Dem
47
GOP
53
Every day, this presidential administration finds new ways to make us scratch our heads and say "Huh?" The government is shut down right now, of course, though "essential" functions can still be performed. It's largely up to the White House to decide what is "essential," and yesterday someone decided that it simply cannot wait: We must know IMMEDIATELY what happened to Amelia Earhart.
Maybe you think we are joking, or making this up, but we're not. Yesterday, FBI officials in New York and Washington, DC, got priority orders to find any and all records they can locate related to Earhart's disappearance. This is a pressing enough matter that the deadline for submitting those materials to the White House is today, no exceptions.
We honestly cannot imagine what Donald Trump hopes to accomplish here. It's been close to 90 years since Earhart disappeared. How much undiscovered documentation could there possibly be (even if you include a search of the bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago)? And how could that documentation possibly resolve the mystery of Earhart's disappearance? At the time she vanished, 16 days were spent trying to figure it out, and since then both professional and amateur investigators have put the case under the magnifying glass thousands of times. And even if there is unknown documentation, and even if there are new insights to be had, why is this so important it needs to happen during a shutdown?
It's hard to come up with an explanation here, though there is certainly one possibility, and that is why we decided this news was worth at least a passing mention. The possibility that occurs to us, and that fits the facts, is that it's another sign Trump has become erratic and is losing mental control. Things like this happen; Caligula made his horse a consul (or tried, at least), Charles VI of France would go streaking in the royal gardens, King Farouk of Egypt hated the color red and would shoot out the tires of any red cars that passed him. We might be wrong, but it might also happen that, a year or two or three from now, the secret will be out, and people will say, "You know, all the signs were right there in front of us." (Z)