The risk to our security resides in the White House

If anyone should have his security clearance lifted, it is Donald Trump.

Who in America's intelligence community can trust what might happen to highly classified information passed on to Trump?

Where do Trump's true loyalties lie? Do they extend beyond his own all-consuming ego??

Is he a captive of Putin and Russia's own intelligence apparatus?

His behavior and mounting evidence point to the answers.

No, the Trump Oval Office should be quarantined as off-limits to US intelligence findings.

Titrating Trump

I, like a multitude of others, chose not to watch tonight’s State of the Union address.

Mine wasn’t a political protest as it was for many. Donald Trump, I have concluded,  is not good for my health. To put it bluntly he literally makes me sick.

And if he so unsettles me — and I’m pretty healthy — what does he do to thousands of others who are less healthy?

I can still handle reading about him. I’m even OK with seeing his words in print, as disgusting and deceitful as they usually are. But if they — or he — get to be too much, I just avert my eyes, say a small prayer, take in the beauty of my surroundings or give thanks for the goodness in the world.

A mental health counsellor I know says that I have learned to “titrate” Trump. I'm told this is good. I take him in very, very small increments — drop by drop — until ... well, until I can’t tolerate any more.

I tune him out if I feel my blood pressure rising ... if I begin to react with anger at the disgust ... if I’m creeping up on wanting to throw something at his televised image.

Still photos of him even set me off.

This man is not just divisive, he’s sickening. A poison. He’s a poisonous and poisoning president.

And lest we forget, he is sickening even to himself. And that sets off another kind of sickness — melancholia, a sadness — for him.

Trump and the Apocalypse

From the beginning, the biggest problem with Donald Trump has been his deranged psychological state.

As numerous psychologists will tell you, Trump is a textbook malignant narcissist.

As noted repeatedly, but not enough, Trump’s existence is devoted to Trump, period.

Trump suffers (and he clearly DOES suffer) from “narcissistic personality disorder” or NPD.

Here are the manifestations of NPD. Judge for yourself whether they apply to Donald Trump:

• a grandiose sense of self-importance
• a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love
• a belief in one’s specialness or uniqueness such that one can only be understood by associating with others of unique high status
• excessive self-admiration – arrogance and utter lack of humility.
• a sense of entitlement
• an exploitative personality
• a lack of empathy and unwillingness to  recognize or identify with the feelings
 and needs of others.

Since he arrived in the White House,  Trump as become even more obsessed with self. As he becomes threatened by his own frantic undoing and hubris, he grows ever more defensive, deceptive, unstable and angry. Growing paranoia is likely in the mix.

 His response is to lash out at not only his perceived “enemies," but those around him, those who don’t bow and scrape before him.

And so we anticipate more firings to come.

If it weren’t for his fragile mental health, we might survive the demise of a merely incompetent Donald Trump.  But with a deranged president faced with defeat and public humiliation, we are threatened with his power to take us all down in a fit of madness.

And by “us” I mean humanity.

Think no further than a mad man (in both senses of the word) who has a doomsday nuclear arsenal at his disposal.

We can only hope that sane minds in the nation’s capital are thinking along these same lines. 

How could they NOT be?

Trump, in a lesser, but still dangerous, scenario of madness and anger, could brandish presidential threats to protect his all-consuming ego by holding hostage the rule of law.

We have yet to learn whether last year his arrogance played a direct role in undermining our elections.

Some weeks back I wrote eight Republican senators who have been identified as possibly willing to put the nation (and humanity) before their partisan interests. I asked that they initiate the removal of Trump from office on the grounds of his mental instability.

Only John McCain responded. His short letter was largely political boiler-plate that, predictably, avoided the question of Trump’s mental health.

Since then, the president’s behavior has become all the more ominous.

It is not alarmist to say that a mentally unstable Donald Trump is a threat to humankind. It’s time for Republicans and Democrats, for those closest to the president, for his family, for all of us, to insist on and force his resignation or impeachment.

MOAB hits home — mine and yours

Just to make the power of the GBU-43, aka “Mother of All Bombs,” up close and personal…

Dropped on our Portland neighborhood of HIllsdale, with 8,000 residents, the bomb obliterates every man, woman and child and all structures.

It would leave behind a wasteland.

If this is “conventional,” as in “conventional weapon,” we better rethink our conventions…fast.

A few other results from a search of the web. Two miles from where the bomb hits here in Southwest Portland, victims could be rendered deaf.

That takes us from Hillsdale to the Willamette River to the east, and to the Portland-Beaverton border to the west.

For several miles beyond that victims may suffer bleeding ears, to say nothing of trauma and the loss of family and friends.

Five miles away from the blast, the ground would shake and windows be broken. Question: Could this bomb trigger a massive earthquake?

Then there is the fiscal damage already being inflicted by the development and construction of this bomb. Each MOAB costs $16 million. That doesn’t include the cost of the planes needed to drop it.

To put that number in perspective, Portland Public Schools estimates its budget shortfall for next year to be $18 million, resulting in a projected loss of 70 teachers.

And what are the consequences of accepting the use of this weapon as “acceptable." The military-industrial complex, and our power-mad president, have at the ready so-call “tactical nuclear weapons.”


Russian, by the way, has a similar "conventional" bomb, and we know about the nuclear weaponry of North Korea, whose leader is as unpredictable and crazed as Donald Trump.