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DonViejo

(60,536 posts)
Tue May 23, 2017, 04:51 PM May 2017

The definitive book about the Trump administration was written in 1951 - By Richard Cohen

By Richard Cohen Opinion writer May 22 at 7:33 PM

Back in 1951, Herman Wouk published the definitive book about the Trump administration. He set it in the 1940s, during the war in the Pacific, aboard a destroyer-minesweeper skippered by a paranoid man with a compulsion to blame others for his mistakes. The captain was named Philip Francis Queeg, his ship was called the USS Caine, and the novel was “The Caine Mutiny.” It won the Pulitzer Prize. It’s a dead certainty President Trump never read it.

But maybe he saw the movie , in which Humphrey Bogart plays Queeg, a performance that earned him an Oscar nomination, or the Broadway play, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” — but none of that is likely, either. The character of Queeq would have been too close to home for him and the mutiny too terrible to contemplate.

In seizing command, Queeg’s fellow officers invoked Article 184, which is the Navy’s version of the Constitution’s 25th Amendment. I wrote about this amendment — which provides for the removal of a president if he is incapacitated — in early January, convinced that the Trump presidency, like a winged pig, was an oxymoron that was bound to crash. The man was not yet president, but he had revealed his character over the years in his business dealings and his public pronouncements. It was enough for me that he had insisted that President Barack Obama was not American-born. Trump had no evidence — just a lack of scruples. Nothing has changed.

In “The Caine Mutiny,” our first hint that Queeg is unbalanced comes when he tries to cover up a serious mistake — running over a towline in a gunnery drill. Later, when the Caine has to participate in an invasion of a Pacific island, Queeg cuts and runs and then demands his officers support his decision. They choose instead to keep silent.

We have many such similarities with Trump. Maybe the most psychologically egregious occurred right after the inauguration when he sent out Sean Spicer to lie about the size of the crowd. This was seemingly a small matter, but the inability to distinguish between the trivial and the consequential is, we now know, a Trump character malfunction.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-definitive-book-about-the-trump-administration-was-written-in-1951/2017/05/22/89686858-3f16-11e7-9869-bac8b446820a_story.html

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The definitive book about the Trump administration was written in 1951 - By Richard Cohen (Original Post) DonViejo May 2017 OP
" . . . . and then there were the strawberries . . . . " no_hypocrisy May 2017 #1

no_hypocrisy

(45,786 posts)
1. " . . . . and then there were the strawberries . . . . "
Tue May 23, 2017, 05:15 PM
May 2017

Captain Queeg: Ahh, but the strawberries that's... that's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic... that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox DID exist, and I'd have produced that key if they hadn't of pulled the Caine out of action. I, I, I know now they were only trying to protect some fellow officers...

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