"Even bodies still in the river did not trigger the high road...."

When I heard the news of the collision over the Potomac last night, I shuddered. A military helicopter and a passenger plane…..each flying in the most controlled airspace in the history of the world…..collided and detonated each other into fireballs mere miles from the symbols of US government. Even if it was only for a few seconds, I went back to 9/11. As more details came out, that faded. But that day made my generation raw in the same way JFK’s assassination and Pearl Harbor made other generations raw. There’s enough triggering trauma for us all, it seems.

All anyone is doing now is speculating. Mechanical issue. Communication issue. Human error on the ground or in the sky. There are no survivors. All that’s left is broken hearts and floating wreckage, along with a nation bewildered that things that aren’t supposed to happen here keep happening here.

When something bad happens, it’s positively human to suggest that we can prevent that bad thing from happening again. We can regulate or spend or build back better…or gather the best and the brightest to write thick reports that will prevent, once and for all, the Titanic from hitting that iceberg a second time. It’s called “hubris”, but in this case it’s the good kind. It’s how we are wired. We can “fix” anything.

But that’s assuming that the room is not filled with jackals. I woke up to a social media hellscape of disinformation, kick-started of course by the Commander in Chief, who tweeted out this….

….which is not exactly Lincoln-esque in tone, and instead reads like the type of verbal buffoonery one might expect out of a coked-up Alex Jones. Even bodies still in the river did not trigger the high road. His instinct is always to burrow into the ground.

MAGA bros took this narrative and ran with it, of course, and currently everybody on Twitter with a High School diploma is acting like they are a member of the FAA….an agency that did not have an acting administrator until this morning. One was appointed AFTER the deadly crash. Can one imagine the howls of outrage from a less cowed press if this happened under a Democratic President? I bet you can.

Even better, I am now being conspiratorially lectured about possible names on the flight manifest and night vision goggles worn by Black Hawk pilots…..by a guy who works in a produce department. At the same time Trump is holding a press conference suggesting the crash was caused by “DEI initiatives” at the FAA, and I’m finding it difficult to distinguish the guy who works with the lettuce from the President of the United States, which is probably not a good sign. The President, who days ago suggested that Los Angeles burned because somebody turned its water off, is now suggesting that 60 people would be alive today if some unknown and unqualified minority knew the difference between “up or down”. Did he provide evidence of his claim? Well, no. But he did say the word “bullshit” in his press conference, which sounded Presidential as fuck and will surely give Proud Boys a chubby.

This is a level of stupid that is really funny until it’s not. Now it’s dangerous and incredibly cruel and insensitive to the families. But then again the cruelty has always been the point. Part of a President’s duties are to act as Consoler-In-Chief….to lead a nation slapped with a tragedy through its mourning….much as a priest might lead a congregation through a funeral. Trump is completely devoid of empathy, so mark this bit under the “not qualified” heading. That is if there’s any room left on the page.

What Trump has done is make this all about him. His inane behavior behind the podium is surely a quick glance at his style in the oval. He’s a bewildered child with a temper. The man is still blaming OBAMA for things. It should terrify you. And now the dead are no longer the story. HE is the story. He insists upon it. The press go along. The man is walking click-bait, after all.

I am more and more certain that this nation cannot survive 4 years of this monumental fool. He seems to be rotting from the inside out. It’s only been a few weeks and each day he gets dumber. Each day he gets more cruel. Each day more and more sycophants climb all over each other to sit on his knee and tell him how wonderful he is (yesterday the House introduced a bill to have his face carved into Mount Rushmore*). Each day the mainstream media further desecrates the memory of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite by normalizing his behavior, for fear that making him mad could affect their bottom line. Brave reporters (like Jim Accosta at CNN) who frequently tag him with haymakers are pushed aside and replaced by somebody more likely to help rub in his orange glow make-up instead. I cannot imagine the self-esteem of a Washington Post reporter forced to clear his copy with a bootlicker like Jeff Bezos…..nor the vibe of the New York Times newsroom not allowed to use the word “lie”.

Do not expect a government to function when the leaders of that government clearly stated their goal was to burn it all down.

In other words, “NOT GOOD!”

In a bit…

—tf

*part of me would like this to pass just to see how the rock would react to his brutal comb-over…