WEIGHT WATCHER

WEIGHT WATCHER

I'm on a diet.

It's not the usual kind --  cutting carbs, avoiding sugar, portion control.

My diet is cultural and political.  

It tries to avoid ingesting . . . 

Anything Trump.

This is not easy and may not even be possible.  Every time I turn on a news program or flip through a newspaper, I am confronted with all things Trump -- his latest lie or mean tweet or juvenile tantrum or just plain stupid claim.  

Some are quite serious, like his statements in Helsinki last month more or less denying the Russians interfered in the 2016 Presidential election.  They enable both an enemy and a domestic fifth column of support for that enemy's fascist regime.  

There really is no difference these days between Russia and the old Soviet Union.  In both, the governmental norm is/was  Orwellian double speak, the arbitrary arrest and/or killing of dissenters, and a kleptocratic corruption at the top.  As Timothy Snyder has made clear in his recently published "The Road to Unfreedom", the old USSR and the new Russia differ only in the ostensible ends to which their authoritarianism was/is directed -- a world wide communist revolution in the case of the former , a fascist Eurasianism in the case of the latter.  In both, oblvious to history, the dictatorial regime asserts the inevitability of its ends and rigorously subverts competing systems -- capitalism in the case of the USSR and rule of law liberalism in the case of the new Russia.  The subversion is accomplished by any available and effective means -- military support for other communist regimes and the subjugation of the whole of eastern Europe in the case of the USSR; poisoning adversaries, cyber warfare, old fashion spy craft (e.g., Maria Butina) and phony elections in the case of the new Russia. 

That the head of today's new Russia was a committed KGB spy in yester-years' old Soviet Union is no accident; to the contrary, it is perfect symmetry.

And, because he is President, Donald Trump's toadyism -- his unwillingness to confront Vladimir Putin, and his practiced habit of pulling punches or suggesting false alternative explanations for Russia's blatant interference in elections both here and in Europe -- is at best dangerous and at worst treasonous.

But then . . .

There is everything else.

Like the latest Omarosa contretemps.

That episode ranks somewhere between utterly predictable and side-splittingly comical.  

Omarosa is, as we all know, a one-time and thrice-fired contestant on Trump's "Celebrity Apprentice" reality television show.  With no qualifications other than having said "great" things about the Donald, she became a White House adviser once he became President.  He then fired her a fourth time, with Chief of Staff John Kelly this time doing the dirty work.  On the day she was fired, the grounds appeared to be her misuse of a car service; over time, however, her general obnoxiousness and divisiveness has worked its way into the story in a White House where there is no room for either inasmuch as this space is fully occupied at the top.

Over the course of the last week, we learned that Omarosa had tape recordings (how many is still unknown) of her days in the President's employ, and last Sunday she began slow walking them to the public.  First she broadcast the tape of Kelly firing (and threatening) her in the Situation Room where her forced removal was announced.  Later she released a tape of her and three campaign aides discussing Trump's apparent use of the n-word.  In response, the White House accused her of imperiling national security and Trump tweeted that she is a "dog".  Trump also tweeted that the n-word is not "in [his] vocabulary", limited as that may be in any case.

OK, so in pot calling kettle black territory, this is up there for a number of reasons. 

One is that Trump imperils national security more or less on a daily basis. So much so that, before he talked to European leaders at last month's NATO summit, his national security adviser, John Bolton, made sure the NATO communique had been signed and agreed to by all members just so the President could not screw it up.  Alongside denials about Russian cyber crimes, a trade war with Canada, inept tariffs, and friends across the world more irate than allied,  Omarosa's violation of the sacred Situation Room is small bore.

Another is that Omarosa and the Donald deserve each other. Both are back stabbing narcissists. Nothing Manigault-Newman is telling us now (e.g., Donald is a racist) was not known to her quite some time ago.  Between birtherism, Mexicans as rapists, Maxine Waters' "extraordinarily low I.Q", "shithole" African countries, and his own history in NYC (condemning five black youths to death for a rape they did not commit and racially profiling would be tenants for his family's apartment buildings), there is no news here.  

Donald Trump is a racist . . .

And has been for a long time . . . 

Regardless of whether he ever uttered the n-word.

In one respect, however, Omarosa hit the nail on the head.  "There's only one way to shut Donald Trump down," she said in an interview on Wednesday, "and that is just don't give him the oxygen.  And the oxygen comes from the clicks, the likes, the shock, the discussion."

She's right.

We all need to  . . .

Go on my diet.