Is The President Off His Rocker?
Gaius Plinius Secundus, better known as Pliny the Elder, in another thrilling letter, has been explaining to Pliny the Younger, and members of his generation WTF is going on in the last years of American civilization, such as it is.
The stature of the presidency has not risen, young feller, as it usually does in the first days of a new administration when the winner gets to exercise his mandates. If anything, our new president’s standing is declining day by day as he takes his mandates out for a walk around the park and a drink at the nearest Trump hotel bar.
We thought it hit the bottom of the barrel a fortnight ago with those “air quotes” he used to expand his “wiretapping” charges. But the bottom of the barrel is removed, and he is in the sub-basement with his latest without evidence allegations they are out to get him, whoever they might be.
He is absolutely off his rocker this time about British skullduggery. Her Majesty’s Government Communications Headquarters, according to his usually reliably misinformed sources, had been secretly called on by the Obama administration to spy on him.
Now I’m only a pundit, but that’s insane.
He doesn’t seem to remember ever since the end of the War of 1812-16, when the British and American navies combined forces to clean out the Barbary pirate states in Tunis, Tripoli and Algiers, making it safe to do business, there has been a great friendship between our countries.
We had finally managed to let bygones- be-bygones about the late unpleasantness of the Revolution. Her Majesty’s people and the revolting cousins, as some Tories still call us, were united.
Now here was a president calling into question a relationship that has endured for some two hundred years.
How could he say something so stupid, Pliny the Younger might well ask?
First of all, kid, he is the dumbest president we’ve ever had, next to Gerald Ford.
Furthermore, we can’t expect our semi-demented, inexperienced unqualified president to know anything about our history. All he knows about Andrew Jackson, who he is compared to by some of my colleagues in the punditocracy, is that his portrait is on some dollar bill.
Anyway, he isn’t worried about going to war with England. We haven’t had a good war since Grenada, the last war we won. And he’s a winner. Peace is hell for the military industrial complex.
Wasn’t it crazy making these claims against Obama and HMS Government Communication Headquarters without evidence?
When you’re a president like ours, young fellers, you don’t need evidence. If anything the absence of evidence, such as the facts, is a sure sign the president knows what he’s tweeting about. His people have come to believe that the facts prove the fact- checkers are dishonest and corrupt.
Doesn’t there seem to be a pattern here, as they say in the garment industry?
That’s true. He doesn’t seem to know what he is doing about foreign policy.
When Nixon came to the White House he immediately brought in Henry Kissinger to advise him on foreign affairs. Hammerin’ Hank, as we used to call him, may have hit some foul balls about Vietnam, but he got Nixon to open the door to China. On Day One, our boy almost closed them with that clueless phone call with Taiwan.
Neither Gen. Flim Flam Flynn— the foreign agent stripped of his epaulettes and expense account in a humiliating defrocking of the president’s extreme vetting process— or Rasputin Bannon is a Henry Kissinger.
You can tell how ignorant the new president is about the way things really work in the world in his first idiotic budget message to Congress. He seems to think foreign aid is a waste of money. Cutting off aid to Egypt, for example, is a huge idea to him. But you don’t want ISIS coming in. They could be running the Suez Canal.
He doesn’t understand NATO is the reason we were able to stop the Russians from taking over Europe for the last 60 years.
Maybe that’s why he doesn’t seem to mind the Rooskies playing footsie with the last election. Sad.
I tell you the more we see of our president in action the more he seems to be a character out of one of those stirring Tom Swift boy’s life adventure stories (“Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout” and “Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice” are still two of my favorite coming-of-age novels.)
I’m willing to bet my grandson, Milo Finn Kitman, age 8, knows more about American history and the world than our boy president at 72. But Donald Trump has turned Milo off about wanting to be president when he grows up. He would rather be playing third base for the Pirates.
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Marvin Kitman
March 20, 2017