So, at 4:44 a.m. this morning,^[1] here’s what the President of the United States tweeted:

So many people are asking why isn’t the A.G. or Special Council looking at the many Hillary Clinton or Comey crimes. 33,000 e-mails deleted?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2017

Besides the Captain Queeg obsession with Clinton’s emails, the thorniest issue here for me is that he misspelled Counsel.  I am reminded of John Stewart’s comment about people wanting to vote for Bush43 because he seemed like a “regular guy,” i.e., not a pointy-headed intellectual: “Not only do I want an elite president, I want someone who’s embarrassingly superior to me.”

We have a long way to go.

(Open note to the White House: I know you don’t do “history,” but get someone to read you the results of all previous investigations into those emails.)

—————

^[1] I don’t know why this embedded tweet says 7:44 a.m.  The original said 4:44; if you click through, it still does.

My internet server has a spam filter on it and catches about 100 spam emails a day.  It’s very good—I’m actually quite surprised when I get a spam message in my inbox these days.

However, it will also occasionally snag emails from people or companies that I want to hear from, and so when I get the email saying that it has messages for me to review, I click and go look.  Mostly I just scan the subject lines; it takes less than a minute to do, and then I click Reject All As Spam and I’m done.

Every now and then, though, my curiosity gets the better of me: what are all these emails that warn me of Hillary Clinton’s devastating plans to oust our current embarrassment and take over the White House?  Since I can check the contents of the email without actually leaving the spam filter, I opened one up the other day and found this:

This was followed by blocks of text that were literally jumbled together by a bot from online sources.

I did not explore past this content; in my experience, these things are setups for sites trying to sell you miracle cures or prepper supplies.

As always, my fascination is with the target audience, the 27% who are going to be clueless rage-bunnies no matter what.  I found it fascinating that in our new reality it’s taken as a statement of fact even by the rage-bunnies that Russia intervened directly in our election—but the rage-bunnies direct their anger at the woman who lost the election eight months ago.

And I love the links to “unsubscribe.”  This is where the cluelessness of the rage-bunnies is delicious: how many of them click on those links and give the spammers their information?

Bless they hearts.

I don’t know why this keeps bubbling up in my head—wish fulfillment, perhaps.  But whatever the authors of the 25th Amendment thought they were doing, they weren’t solving our problem.

To be honest, there is no way they could have anticipated this problem: an unstable, childish, corrupt, vindictive know-nothing in the White House.  They wrote the Amendment in case the President had a stroke (Wilson) or was shot (Reagan) or was otherwise incapacitated.  They assumed the President to be an honorable man who, after a period of recuperation, would be welcomed back to his office by a sympathetic nation.

As if.

Instead, we have a reality TV star, and the 25th Amendment gives us no guidance on What Happens Next.  I mean, think about it: Pence and the Cabinet write their letter to both houses of Congress and Pence assumes the title of Acting President.  But do we really think the current embarrassment is going to vacate the White House?  We do not.

Again, the authors of the 25th weren’t thinking about actually removing the President.  We have the impeachment process for that.  They were just codifying what everyone assumed to be an orderly transition of power in case of incapacitation.  So if we go the 25th route, we can expect to be treated—if that’s the word I’m looking for—to another three years of reality TV.  Do we perp march the embarrassment out of the Oval Office?  Do we pay to set up a parallel White House (and no, not at a Trump hotel)?  We’ll have competing press conferences.  Torrents of tweets.  Republican congresscritters would never come out of the elevators.

And what, oh what will Fox News do?

All in all, a complete circus.

And yet we’ll be rid of him.

There has been much talk of the 25th Amendment recently: short of actual impeachment, it seems to many to be the easiest way to rid ourselves of the national embarrassment.  I myself think it’s a solution that the national embarrassment will embrace, and here’s why.

First, the pertinent document, Section 4 of Amendment 25:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

tl;dr: Mike Pence pulls together a majority vote in the Cabinet that the current occupant is unfit, and they write a letter to both houses of Congress saying so.  Poof! Mike Pence is Acting President.

Here’s the interesting part: Pence does not become actual President.  The actual President is merely sidelined, where he can tweet that uhuh he is too fit for the rest of his days.  Technically he can write a letter to both houses of Congress that he’s feeling much better, and then they vote on it.  I figure the Senate’s good for two-thirds of those votes; the House is where the balance lies, and I don’t trust them not to reinstall the man.

But let’s assume that they see their duty to this nation clear and vote that he’s still nutso.  This should make him very happy, because now he’s got tons of enemies to insult and bluster and blame.  He can keep writing those letters for the next 42 months, and Congress can keep voting him out, and he makes the cable shows explode and he’s good.

And we’re rid of him.

This popped up on Facebook today:

This is the “evidence” used by racists whenever they’re doing the uh-UH you’re the racist thing: since the Democratic party took this position over a 100 years ago, they’re the real racists.

There’s plenty of this type of thing in archives about our great nation:

Like with today’s racists, it seems to have been a talking point passed freely around:

But back to my point about today’s racists’ uh-UH stratagem.  I have found that there’s no point in arguing any kind of historical perspective, because those folks don’t do historical perspective.  (Cf., “Why was there a Civil War?” With a conservative and a liberal take from writers who do have historical perspective.)

So when confronted with this fuppery:

… I shall now reply, “That’s absolutely true.  Those voters were racist cretins.  Here’s the deal, though: those voters haven’t changed. They’re still racist cretins.  Their party allegiance has certainly switched, though.”

I had a realization this morning.

People who voted for the Current Republican Administration have gotten very defensive about their new leader.  It seems that the rest of the world looks on agape as the man flounders his way through actually governing the nation, and his supporters are miffed when anyone points out that on the whole a seven-year-old has better self-control and predictive skills.

“SNOWFLAKES!” they yell.  “HE WON! GET OVER IT!”  Their point seems to be that nuh-uh, he isn’t floundering, he’s the bestest President ever look at how he’s done the most of any President evAR.

Ahem, as Delores Umbridge would say.

This morning, I read this article and realized a thing.

Here’s the money quote:

“…because the president knows effectively nothing about policy, he doesn’t understand in advance whether developments have worked in his favor or not. Trump relies on media coverage to tell him, after the fact, whether he’s done well or poorly, and he then reacts accordingly.”

I would like to point out to the Trumpettes that this is why you voted for him.  The very fact that he knows nothing about policy, nothing about government, nothing about protocol, is why you voted for him.  You wanted someone who was going to go in like a bull in a china shop and wreck the status quo.

So when the rest of us point and laugh at the man because he trips over his own ego and ignorance at every turn, you don’t get to get huffy about it.  You have to embrace it.  “Yes,” you must say, “we admire him for getting all pissy because he lost the spending bill battle.  In fact, we love that he got outmaneuvered by the Democrats—we think that kind of incompetence is exactly what we need in the White House!  Drink Brawndo!”

Yep.  Keep reminding yourself: this is why I voted for him.  This.

The rest of us will keep pointing and laughing.

Here’s a screen shot of an article in Variety.

This is very funny, is it not, the reduction of an act of violence, a fupping missile strike, to a bon mot, a piquant witticism to make one’s fellow billionaires chortle?

These are the people in charge now: so rich, so insulated, so absolutely unconcerned with the other 99.9% of the earth’s population—or the earth itself—that the death and misery of other humans is a humorous abstraction for a stand-up routine.

What is to be done?

Remember how Bill Clinton was always referred to as a “draft dodger”?

Or how we all slagged Barack Obama for not saluting a Marine when getting off the helicopter?^[1]

Or how none of us liberals “support” the “troops”?^[2]

Hold that thought, because it’s time to play yet another round of IOKIYAR!

The Current Occupant was inspired recently to personally pin a Purple Heart medal onto Army SFC Alvaro Barrientos, where he congratulated the young man, whose leg had been amputated, telling him it was “tremendous.”  Just tremendous, not yooge?  But I digress.

The Current Occupant’s brain, from my observations, seems to be pretty binary: A/NOT A.  There is no B, and Cthulhu help the rest of the alphabet.  He sees winning and not winning.  The young man won a Purple Heart.  He was to be congratulated for winning.  Simple.

The idea that perhaps the young man would rather have his leg than the ribbon, that there might be more layers to this man’s experience, that perhaps other words might better express the Commander in Chief’s appreciation for a citizen’s service/sacrifice, never entered the Current Occupant’s brain.

So “Congratulations!… Tremendous!” it is.

Now imagine, if you will, if Barack Obama had handed a Purple Heart to a wounded soldier—let’s say, for the fun of it, a white boy from North Carolina—as if he were getting the immunity idol instead of being voted off the island.^[3]  Imagine how Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly or god help us Michelle Malkin would have reacted.  Imagine the huffing and puffing on the Sunday circus shows from Mitch McConnell or Lindsey Graham or John McCain.

How do you think the rightwing Wurlitzer is reacting to this tone-deaf gaffe?

1. crickets
2. crickets
3. crickets
4. dead crickets
5. all of the above

Take all the time you need.

—————

^[1] Which, as a civilian, the President is not supposed to do.  Reagan, that Great Pretender, was the first to pull that stunt.

^[2] Limited to bumper stickers, yellow ribbons, and yelling at hippies.  Funding veterans healthcare or GI Bill not included.  Prosthetics sold separately.

^[3] Imagery used deliberately.