Chad Wolf protesteth too much

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf took offense at characterizations of the abusive federal officers in Portland, Oregon as "stormtroopers" and "Gestapo".

Wolf also defended the re-assignment of immigration officers and pushed back on accusations the officers were acting without proper oversight.

“These officers are not stormtroopers,” Wolf said. “They’re not the Gestapo, as some have described them. That description is offensive and hyperbolic, and it’s dishonest."

Most police officers in the United States work in uniform, not camouflage; the uniforms identify their departments. They operate in marked vehicles. Officers in plain clothes and unmarked vehicles display their badges and identifications when they have to take official action. They don't accost civilians without identifying themselves as police officers, and if they restrict a civilian's movements it's because they've placed that person under arrest.

The anonymous armed men lacking name tags or large, visible insignia on their camouflage-style uniforms, who assaulted peaceful protesters and heightened tensions with the local populace, who took peaceful protesters into their dubious custody and whisked them away in unmarked vehicles for interrogation without placing them under arrest — they don't operate like any reputable police force in this country. To the contrary, they sure as hell are reminiscent of the brutal thugs who worked for Hitler as far as I'm concerned.

How is the ordinary person supposed to know these unidentified men with no obvious affiliation with any recognized law enforcement agency aren't some extralegal, self-proclaimed "militia" that has decided to take "law and order" into their own hands? White supremacist groups have done that before. Come to think of it, that's how Hitler's Brownshirts started.

(Incidentally, federal police dressed in camouflage so outraged retired Army Lt. General Russel Honoré that he exploded on live TV: "What kind of bullshit is this?!" He demanded the Trump administration stop letting these federal police wear camouflage, forcefully noting that camouflage clothing has a specific purpose that is completely unrelated to the supposed mission in Portland. His obvious subtext was that police personnel have no business playing at being soldiers, and he's right.)

It would surprise me if Wolf knew what "Gestapo" actually meant. It's a German abbreviation for what translates in English to "Secret State Police". That, too, sounds like the amped-up, militarized thugs we've all seen in action in Portland.

So Chad, if you're offended by others calling your pets "stormtroopers" and "Gestapo", good. The rest of us are more than offended by your deployment of goons in camouflage where the local authorities are united in not wanting them, and where every indication is that those goons are worsening tensions.

Of course, fomenting a crisis — creating a shiny, made-for-Fox-News flashpoint of civilian-Gestapo strife — is probably exactly the order you got from your boss, the domestic Dear Leader. He badly needs a distraction from the more than 140,000 dead from CoViD-19 on his incompetent watch.

So I strongly doubt your outrage is genuine.

But ours is. And we will not forget your despicable aiding and abetting of this lawless "president", your ready acquiescence to his worst autocratic instincts. I, for one, am wondering if your actions warrant criminal investigation for abuse of power.

A little word of advice, then, Chad: better keep reminding the boss you've risked criminal charges for him and are counting on being included in his long list of pardons whenever he heads out the door.

Just understand that, pardon or no, you will go down in the history books as an authoritarian enabler, as egregious a lawbreaker and kingly sycophant as Bill Barr. No pardon will rehabilitate your terrible reputation.

Ignore Trump

The domestic Dear Leader is resuming coronavirus press conferences. Apparently he thinks it will help his popularity, which has taken a beating recently.

Much as I personally wish otherwise, we can't shut him up. Nor can we keep news outlets (or outlets that propagandize under the guise of delivering news) from covering him.

What we can do, though, is to ignore his gibbering.

It's not just that what he says is frequently unintelligible, or that the little that is intelligible is generally wrong, often catastrophically so. (Using bleach internally, anyone?)

Worse is that gratifying his desperate need for attention simply distracts us from doing the things that can be done in the absence of any coherent federal assistance or coordination. We need to preserve our energies and time to help one another, not to rage, however justifiably, against his latest inflammatory and/or boneheaded remarks.

Between his car crash of an interview with Chris Wallace (for which CNN's Chris Cillizza provides a helpful list of the lowlights) and his autocratic declaration that he will send more unidentified federal law-enforcement personnel to various cities (all of them under Democratic leadership, curiously enough) to quell what he deems unrest, Trump has shown himself to be, if not totally unhinged, less hinged than ever.

What we see, in fact, is a man of limited intellect and even more limited emotional control, flailing and failing to come to terms with multiple crises. These crises — the pandemic, systemic racism, a collapsed economy, and (for him the most important) his endangered reelection — were not entirely of his own making, save, perhaps, for the last. However, he has unquestionably worsened every one of them, by a lot. No sane, emotionally balanced, humane person would make the unforced errors Trump apparently can't stop himself from making.

His resumed coronavirus press conferences promise more of the same misinformation, distraction, and pathetic, empty boasting as before. After all, he is incapable of doing the work that a true leader would be doing at a time like this, so he has no truthful good news to deliver.

But the fact that you will learn nothing useful from him, and indeed, may come away less intelligent than you were before watching him, isn't why you should ignore him. It's not the only reason, anyway.

We all should ignore him simply because it's unkind to gratify the childish attention-seeking of a mentally diminished old man who insists on making a piteous spectacle of himself in public — even if he is the president.

Trump keeps failing the response

When Donald Trump was campaigning in 2016, he repeatedly claimed that the rest of the world was laughing at the U.S. That was, of course, not true except in his own messed-up head.

At least, it wasn't true in 2016. In 2020, well, that's a different matter.

Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong-Un have had many reasons to laugh, not just at this country but at the domestic Dear Leader in particular. It's easy to see why: they all have benefited tremendously from the dDL's gullibility, stupidity, and childish fragility.

Much of the rest of the world, especially our allies, isn't laughing. They're watching us with alarm ... and deep pity. And we deserve that pity, those of us who have watched our own country with such horror. Perhaps no modern democratic society has so thoroughly been reshaped in the broken mold of its executive as ours.

Four months ago it was obvious that Trump had failed to marshal the government to fight the novel coronavirus.

Four months ago it was obvious. In early March it was obvious.

Everybody knows what Trump has done since then.

Nothing.

Guess what we're facing now? Shortages of vital personal protective equipment. Again.

Again!

And why? Because our emotionally and intellectually crippled president can't bring himself to face the ugly reality that on his watch, 140,000 people have died. (And counting.)

So he refuses to engage with that reality, preferring instead to gibber about fucking dishwashers and light bulbs.

At least Nero made music on that fiddle while Rome burned. Trump simply makes noise as we die.

Any other sentient human being would have invoked the Defense Production Act starting in February to gear up production of personal protective equipment and testing supplies. (The CNN piece doesn't discuss testing but oh Lord, testing supplies are also inexcusably lacking.) Even if that person had botched the initial response the way the domestic Dear Leader did, that person would have learned from that mistake and ramped things up in March, when much of the country was starting to shut down and shelter at home.

Trump? He couldn't be bothered.

And he still can't.

This administration's response to the pandemic has been criminally negligent. I mean that literally. When we get a new president — and that had better happen this November or we are all fucked big-time — among the many things that new president will have to do will be to pursue criminal charges against Donnie and his Cabinet for gross malfeasance. (If incompetence were also criminal, these amoral vermin would merit life sentences in prison.)

No one knows how many would be sick and how many would have died under a different president. We can, however, safely assume that the numbers of sick and dead wouldn't be anywhere near as grotesquely high as the 3.6 million (and counting) confirmed infected and nearly 140,000 (and counting) dead.

Hurricane Katrina used to be the benchmark for presidential catastrophes. Now, CoViD-19 will stand as the dreadful standard by which all future presidential failures will be judged.

And George W. Bush can rest easy, knowing that he has escaped the judgment of history as the worst president the United States ever had. Bush 43 looks like a paragon of intelligence and competence next to the ongoing colossal failure that is Trump.