Here is where we are
On the day before my 90th birthday, it seems right to share some of the things I am reading today. One person commented that it is like living in an episode of Monty Python. It is instructive that Canadians loved the show while it never took off the the US in the same way. I didn’t expect to have to make such a comparison. I’ve thought that a certain person is actually nuts, but I fell like the small boy in the fairytale who was the only one to say out loud that the emperor has no clothes. All the members of the US congress could have some clout if they saw the reality. They have some power to use one of their constitutional amendments That doesn’ t seem to be on the horizon - yet.
From Paul Krugman:
“But after reading the letter that Trump just sent to the prime minister of Norway (Jonas Gahr Støre has confirmed that it’s genuine) there should be no doubt that we have a president who is suffering a real detachment from reality: . . How did a great, sophisticated nation, one of the world’s longest-standing republics, end up so fragile that it can be undone by one man’s dementia?”
From Anne Applebaum:
“Yet what matters isn’t the specific phrases, but the overall message: Donald Trump now genuinely lives in a different reality, one in which neither grammar nor history nor the normal rules of human interaction now affect him. Also, he really is maniacally, unhealthily obsessive about the Nobel Prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government and certainly not the Danish government, determines the winner of that prize. Yet Trump now not only blames Norway for failing to give it to him, but is using it as a justification for an invasion of Greenland.”
From Heather Cox Richardson
“Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s doctor Jonathan Reiner agreed: “This letter, and the fact that the president directed that it be distributed to other European countries, should trigger a bipartisan congressional inquiry into presidential fitness.”
Today three top American Catholic cardinals, Blase Cupich of Chicago, Robert McElroy of Washington, D.C., and Joseph Tobin of Newark, New Jersey, issued a joint statement warning the Trump administration that its military action in Venezuela, threats against Greenland, and cuts to foreign aid risk bringing vast suffering to the world. Nicole Winfield and Giovanna Dell’Orto of the Associated Press reported that the cardinals spoke up after a meeting at the Vatican in which several fellow cardinals expressed alarm about the administration’s actions. Cupich said that when the U.S. can be portrayed as saying “‘might makes right’—that’s a troublesome development. There’s the rule of law that should be followed.”
The New York Times reports:
Early on Tuesday morning, as Europe’s leaders continued to wring their hands over the president’s latest threats to Greenland, Mr. Trump posted an apparently A.I.-generated meme that showed him hoisting an American flag while standing on the island.
From Canaian Prime Minister speaking at Davos as reported by the New York Times:
“I will talk today about the breaking of the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a brutal reality where the geopolitics of the great powers is not subject to any constraint,” said Mr. Carney, who used a mixture of French and English in his address in Davos, Switzerland.
“Every day we are reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry,” he said. “That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
He added, “Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”