I'm sorry to say that this is already semi-stale news. It's just a hop, skip and jump from steamy sex and bribery to sleazy political murder.There was the just-revealed Monday Afternoon Massacre (Trump's body man mysteriously and forcibly removed from Trump's body and environs); the Tuesday Morning Massacre (Rex Tillerson fired by Trumpian Tweet); and the Tuesday Night Massacre. This wasn't really a massacre at all, even though the corporate media were prematurely describing the still too-close-to-call Pennsylvania special election as such. A right-wing Blue Dog Democrat was slightly ahead of a right-wing Trump Republican. This was despite The Leader's rousing Nuremberg rally in steel country over the weekend, when he called for death to all drug dealers. (Update: the Democrat, Conor Lamb, came in like a lion cub and will able to serve his one term before his district is un-gerrymandered.)
Trump is acting weirdly chaotic, even for Trump. And it's still only Hump Day. Maybe he is more sleep-deprived and cranky than usual, given the Daylight Saving Time torture bug that's been going around. Speaking of which, his elite factotum's last known official act before getting bounced was setting all the clocks in the personal residence ahead by an hour on Saturday night. Perhaps Trump's sense of personal security was breached more by this effrontery than by his manservant's suddenly discovered history of alleged financial chicanery. Where's Jeeves when you need him?
The corporate pundits are, of course, blaming Trump's purge of the State Department on Tillerson's heretical stated opinion that the Kremlin is to blame for the poisonings in Britain of a former Russian spy and his daughter. But perhaps just as likely (besides the trauma induced by Daylight Saving Time) is that Stormy is threatening to spill her guts on national TV. I suspect Trump is not so much worried about having been caught cheating and later having his lawyer pay her off. I suspect Trump is worried that Stormy will reveal that he is a total dud in the sack. So he's got to prove his virility however he can.
It's March, the rutting season for horny hares. So Trump could be on a firing binge because he feels like he's been stuck in a different kind of rut. He doesn't drink or do drugs so he's got to get his jollies somehow. I'm sure he misses hosting Celebrity Apprentice, too.
He is certainly exhibiting all the classic symptoms of hare-brained weirdness. From Wikipedia:
This odd behaviour includes boxing at other hares, jumping vertically for seemingly no reason and generally displaying abnormal behaviour. An early verbal record of this animal's strange behaviour occurred in about 1500, in the poem Blowbol's Test where the original poet said: Thanne þey begyn to swere and to stare, And be as braynles as a Marshe hare (Then they begin to swerve and to stare, And be as brainless as a March hare).
Herr Trump reportedly has swerved his withering braynles stare in the direction of his Veterans Affairs honcho. But not before he hopped Air Force One over to California to eyeball samples of designer walls against immigrants. Ever the wascally wabbit, Trump quipped that the wall has to be really high because those Latino dudes sure are great jumpers. And just to make sure, his "Justice" Department is suing California over its sanctuary polices which protect immigrants, both with papers and without, from Trump's ICE brigade.
All of this compulsive punching and swerving is not to say there aren't any upsides to the the Blowbol President's March Madness. At least we're no longer being tormented by the corporate media's fawning blow-by-blow accounts of Barack Obama's boring obsession with his college basketball brackets as he went out about quietly deporting a record number of immigrants, more than all previous administrations combined. For despite all his vicious rhetoric, Trump still has a lot of catching up to do in that department.
The major upside to the latest bout of insanity is that the long-protected torturer whom Trump has tapped to lead the CIA will finally be subjected to a public grilling in the Senate. Of course, this will probably be a mostly theatrical grilling prior to Gina Haspel's ultimate confirmation. But at least the public will be reminded of this deliberately buried and sordid chapter in our nation's long, buried and sordid history. The appointment of a war criminal to lead the spy agency is forcing politicians from both legacy parties to take a stand and reveal who they really are. Supporters of Haspel - for example, Clinton campaign adviser and former acting CIA Director and current CBS consultant Mike Morell - are already defending her as a poor misunderstood Adolf Eichmann type of gal who "was only following orders" as she ran a secret black site prison and later oversaw the destruction of incriminating evidence. She is, after all, among the people described by Barack Obama himself as "patriots who tortured some folks" before he ordered the full Senate report of the Bush-era torture program to be classified for at least another decade.
The public will also be reminded of Secretary of State-designate Mike Pompeo's sleazy financial ties to the Koch Brothers.
Still, Minority Weasel Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) has signaled he'd be just fine with the hawkish and xenophobic Pompeo, as long as he's "tough on Russia." He will not, therefore, urge his caucus to stall the confirmation process. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CIA) will vote to confirm Haspel on the grounds that she is "respected" by other spooks and torturers. Because, just like Obama said when he refused to prosecute war criminals, "we have to look forward, not back."
And as the World Socialist Website has just so brilliantly documented with its exhaustive lists of congressional candidates actively recruited by the Democratic Party from the ranks of the CIA and the State Department and the Pentagon, we're already as good as living under military and surveillance state rule anyway.
So let's look for at least one more silver lining. Trump's firing of the State Department's public relations flack, Steve Goldstein, along with his boss means there is nobody officially in charge of the just-released $40 million in excess Pentagon funds to fight Russian trolls and other nefarious sowers of domestic discord. This money was to have been shared by Silicon Valley and various unnamed corporate media outlets "to fight the spread of divisive content" on the Internet. In other words, the express purpose of this slush fund is the censorship of both sock puppets and legitimate independent news sources, along with an even more intensive spreading of oligarch-friendly propaganda on approved, consolidated platforms.
Maybe Trump can appoint DOTUS (Ivanka) to dole out this money as she sees fit while her own security status is still so conveniently fuzzy. Who wouldn't kill for an Ivanka-branded line of mix-and-match accessories after the fact? Instead of sowing divisions, women can be empowered to sew on buttons and bows for pennies an hour in sweatshops all over the world. Somebody's got to ensure that Ivanka will continue to clear her millions in profits every year, so it might as well be entrepreneurial feminists in Bangladesh and Pakistan and Thailand.
As an homage to Daddy and to the first woman ever nominated to lead the CIA, the Ivanka Collection's Little Black Site Dress could well be the hit of the Paris, London, Milan and New York Fashion Week runways next season.
