Trump and Pompeo offer free civics lesson: guest blog by Mike Hi

Nixon went to China and Trump goes to Hanoi.

Mike Pompeo is not Henry Kissinger nor is Donald Trump Richard Nixon, and this presents new problems that would seem even more dire than the problems once presented by Kissinger and Nixon.

Now that we've gotten a real taste of what it's like to be led by actual moral idiots, these new problems are being passed down to us as a whole new set of civic responsibilities; in fact, the best thing that can be said of this time is that it is allowing us to partake of a crash course in civics, with complete transparence: both our domestic and foreign affairs have provided the opportunity for us to learn where Iraq is in geographic relationship to Afghanistan, the history of Syria and Yemen, establish that Venezuela is not an island off the coast of Cuba, that NATO is unnecessary, and to realize that the Chairman of the House Oversight Committee is named Elijah Cummings who gets the last word in an oversight hearing, and so, so much more.

Pompeo and Trump on stage last night in Hanoi. This is not Simon and Garfunkle or even Tegan and Sara, this is the President of the US and The Secretary of State. Trump's describing the 'tremendous potential' of North Korea, as a real estate opportunity--the beaches, the coves, the beauty of the land, so beautiful--and Pompeo plays bass fiddle. Trump's licking his chops, you can see in Trump's eyes and in his finger-puppet gestures that he'd like to impose The Trump Brand on North Korea and may do so in the near future, as soon as 2020. Pompeo's the facilitator, the guy the boss always keeps by his side, a little smarter than the boss but not quite as rich, the one the rich big-picture-boss relies on for details.

Pompeo and Trump must have read the polls: more than half the kids in high school now don't know who Thomas Jefferson is! Or Captain and Tennille. Civic lessons must now be self-administered or provided by the examples of the leader we've chosen, Trump himself; only then, once Trump was elected President by the electoral college, could Trump choose Pompeo, the Senate confirming Trump's choice of Pompeo, but not before Trump chose Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of an international oil company, as Secretary of State, and so on.

This is the way it works when civics aren't taught in the schools. We get leaders more and more incompetent, breathtakingly so. Yet they teach us, they just keep teaching us: possible impeachment and the possibility of the unctuous Mike Pence becoming president, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the process of the appointment of unqualified federal judges, the dangers of nepotism, Jared Kushner, Little Rocket Man and Michael Cohen and Roger Stone, Wikileaks, "Fox and Friends", Twitter, The Wall, collusion, how to properly grab women's private parts, The Inauguration...the incompetence never seems to end though it seems we've developed a taste for more and more.

My high school civics teacher, the Hon. Peter Sellers, appearing as President Muffley in Stanley Kubrick's 'Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb', 1964, my freshman year.