This is It - Make No Mistake Where You Are

You'll have to read to the end to understand the title of this post. Sorry.

After my last post, I received a number of comments and messages, as is typical. Usually, I'll get some comments and messages agreeing with what I've said, some that may correct minor points, and some that flat-out disagree with me.

That's okay; I encourage that. Diversity of thought is under attack in the media, on our college campuses, in some cities, and elsewhere in our lives, so if I can provide a forum for it, I'm more than willing.

This time, however, no one disagreed with my premises regarding the impeachment process, nor with my comparison between the House's committee impeachment hearings and the Senate Judiciary Committee's questioning of IG Horowitz. No one even took exception to my assertion that Trump was never worried about Biden as a serious political adversary, because even the Democrats are fearful that Biden can't beat Trump.

No, this time there were but two camps: those who agreed with my points, and those who ignored them altogether to point out other awful things about Trump, most notably his mean-spirited tweets, although one messenger went on at length about all the names Trump called his Republican primary opponents.

Most of whom support him now, but apparently somebody is still pissed about it.

The most common theme related to Trump's ill-advised and wholly unnecessary tweet about Greta Thunberg a few days ago. Now, I have friends with autistic kids, and I'm very compassionate about that particular condition. I would like to tone down the emotion, however, and point out a couple of facts.

First, while Ms. Thunberg may be considered by some to be a "child," she is sixteen years of age. Still too young for Trump to be targeting her in a tweet, just as Barron Trump - who is kept out of the public eye - is too young to be publicly targeted by a law school professor who would rather cross the street than walk in front of a Trump hotel, so deep is her hatred of the man. (I don't recall any of the same folks calling out that behavior as unacceptable. Maybe it's okay, depending on who the child is.)

Second, Ms. Thunberg has Asperger's syndrome, which is within the autism spectrum, but is a particularly high-functioning manifestation. No matter; these may well be distinctions without differences. However, it seems to me that to use the characterization of "autistic child" when that isn't quite accurate is merely an attempt to evoke sympathy and vulnerability in making Trump out to be even worse than he is, when it comes to his tweets, which comes across as exploitative.

It's not necessary - he's bad enough on his own. I'll state yet again for the record: I do not defend his tweets. I find them churlish, ill-mannered, unnecessary, immature, inappropriate, bombastic, superlative, braggadocious, crude, distasteful and hyperbolic. Write it down. I don't want to keep repeating it. And I don't need to defend myself to anyone, thank you (see Matt. 7:5).

However, there is something that folks should be aware of regarding young Ms. Thunberg, and then I'll make a few observations.

There are at least a couple of left-wing climate change groups behind her, one of which paid her way across the pond on a boat to address the U.N. on the topic. (What, you thought she paid her own way by flipping burgers at a Swedish McDonald's?) And why would they do that?

Because she is indeed a sympathetic and vulnerable face on the radical fringe of the climate change movement - you know, the "we'll all be dead in 12 years" faction.

To disagree with her is to be perceived as attacking her, and it's despicable to attack a child with a disability. So she's held up in front of the climate change extremists as a human shield, so that if you attack the cause, you're a reprehensible cad.

Just as Christine Blasey Ford was held up by Dianne Feinstein et al in defense of preventing Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court: none of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee dared question her allegations, though her own witnesses couldn't corroborate them, for fear of being seen as attacking a victim of assault. Never mind that the myriad allegations against Kavanaugh probably set the Me-Too movement back years.

And just as former Ambassador Yovanovitch was held up by Adam Schiff et al as a poor, sympathetic woman who was *gasp* fired from her job! No one dared call her a disgruntled former employee, in spite of the fact that she clearly came across as one; no one dared question her service record in the various hot-spots in which she served, no matter how things turned out in those places. She is, after all, a woman.

Vulnerable as they may be, neither Amb. Yovanovitch nor Ms. Thunberg seemed as triggered by Trump's tweets about them as were their defenders. The Ambassador, after Schiff read Trump's tweet about her to her, proceeded to testify against him for hours. And Ms. Thunberg, who herself refers to Asperger's as a "superpower" that contributes to her ability to stand strong for her cause, responded with her own clever tweet, which was a pretty solid counter-punch. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Trump read it, chuckled, and said to himself, "Well played, Greta."

Now, some observations. First, regarding Greta's being named Time Magazine's person of the year, I offer my congratulations. I do, however, wonder how many trees are cut down every year to print magazines. Seems that if she's serious about the environment, Greta might want to thank Time for the honor, but admonish them for deforestation.

Second, I find her chosen form of protest curious: she stages school strikes, wherein students skip school to protest against climate change. If it's fine with her parents, it's fine with me. It just seems ironic that she's skipping science class to protest against climate change. Maybe she already knows everything there is to know about climate science.

Third, none of the above should be misconstrued by anyone as attacks on her. They're just curiosities I have, born of the irony of their circumstances. I am probably more bothered by her being exploited by her handlers and her defenders than her defenders are. I will, however, bar no holds in taking shots at adults who take their climate science policy cues from a 16-year-old non-scientist.

Back to Trump's tweets. Look, I wish he wouldn't tweet at all. To some extent, he has to in order to get his message across; CNN, MSNBC and ABC will never report positive economic data, or cover Trump visiting our troops in Afghanistan on Thanksgiving (instead letting themselves be hilariously trolled into saying he's playing golf, a clever gambit which exposed the media for what they are), or show the applause he received at this year's Army-Navy game. So he has to resort to Twitter to get those messages into the mainstream.

But I'd be happy if he just closed his account, or turned over control to a cooler head within his press team.

And yet -

None of his tweets constitute an impeachable offense.

So the fact that his mean tweets were universally invoked as a response to my post about the sham of an impeachment process Congress is now wasting its time and our money on, rather than any substantive defense of "abuse of power" or "obstruction of Congress," or any argument in support of Joe Biden's prowess as a threat to Trump's re-election, is pretty much evidence that -

This is it - make no mistake where you are. If you believe that Donald Trump should be impeached and removed from office, your basis for that action - which should be reserved for the most egregious and serious of offenses - is that you don't like the guy.

That's a slippery slope down which we as a nation do not want to venture, but I fear we're headed that way. This may well become how we wage political campaigns in the future, and how our legislators spend our hard-earned tax dollars.

A final note: I have been remiss, as the author of a blog originally devoted to economic and market topics, in not weighing in on the equity market's take on this impeachment imbroglio.

In a word, the market's reaction is *yawn*.

Now, during the Nixon impeachment process, the market was tanking, but the economy was in recession, and there was a looming oil crisis. (Today, the U.S. is the #1 energy producer in the world. You won't see that on MSNBC.) And during the Clinton impeachment process, the market was rallying, but Alan Greenspan was busy inflating the dot-com bubble.

More recently, the market has fluctuated, but only due to trade concerns or hopes, and overwhelmingly positive economic data.

What's significant about that, especially in light of the market's apparent nonchalance over the Nixon and Clinton impeachments?

Under Nixon, the economy was in the toilet - it wasn't going to matter who was President.

Under Clinton, the market was rallying, but thanks largely to the Fed. Plug in Al Gore, and the market likely doesn't suffer greatly, not with interest rates at then-record lows.

But remember what happened when Trump was elected? The market, which had been trading sideways based on an economy that could barely average 2% growth under an administration with decidedly unfriendly policies toward business, sold off in overnight futures trading by some 800 points after it was announced that Trump won.

Then, not only did the market recover those losses by the open, but it finished the day up 300 points.

An 1,100-point swing in 24 hours' trading is unprecedented, and undeniably triggered by an event - in this case, the election of Donald Trump as President. And the rally has continued, with major indices having set about 100 new records since that day. The business sector likes the guy, whether you do or not.

If the market were fearful that Trump would be removed from office, knowing that the Dems would then likely go after VP Pence, it would be spooked into record lows by the prospect of Pres. Pelosi.

But the market is betting that Trump won't be removed. And the market usually isn't wrong about these things.