Today's preeminent whack job was brought to us by a little man who calls himself POTUS. The national embarrassment entailed his billowing of smoke so as to obscure the mirrors reflecting the even greater national embarrassment of the U.S. Senate seriously questioning the nominated jokes of Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Rhode Island's Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a member of the vestigial sanity party, framed one of the confirmation hearings as an "unfathomable difference between a seeming facade being constructed around this nominee here today and what he has actually done and said in real life when left to his own devices." The senator's observation was flawed in only one respect: The facade surrounded and safeguarded not one nominee but three.
You can see the White House's problem. Three clowns on stage, each one exposed as abysmally unqualified for high office — one of them, Gabbard, so profoundly unqualified it moved Democratic Sen. Mark Warner to note that her confirmation as director of national intelligence would actually violate the office's lawfully established requirement of "extensive national security expertise."
Whenever confronted with a problem of public relations — say, televised confirmation hearings for three aggressively benighted clowns — this White House does what it always did in its first iteration. It calls in the 7th cavalry of distraction. Thus did little man POTUS take to a podium while mentally clutching The Cause: the incontrovertible necessity of making everyone look at him not at them. This routine comes with a universal guarantee; everyone will look at him not at them because he's the uncontested biggest clown of all.
Today's requisite carnival act began with a head fake, another Trump routine. He in his littleness huckstered an appearance of human decency, expressing the "anguish for our nation" over yesterday's midair tragedy. He even went so far as taking a stab at compassionate leadership: "Differences between Americans fade to nothing compared to the bonds of affection and loyalty that unite us all."
The two elements combined in Trump's soulless brain, however — decency compounding the unbearability of compassion — were simply too much for his natural malignity. But for the littlest man to ever call himself POTUS, the easily vanquished effort of trying to appear human is the best of all possible exercises in that it leads to the best of all possible outcomes in rather dicey situations such as today's: the three confirmation hearings in vital need of beclouding. Job done.
Trump huffed and puffed in a veritable apotheosis of the preposterous and the perverse — the objective of distraction firmly assured. Responsibility for Wednesday's lethal calamity he heaved on Presidents Obama and Biden, "Their policy was horrible and their politics was even worse." The policy? D.E.I., of course.
I repeat, D.E.I. Those other guys wanted the non-white overseeing the skies, whereas "we want the people that are competent," said Trump. (NBC's Peter Alexander reminded him that "the policy" was posted in 2013 and Trump 1.0 never changed it; Trump 2.0 then reminded the nation that he lies about everything: "I changed the Obama policy.")
And so it went, distraction in its entirety. Concerning blame for the tragedy's fatalities, Trump placed it on the Army helicopter pilot as he sported no evidence for his reckless contention. This he did only moments after conceding that the accident's investigation had just barely begun. And so to the grim deaths of 67 people, add the life destruction of one pilot — also an air traffic controller's, same reason, but as always Trump himself was blameless there too. He was, you see, "not blaming the controller."
Still, today's obscenity of distracting from the confirmation hearings demanded at least one more. Who better to volunteer it than — and I can scarcely believe I'm about to type this — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a previously cleared clown. "The era of D.E.I. is gone at the Defense Department," said Pete the drunken woman abuser, "and we need the best and brightest — whether it’s in our air traffic control or whether it’s in our generals or whether it’s throughout government."
How does one close a post such as this? How can the unspeakable be spoken, so to speak, in print? I really don't know. So I'll just stop.
Something about this post reminded me of the tourist at Yosemite complaining about how crowded Yosemite is.
I really, really, really do not think that Trump’s performance today had anything whatsoever to do with distracting from the nomination hearings. On the contrary, today was a perfect example of Harold Macmillan’s dictum regarding events. And our orange overlord did not come out of it looking good, at least imho. 67 people are dead on his watch and he’s babbling about DEI because he can’t do anything but spout social media talking points. I would say it was a good day for our side but it came at far too high a cost to do anything other than mourn the dead.