Mental Acuity Gone, America?  When facts face a nation, naked, unobscured, and the faithful still deny them, we’re truly on hallowed ground.  Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen are guilty of very serious crimes in which MAGA POTUS is implicated.  Of course, anyone with an intact medulla oblongata knew that Trump was lying from well before the election.  I just wonder if America is suffering from mass mental illness.  

A few years ago I visited Ellis Island.  This port of entry into the United States turned the hopeful—let’s call them dreamers—away for many reasons.  The room at the museum that bothered me the most was the one where mental illness was discussed.  An enormous number of would-be Americans were turned away because of what we would now recognize as mental illness.  It had many less flattering names back in the day, but the idea was that we only wanted bright, or at least competent, specimens to build up this nation.  Theirs was a misplaced and misguided fear; we specialize in home-grown.  Any rational person has difficulty explaining the election of Trump in any other way.

Who can imagine running for the highest office in the land with literally thousands of open lawsuits against him (or her)?  Who can claim to be elected when their own home state—which knows him (or her) best—roundly and soundly rejects him (or her)?  When clear evidence of Russian collusion emerges, the GOP rises up and says “We see nothing wrong with a foreign government running the country.”  And this is not mental illness?  Is our Mental Acuity Gone, America?  Have we become a nation of (hashtag) idiots?

The events of the last few days have revealed in clear light what many rational people knew from the beginning—there has been massive and willful deception from the very inception of this administration.  The simple fact that 45 would assert that Cohen wouldn’t flip on him indicates that the incumbent had done something wrong and was counting on the loyalty of comrades to keep him in the clear.  Mental illness takes many forms.  One of them is a pathological avoidance of the truth.  Now that we know truth isn’t truth and that 45’s fixer knows more than he’s said so far, we have to wonder how deep down this incompetence goes.  Yet the GOP marches along in goose-step.  Depending on your angle of view, Miss Liberty won’t even show her face.