Yet Another Refugee from Livejournal

President Trump has proven me wrong about something.  I never thought I'd see the day when he did something that was memorable for its originality.

But he has!  He has created a highly innovative, and quite effective, method of terrorism.

Think about it.  The people of this country have been attacked with bombs, with guns, and with crashing airplanes.  But it took the genius of Donald Trump to realize that you could bring the United States of America to its knees by committing political suicide.

I certainly hit a speed bump at the end of the last post (the one dated 2018-12-27, with subject line "... but we should fire the poor bastard anyway.").  And it has taken me this long to figure out what the source of the difficulty was, and how to get past it.

To put it simply, I lost track of what point I wanted to make.  Here's the part of the text where, I now believe, I went off the rails:

... how can I say that it's time to get to work on firing the poor bastard, when in just the last post, I said that we need to emphasize Donald Trump's incompetence more, and his evil nature less?

That quote implies that there is some sort of a contradiction between emphasizing Trump's incompetence, and suggesting that the new Congress should be looking seriously at impeaching him.  What made me think that those things were, or even sounded, contradictory?  Answer: the idea that you can't impeach the president for being incompetent, only for doing something wrong, something with [at least] the "flavor" of criminality.

Well, I might actually believe that, and I might not.  But if I hadn't lost track of my point, I would have realized that it was a mistake to even raise that question, let alone go off, as I did, on a long detour on the subject of whether or not it is possible to give a positive definition of what constitutes an impeachable "offense."  That may be a worthwhile question, but for purposes of the point I was actually trying to make, it doesn't matter.

Why not?  Because I never intended to suggest that Trump should be impeached "merely" for being incompetent.

On December 25, I posted a journal entry with the subject line, "Pity our underprivileged president ...," whose central point was that Trump's critics, myself included, "tend to focus too much on his being bad, and not enough on his being incompetent."  Two days later, I posted the one already mentioned, the one that said (though not in these words) that I thought it was now time to begin impeachment proceedings.  By posting those two statements in quick succession like that, I may have misled the reader into thinking that I wanted to claim that they were very closely related: that we should be looking at impeaching and removing the president, because of his incompetence.

Whether or not I did give any readers that mistaken impression, I now realize that I somehow managed to give it to myself.  Why, actually, did I follow a statement about incompetence with a statement about impeachment?

Not because I wanted to say that he should be impeached for incompetence.  No, in my original train of thought, mentioning impeachment was meant to be nothing more than an aside to the reader.  "Don't misunderstand me," I wanted, in effect, to say.  "Just because I think Trump's incompetence deserves more attention, doesn't mean that I believe that he shouldn't be impeached.  I do think he should be (or at least that Congress needs seriously to be considering the possibility)."

And if someone were to object that incompetence isn't grounds for impeachment, there would be no need to argue with that person.  I could just say, "Oh, you mean that there needs to be a flavor of criminality, an intent to do something wrong?  No problem.  He's got those, too."

And then, having gotten that out of the way, I could have returned to my main thread: clarifying, and arguing for, the claim that with all the focus on Trump's unethical character, we tend to forget that his incompetence is a major factor in the situation, the mess in which we find ourselves, as well.

Exhibit A: the government shutdown.  A competent individual would never have let himself get caught in the double-bind in which Donald Trump finds himself now.

Things move so fast that I can't be sure what I will write about next.  But I will surely find an opportunity, sooner or later, to expand on this point about the shutdown.  Just not today.

What's that?  You say you can't stand the suspense?  Okay, here's a hint.  Whose shutdown is it?

Does Trump "own" it?  A good guess, but I don't think it gets to the heart of the matter.  Ask yourself this: can you think of anyone who is active in American politics, and who actually benefits from the shutting down of the United States government?  If you give that some serious thought, I think you will come to the same conclusion that I have: that we should be calling this the "Putin shutdown."