Columnists

A familiar children's tale is "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." It's the story of grim revenge: a man is hired to do a job, does it, isn't paid, and responds by abducting 130 children. Now Donald Trump is enacting a similar narrative: leading thousands of Americans to their deaths from COVID-19.

Based on a 13th-century German legend, The Pied Piper has four parts: The town of Hamelin hired the Pied Piper to get rid of its rats; the Piper took care of the problem; the town refused to pay him what they promised; and the Piper responded by luring away most of the Hamelin children.

The Pied Piper of Mar-a-Lago also has four segments:

1.Contract: Hamelin had a rat problem and hired the Pied Piper to deal with it. In 2016, those who voted for Donald Trump hired him to fix a problem: the economy of the United States was not working for the ninety-nine percent and the government needed to be shaken up. Hamelin hired an outsider to exterminate its rats; Trump's base hired a Washington outsider to "drain the swamp" and "make America great again."

2. Action: The Pied Piper fixed Hamelin's rat problem -- legend says by playing his flute and leading the rats away from the city. It's not clear that Trump fixed the problem that his base hired him for, but he did shake up Washington and, for the first three years of the Trump Administration, the stock market went up 52 percent (by-the-way: during the comparable three years of the Obama administration, the market went up 78 percent). -more-

People with mental illness are often taught to distrust our own instincts and to doubt the validity of our own perspectives. Yet, these are the wrong things to impart to someone. When in untreated psychosis, it can be useful for a recovering patient to realize that her or his beliefs were erroneous. Yet, as we continue in our recovery, we should be validated and not negated. Many if not most of the things that we believe to be true, in fact, are. -more-

Trump's Comeuppance? How Tweet It Is

Donald J. Trump is furious and the folks at Avaaz ("The World in Action") couldn't be happier. Avaaz, which describes itself as "a global web movement to bring people-powered politics to decision-making everywhere," finally tired of Trump's racist rants, misogynistic snubs, schoolyard-bully insults, and outright lies.

The straw that bent the camel's hump was two-fold: first was Trump's false complaint that voting-by-mail was tantamount to "election rigging"; the second was the fake news conspiracy tale that accused MSNBC's Joe Scarborough of murdering a female staffer in 2001.

Avaaz went straight to Twitter headquarters to lodge a complaint against Trump's Tweets and . . . it worked! "Twitter just took our movement’s advice and posted fact-checks on one of his tweets!" Avaaz huzzahed on May 27.

To absolutely no one's surprise, Trump immediately went buffoon-ballistic, threatening to shut down all of Twitterdom for daring to address his vile bile by adding a simple "Get the facts" link to one of his not-so-sweet Tweets.
Now the question is whether Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey will stand firm and continue to hold the Reprimander-in-chief accountable for his lies and libels? Avaaz wants to shower Dorsey with "a giant show of public support to go all-in on this direction." Avaaz claims to have held meetings with "top Twitter executives and we know they're listening."

Shortly after 1PM on May 28, the online petition topped 40,000 on its way to a goal of 50,000 signatures. On the petition's website, the names were flooding in at a phenomenal rate of two-per-second, with signees swarming from around the world. Clicks of support were coming in from as far off as Zimbabwe, Honduras, and the Arab Emirates. The whole world seems to be climbing onboard this tweet-storm. Here's the text of the petition to Dorsey "and all social media companies": -more-