George Conway III notes in his latest op ed piece in the Washington Post that, faced with two serous crises—the pandemic and it’s economic damage and the social unrest following the George Floyd killing—the president is “lacking in humanity (and) has had no idea how to handle either one.”
“The virus of self-absorption,” notes Edward J. Lavin, “is deadly and has only one cure-compassion.”
But when compassion isn’t on the menu, what, then, remains to quell the beast raging inside this singularly insufficient would-be titan of anything monetizable?
One thing is crystal clear: giving him the power he has been given is NOT the correct thing to have done. His very physical presence in the White House itself is a mockery of everything reasonable people hold sacred. The senators who had it in their power to relieve him of his powers during his impeachment failed us miserably. Whether they hold any reservations in their heart of hearts at this point is impossible to detect, given their continued obeisance to this careening car wreck of a standard-bearer, but their silence tells us all we need to know about the “standards” their party has come to represent. We need look no further than the emerging Nazi party of the 1930s to see a fitting parallel, and everyone knows how that turned out.
It is painful to observe the continuing unravelling of this damaged and unhinged man as his tweets grow more desperate, his utterings more erratic and his pronouncements more ridiculous. It is perplexing to witness the growingly absurd explanations his spokespersons devise while attempting to temper his excretory blurts, blathers and boastful buffoonery. Each new bit of “messaging” only serves to further clarify what we all have come to realize all too well— at this point we’ve gone far beyond “the emperor has no clothes.” It’s now become a five-alarm fire, a crisis of leadership calling for the men in white coats to appear and take him away to some undisclosed location where he can be held for his own protection—and for ours!
Sadly, the Founders never anticipated the need to 5150 a sitting president. It is to our peril that they did not, and it provides a fitting argument against those who hold that the Constitution must be interpreted literally rather than as a dynamic document capable of reinterpretation when the old rules have become outdated or insufficient to deal with developments not envisioned at the time of its creation.
In that regard, the mindset of Constitutionalist “purists,” inflexible, rigid and closed to new ways of thinking, bears comparison to that of fundamentalist Christians, thereby illustrating the wisdom of the Founders in seeking to separate religion from the workings of government.
In fact, the only reason I can see for why anyone would want to interject religion into politics is to attempt to force people to follow religious ideals and rules of conduct they don’t agree with and with which they wouldn’t otherwise comply. When a nation starts to go down that road, it ceases to be a democracy, becoming instead a theocracy, where the interests of the many are sacrificed in favor of the interests of the few. Come to think of it, isn’t that what the current administration is attempting to do?
Tim Konrad
2020.06.06
sonora2sonoma 
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