Trump Pal Tweets: 'This is Rick. He Carries The Nuclear Football. Rick Is The Man.'

It was only the 24th day of the Donald Trump presidency, but it most assuredly was not another day of Making America Great Again. 

* Michael Flynn, top Trump security aide who lied about pre-election contacts with Ruskies, quit. 

* Flynn was vulnerable to bigly Ruskie blackmail, just like in the movies. 

* Repeated efforts made, beginning with Obama's acting AG, to apprise Trump of dangerous Flynn situation, but were ignored until leaked to press. 

* Flynn deputy K.T. McFarland likely to blow town, as well. 

* Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, in way over his head, next admin big likely to get ax. 

* Admin foreign policy team scrambles to fit policy with prez's latest tweets. 

* Mar-a-Lago dinner table becomes open-air Situation Room. 

* Army officer who carries "nuclear football" poses for photo with Trump pal. 

* Deportation raids continue.

* Yet another federal judge issues Muslim Ban injunction, noting only evidence in admin pleading is actually declaration by experts that ban "undermines national security . . . rather than making us safer." 

* White House collecting "negative info dossiers" on reporters. 

* Secret Service steps in as communications staffer Omarosa Manigault attacks reporter. 

* Trump furious over SNL sketch casting chief strategist Steve Bannon as Grim Reaper manipulating prez. 

* Leading shrinks warn Trump's speech and actions "demonstrate inability to tolerate views different from his own, leading to rage reactions." 

* Distracted by political brushfires of own making, prez fails to fill key posts, including scores of ambassadorships.

* Billionaire who forgot $100 million in pants pocket confirmed as Treasury secretary. 

* Wife abusing Labor nominee up for vote next. 

* Plans afoot to give predatory companies free rein by gutting Consumer Financial Protection Agency 

* More false voting fraud claims. 

* Republicans clueless about how to repeal and replace Obamacare, may give up on screwing with Medicare. 

* Trump poodle Jason Chafetz launches investigation of Sid the Science Kid. 

* Aides so fearful of pissing off prez that they're telling him everything is going great. 

* Are we safe yet? 

No one in charge, no grown-ups, anyway.

Is There A Trumpian Constitutional Crisis Looming? Be Careful What You Wish For.

"THE COURSE OF THE EMPIRE" © MARK BRYAN

There is a lot of wishful thinking going around that the infant (both meanings) Donald Trump administration is lurching toward a constitutional crisis.  Never mind that most of us wouldn't know a constitutional crisis if we were to be hit on the head by one.  The upside of a constitutional crisis is that it might hasten Trump's exit, while the downside is too awful to comprehend. Perhaps a terror attack on the homeland provoked by his bullying that would unleash government-sponsored atrocities for political gain making the post-9/11 fallout -- curtailment of civil liberties, widespread eavesdropping on Americans, black site prisons and the torture of innocents -- seem minor by comparison. 

Am I being hysterical?  Not when the decision of a department store to drop Ivanka Trump's clothing line is framed by the White House as a "direct attack" on the policies of a president showing every sign of being over his head and out of his mind. 

According to a couple of political scientists opining at FiveThirtyEight, constitutional crises come in four flavors.   Here they are in what I believe is the ascending order of relevance as to where we find ourselves:

SCENARIO ONE: The Constitution doesn't say what to do.  The beauty of this 18th century document is its brevity, but this means it doesn't offer much in the way of a 21st century instruction manual. This scenario may be most relevant as it pertains to its vagueness concerning presidential emergency powers, something that Trump has beaten his gums about a great deal when it comes to dealing with terrorism and ginning up fears real and imagined. 

SCENARIO TWO: The Constitution's meaning is in question.  In this respect, the Civil War was one big constitutional crisis, as were FDR's sweeping Great Depression relief measures and LBJ's unilateral escalations of the Vietnam War. The greatest relevance here is to impeachment, and what constitutes "high crimes and misdemeanors."  Bill Clinton was impeached on what at the time and certainly in retrospect were the flimsiest of grounds.  That won't happen here. 

SCENARIO THREE: The Constitution tells us what to do, but it's not politically feasible.  We recently have been reacquainted with the fact Congress and the Cabinet can remove Trump without impeaching him because of the 25th Amendment, but given the GOP 's hyper-dominance, that may be problematic unless Trump goes completely off his rocker by declaring martial law because of unruly town hall meetings or something equally pernicious. 

And the most likely -- or least less likely -- scenario:

SCENARIO FOUR: Constitutionally mandated institutions fail.  The greatest relevance here is that Trump has shown disdain for the system of checks and balances, including disturbing reports of Customs and Border agents, who are members of the Executive Branch, refusing to follow orders from the Judicial Branch during the days following the federal court injunctions against the Muslim Ban.  Oh yeah, and Trump could refuse to leave office if impeached.

Since the U.S. Constitution became the law of the land in 1789, there have been very few constitutional crises.   

Big deal, you say.  Well, maybe not when you consider that politicians and officialdom have had an overarching respect, if not downright awe, for a document that has been amended a mere 27 times (in 33 tries) and the last amendment not of a technical nature (like changing the voting age or tinkering with presidential succession) was adopted in 1920 with women's suffrage. 

All that changed with the election of Trump, who in a mere 24 days in office is straining democratic norms as the Founding Fathers spin ever faster in their graves.  (Beware of flying wigs.)  There will be a pushback, and at this point it is more likely to come from the grassroots than the feckless Democratic minority, but whether that provokes a constitutional crisis is another matter.   

Or as David Frum so somberly puts it in The Atlantic as he visualizes what a two-term Trump presidency might mean: 

"Those citizens who fantasize about defying tyranny from within fortified compounds have never understood how liberty is actually threatened in a modern bureaucratic state: not by diktat and violence, but by the slow, demoralizing process of corruption and deceit.  And the way that liberty must be defended is not with amateur firearms, but with an unwearying insistence upon the honesty, integrity, and professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them.  We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered.  What happens next is up to you and me.  Don’t be afraid.  This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American."

My own scenario of the moment is somewhat more upbeat, at least on the front end, and goes something like this: 

While the worst outcome, in a way, would be the Donald Trump presidency becoming "Carterized," as one pundit put it; that is, unpopular, ineffectual, fractious and not going anywhere, the best outcome would be Trump becoming not a two-term president,  but a two-year president, as that mighty pendulum of American political history swings back hard and fast to the left with the Democrats riding the wave of a huge backlash to retake the Senate and House in the 2018 midterm election.  And promptly begin impeachment proceedings.   

We can then contemplate cuing Scenario Four. 

A Man Walks Into A Bar: Why We'll Take Small Victories Over Cheeto Where We Can

Yes, it sounds like a bad joke, but could the tide have turned in the false news wars by a guy walking into a bar?  The answer is maybe, but in any event we'll take small victories where we can in the long slog to take down Cheeto Jesus.  

A mere three weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump has historically low popularity ratings, but still has the unwavering support of the pitchfork posse while rumors of a congressional Republican revolt obviously are baseless.  Just ask a lamebrain like Betsy DeVos.  Still, we do now know more than ever that Trump is psychologically damaged and pathologically incapable of change.  This is why small victories and their incremental effect on his raving narcissism really matter.  Because they will help accelerate his eventual failure. 

Those small victories include: 

* The Women's March, having creating so much negative publicity the day after Trump's inauguration with the largest protest in American history, lives on in smaller protests wherever Trump goes to work or play.   

* These protests have spread to the town hall meetings that congressfolk hold during recesses and have been so successful that many have been cancelled with pro-Trump pols resorting to hiding in their offices.  

* Trump has used social media with diabolical effectiveness, but an alt-majority of a sort has turned that on him by repeatedly nudging him from the spotlight, notably the flash protests at airports against his notorious Muslim Ban. 

* The continuing tsunami of leaks from insiders don't merely show a White House run by amateurs that is in constant turmoil, but betray widespread disloyalty to a president who demands absolute subservience.  

* Melissa McCarthy's unhinged takedown of White House press secretary Sean Spicer on SNL is merely the most devastating of many parodies which have upset the thin-skinned Trump and further unsettled his administration. 

* Supreme Court nominee Neil M. Gorsuch's criticism of Trump's aggressive attacks on the judiciary, which in ruling on the Muslim Ban has had the temerity to display its constitutionally-mandated independence.

Now about that guy who walked into a bar.  He's Joe Sonka, a staff writer for Inside Louisville.  The bar is the Backdoor, a watering hole in that Kentucky city.   

Sonka was sipping on a cold one the other day when someone texted him that Kellyane Conway, Trump's high-ranking aide, notorious spokesmouth and purveyor of lies and false news, had done it again.  This time it was her claim that there had been a horrible massacre at the hands of Islamic terrorists in nearby Bowling Green in 2011 that was ignored by that dishonest news media and could have been prevented had the Muslim Ban had been in place.  

Sonka quickly deduced that Conway's latest "alternative fact," as she has unashamedly characterized her serial lying, was shakily based on the arrest of two Iraqi refugees at their new homes in Bowling Green for plotting to send money and weapons to Al Qaeda in Iraq.  They received extensive media coverage and harsh prison sentences (one for life and one for 40 years), and the incident led to further toughening of refugee vetting procedures by the Obama administration. 

Sonka fired back, writing on Twitter: 

Sonka's tweet got 2.4 million hits, putting it into Trumpian territory, was quickly picked up by major media outlets and, perhaps inevitably, used in an SNL sketch.   

Flat out caught (or is it caught flat out?), Conway equivocated and then acknowledged her lie on Twitter.  (Where else?)  Social media had prevailed, although the victory was quickly overshadowed by the administration's next mega-whopper: The news media was so inured to terror attacks that a whopping 78 attacks had gone underreported or unreported.  (All 78 had, in fact, been widely reported, and USA Today dutifully published a list of its own coverage of 54 of them.) 

The bastard brother of "alternative facts" is, of course, "fake news," which the Trump administration has repeatedly accused the news media of pedaling, yet its silence was deafening earlier this week when the lead New York Times story was:  

This is not because it would have been preposterous to claim the deeply sourced, leak-based story was "fake news."  It would have been, but no one from the administration questioned the story.   

The administration and perhaps even the president know that The Times and other outlets are not fabricating news.  But the "fake news" meme -- whether about unrelentingly negative polls, their boss's ongoing bromance with Vladimir Putin or balloon-pricking stories that Trump's claim the U.S. murder rate is at an historic high is flat-out wrong -- is pretty much the only weapon they have to distract people from all the bad news and assuage their sense of grievance over Trump's entirely self-inflicted lousy start.

Incidentally, after being banned from CNN for two whole news cycles (Oh, the humanity!) over concerns about her credibility following the Bowling Green Massacre fib, Conway was back at it, ignoring what that terror attack list contained and then lying about it when repeatedly pressed by CNN's Jake Tapper in the hope the media would move on. 

The media, thankfully, smells blood and is less likely to move on.  But we have to remain involved, too.   

The Muslim Ban is the most notable case in point.  In a brief appearance the day after the the ban was dropping on an unsuspecting public -- and most of the president's own aides, including key homeland security officials who weren't consulted, were as shocked as we were -- Trump declared that the ban was "working out very nicely -- you see it in airports." But what the nation and world was seeing, sometimes in jolting split-screen Instagram images, were refugee families, including Iraqis who had risked their lives to aid the American military, denied entry as immigration lawyers rushed to help them and chanting, sign-waving protesters clogged airport terminals from New York to Los Angeles. 

Things were not working out very nicely, and what we were seeing was the birth of  a social network-fueled movement to defeat Trump's policies, if not eventually the president himself.   

As my friend and fellow blogger Will Bunch wrote so eloquently today:

" . . . the silencing of Elizabeth Warren is  just one more example -- arguably, one of the most powerful ones yet -- that the basic norms that have loosely governed the way we do things in America are slowly and painfully getting crushed, one brittle bone at a time, right before our stunned eyes. I'm talking about the ways that we value and uphold democracy, our freedom to debate and express opposing views, and the fast-fading notion that we even pretend anymore to cherish diversity -- not just of human beings but diversity of thought." 

Trump has turned the Washington swamp into a cesspool while trashing America's image abroad and gifting terrorists the kind of bogeyman of which they could only dream.  He has brought out the worst in Americans.  And he has brought out the best, as seen by that social-network fueled movement, protests that even at this early date are eclipsing the civil rights and antiwar protests of yore. 

The success of this network is far from guaranteed, but a notable and noble start has been made.

62 Years On, The Second Life of Emmett Till & First Confession of Carolyn Bryant

Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, and Carolyn Bryant (below)

For someone who was murdered 62 years ago, Emmett Till has never seemed more alive. 

Whoopi Goldberg is said to have been signed to direct a feature film, with another in the offing produced by Chaz Ebert, the widow of the critic Roger Ebert.  A six-part HBO series, with Jay Z and Will Smith among the producers, is in production.  The National Museum of African American History and Culture opened an exhibition late last year, while there have been a flurry of books, an Off-Off-Broadway play by my friend and former colleague David Holmberg and, only yesterday a New York Times editorial. 

Till is the 14-year-old black kid with the incredibly sweet face from suburban Chicago who, while visiting relatives in backwater Mississippi in

August 1955, allegedly flirted with Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year-old white woman with movie star good looks who worked the cash register at a rural grocery and meat market.   

Bryant later told her husband and his half brother of her encounter.  They drove to the house of Till's preacher uncle, forced their way inside, dragged Emmett from his bed, and then had Bryant, who was waiting in their vehicle outside, identify him.  The youngster was later beaten until his skull collapsed, and shot in the right ear.   A 74-pound iron cotton gin ventilating fan was tied to his neck with several feet of barbed wire and his body thrown into the muddy waters of the Tallahatchie River.  His tongue was swollen beyond recognition when his body was found three days later.  His right eyeball was hanging from the optic nerve and his left eyeball was gone altogether, and he was identified only because of a silver ring he was wearing engraved with the initials of his father, who was killed defending American values in World War II. 

The murder would never have caused a ripple beyond the deeply segregated Delta community -- after all, hundreds of lynchings across the South during the Jim Crow era never did -- had it not been for Emmett's mother, Mamie Till Mobley. 

Mississippi authorities wanted to bury Till as soon as possible, but Mobley interested journalists in the story, which became a sensation after she insisted on a public funeral in Chicago with an open coffin that revealed to the world Emmett's mutilated face and bloated body.  Although an undertaker made cosmetic repairs, a widely published photograph revealed a body lying in state with a head that did not even appear to be human. 

The murder and subsequent viewing and funeral, one of the first major television events and attended by 100,000 people by conservative estimates, was to jump start the civil rights movement four months before Rosa Parks triggered the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott by refusing to yield her bus seat to a white man.

Now comes a just-published book that fills in a gaping hole in the Till story. 

Outside of private correspondence, trial testimony long believed to be perjurious and an unpublished memoir, Carolyn Bryant had refused to speak about what happened that sultry afternoon until she reached out to Duke University research scholar Timothy B. Tyson.  The account related to Tyson by the now 83-year-old Bryant is the sensational centerpiece of The Blood of Emmett Till, an exhaustive and extensively documented account of this horrifyingly tragic chapter of Americans not getting along, and where it fits in the historic mosaic of the travails of black Americans from slavery to the relative successes of the civil rights crusades and most recently the Black Lives Matter movement.

Till's lynching was triggered not by an insult or a wolf whistle, as Bryant had told husband Roy and his half brother J.W. "Big" Milam in various accounts, nor by Emmett grabbing her around the waist and uttering obscenities, an implication that he had stopped just short of attempted rape, as she falsely testified in court, but merely by violating a race taboo unknown to a teenager from up North: Failing to put on the counter the coin he pulled from a pants pocket for a piece of bubble gum. He instead had dropped it into Bryant's hand.

Roy Bryant and Milam were arrested for the murder after intense national media scrutiny on the plight of blacks in Mississippi rallied black support and, in the North, white sympathy.  This soon translated into local support for the killers and even accusations in the white press that the NAACP had murdered Till to garner sympathy for the cause of desegregation.  Bryant and Milam were brought to trial a mere three weeks after Till's body was pulled from the Tallahatchie to assure there would not be a thorough investigation.  Witness and jury tampering and other efforts to undermine the prosecution's case were superfluous as the men were quickly found not guilty by an all-white, all-male jury after an hour -- and only that long because, as one juror later acknowledged, "to make it look good."     

The Blood of Emmett Till recalls to mind the 2015 massacre of nine black parishioners in a Charleston church and the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr., a black man who was abducted by three white men and dragged to his death from the back of a pickup truck in Texas, among other  contemporary hate crimes, a form of terrorism that somehow doesn't get the attention that those jihadist crazies reliably do.  In other words, while Till has been dead for more than half a century, racism of the most violent and unspeakable kind

continues to flourish in America. 

Then and now, that racism has been every bit as present in Mamie Till Mobley's Chicago and elsewhere in the North.  It just lurks a little deeper below the surface as shown by the animus against Barack Obama and embrace of Donald Trump.   

By the numbers, as many blacks have perished at the hands of whites above the Mason-Dixon Line as below it, but the Deep South that has worn the racial taboos that killed Emmett as proudly as it has flown the Confederate battle flag still deserves special scorn. Till's lynching was blamed on Yankees and that ever present international communist conspiracy in general and specifically the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling of the year before that ordered the desegregation of public schools. Underlying all of this was the terror of miscegenation.  

And try as he might, Trump attorney general-in-waiting Jeff Sessions cannot whitewash his own racist past, let alone those of his forebears, in solemnly declaring that he will uphold the nation's laws for blacks and whites and Christians and Muslims alike.   

"You tell these stories for so long that they seem true, Carolyn Bryant told Tyson. "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him."

So then how should we feel about Bryant after her long belated admission that she repeatedly exaggerated and lied, as well as her expressions of remorse?  Hatred? Forgiveness?   Or perhaps something in between?  I don't know because all I can think of is what must have been going through Emmett Till's mind as he was being butchered.  

"From this tragedy large," wrote Tyson, "Diverse numbers of people organized a movement that grew to transform a nation, not sufficiently but certainly meaningfully. What matters most if what we have done and will do with what we know."  

Human Feelings & Universal Truths: The Timelessness Of 'Exodus'

Bob Marley would have been a wizened 62 years old today. 

It had been at least a couple of years since I played Exodus, the seminal Marley and The Wailers reggae album.  It was most un-tropical outside the mountain retreat, but the coal stove was chug chugging away and we were plenty cozy as the living room filled with the first notes of "Natural Mystic," the album's opening track.

A little under 40 minutes later, with the closing notes of "Funky Reggae Party" fading, I slowly climbed out of a trance-like state and understood for the first time all over again why Exodus is not just a masterpiece.  It is the finest example of the genre, but more importantly it is one of a small handful of recordings that the term "concept album" does not do justice.  This is because of how it brilliantly distills the most mundane of human feelings with universal truths through words and music that are at once simple and deeply complex.

§  

My introduction to reggae (as well as for traveling mate George Wolkind) came on a sultry summer evening in 1973 when the soundtrack from The Harder They Come by reggae pioneer Jimmy Cliff was played through the house system at the Keystone Berkeley, a music club in Berkeley, California between the sets of a Jerry Garcia Band show.

I had cut my teeth on Motown in my early teens and adored soul and R&B, but this was something else.  I was knocked over by the swinging backbeat, Cliff's mellifluous vocal stylings and the hypnotic minor chords that ran through most every song.  The next day I bought my first two reggae LPs -- The Harder They Come and, on the recommendation of the record store clerk, Catch A Fire -- which happened to be debut American album of Marley and The Wailers.

By the time Exodus was released in 1977, reggae had moved beyond its cool ska and rocksteady roots.

But outside of Jamaica, where reggae was the antithesis of its slowed-down precursors, it had only really caught on in the U.K., where it was helped considerably the enthusiastic endorsement of punk bands like The Clash.  Marley was on his way to being a star in the U.S., but that had a lot to do with Eric Clapton's 1974 hit cover of his "I Shot the Sheriff."

As Chris Blackwell, who "discovered" original Wailer Peter Tosh and broke Marley internationally on his Island Records label, put it: "At that time, Eric was God, right? So people looked to see where God was going for his material, and it led back to Bob."

§  

As transcendental figures go, Robert Nesta Marley was huge, a the global Rastafarian  icon who was part revolutionary and part lover.  But there was even more to the private man than our brief public glimpses of him.

As Vivien Goldman notes in The Book of Exodus, a fine 2006 book on the making and meaning of Exodus by one of the few non-Rastafarians and non-whites to truly have Marley's measure, his reality was deeply enmeshed with prophecy.

The story of Exodus led by Moses as told in the Torah and Old Testament was a natural theme for Marley the man and for his musical canon, writes Goldman:

"Its issues of power, betrayal, hope, disillusionments, and the search for serenity were all uppermost in his mind as he created the Exodus album with the Wailers. The Book of Exodus deals with leaving familiar oppression behind, braving the unknown, and letting faith guide you to a brighter future."

My one relatively minor complaint with The Book of Exodus is that Goldman overstates the Moses-Marley connections, which hardly matter beyond the obvious one -- that like the Israelites, Marley's people also escaped slavery to start life anew in freedom and determined in their worship of Jah, the shortened Rastafarian name for God.

Goldman focuses on a sixteen-month period of exile for Marley and The Wailers.

It began with a 1976 assassination attempt, a perhaps predictable result of Marley being the big prize in a violent tug of war between the two political parties two decades after Jamaican independence, the creative leap that resulted in the making of Exodus in London, and the 1978 Peace Concert back in Kingston, which promised but failed to deliver a new beginning for Marley's downtrodden brothers and sisters.

§  

In its original vinyl incarnation, the emotional extremes of Exodus are more evident than on the seamless compact disc versions, which include a fine remastered and expanded CD with alternate takes and live cuts from the Wailers U.K. tour that followed the release of Exodus.

Side A of the original flows from "Natural Mystic" to "So Much Things to Say," picks up in intensity with "Guiltiness" and "The Heathen" and thunders to a climax with "Exodus."  Side B is a kind of love feast with "Waiting in Vain," "Turn Your Lights Down Low," "Three Little Birds" and "One Love," which Marley combined with a riff on Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready."

Selfishly, I found it somewhat galling that Time magazine in 1999 named Exodus the best album of the 20th century.

How could this mainstream rag appreciate the stories that Exodus told, let alone the humble man whose escape from death would drive him to write and record its nonpareil songs?  But that's silly, because a whole lot of people who read Time and may have been as cold as that night back at the shack in the mountains ended up being warmed to their very souls by listening to Exodus.

Cheeto's Ship Of State Steams Full Speed Ahead Toward The Iceberg Of Reality

© ARTOFMARKBRYAN.COM

All things being equal, which they rarely are in the land of the yawning gap between rich and poor, the Washington establishment can go to hell.  Allowing that there are some lawmakers, officials and careerist bureaucrats who are admirable people trying to do a good job, the Inside the Beltway crowd on the whole is one big Eddie Haskell, and it matters far less what the politics of the guy in the Oval Office are than what's in it for them so long as they can continue feeding at the public trough and all those revered if largely superfluous traditions are respected.   

And so I take delight that the chaotic opening days of the Cheeto Jesus administration has upset the Washington establishment apple cart, but also a certain pride that Trump and his handlers are so morally bereft and so utterly uncouth that the establishment -- well, some of it anyway -- is pushing back in praiseworthy ways as the ship of state steams full speed ahead toward a very big iceberg, an all-but-certain rendezvous with self destruction because it will be only able to play by its own bizarre alt-reality rules for so long before colliding with the real world.      

It is those feckless Republicans, of course, who have been blindsided.   

While Donald Trump the candidate vowed to shake up Washington, which apparently enabled several millions of voters to look past his racism, bigotry, misogyny and pathological inability to be truthful, Donald Trump the president has not just tipped over the apple cart, he and his secrecy-obsessed administration are equal opportunity scolds as disdainful of those Republicans as the Democrats.   

He is castigating the relatively few Republicans with consciences who have not obediently fallen into line even as he cuts the loyal, if cowardly, Vichy Republican leadership out of the policy-making loop in contravention of one of the hoariest of Washington rituals when a new president has come to town.  This White House's learning curve is not merely slow, as some Trump apologists claim, it is non existent.

What we have here is a screwy-louie administration that has declared war on governance. Perhaps declaring war on Iran will be next. 

This administration is so bent on slashing and burning, issuing uncompromising edicts and so filled with inept amateurs obsessed with political purity and unconcerned about procedure or law that the collision between ship and iceberg is all but inevitable with the Muslim Ban disaster and continuing fallout from it, including sacking the acting AG and a blistering dissent from a thousand or so State Department careerists, merely previews of things to come.   

And you can now add insulting one of the U.S.'s staunchest allies to the ever lengthening list of crazy Trump shit.   

Trump hectored Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull in a phone call for asking that the U.S. follow through on an agreement to take about 1,200 Australia-bound refugees from an Australian detention center in Papua New Guinea (as well as the unreported part of the deal -- that Australia take a like number of U.S.-bound refugees mouldering in a Costa Rican detention center).  Trump accused Australia of seeking to export "the next Boston bombers" and then hung up on a guy whose nation has sent troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan and flown missions over Syria for the allied coalition.   

§  

Here is how Trump is shaking up Washington: 

In 2015, Senator Jeff Sessions, a flaming racist who fired up crowds at Trump campaign rallies with xenophobic calls to arms and as his reward will be the next attorney general, had this exchange with Sally Yates at her Senate confirmation hearing for deputy attorney general:

SESSIONS: If the views a president wants to execute are unlawful, should the attorney general or deputy attorney general say no?  

YATES: Senator, I believe the attorney general or deputy attorney general has an obligation to follow the law and the Constitution.

Yates, of course, did precisely that as acting attorney general in refusing to defend Trump's Muslim Ban.  And was sacked for it.

§  

There are news leaks in all administrations, but because of a combination of disloyalty and dumbness, the Trump White House is more like a hole in a bucket, which offers us an unprecedented look behind the wizard's curtain despite his obsession with secrecy.   And so we know, among other things, about that phone call with the Aussie PM, that homeland security czar General John Kelly learned of the Muslim ban on CNN, that one of the two judges being considered for the Supreme Court vacancy was instructed to drive to Washington to maintain the illusion that the selection process was still competitive, that mention of Jews was intentionally left out of the presidential Holocaust Day statement, that Trump's first military operation in Yemen was crippled because of a lack of concern about insufficient intelligence and ground support, and that Steve Bannon is a seriously evil man who acts out of hatred and spite, and delights in the damage he causes.   

But far and away my favorite leak, and in its own way most frightening, is the view that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is seen by the leak brigade as the angel to Bannon's devil, is the only person who has a taming influence on Cheeto.  But because Kushner is a practicing Jew who observes the Sabbath from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday, that is when the president runs wild.   

It was during the Sabbath that Trump unleashed tweet storms against his perceived enemies, gave an insulting, over-the-top speech at CIA headquarters, pressed the National Park Service for photos showing more people at his inauguration and upbraided Turnbull, only to apparently come off his bender on the following Sundays when Jared was back in the house.     

§  

Sadly, much of the smoke and fire fanned by the opposition will have been largely symbolic. 

Trump's Supreme Court nominee and billionaire Cabinet will be approved.  There will be a Muslim Ban, if somewhat watered down.  There will be a few court victories, but also losses.  Many of those thousand or so protesting State Department employees will quit rather than knuckle under.  Devil Bannon will outmaneuver Angel Kushner.  The few rebellious Republicans will capitulate for fear of losing their Trump country club memberships.  The hapless Democrats, who are badly overplaying their hand with tactics reminiscent of what Republicans did to Barack Obama, will be left to lick their wounds and wonder how it came to be that a bunch of women in funny pink knit caps seem to have more clout than they do. 

And all the while the ship of state steams full speed ahead toward that very big iceberg.  

'If I Had A Rocket Launcher . . . Some Son Of A Bitch Would Die'

IF I HAD A ROCKET LAUNCHER

By BRUCE COCKBURN 

Here comes the helicopter -- second time today

Everybody scatters and hopes it goes away

How many kids they've murdered only God can say

If I had a rocket launcher . . . I’d make somebody pay

I don't believe in guarded borders and I don't believe in hate

I don't believe in generals or their stinking torture states

And when I talk with the survivors of things too sickening to relate

If I had a rocket launcher . . . I would retaliate

On the Rio Lacantun, one hundred thousand wait

To fall down from starvation -- or some less humane fate

Cry for guatemala, with a corpse in every gate

If I had a rocket launcher . . . I would not hesitate

I want to raise every voice -- at least I've got to try

Every time I think about it water rises to my eyes.

Situation desperate, echoes of the victims cry

If I had a rocket launcher . . . Some son of a bitch would die

AUDIO AND VIDEO HERE 

 

Yes, Trump Is Crazy. And It Is Republicans Who Hold The Keys To The Kingdom

THE CAINE MUTINY

Lost in the debate, such as it is, over whether Donald Trump is crazy is that there is a calculated cruelty to his actions -- an ethnic, racial and sexual brutality, a blood thirst for dominance and humiliation -- that is all too American considering our shameful history of subjugation and conquest, yet so un-American considering that so many of us and so many of our forebears have aspired to be better than that. 

We are watching with morbid fascination the not slow-motion crackup of a man who is determinedly leading the U.S. to disaster, all the while telling ourselves as we wallow in our seeming helplessness that we saw the ship of state approaching the iceberg and anticipated the grinding collision of immovable objects, but couldn't do much of anything beyond scratching our heads, fingering our worry beads and taking to the streets in goofy pink caps as something awful was happening to our beloved country. 

We knew that Donald Trump was temperamentally unsuited to be president, but his first week in office has been a five-alarm fire.   

Beyond Trump declaring that Muslims and millions of other immigrants will be deported, a border wall built, torture and black-site prisons re-instituted, government agencies gagged and perceived enemies punished, there has been a tsunami of leaks from his inner circle over their alarm concerning his incessant television watching, tweeting, disinterest in the details and consequences of policy positions that rank amateurs are drafting, anger over inauguration crowd estimates, dwelling on conspiracies theories and obsessing about his image.  His staff, meanwhile, is so overwhelmed by power struggles that it can barely function.  

So how's that democracy thing going, anyway?  

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It has taken barely a week for the first flurry of articles to appear concerning a little-remembered section of the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution about what can happen if the president is deemed unable to serve.   

Section 4 reads:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body of 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.

We are, of course, getting ahead of ourselves.   

Cynics might suggest that Republicans would not take such a drastic action -- a legislative version of The Caine Mutiny, if you will -- until after a new Supreme Court justice is confirmed, tipping the balance back to the dark side, or most of the right-wing agenda is enacted, but in any event it is Republicans who are privately talking about how the king could be deposed since it is they who hold the keys to the kingdom. 

There is ample precedent for such an action, although not quite under the bizarre circumstances in which we find ourselves with a messiah who grows into my Cheeto Jesus moniker a little more  with every passing day.   

There has been a temporary transfer of power several times since the JFK assassination, which prompted the amendment, once when Ronald Reagan had cancer surgery and twice when George W. Bush had colonoscopies, and of course when Gerald Ford rose to the highest office from the ashes of the Watergate scandal.   

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When I wrote not quite above, I was alluding to the closing days of the Reagan presidency when it was obvious The Gipper was losing his gripper as the early stages of Alzheimer's disease set in.  What we have with Trump is even more obvious -- classic psychopathy -- and he has nearly four full years to serve.   

I have argued that Trump's impeachment may not be a question of whether, but when and why because the logjam of unethical and possibly criminal behavior piled up behind him is so immense that it will have to give way.  But deposing the guy because he's nuts would be so much less messy.   

Tragically, that blood thirst for dominance and humiliation is not necessarily a sign of insanity.  After all, Trump is merely upholding a shameful aspect of our heritage. The question would then be when it can be determined that, all things considered, Trump finally has gone too far.   

And what, pray tell, will Trump have had to do to go too far considering what he already has done?