313 - Entering Dante's Inferno: Today's Torment of Hell, with Fires Raging

            Hell is depicted by Dante as nine concentric circles of torment located within the Earth; it is the "realm...of those who have rejected spiritual values by yielding to bestial appetites or violence, or by perverting their human intellect to fraud or malice against their fellowmen."

            (Readers:  How deeply are these United States descending into Dante's circles of Hell?  This is a serious question, not a rhetorical one. So do please let me know and I can post your answers as comments to this post.)

            No modern political animal has ever plunged us so thoroughly into the abyss of disdain.  But, then, no convicted felon and sexual predator has ever contemplated turning our nation's justice over to a sex trafficker who displayed nude photographs of women to his colleagues in the chamber of the House of Representatives.  Maine Sen. Susan Collins at first said that she was shocked, then backed off.  Alaska's Sen. Lisa Murkowski equated nominating Matt Gaetz to bringing George Santos, liar in chief, into the cabinet. Republican male senators may have been equally stunned by Trump's pick for Justice but have said little. None, however, has appreciated his trolling relentlessly for himself and Trump. Whether collectively they will have the integrity to reject at least a handful of Trump's more bizarre nominations has yet to be seen. Doing so will be an early test of leadership in the new Senate. How does our Republic's betters handle pathological disassociation in its presidential person?

            Trump, our new president, may purposely be making a mockery of governing. By nominating for senior positions in our government so many persons qualified only by fealty to him (more than loyalty) he may intend imposing his idiosyncratic instincts for provocative mayhem on his entire administration, and certainly on his followers.  The rest of us are just meant to suffer and fume until our flames die out. But, somewhere, the nine circles of Hell boil expectantly.

            Mockery, as well as unmitigated revenge, must motivate nominating so many palpably unqualified persons to cabinet and cabinet-level positions.  Pete Hegseth, at Defense, would preside over chiefs of staff and his military betters despite having publicly declared that he would cleanse our war-fighting machine of "woke" generals, wholesale. He has urged firing chiefs of staff and other generals and admirals. He has also declared himself against women in combat, sending Pentagon policies backwards and reducing our effective fighting power just when combat with China and confronting Russia in Europe is becoming more urgent, more dangerous. 

            Hegseth has been an outspoken champion of service members who have been accused of hideous war crimes. In a published book, Hegseth asked whether General Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would have gotten his job as the highest-ranking military officer in the country if he were not Black.  Hegseth was involved in a rape case that was settled by payments from him. It needs to be spotlit, too.

            The titanic struggles against Putin and Xi Jinping, and the ongoing wars in the Middle East, demand impeccable intelligence gathering and analysis of the highest order.  So, to sabotage American warring capabilities, Trump has appointed two (not one!) unqualified persons to run the CIA (John Ratcliffe) and the directorate of national intelligence.  Tulsi Gabbard's qualifications for the latter position are non-existent except for the fact that she was investigated by the FBI for tilting materially toward Putin and palavering with Syria's dictator Bashar al-Assad.  After Putin invaded Ukraine, she blamed her country for provoking Putin. And then she averred without a shred of evidence that the U.S. had covertly worked with Ukraine to invent biological pathogens.  Trump obviously enjoys having unbalanced conspiracists in charge of vital global intelligence.  What will her stalwart staff think of her? And who can trust her? Who makes up these wild mismatches of talent and need?  Sen. Mitt Romney says that Gabbard has parroted "false Russian propaganda."  But he won't be around to vote against her. In Russia, the possibility of her guardianship of American intelligence gathering has elicited great glee. They welcome her as a "comrade."

            The proposed appointments to Interior and the EPA will harm our already promised efforts to reduce fossil fuel use and keep our national parks available for present and future generations of Americans. Our responsibility to counter global warming and join China in reducing the CO2 that we together spew into the atmosphere, along with vast amounts of methane, will be hindered greatly by those proposed appointments as well as by Trump's denial of the existence of accelerated climate change.

            Trump's nomination of a prominent fracker and fossil fuel executive to be energy secretary only compounds the planet's misery, especially since Chris Wright calls climate change a wild hoax and promises to everything possible to keep the atmosphere heating up.  What were younger voters thinking when they cast ballots for Trump?  Biblical floods are already at hand, plus impenetrable droughts not seen in a century.

            Trump will jeopardize the health of the planet, for sure.  But Trump seems determined to damage our personal health, too, by taking us back to the unhealthy and unregulated cesspits of the nineteenth century.  That is what his absurd nomination of Robert Kennedy Jr, a lawyer with no medical training or experience, will mean, if the Senate bows to Trump and approves Kennedy's appointment to head Health and Human Services.  

            “I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on medicines.” Those are Trump's unhinged words.

            Folks, stock up on fluoride pills because Kennedy thinks fluoride (and vaccinations) cause autism (there is no evidence) and seeks to take fluoride out of our national water supplies, state by state.  Kennedy is also an anti-vaxxer, a further and dangerous promoter of conspiracy nuttiness. He asserts that the use of antidepressant medicine is the main cause of mass shootings, that sunscreen is harmful, that autism can be cured by chelation, and that 5G cellular networks are being employed to control our behavior. Certain chemicals in our water are responsible, he says, for sexual dysphoria in children. He wants everyone to drink raw milk. He wants to combat Covid-19 with unproven therapies such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. He promises to prosecute medical journals and fire hundreds of civil servants from his prospective department. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy, other relatives, and his birth family call him "dangerous" and unqualified. There is likely no end to the calamities in our medical defenses that Kennedy's pernicious meddling will cause. But Trump prefers interminable chaos to real governing, and Kennedy will do his part to wreck what has been constructed so laboriously over decades. Even the most corrupt and kleptocratic African nation approaches governance with greater seriousness than Trump and his anointed nominees.

            Why would Trump try to install such a backward-bending anti-science conspiracy monger to run our biggest and, arguably, most important bureaucratic entity?  To mock, as I have indicated, to stick his finger in establishment machinery and to express his disdain for Washington.  Jeopardizing the health and prosperity of the American republic by appointing patently unqualified people like Kennedy, Gabbard, Gaetz, Wright, Mehmet Oz, and the rest to help run our nation at a time when Xi and Putin want to see us falter and collapse, and when our hard power as well as our soft power are both being diminished, paves the rapid descent into Hell. Those who voted for Trump will soon obtain that perfidy for which they never bargained, plus the inflation and potential recession that will follow deportations and unnecessary tariffs.

            Trump is on track to undermine the fight for survival by courageous Ukrainians, too. And losing Ukraine to Russia will almost immediately forfeit Taiwan to China. The world, especially our enemies, are watching.  Nominations telegraph the seriousness and intelligence of the nominator:  Beijing and Moscow smirk.

            Thursday evening Trump bleated loudly about the thousands of Ukrainians that were dying and said that he would stop the war.  But unless he shows strength, not weakness, and quickly gives Zelensky every weapon that Ukraine needs and can use to fight back against Putin's invaders, the battle against communism could well be lost for generations.  President Biden's release Sunday of long-range shelling by Ukraine will help.  (Please also see Monday's column, Nov. 18.)