Civil Commotion

It’s hard to believe anybody could believe, or pay attention to, this superstitious claptrap in an age when it’s possible to manufacture molecules to fight specific instances of cancer, and grow-your-own organ replacement. If you want to give thanks for somebody’s medical recovery, give thanks to the doctors and scientists whose disciplined minds figured-out how to do these things.

The endless references to Alex Jones as a “conspiracy theorist” get under my skin as few real irritants do. Jones is not a theorist; he is a fabulist.

From the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the dictionary-of-record hereabouts: A theory is “A system of ideas or statements explaining something, esp. one based on general principles independent of the things to be explained,” and a theorist is one who develops a theory.

A fabulist is something quite different: “A person who relates or composes fables or legends,” or “A person who invents dishonest stories; a liar.” Now, I think, we’re getting somewhere.

That is all.

We all know by now that Trump-aide Omarosa Manigault Newman recorded her firing by Chief-of-Staff John Kelly in the White House Situation Room, and today we learn that the next day she recorded a conversation with the Buffoon-in-Chief. He commiserates, claiming he knew nothing about the firing and adds, “I don’t love you leaving at all.”

Today, there are these tweets:

OK — Trump talks out of both sides of his mouth, is incapable of meaningful friendships, will say anything. We all knew that; the White House is occupied by an amoral whore.

But did you know that a low-level flunky can carry a recorder into the Situation Room, the “safe” room for dealing with national crises, and walk out with a recording that can be e-mailed to anybody in the world, or stolen by any country’s intelligence agencies? I sure didn’t.

It seems that there is a rule that phones and other electronics aren’t carried into the Situation Room, and a box where they are to be left behind, but there is no surveillance to verify compliance. To put the point a bit differently, if you work in the White House you are assumed to be an honorable grown-up who can be trusted to conduct yourself responsibly. What is more, there is no federal law against surreptitiously recording conversations in the White House, or with the federal government’s officers.

Whoops.

A lot of public sector employment is nothing but pity-gigs; we all know that. Large state bureaucracies, such as DOTs, are especially notorious dumping grounds for idiot nieces and sons-in-law. If Trump had asked the Department of the Interior if it could find a job for a friend, perhaps leading fungus walks at a remote national forest in northern Idaho, or work writing press releases for an obscure national park in North Dakota … well, that’s swampy allright, but the way things work and nobody would actually care.

But when the president is a sleaze with no sense of honor or responsibility, no sense of anything but opportunities for self-aggrandizement … birds of a feather, and all that. In the event it appears, so far, that no harm has been done. But what a pointer toward the recklessness of Donald Trump.

The Buffoon-in-Chief must have missed an easy putt on the course today.

One wonders: Why does Sessions submit to this endless abuse? And then one thinks: Geez, what if he gets disgusted and quits? So there isn’t a lot to like about Jeff Sessions, but he surely feels the humiliation of Trump’s relentless abuse, and maybe there is some not-previously-revealed character in the man. Perhaps, as best he can, he is doing an honorable thing and protecting the country by protecting Mueller’s investigation.

Privileged tax status for clergy is an egregious affront to the First Amendment — my freedom of religion should mean freedom from compulsory subsidizing of those ridiculous clubs — and the Holy Men are getting worried.

A federal district judge has already ruled that the cash housing allowance paid to ministers is unconstitutional (the HA that includes a parsonage is a separate section of the tax code and was not challenged). This is the case brough by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. The case is on appeal with the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and some law profs have weighed in on the matter, on the side of the FFRF.

Good. There is no one thing we can do that would curtail the destructive power of the churches, and be consistent with the Founders’ plainly-stated intention, as end their tax privileges.