Quiet, Piggy

 

     These days, I'm thinking more and more about Hitler's famous tantrum in the bunker after finding out that Gen. Steiner didn't follow his orders and attack the Soviets as they encircled Berlin. Steiner, one of Hitler's most capable generals, disobeyed his order, not for ideological reasons but purely pragmatic ones. Confined to the bunker, Hitler was out of touch with the reality of the situation aboveground.

     Steiner, being on the ground, knew better than to attack a force with superior manpower, weapons and ammunition. He was forced to cobble together whatever males he could find from the ruins of Berlin. By late April 1945, Steiner realized he'd be sending old men and boys into a meat grinder and he was enough of a military commander to not send them out on a suicide mission in the twilight of a lost war.

     On discovering this, Hitler flew into a rage and looked at Steiner's refusal to send poorly-trained troops into a sure death trap. Hitler, refusing to see the reality of the situation, looked at Seiner's refusal as a personal betrayal.

     There isn't a helluva lot of daylight between Trump and the man whose speeches he slept next to. Both represent a mindset that's poorly-informed and out of touch with basic reality. And Trump's rages are starting to get attention even from those of us who've grown accustomed to them over the years. Just recently, he snapped at a Bloomberg reporter asking about the Epstein files by saying, "Quiet. Quiet, piggy."

     But then there's his new jihad, one against Sen. Mark Kelly, my senior senator here in Arizona. Since getting elected to the upper chamber, Kelly has been a bland, anodyne centrist lawmaker, certainly no liberal. But he brought with him the prestige and gravitas of being a former astronaut, combat pilot and a retired Navy captain with a quarter century of service.

     Kelly appeared in a video with five other Democratic lawmakers imploring service members to not obey illegal orders from Trump. They had reminded them that the UCMJ doesn't merely suggest but obligates those in the military. The video's main failing was that it didn't specify what those unlawful orders were but one can take more than a wild guess. 

     One could start with Trump's  illegal order to send 700 Marines into Los Angeles in violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus law. One could further point to the military being ordered to fire on fishing boats off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia that have resulted in at least 73 deaths.

     When the video came out, Nazi pipsqueak Stephen Miller whined about it on Fox. The next day, Trump raged on Truth Social that the six lawmakers were guilty of sedition and shared a post that they ought to be hanged. Then he set his sights on Mark Kelly.

     Trump's reaction was similar to Hitler's after the Generals Plot on July 20, 1944 when a bomb went off under a table at the Wolf's Lair. Hitler purged the Wehrmacht and had 200 executed. Another 20,000 went to the concentration camps.

     Blindly lashing out and meting out punishment is part and parcel to dictators. They tend to look at the military as theirs to do with as they please regardless of laws or constitutions. And Trump's own blind rage at Mark Kelly is rather surprising, not to mention alarming. Later, he tried to walk back his threats by saying he was “not threatening death, but I think they’re in serious trouble.”

     Pete Hogsbreath, the War Czar, announced a "uniform inspection" of Kelly to make sure he earned the medals he had, an investigation into his conduct and even floated the idea of recalling him to active duty to be courtmartialed.

     All things you see in totalitarian dictatorships.

     One could make a case that Trump's escalating rages are perfectly symptomatic of dementia, something I've experienced firsthand, but that's not what's important. What is important is that this lunatic needs to be removed from office as soon as humanly possible. It's really that simple.