25th Amendment, Section 4

For the first time in 70 years, the world finds itself without a leader.  The consequences would seem to range from merely “bad,” if we’re fortunate, to something much worse.

In truth, it’s hard to grasp that this is even really happening.  That it’s not just a TV show.

(What’s more, that it’s happening with a huge assist from our primary adversary of those past 70 years, Moscow.)

(And that it’s happening, in a sense, as the culmination of work begun in 1958 when Fred Koch helped found the rabidly anti-communist John Birch Society.*)

(And as questions about team Trump’s Russia connections are now joined by this must-read story of his Azerbaijani deal.)

So how do we fix this?

Do we wait for something truly awful to happen?

Do we suffer a long, slow slide toward a long, drawn-out impeachment?

Do we wait for the Captain Queeg moment that has surely crossed the brain pans of all my older readers, as it has mine?

Or at some point possibly sooner rather than later do we rip the bandage off — real fast — as responsible Republicans invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution?

That would be my preference.  “Reckless, unhinged, and petty” are not what the world needs right now.

*What irony, that two of the key forces that converged (along with others) to give us Trump would start from such polar opposite places — the Soviet Union and the John Birch Society.  Though of course Soviet communism is long dead; Russia is a kleptocracy whose ruler may be nearly as wealthy as the Kochs. Not that the Kochs supported Trump directly — they opposed him in the primary, presumably agreeing with Colin Powell that he was “a national disgrace,” with Karl Rove that he was “a complete idiot,” with 51 former Republican national security officials that he was “dangerous.”  But the work the Kochs had funded over the decades to help build Republican turn-out certainly made a difference in an election as close as this one, where Trump came within 3 million votes of his superbly qualified, steady, respected opponent.