Reality Check

Last week we had flooding in Texas, a category 5 hurricane eventually hitting Florida, the largest wildfires in recent history in the West, the most violent earthquake in over a century in Mexico, which was also hit by a hurricane. Yet somehow it seemed like a good week with no major Trump Twitter-induced drama. I do recall something about a deal with Schumer and Pelosi and a very pointed and public diss of McConnell and Ryan afterwards. Oh, there was also DACA, or was that the previous week?

Am I getting numb or has life in the Trump era honed my capacity for denial to the point where reality no longer matters? Just when I was starting to doubt my orientation to reality, I was fortunate to hear a clip of Rush Limbaugh expounding on how there are no more hurricanes than in the past, and they are no more powerful than in the past. He went on to say that the mega-storms were not really mega-storms and that it was all a conspiracy to use the fake hurricanes for fake news on the hoax of climate change. Thank god for Rush. He is like the North Star for the reality challenged. Just when you begin to think you have lost touch with reality, Rush provides another petulant hurricane of his own insanity to serve as guidepost – a clear and bright baseline of insane ideology to measure against any slippage of our own.

Now that the insanity of right-wing media has shaken me from my disorientation, let’s look at what happened last week. Wildfires and hurricanes are increasing in intensity, and they are even more destructive if one considers the damage done even with the tremendous advances in disaster mitigation. Warmer temperatures worldwide have heated the oceans and the withered land mass. Storms, fires and drought are the predictable result. Hurricanes as large as Irma will be dwarfed in the next decade. The denial of the Trump Administration of basic sciences will only exacerbate the disasters. After cutting the NSF, NASA and EPA funding, scientists have begun to flee to European Universities where they can continue basic research, even if their findings will be denied here at home.

Pelosi and Schumer emerged from their “deal” with Trump with Cheshire cat grins – the kind of clueless grins that many people who make deals with Trump have until they realize that he has broken virtually every deal he has ever made from the first hotel in New York City to casinos in New Jersey to his failure to repeal ObamaCare and build Mexican-funded walls. Maybe they did benefit from what appears to be an intended humiliation of the GOP leadership by Trump, but if they are reality oriented then they will be looking for a knife in the back soon.

The Emolument lawsuit is proceeding and it will be interesting to see how these so-called “Federalist” judges on SCOTUS will interpret the clear language of the Constitution. Taken at their plain meaning, the Constitution prohibits exactly what Trump has illegally done since becoming President – enriching business at the expense of the country. Add to that the Facebook admission that fake companies connected to Russian intelligence bought adds that targeted swing voters in key counties in the U.S.; Mueller’s request to interview former White House aids; and the expansion of Mueller’s investigation of Trump family financial dealings (AKA money laundering), then we have three potential routes to impeachment.

Twitters to follow … no doubt.