SHITSHOW DU JOUR — TEAM OF MORONS

I used to publish this column — SHITSHOW DU JOUR — on another platform. Each column had a sequential numeric that not too humorously, parodied Charlie Sheen’s Hot Shot! movies. I was up to Part Quinze. Now that I am writing on Medium.com, it becomes too confusing to continue with the sequencing, so I am dispensing with the numbers.

Let’s start with Sean Spicer.

What’s most disturbing about his statement that even Adolph Hitler “didn’t sink low enough to use chemical” weapons is that the remark is not just an isolated example of appalling ignorance, but that it is yet one more comment in a never ending series of head scratching WTF comments from this administration.

Giving LPOTUS the benefit of the doubt and not including the noxious stuff he peddled from the campaign stump, only tallying his WTF moments and comments — and those of his minions — from January 1st, they would still generate a formidable catalogue of lies, disinformation and slander. It took Yogi Berra a lifetime to create an endearing catalogue of “Yogisms”. Here we are not yet three months into his administration, yet Trump has spewed forth more toxic Trumpisms in his short tenure than an entire lifetime of the Berra oevre.

A note here: on that other platform, I referred to Trump as President Lying Piece of Shit. My wife cautioned me that if I am going to publish on a respectable platform, I have to back off the profanity. So I am stealing her sobriquet for Trump, “LPOTUS”. The curse words are (mostly) gone, but the “lying” remains.

I am not the most observant Jew in the world (probably, among the least), but at every level I am offended Spicer’s breathtaking dumbness, compounded by his tortured attempts to apologize and explain himself.

Reaching for a reference to concentration camps and coming up with “Holocaust Centers”; trying to draw a distinction between Hitler and Assad by saying that Hitler didn’t bomb his own people the way Assad did, implying that the Jews Hitler gassed weren’t his own people, Spicer reminds me of Jon Lovitz’ “Liar” character on SNL and John Ratzenberger’s Cliff Claven on “Cheers”. Each told lies so outrageous that you roared at their audacity, and then laughed again when they lied their way out with an equally audacious explanation.

This is not funny. Spicer isn’t that smart, or maybe his writers aren’t as good. He just keeps digging the hole deeper.

He, of course, has a lot of help. Kellyanne Conway has been quiet recently, but she matches him lie for lie and dumb statement for dumb statement. When you add in Trump’s two Doberman Pinscher sons, Bannon, Priebus, Nunes, McConnell, Ryan and the head of this not-ready-for-prime-time crew himself, LPOTUS, you have a cruise ship with a crew too stupid to understand how to use its navigation system.

It should give the nation and the world no comfort to realize that our 45th President does not have the intellectual firepower to run a hot dog stand, not to mention the most powerful nation in the history of the world. The man has difficulty stringing together two coherent sentences in a row, and when asked what his next steps will be, inevitably responds “You’ll see”. Inevitably, because he has no idea what any next steps are or should be.

For the United States, the foreign policy playbook drills home the lesson that all responses to international incidents should be “proportional” to the wrongdoing. In that context, bombing the airfield outside Homs generated across-the-board consensus that the action would not escalate into a larger commitment that we could not control. It “sent a message”. It was “a measured, one time reaction”. It was “in response to the use of chemical weapons”, violating treaties and international norms that date back to World War I.

Except, the statements coming forth from the voices in this administration are all over the place. At various times, different players have said we will only react when chemical weapons are used, but also when barrel bombs are used. It should be pointed out that the Syrian Air Force drops barrel bombs all the time. Our goal is regime change and Assad should be out. Our goal is not regime change. We are fighting ISIS in Syria.

Not a clue.

And that’s what makes Trump so scary. Contrary to his campaign statement that he is his own general and needs no counsel but his own, this guy doesn’t have a plan, and worse, he’s not capable of formulating one. And the people (almost solely white guys) he has surrounded himself with don’t have smarts or the experience to come up with a coherent strategy for the region.

Look, smart guys have gotten us in deep trouble before. All those Harvard “Best and the Brightest” people Kennedy surrounded himself with landed us waist deep in Vietnam. But for the most part, over the course of history, it’s the smart and compassionate leaders who’ve managed to solve our worst crises. It took Lincoln, not Buchanan, to win a civil war and put the nation on the road to addressing slavery and civil rights.

I have been screeching from this platform that Trump should be impeached. A few months ago I mused whether he could be impeached before he was elected, sort of arriving at the Inaugural ceremonies freeze dried. I don’t believe in the conspiracy theory that bombing Syria and standing up to Russia is a ruse to distract us from what I have every confidence was a heavy-handed attempt to collude with the Russians to disrupt our election. I do believe that bombing the airbase in Syria was the right move, but that Trump did it for all the wrong reasons.

I also believe that the only solution to our continued descent into this latest, long national nightmare is to lance the boil on the surface of the republic and impeach and convict LPOTUS.

So then someday, Doris Kearns Goodwin can write a Pulitzer Prize winner entitled “Team of Morons”.