All right, bear with me here.
Discussions on the Tim’s Timely Topics Facebook Page and elsewhere over the last two days have led me to better shape my thoughts on the New York Time’s Op-Ed from the “White House Resistance.” I’d like to share those thoughts with you here, in one message. I am also including this link to the original piece to allow you easy access to full context of any quotes I pull out.
I do not think the decision to release a statement exposing the President’s incompetence to be cowardly. This president has a long and well documented history of using whatever power available to him to personally and professionally destroy anyone who dares to defy him. And he currently has access to a considerable amount of power to use toward such goals.
I do not think writing this letter was an act of bravery either though. No proof of the claims made is provided to be used by us, the readers, to force correction. No specific incidences of wrong doing are given.
The author, and whatever group is working with him/her, are showing the worst of both aspects here. They refuse accountability or responsibility while complaining of problems and providing no means to address them.
They do this because they want the problems to continue. It is to their advantage to create more chaos within the White House, as long as they are suspicious of everyone, they won’t zero in on anyone. This allows them to keep doing exactly what they are doing. Which is no better than the president himself.
My original thought, and I still believe it to be the best guess available, is that it was authored by the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats. I also believe that it does matter who wrote it, beyond whether it was legitimately written by a member of the White House staff.
Let me start by saying that I am grateful to know that there are members of the staff that see the problem with Trump’s dangerous lack of morality.
“The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.
This is absolutely a problem, and we need people to buffer the world from the damage it could cause while we work to remove him.
But, there’s the rub.
This so called resistance isn’t really attempting to protect the people from the President as it claims.
“That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.”
This is not at all what they are doing.
What they are doing is protecting themselves and their corporate donors from the President’s complete lack of understanding of economic and ecological policy and foreign and domestic diplomacy needs.
They are willing to not only overlook but help obstruct the investigation into his conspiracy with adversarial foreign powers to usurp the Executive Branch of government, and they are willing to overlook and even participate in his stocking of racial hatred and religious bigotry to achieve their party line goals.
“Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more. But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective. From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.”
They even went so far as to consider invoking Article 4 of the 25th Amendment to declare him unfit for the office in order to bypass impeachment and remove him.
“Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.”
To sum it all up, this man operating from the shadows for fear of retaliation from both sides, has told us there is a faction in the White House Presidential Administration working against the both the people and the President. They are overlooking the worst aspects of this president and all the damage he is doing to the American people, economy, and geopolitical power structure, for as long as possible solely so that they can force their own agendas through without us knowing it was them.
They are using the President to shield themselves from accountability to us, and they are protecting him from his own accountability to us to do so.
If they believe that we have a dangerously amoral, incompetent, ignorant, Commander-in-Chief n office then they are duty-bound to do everything within their considerable power to remove him, not to use him to their advantage.
The most truthful, and self-aware, passage in the entire Op-Ed essay is this one, where they tell us they recognize the problem, and have specifically chosen to abdicate themselves from responsibility to fix it at as long as it continues to benefit them:
“The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.”
They have the power to fix this, and they have chosen not to for personal gain.
What could be more amoral than co-opting amorality to further a personal agenda?
There is no moral high ground for them to claim here.
If they want our respect and gratitude, they must fulfill their duty to the people, and make the hard decisions.
Step forward. Step up.
Changing the #Culturalinertia 