DRAWING BLOOD WITH HANLON'S RAZOR

It's all done but the crowing. The Greatest American Witch Hunt (2.0) is over... and again, the witches have won.

Without the need for witnesses or documentary evidence, the Republican Senators have acquitted the president of crimes against the nation.

As expected, Trump moved quickly to claim total vindication and exoneration. Republicans leaped to back him up, excoriating Democrats for perpetrating this hoax on the American people.

Some of the Senators who acknowledged his guilt, but voted to acquit anyway, think Trump will be chastened, put "on notice" to rein in his criminal tendencies.

There's no evidence of that happening.

At the national prayer breakfast Thursday morning Trump accused Senator Romney of hiding behind his religion, voting guilty even though that Mormon scumbag knows the president is innocent.

This is pure Trump. People not only behave very badly when they attack him. For some inexplicable reason, they go against what they know to be true. What is wrong with those idiots?

Don't they realize Trump is privy to all the secret nooks and crannies of the heart? That guy is in a perfect position to call you out on your dishonesty.

And where does he get this wonderful knowledge? Probably the same place any human being gets knowledge: out of his ample ass.

Trump is an exaggerated example of the standard human being, the creatures who know what they know and can't be wrong (as far as they can tell).

Trump appears to believe the nonsense he vomits out, and he gets volumes of support in his paranoiac position from politicians who depend on him to deliver votes for their reelections.

Trump must recognize the power he holds over those people, yet he seems to revel in their acclamation as if it were nothing but sincere. Who is conning whom here?

Trump gleefully extols his exoneration by the Senate, as if that result was not a corrupt vote along partisan lines. But unrecognized corruption can still rot the heart. Question is, are those not-guilty voting senators truly tainted?

Perhaps we should be generous and apply Hanlon's Razor here:

"Never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity."

Maybe the majority of Republican senators really did think Trump not guilty. The president believes in his innocence (or at least, repeatedly asserts his innocence). Maybe the senators concur. And their votes to acquit, though idiotic, were heartfelt.

My problem with Hanlon's Razor is that the word "never" goes too far. It suggests that stupidity and incompetence are far more prevalent than malice.

In my estimation, stupidity often leads directly to malice.

Idiotic thinking engenders pumped-up rage in weak individuals. And when you know you're right (and human beings almost always know they're right), going forward to fix a perceived wrong is simply what you do next.

Lock and load, baby, you have to act on what you know!

Donald Trump knows the Democrat-pursued charges stemming from the Ukraine phone call was nothing less than an attempt to overthrow the legitimate government of the United States.

In this case, the president is simply employing Trump's Razor: Forget incompetence; all actions come from malice.

This is what he knows to be true.

And he knows it because there is something seriously wrong with the man. He is either profoundly stupid, or grievously mentally ill, or powered by an astonishingly potent combination of the two.

Trump's words and actions provide an abundance of examples of his mental defects, new outrages coming every day or so.

But we need to be careful. Sometimes the evidence is too good to be true.

Recent statements about Thomas Edison were waved about by talk-show hosts to suggest the man thinks Edison is still alive. Is that stupid or crazy? Personally, I think neither. It's just the loose way the man talks. He sounds goofy most of the time. He just doesn't know it.

Other comments about stealth aircraft are interpreted to mean he thinks they are literally invisible. But it was probably just a joke. He sometimes jokes, throwing overheated goofball detectors all cock-a-hoop.

His rally-based rants about the inconvenience of low water pressure sound erratic, but they may be the sharp edge of a future attempt to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, the folks behind low-flow toilets and water-saving showerheads.

(Trump knows the environment is a hoax, that no one will ever run out of clean water to drink. God would not allow that to happen, right?)

But when he rails about vicious attempts to railroad him out of office, he's not joking. When he says the press is the enemy of the people, he's not goofing around. When he says Democrats hate America and seek to destroy the country, he means it.

Wholeheartedly.

Or not...

Because there is a fourth choice beyond stupid, crazy, and stupi-crazy:

Donald Trump might just be pure evil.

What if he is the genius he keeps telling us he is? What if he's hiding his real agenda in a whirlwind of nonsense? What if he's working ten moves ahead of us? What if he's like a serial killer who offs thirty people to hide the murder of his wife?

Okay, probably not.

So, I guess it's back to the Big Three: stupid, crazy, or stupi-crazy.

Does his increasingly obvious disability disqualify him from office? Maybe, but can anything be done about it? Probably not, because the 25th Amendment requires a two-thirds vote of both houses to kick the president to the curb.

And I think we all know how the Senate would vote.

Besides, the vice president is pretty important in 25th Amendment proceedings, and Mike Pence knows Trump would eviscerate him for even thinking about it.