{"id":113328,"date":"2019-09-11T00:38:49","date_gmt":"2019-09-11T07:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=113328"},"modified":"2019-09-03T16:35:10","modified_gmt":"2019-09-03T23:35:10","slug":"if-trump-were-an-airline-pilot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2019\/09\/if-trump-were-an-airline-pilot.html","title":{"rendered":"If Trump Were an Airline Pilot"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Back in 2016, the Right Wing Lie Machine published a famous essay ginning up hysteria among the suckers who have been trained by years and years of Right Wing Lie Machine Panics du Jour to fly into a terror about everything the Lie Machine commands them to fear and lose their sanity about. (Who can forget the Tan Suit Panic du Jour<\/a>, the Latte Salute Panic du Jour,<\/p>\n

<\/iframe><\/p>\nor the <a href=\"http:\/\/gawker.com\/5839906\/fox-news-troubled-by-obamas-use-of-paper-clip\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Paper Clip Panic du Jour<\/a>?). Indeed, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cheatsheet.com\/entertainment\/15-ridiculous-moments-fox-news-attacked-barack-obama.html\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">here are a mere 15 more of the countless Panics du Jour to which the Right Wing Noise Machine trained the brainwashing victims in the FOX audience to Pavlovianly respond<\/a>.<\/p>\nWith an audience as mindlessly brainwashed as that, it was child\u2019s play for the Lie Machine to stir up the suckers with the spectre of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.claremont.org\/crb\/basicpage\/the-flight-93-election\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">The Flight 93 Election<\/a> and play upon all the nativist fears of Trump\u2019s racist base with visions of Brown People Coming to Kill Us All. <\/p>\nBut 2 1\/2 years into this unstable imbecile\u2019s catastrophic rule, the wheels are coming off and James Fallows returns to precisely the image deployed by the Lie Machine to asks sane people what they would do <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/notes\/2019\/08\/if-trump-were-airline-pilot\/596575\/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share&fbclid=IwAR3z_wKKGlFM12kUuquGZNOgzFDmg_91ACZcEFUsyCZlgUjv7mK7RMBRu2A\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">if a person like Trump were, in fact, an airline pilot<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>ut now we\u2019ve had something we didn\u2019t see so clearly during the campaign. These are episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting: An actually consequential rift with a small but important NATO ally, arising from the idea that the U.S. would \u201cbuy Greenland.\u201d Trump\u2019s self-description as \u201cthe Chosen One,\u201d and his embrace of a supporter\u2019s description of him as the \u201csecond coming of God\u201d and the \u201cKing of Israel.\u201d His logorrhea, drift, and fantastical claims in public rallies, and his flashes of belligerence at the slightest challenge in question sessions on the White House lawn. His utter lack of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/ideas\/archive\/2019\/08\/trumps-el-paso-photo-is-obscene\/595888\/\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">affect or empathy<\/a>\u00a0when personally meeting the most recent shooting victims, in Dayton and El Paso. His reduction of any event, whatsoever, into what people are saying about\u00a0him<\/em>.<\/p>\nObviously I have no standing to say what medical pattern we are seeing, and where exactly it might lead. But just from life I know this:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>If an airline learned that a pilot was talking publicly about being \u201cthe Chosen One\u201d or \u201cthe King of Israel\u201d (or Scotland or whatever), the airline would be looking carefully into whether this person should be in the cockpit.<\/li>\n<li>If a hospital had a senior surgeon behaving as Trump now does, other doctors and nurses would be talking with administrators and lawyers before giving that surgeon the scalpel again.<\/li>\n<li>If a public company knew that a CEO was making costly strategic decisions on personal impulse or from personal vanity or slight, and was doing so more and more frequently, the board would be starting to act. (See: Uber, management history of.)<\/li>\n<li>If a university, museum, or other public institution had a leader who routinely insulted large parts of its constituency\u2014racial or religious minorities, immigrants or international allies, women\u2014the board would be starting to act.<\/li>\n<li>If the U.S. Navy knew that one of its commanders was routinely lying about important operational details, plus lashing out under criticism, plus talking in \u201cChosen One\u201d terms, the Navy would not want that person in charge of, say, a nuclear-missile submarine. (See: The Queeg saga in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Caine_Mutiny\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">The Caine Mutiny<\/em><\/a>, which would make ideal late-summer reading or viewing for members of the White House staff.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nYet now such a\u00a0 person is in charge not of one nuclear-missile submarine but all of them\u2014and the bombers and ICBMs, and diplomatic military agreements, and the countless other ramifications of executive power.<\/p>\nIf Donald Trump were in virtually\u00a0any other position of responsibility<\/em>, action would already be under way to remove him from that role.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Back in 2016, the Right Wing Lie Machine published a famous essay ginning up hysteria among the suckers who have been trained by years and years of Right Wing Lie Machine Panics du Jour to fly into a terror about everything the Lie Machine commands them to fear and lose their sanity about. (Who can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1071],"class_list":["post-113328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-the-cult-of-trump"],"yoast_head":"\n<title>If Trump Were an Airline Pilot<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Back in 2016, the Right Wing Lie Machine published a famous essay ginning up hysteria among the suckers who have been trained by years and years of Right\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2019\/09\/if-trump-were-an-airline-pilot.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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