Let's Hope Trump's Trigger Finger Isn't Itchy

I spent a chilling 45 minutes Wednesday afternoon listening to the author of Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself—While the Rest of Us Die be interviewed by Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air.

Garrett Graff’s book fills in the details on what most of us have taken for granted, namely, that in the event of a nuclear holocaust a few chosen elites from government and business will be whisked to impregnable fortresses  to survive and keep our country functioning with, for example, a stash of $2 billion, mostly in $2 bills the public rejected when re-introduced back in 1976 but will have little choice but to use in the absence of most other legal tender. The Federal Reserve, Graff reports, estimates it would take about 18 months to produce more currency.

Sounds funny but it’s a deadly serious book. Here’s the part that really shook me to the bone: According to Graff, there is no one who stands between a president and an order to launch a nuclear strike. No secretary of state or secretary of defense, no chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. No one is needed to validate, confirm, authorize an order. No one can counterman it.

It is not like in the movies. The “nuclear football” carried by a military aide is always near the president. “Contrary to pop culture or public perception, there is no such thing as the red phone or the nuclear button,” said Graff. “What the nuclear football entails is basically a bunch of binders with different plans. One military aide compared it to a Denny’s menu. You can go through and point at different pictures and that’s the type of nuclear war you would order.” 

When asked why and when safeguards from a would-be mad-bombing president were stripped from the protocol, Graff said, “The way that these procedures have evolved over the years is to remove any middlemen that could slow the process down, because the decision-making window would be so short as it is. The president might only have 8 to 10 to 12 minutes to make a decision about launching a nuclear weapon. There wouldn’t be any time to double check with someone else, so we have very carefully crafted a system that ensures that there’s nothing that slows down a presidential launch order. 

“Those plans were always predicated upon the idea that the person giving the launch order is the most thoughtful, most intelligent, most sober-minded individual that you could possibly imagine atop the nuclear command and control system.”

Not once did Donald Trump’s name get mentioned. But the more than 240-pound orangutan in the room could not have been far away from any listener’s thoughts. 

Located in Waynesboro, PA, not far from Camp David, Raven Rock is but one of many havens hollowed out of mountains. Some 5,000 “lucky” personnel would be assigned sanctuary there. 

I’m not sure how comforting it might be to you, but Graff said even after Doomsday the IRS would continue to collect taxes. How would it know from whom to collect? Apparently the Postal Service would be charged with compiling lists of who died and who survived.

For those who would like to hear the Fresh Air interview, including the ability of a president to declare a state of emergency that would suspend many rights and permit the state to incarcerate anyone the president judges to be a dissident, here’s a link: http://www.wnyc.org/story/in-the-event-of-attack-heres-how-the-government-plans-to-save-itself/

Keeping Up With Trump and Other Dangers to the Republic

The president is being investigated for possible obstruction of justice, but like watching a duck swim serenely on a pond, there’s a whole lot of action—in Washington—going on under the surface, much of it hazardous to the progressive state of the last 80 years.

Last week Politico initiated a new feature: “5 things Trump did while you weren’t looking.” It is difficult, depressing, but required reading, for it goes beyond the orange-topped menace. Trump or Mike Pence or any Republican in the Oval Office would be doing much the same.

Here are links to the articles for first two weeks: 

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/06/09/five-policy-changes-trump-this-week-000455

http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/06/16/5-things-trump-did-while-you-werent-looking-week-2-000462

 If you’re not already reading Politico, this series is a good reason to begin.

If you’re not already too bummed out, spend 35 minutes listening to Nancy MacLean tell Leonard Lopate of WNYC about the origin of the conservative movement’s plan to deconstruct government. MacLean is the William Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. Here’s the link: http://www.wnyc.org/story/engineer-rights-libertarian-takeover/

A Breadth of Fresh Air: I listened Thursday to Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air interview former vice president Joe Biden. It was refreshing to hear a reasoned discussion absent of hyperbole and self-aggrandizement. It got me wondering if we have become enmeshed in an era when intelligent, civil dialogue no longer is expected or the norm. 

Let me not give a wrong impression—neither Gross nor Biden hid their disapproval of Donald Trump. But they did so in articulate, non abusive language and discourse, so different from what so often passes for acceptable practice on talk shows and during public forums.

If you have 40 minutes, do yourself and the country a favor by listening to their discussion: 

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/15cad59c689d41d1

Talk To Me: Whenever the subject of talking to oneself comes up I volunteer that I do. I talk to myself, I say, whenever I want good conversation.

Now that The New York Times has published results of studies showing the benefits of talking to oneself (https://nyti.ms/2sWvKc3), I guess we can expect more public displays of private patter.

For some 20 years or more we have seen lots of people babbling as they walked. General reaction at first was that more crazy people were walking among us. It was as if Elwood P. Dowd had developed the procreative trait of his friend, Harvey, the 6’ 3½” rabbit invisible to all but Dowd (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Harvey_(film)&oldid=781895785). Only upon closer inspection did we come to realize cellular phone technology was at play.

Of course that meant it was harder to pick out the actual crazy people talking to themselves as they ambled among us.

For all the benefits of talking to oneself noted in the studies perhaps the perils of internal conversation can best be observed from the public admission of our fearless but scare-inducing talker-in-chief. In his famous or infamous interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump made the following admission about his reason for firing FBI director James Comey:

“And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’”

And that’s how we have arrived at the point where Comey went before a Senate committee to say before the American public and the world, with klieg lights shining and cameras rolling, the president of the United States is a liar.

Many of us may have thought it but few if any would have had the courage and the character to say it in so public a forum.

Many of you might also have thought Trump is an idiot. In case you missed it, here’s an Op-Ed piece that explains the origin of the word “idiot” and how it might be conferred upon our fretful leader: https://nyti.ms/2se1igv.