos from US-based media, but did allow the Russian foreign office to broadcast video and pictures far and wide. Why, was he meeting with them now, well, as he curiously explained, he was doing it at the bidding of Russian president Putin. Let’s hope Putin at least said “pretty please.” Of course this intel was given to us by a Mid-Eastern ally, that turned out to be Israel, and we hadn’t bothered to tell them we no longer could be trusted to keep secrets, and it involved ISIS, and it just goes down hill from there. Boom, another cannonball hits the West Wing!
And, of course President Trump also intimates that he may be taping conversations and phone calls, and it turns out, and according to Trump Organization sources, that has been his m.o. for years and standard operating procedure in his business. But, oh no, of course Comey had done a contemporaneous memorandum and shared it with other senior FBI staff after his early February meeting with Trump, on what he saw as an effort by Trump to try to persuade him to terminate the FBI investigation of former General and ex-NSA chief Mike Flynn and his extralegal contacts with the Russians before and after the election. Whoops, someone opened a big can of whip-ass there! The President must have confused Comey and the FBI with some small-time contractor desperate for work on one of his old Atlantic City casino dream machines. And, the bombs were bursting in air, but our flag is still standing…hopefully.
But, what else would we have expected? Bizarrely, I’m minding my own business and reading The Economist as a diversion flying between Houston and Detroit and there’s a small box on one page distilling some points from an audience they were given with the President. Trump is talking about the economy and his so-called plans. He mentions that he wants to “prime the pump,” and then goes off of a riff about how much he likes that expression, asks whether the reporters have heard it before, and then in his profound ignorance he takes credit for coining the expression, “priming the pump.” Why not, it’s only been in common use since 1932. Who’s to know? Who’s to care? Another bomb. Not even funny, just a huge dud.