The ancient Greeks warned that those whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Don’t you wonder, as I do, whether “the gods” are engineering the destruction of America?

For starters, the election of Donald Trump as president arguably qualifies as madness. And the lunacy has multiplied now that he is actually governing. He and his entire party have suspended sane discourse in America. They do and say things that make me gasp with disbelief.

I am not just  talking about the preposterous lies they concoct to defame their political opponents and glorify their Dear Leader. At least there’s a motive for those. And I can understand why they defend guns for all regardless of the tragedies that guns inflict. The NRA rewards them generously for that.

There’s even a pragmatic explanation for their self destructive trashing of the environment and their denial of human involvement in global climate change. That’s  driven by their mega-polluting mega-donors.

What alarms me most is the random ranting that gets picked up by the press from time to time.

Here’s a recent sample from GOP Senator Jim Risch, a member of the US delegation to the Winter Olympics’ closing ceremony in South Korea:

If a nuclear conflict with North Korea starts, it’s going to be probably one of the worst catastrophic events in the history of civilization. It’s going to be very brief. The end of it is going to see mass casualties the likes of which the planet has never seen. It will be of biblical proportions. 

Nobody I know talks like that.- especially in public.  And if I did know a man like that, I wouldn’t suggest selecting him for an official visit to South Korea, which is where a lot of those biblical casualties would occur.

But blatantly inappropriate selections are the order of the day in the Age of Trump. His cabinet is a sick joke, for example.

In this nutty White House, the vice president is guided by celestial voices. And the president churns out a flood of bizarre tweets that often contradict one another.

Meanwhile, Republicans across the land sanctimoniously quote the Bible as they plunder the nation’s wealth, enrich the richest Americans, deprive the poor of the necessities of life, oppress minorities of every kind and antagonize the rest of the world.

Yet the voters keep electing them. If that’s not mad, I don’t know what is.

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