Getting Our Hair Mussed

Created
Fri, 27/09/2024 - 03:30
Updated
Fri, 27/09/2024 - 03:30
You may recall that he said this yesterday: Check out this piece by Jill Lawrence in the LA Times. She recently went to Los Alamos and suggests that people should stay away during this presidential election because you won’t be able to sleep at night: President Truman followed through with the plan to use the bombs that ended World War II. Truman could have stopped it. He didn’t, but right afterward he ordered that presidential permission was required for such action, and his administration made it official policy in a 1948 memo: U.S. presidents had the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. If a president gives the word, the military must obey. That’s even if America has not been attacked, and even if a president is demonstrably unfit. A president, for instance, such as Trump, whose reckless, divisive term ended with his loyalists — at his urging — staging a deadly attack on the Capitol to try to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election. “President Trump’s last terrifying weeks in office have been a wake-up call. Never again should we allow a dangerous president to have unilateral control over nuclear launch,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Defense Secretary William J. Perry wrote in USA Today shortly after the mob rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump wasn’t the first president to raise such concerns, they said, nor would he be the last. They called for ending “this godlike power” for all presidents to come. But presidents still…