The Microphone is Always On

The first rule of gun safety is to handle every gun as if it was loaded. There is an old saying that many people have been shot with unloaded guns, but it's frequently misinterpreted. What it really means is that people have been shot with guns that were believed to be unloaded, so you should treat every gun as if it was loaded, even if you know it's not.

Maybe there should be a similar rule about microphones. Treat every microphone as if it was on, even if you know it's not. The reason I say this is that I looked up the latest Trump scandal, the one with Billy Bush on the bus, and it appears that Trump was speaking informally with Billy and didn't know that his microphone was on. I seem to remember that other politicians have had this problem over the years. The one that immediately comes to mind is when Mitt Romney said something disparaging about poor people while he was running for president. It may not have cost him the election by itself, but it certainly didn't help.

Then there are the guys who deliberately make a video of themselves planning a crime, or bragging about one after the fact, and then post it on the internet. What are those people thinking? The first time I remember hearing about something like that was Richard Nixon's Watergate tapes. There was some speculation at the time that Nixon either was unaware of the tapes or did not exercise control over them, which implied that Nixon himself was under the control of somebody, probably David Rockerfeller. Other pundits believed that Nixon knew exactly what he was doing and wanted to preserve it for posterity, figuring that history would vindicate him.

The same might be said about Donald Trump, he is either under somebody else's control, or he is incredibly stupid, or incredibly arrogant. Then again, maybe it's like Ken has said, Trump is just an asshole. Be that as it may, this incident dates back to 2005. Why is the media dredging up this ancient history, can't they find enough current Trump atrocities to report?