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| (Photo of Fort Sumter (center) is from the National Park Service; photos of Alcatraz (left) and Columbia are by me.) |
Until this weekend, the stupidest thing I'd seen a president do was when Trump ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to release millions of gallons of water from two California reservoirs to fight fires in Los Angeles--after the fires were mostly out and the water in those rivers had no way to get to L.A. so it just flowed into the ocean instead.
Now I think Trump has topped himself by ordering that Alcatraz be reopened as a federal prison. Keep in mind, it got out of the prison business in 1963 because it was many times more expensive than any other prison to run and maintain. The economic argument has not improved since.
I live in the Bay Area and have visited Alcatraz many times. It's been a national park for more than 50 years. Its infrastructure--electrical, gas, water, sewage, foundations, buildings--would all need to be redone. The only way to open a prison on Alcatraz Island would be to scrape off all the existing structures and build a new one from scratch.
Trump ordering Alcatraz to become a prison again is exactly as stupid as ordering Fort Sumter to be recommissioned as a modern military base. It's exactly as stupid as pulling Apollo 11's command module Columbia out of the Smithsonian so NASA could send astronauts back to the Moon in it (note that Alcatraz has been out of operation longer than Columbia has!).
This is Mad King George territory. If any Republicans ever had the guts to open Amendment 25 proceedings, this could be Exhibit A in just how detached from reality our current president is.
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