I’m trying to figure out which is the bigger story, that South Dakota Republican Party chairman Dan Lederman was still as of this afternoon registered to vote as a Democrat at a Lederman Bonding Company storefront in Newton, Iowa, or that we may be on the brink of a great Constitutional crisis, if not a nuclear conflagration, caused by an increasingly moody, isolated, and erratic American President.
* * *
NBC News reported this morning that at a July 20 meeting at the Pentagon with the Vice-President, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, Chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff, and other top officials, Donald Trump said he wanted to expand America’s nuclear weapons arsenal tenfold:
Trump’s comments, the officials said, came in response to a briefing slide he was shown that charted the steady reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1960s. Trump indicated he wanted a bigger stockpile, not the bottom position on that downward-sloping curve.
According to the officials present, Trump’s advisers, among them the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, were surprised. Officials briefly explained the legal and practical impediments to a nuclear buildup and how the current military posture is stronger than it was at the height of the buildup. In interviews, they told NBC News that no such expansion is planned.
The July 20 meeting was described as a lengthy and sometimes tense review of worldwide U.S. forces and operations. It was soon after the meeting broke up that officials who remained behind heard Tillerson say that Trump is a “moron” [Courtney Kube, Kristen Welker, Carol E. lee, and Savannah Guthrie, “Trump Wanted Tenfold Increase in Nuclear Arsenal, Surprising Military,” NBC News, 2017.10.11].
In response, the President of the United States threatened to shut down NBC:
Trump lashed out at NBC, appearing to make a threat that is not even possible, given that the Federal Communications Commission doesn’t directly license networks.
“Fake @NBCNews made up a story that I wanted a ‘tenfold’ increase in our U.S. nuclear arsenal. Pure fiction, made up to demean. NBC = CNN!” Trump wrote on Twitter, equating the two TV news outlets he has most often lashed out against. “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” [Louis Nelson and Margaret Harding McGill, “Trump Suggests Challenging NBC’s Broadcast License,” Politico, 2017.10.11]
NBC has no broadcast license. Its local affiliate stations do. KDLT, watch out: Trump is coming for you.
Great Benjamin Franklin Bache‘s Ghost! The President hears a news report with which he disagrees and threatens to close down the reporters’ company?
Tell me, Donald…
- Will you challenge my blogging license for writing again yesterday about your unfitness for office?
- Will you revoke NPR’s radio license or The National Review‘s printing license for editor Jonah Goldberg’s use on NPR Tuesday of the words glandular, cocaine, and monkey to describe your tacticless management of the White House?
- Will you seize Vanity Fair‘s publishing license for reporting this afternoon that multiple people in your White House say you are “unstable,” “losing a step,” and “unraveling”?
- Will you yank Fox Broadcasting’s license (you know, the one they’ve been taking with facts since 1996) for letting Neil Cavuto say to you on air last night, “It’s not that some of your ideas aren’t sound, they are…. It’s that increasingly, this erratic behavior makes me wonder whether you are“?
- Will you take former Labor Secretary Robert Reich’s Facebook license for posting an account of a conversation with a friend and former Republican Congressman in which he says the only thing preventing Republicans from acting on the widespread conviction that you are too dangerous to trust with the nuclear codes is their desire to pass tax reform so they can claim some legislative victory before plunging America into the certain circus of impeachment or the 25th Amendment?
Ten times more nukes for a moody, unfocused insult-monger who wants to shut down the free press? Every patriot should rise to defend this nation against the greatest threat to its Constitution and the peace and prosperity of the entire planet: Donald J. Trump. Write your members of Congress, write the Vice-President and the Cabinet, and tell them to take the Constitutional actions necessary to remove this President.
Let’s revoke Donald Trump’s license to preside for lying about… oh, you name it.
South Dakota republicans go meh and claim that trump is the only racist that really knows them. 57% is a tough nut to crack. I guess when they send their sons and daughters off to the meat grinders of yet another war, this one a glowing one, the numbers may drop to 56%. Got to stop those gays and those women from taking over the world. When Saudi women got the right to drive by themselves! is why the numbers seem to remain static.
Dan Lederman is a Democrat? Damn, I knew there was something about him that was okay. I would bet he voted for Hillary Clinton, the rascal, so he is not part of the 57% and is secretly not only a Democrat, but a closeted Muslim. Well played Danny boy, well played.
Bombing attempt in Ashville, North Carolina by…a white guy. trump better keep track of alt-right white Americans and let the nukes be nukes https://theintercept.com/2017/10/11/terrorist-donald-trump-airport-bomber-estes-asheville/
“It is frankly disgusting the press is able to write whatever it wants to write,” Mr. Trump said.
Then, an epiphany. Drumpf slaps himself up alongside the head and sez, “Wow, I coulda had a V–….that’s why they call it freedumb of the press.”
Now we have Niger in the continuing expansion of war with 3 Green Berets killed outright and one other found dead later. 4 United States soldiers and not a peep from trump, nothing, natta, but ESPN, your toast. Knelling NFL players, very important. American soldier deaths, not such a big deal to the fraud that never fought off anything more than the clap. https://www.salon.com/2017/10/11/trumps-benghazi-ambush-of-u-s-soldiers-in-niger-goes-unnoticed/
During the summer of the 2016 presidential campaign while being briefed on nuclear weapons trump asked a foreign policy expert, “if we have them why can’t we use them?”.
Clearly, Trump does not comprehend the impact of a nuclear war and the devastation it would cause. This questions reveals that Trump has had a nuclear war on his mind for sometime.
In the good news and bad news department, Al Green (D-TX) introduced articles of impeachment against Trump today. Unfortunately the move died, but it remains for future use.
Noam Chompsky says: A very important study in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published in March 2017, reveals that the Obama nuclear weapons modernization program has increased “the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three — and it creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.” As the analysts point out, this new capacity undermines the strategic stability on which human survival depends. http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-presidency-imperils-world/
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-V6UXs_Mb3gA/Wd67GIPUVhI/AAAAAAABrQ8/ts85I0560YYjyu1bHY7wEGBIehKpE9Z_wCLcBGAs/s1600/0%2Bsteve%2Bsack.jpg
Drumpf will kill us one way or another.
Oompa Loompa doompadee doo
I’ve got another puzzle for you
Oompa Loompa doompadah dee
If you are wise you’ll listen to me
What do you get from a glut of TV?
A pain in the neck and an IQ of three
Why don’t you try simply reading a book?
Or could you just not bear to look?