The first thing I do in the morning is glance at the LED clock in the bathroom. Yesterday it was blank; the GFCI outlet it’s plugged into had popped (I had to look up GFCI just now: ground fault circuit interrupter) and the little red button wouldn’t reset. A contractor is pumping out our swimming pool prior to cleaning and refilling it and there are extension cords on the patio. I put on a bathrobe and went outside to unplug them and check the fuse box on the north side of the house. Nothing was obviously wrong, but still the button wouldn’t reset.
I get antsy when things aren’t right, but yesterday it was worse: I felt overwhelmed. Wrongness everywhere, and I powerless in the face of it. Of course the real problem was Schatzi. I was and still am gutted by our little dog’s death, the one real thing wrong with the world, the one real thing I’m powerless to fix.
It rained yesterday and water had gotten into one of the contractor’s extension cord outlets. Once it was dry the GFCI reset. The problem was fixed but I was still upset and unable to focus. The low spell may have passed overnight. Hey, I’m writing, and that’s more than I could have done yesterday.
I try not to rant about the unelected president, but my rage keeps boiling over. Yesterday’s firing of James Comey is another in a long line of lines too far. Comey should have been fired for politicizing the FBI and using its resources to throw the election to Trump, but that ain’t why Trump fired him and everyone knows it. Comey’s FBI was the one federal agency investigating Trump’s ties to, and collusion with, Putin. Attorney General James Sessions, who promised to recuse himself from the FBI investigation, unrecused himself yesterday by giving Trump cover to fire Comey, and Trump the coward jumped on what he thought would be an easy way out of his troubles.
I’ll keep this short. One of the first times I mentioned Trump on this blog was in December 2015, shortly after his underhanded attack on Fox News’ Megyn Kelly. During the first televised GOP candidates’ debate, Kelly called him out on his long record of demeaning and mistreating women. Trump went behind her back to Roger Ailes, then the head of the network, lobbying to have her fired or at the very least punished. As you may recall, Kelly was forced to take a long leave of absence, and today she’s working for another network.
Trump’s a coward, and of all his flaws—the lack of character and absence of values, the racism, the colossal ignorance, the worship of celebrity, oh I could go on and on—Trump’s cowardice was the first thing I noticed about him. To this day cowardice is the first thing I think of when I think of Trump, and it was fully on display yesterday.
Those of us who lived as adults during the last months of the Nixon administration mercifully didn’t know how bad things were, but as we learned later, things were very bad indeed: Nixon wandering drunk through the corridors of the White House, mumbling about Jews and threatening nuclear attacks, so unhinged his own chief of staff had asked military leaders to check with him first before acting on launch orders from the president.
One thing we should all know about the Trump administration by now is that things are invariably worse than they seem and that our darkest suspicions probably fall short of reality. You can take anything said by Trump, Sean Spicer, or Kelly Anne Conway and assume the exact opposite is true. Things are bad indeed in Trump’s White House, and they’re about to get worse.
We need an independent special prosecutor to carry on the investigation of Trump’s ties to Russia and collusion with Putin. The FBI (and the entire Justice Department) is now clearly off the case, and the House and Senate investigations were never more than a joke.
Last night one of my Arizona senators, the Republican Jeff Flake, said this on Twitter: “I’ve spent the last several hours trying to find an acceptable rationale for the timing of Comey’s firing. I just can’t do it.” As with John McCain, my other Republican senator (who tweeted “Removal of Director Comey only confirms need for select cmte to investigate Russia’s interference in 2016 election”), his statement falls far short of calling for a special prosecutor. I responded with this: “Treason is afoot, and I pray my Arizona senators will put country before party. Appoint a special prosecutor now.”
If we put enough pressure on them maybe there’s hope the Republicans will do the right thing, as they did after Watergate. There’s a treasonous coward in the White House, and he needs to be gone.
There, short enough?