My favorite topic for household homilies concerns how my moaning roommates should calm down, maybe call to mind the problems of other people for a change, and quit exaggerating the degree of woe settling over their own souls. "It's not the end of the world," I hear myself intoning, repeatedly. (Only the end of the world is the end of the world, and it's never happened yet.)
But our president. I'm beginning to credit the people who think he could take the country down. Here's a thought experiment. Let's say that either he's right, and "the Russia story" is "fake news," or the suspicions of his most wildly gesticulating critics are right, and he is himself guilty of collusion with a hostile foreign power, i.e., treason. Judging from Trump's own actions, which is more likely?
That's an easy one. His behavior only makes sense if he's trying to hide something vile. Mental illness might have something to do with it, too.
It's not as if there isn't anything to enjoy, however. Trump riffing on "priming the pump," claiming he'd invented the phrase and eliciting someone's tweet, "From what I hear, trump coined the phrase 'primed the pump' over dinner with Frederick Douglass just before the Bowling Green massacre." In addition to being a liar himself, he is the reason that lies are in others. With Sean Spicer hiding in the bushes, he waved in Mike Huckabee's daughter from the bull pen, and she told the assembled White House reporters that she'd been taking call after call from disgruntled FBI agents whose opinion of Comey is lower than Trump's.
Yes, yes, when you work at the FBI, and you don't care for your boss's boss's boss, you pick up the phone, dial the White House, and stay on the line while your call is forwarded to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the understudy of the press secretary, aka substitute liar. I suppose people even dumber than she might think this is plausible but that doesn't account for the other 97% of us. For two days their story about why Trump fired Comey was that he (Comey) had been unfair to Hillary Clinton. Then Trump gave an interview to NBC in which he said that wasn't the real reason, of course--it's more like the garden-variety obstruction of justice that everyone had assumed. Whew!
The spectacle is kind of enjoyable in a sickening sort of way.
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