Lunacy unbound

 (In which the Blob again escapes the Sportsball compound for a time. You know the drill.)

"Mr. Vice-President ... Mr. Secretary ... the missiles are flying. Hallelujah. Hallelujah."

-- President Stillson, "The Dead Zone"

And, yes, I know: It was only a movie.

In real life, a madman like Greg Stillson could never reach the White House. He could never force his top general to put his hand on the palm reader that would activate the launching of nuclear weapons. He could never be that completely, stark raving, mad.

But look around now. Listen to what the President of the United States and his enablers are saying. Tell me we are not, as a nation, slowly working up to Greg Stillson level  lunacy.

You can call this melodrama, and maybe it is. Life rarely imitates art, and even when it does, it almost never does so exactly. So the likelihood that President Donald J. Trump will morph into Greg Stillson and instigate global annihilation is probably zero.

But look around. Listen to what he and his enablers are saying. Tell me we have not taken more than one step down that road.

I say this because the other day a group of Democratic congress critters, all of them veterans, issued a joint statement reminding service personnel of their duty as service personnel. Which is, they took an oath to the Constitution, not to any single person. Which is, they are therefore not obligated to obey an illegal order that comes from said person.

In fact, you can reasonably argue they are duty-bound not to.

Now, none of this is controversial, because it's merely stating a principle that has been part of American military tradition forever. And which has been followed on more than one occasion.

For instance: Almost 60 years ago, an American helicopter pilot went rogue in the most blatant way possible. The date was March 16, 1968, the site was a hamlet designated My Lai4, and the pilot's name was Hugh Thompson Jr.

Who went off script that day by landing his chopper between Vietnamese villagers and American troops commanded by a psychopath named Lt. William Calley.

Calley's men, in an unalloyed frenzy, were mowing down the old men, women and children who inhabited MyLai4 and throwing the bodies in a ditch. Even in a war whose lines were as blurred as Vietnam's, this was a singular act of barbarity.

So Thompson landed his chopper between Calley's men and the surviving villagers, and announced he'd open fire on any soldier who tried to resume the killing. 

He could have been court-martialed. He wasn't. In fact, several years later, he was decorated for his actions that day -- and, indirectly, for following the oath the Democratic veterans were reminding everyone of.

And yet you'd have thought they'd taken up with Benedict Arnold the way our Fearless Leader and all of those still in his thrall carried on.

The President, with his usual restraint, called it "sedition" and "treason", and said America used to hang people who said such things. His handlers and acolytes took up that cry. And it really did sound like lunacy unbound.

A movie script come to life?

Again, no. But look around, listen, and start counting all the realities rational Americans could scarcely have imagined ten months ago.

The President and Department of Defense, on the thinnest of pretexts, authorizing the murder of civilians in the Caribbean in violation of national sovereignty and international law. 

Sending U.S. military reservists to "restore order" in American cities (and their states) the President regards as politically hostile to his regime.

Empowering a rogue paramilitary force to drag people out of their homes, workplaces and even courthouses without due process, shipping them off to foreign gulags under the fig leaf that they're "dangerous illegal criminals" -- even though most of them are not, and some are American citizens or decorated service personnel whose only crime was the misdemeanor of crossing the border without proper documentation.

We live in a country now where these things happen. 

We live in a country now where the President of the United States can behave like a third-grade bully to a journalist doing her job ("Quiet, piggy"), and his handlers say, why, that's just the Prez being "frank and honest." And the White House press corps doesn't turn a hair because such Kafkaesque absurdities have become routine from a regime that tells us up is down, black is white and one-plus-one equals whatever the Regime says it does.

We live in a country now where the President's disjointed rambles and lapses into narcissistic fantasy seem to grow more numerous by the day, and whose disconnection from reality seems to grow with them. And which seem clear markers of a mental decline his inner circle denies as zealously as did Joe Biden's.

Who knows what lunatic notion will spring to such a mind next? And if it does, how would it be treason to say, "No, Mr. President. I can't do that"?

How would it not simply be a military man keeping true to his duty, and to his oath?