Bleeding Edge

Since the time of George Washington, presidents have tended to the traditions and obligations of their job, as were set by their predecessors who collectively then passed them on to the presidents who came later, by the timeless process of inertia…

However smart the persons were — this process promoted blandness, sameness, and banality — same as it promulgates unity, continuity, and stability.

It also promoted a certain amount of bloating.

Indeed, if George Washington were to come back today — he would never recognize the office of the Presidency now.

And although he would commiserate and congratulate its modern office holder, the 45th President of these United States — methinks that George would never want his old job back. This is what George Washington wrote in a letter addressed to his friend Edward Rutledge in 1789: “I greatly apprehend that my Countrymen will expect too much from me”

Indeed the modern president today, namely the 45th, faces the same challenges of fulfilling expectations, but while George Washington was conscious of not overstepping the boundaries of his office, and carefully avoided making himself too big — all the presidents who have arrived at the job since his stint at the office, face the opposite challenge: how not to seem too small for an office that has grown so large.

One of George W. Bush’s most vivid memories is the president’s basic conclusion about the attacks of 9/11: “My fundamental job was to protect the American people, and I didn’t do it.”

After the attacks, the then CIA Director George Tenet, added a threat matrix to the president’s morning briefing that delineated all possible threats of terrorist activity, because W. Bush wanted to go through every single one.

“After 9/11, we woke up every day behind. Every day was catch-up day” says Bush’s communications director Dan Bartlett.

Each administration worries that it might somehow slip and let an attack through.

This leads to a lot of make-work and ass-covering, impediments to managing any organization. In his book The Test of Our Times, Tom Ridge, the first homeland-security director, recalled such an episode, when just before the 2004 U.S. elections, Osama bin Laden released a taunting threatening videotape. Ridge said some Cabinet officials wanted to raise the nation’s threat level to show that the administration was being vigilant, even though they had no new evidence of a specific threat. “Is this about security or politics?” he asked himself.

Perhaps that is why Donald Trump often appears to be a president in rebellion against his office, because we have come to expect, that the President always hastens to the scene of natural disasters to comfort the afflicted. Yet, after Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, President Trump arrived to cheer people up, but he was hard at work and behaved like a blue collar worker, when he went about tossing rolls of paper towels at storm-battered residents, as if he were trying to drive three-point basketball shots.

People who saw him said that he had a good hand for basketball…

But the media folks roasted him.

Yet the important thing that journalists, tv people, and pundits tend to forget, is that he was there.

Sure, he was there … hamming it all up, and having a good time doing it, but he was there.

What’s wrong with that?

Nothing.

So…

Maybe something is wrong with us.

Maybe the fault is in our own stars, because we have come to expect the nanny state to be there always in the face of the President.

Or maybe we expect our Mother to be the President,

Or indeed, we expect that when the national fabric “rends” the president will be there at the ready, with needle and thread, or at least reach for the sewing box of unity.

And the point is well taken because after all, he needs to be able to mend the threadbare socks we all wear from time to time.

Or when some threadbare white supremacists go out for a walk, along with a few tens of conservative voters, and they march through Charlottesville Virginia, shouting, President Trump’s instinct was to emphasize that there were good people in there, amongst the crowd of fanciful deplorables, aside from the tiny clutch of neo-Nazi skinheads, and dissatisfied whites, and maybe three or four evangelical Christians venting steam.

So … as expected, the media went bananas over that.

And they then cried uncle, and said that we all expect our presidents to be deal makers, and peace makers, (and they kept stammering) … but … not … with our enemies.

Here is where that old Jewish Rabbi said it best: “Blessed Be The Peacemakers”

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God”
–Mathew 5:9

Now, when the “resistance”, the “errant revolution”, the “blood nosed opposition” and all the members of the Media class, the television journalists, and their brethren in print media and newspapers, who make up the basket of news deplorables, and dissatisfied fakes, has calcified in opposition to the 45th — while they are supposed to be speaking, sharing, discussing, and discoursing, or to casually get together to drink and dine with the other side — how do you expect them to find a bipartisan solution?

For Democrats, demonizing Trump is their only claim to fame anymore. It has become their only job. And while the Media and the Dems had initially surmised that his many decades in the real-estate business proved that he was a good negotiator and an able dealmaker they could make deals with — when it comes to the sacred cows of health care, taxes, census rolls, immigration, border control, American imagery, voting rights, 2nd amendment, etc — they haven’t much bothered to trade horses with him.

Seems like they have not even tried or even considered, being a negotiating partner in the process go governing.

Of course, President Trump’s detours from the expectations of his office are legion, and for good reason. Yet to the crazed Dems, this “proves” that he is somehow unfit to inhabit it, as Comey’s and Brennan’s “apologia” all over the tv land clearly shows.

It all comes down tot he fact that “nobody” can possibly represent the varied, competing interests of 327 million citizens.

So when the members of the MAGA Nation make “maga-nation-building” a priority and scoff at the president’s detractors, while basking in the glow of his camp bonfires consuming the norms of the Presidency and draining the swamp of DC politics — why should Trump throw all his energy and political capital into producing quick results in Puerto Rico or for that matter California, or Hawaii, when the island’s notorious corruption, poor planning, weak infrastructure, and the always and forever Democratic leaderships of those forsaken places have conspired to make success impossible?

Please tell me, seriously, why should the “45” bow before Democrats who have set out to destroy him, and who will never work with him anyway?

Trump’s backers see him as a new kind of president, unburdened by political correctness and unconstrained by the old rules of Beltway deal making. He doesn’t let niceties get in the way of taking care of business.

The intensity of public feelings about President Trump makes it hard to measure his charisma, against the raging mediocrity most people prefer to have in the President’s chair.

And perhaps his breaks with tradition are so jarring, and the murmuration of tweets so thick, that debate about his behavior tends to be conducted on the plane of propriety and the president’s seeming disregard for it.

But my thinking goes more like this:

This man the 45th, is a builder. And he wears the builder’s pants the proper way. Working hard for the average Joe with his blue jeans, way down and the visible butt-crack showing disdain for anyone looking to find dark places where the sun don’t shine.

Capice?

Yet, today we are obsessed and we don’t just notice when the president doesn’t show up for funerals and bar mitzvahs, but we are getting angry with him that he doesn’t play the clown at children’s birthday parties.

And God forbid he doesn’t show up to walk the bride down the aisle in every single church, mosque or synagogue.

Sadly now, we have gone off the deep end and we’ve truly become a president – obsessed nation of facing or screaming puppies.

Any sign of maturity has long gone out of the window.

So much so that those of us that like the “Nanny State” and quite often confuse that with the “Deep State” and it’s cries of Ru-Rus-Russ-Russia, we have now come to the sad point that we are willing to undermine the very idea of our constitutional democracy, and are willing to destroy our Republic, just so that we can smite the 45th.

Talk about shooting your own face with a .45 because you don’t like the shape of your nose.

Indeed Nobody, can possibly represent the varied, competing interests of 327 million citizens.

Ehhhh…

Can you grog that?

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

And if Trump can perform the ever-expanding duties of the President”s office, while managing an executive branch of 2 million employees, and then leading the far more numerous armed forces as well, while charged with everything, from regulating air pollution, to x-raying passengers before they board the plane, to managing all the borders and emergencies too, and still cares to show up for my weekly poker game — then I suspect that his real name is Ken Clark, and he truly is the flying X-ray vision SuperMan, who wears his red underwear on the outside of his uniform, to match colors with his flying cape.