WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT: Strawberries

F LoBuono

If you had the great misfortune of witnessing the White House Corona Virus Task Force press briefing led by President Trump this evening (4/13/2020), you would have seen a man consumed by ego, greed, vanity, and paranoia. An analogy pointed out by a friend on social media, saying he's gone totally Captain Queeg, referring to the psychotic ship's captain character played by Humphrey Bogart in The Caine Mutiny, seemed wholly appropriate.

In the 1954 film, Queeg takes over a warship, a destroyer named the USS Caine, where discipline and morale seem to be mostly lacking. At first, the crew responds positively to the hard-charging new captain. He will make them proud to serve again. Then, as the pressure of command begins to ratchet up, their commander becomes more and more unhinged. He makes serious mistakes in leadership and, despite his position, refuses to take responsibility for them, preferring to blame his underlings - the crew is deliberately incompetent just to make him look bad. He is cruel to the sailors and demeans his junior officers. In other words, he's not a leader. He's a bully with gold bars on his shoulders.

His psychosis becomes completely exposed when he assembles the ship's officers to the ship's state room where he uses ladles of sand in an elaborate demonstration to expose a diabolic act perpetrated by one of the crew that threatens the very soul of the ship - someone has stolen a pint of frozen strawberries. After a few minutes, virtually all of the officers realize that the Caine's fate is now in the hands of a man suffering with severe dementia, i.e. a madman. The only way to insure the safety of the crew is to commit the last resort for sailors under a tyrannical leader - mutiny. After much debate, the officers agree to remove Queeg from command.

This evening, the President once again showed us just how further unglued he continues to become. Instead of giving useful information on the progress of the disease and our efforts to defeat it, he spent the majority of his time railing against the press, arguing with reporters, blaming a host of others, of course, lying, and ultimately showing a promotional video defending his response to the Pandemic. Then, in the ultimate Constitutional Blasphemy, he said his authority is not to be questioned. All he needed to go full Queeg was to say, it was the strawberries. . . 

This is leadership?

This is megalomania!!

This is a man willing to sell out the country for a pint of strawberries!!

For the good of their ship, the officers aboard the Caine had the courage and conviction to risk everything; their careers and their very lives. If found guilty, the penalty for mutiny in times of war is death. Of course, they didn't arrive at their decision lightly.

We don't have to risk quite that much to make the right decision. We just have to wait until and then the right thing. VOTE THEM OUT.