Wire Tapping Trump Tower And Curing Cancer: Equally Likely
By
Leonard Zwelling
What is crucial to understand is that Mr. Trump better hope that he’s wrong about the wire tapping of Trump Tower by President Obama.
First, the President, Obama or otherwise, cannot order such a wiretap. It’s illegal.
Second, if there were a wiretap on a phone in Trump Tower it would be for probable cause and not ordered by the president, but more likely by the intelligence community or Justice Department after an appeal to a federal judge.
The FBI Director and the former head of national security have adamantly denied that any such wiretap was ever in place and this is just another indicator that the current President of the United States is quite simply out of his mind. The leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence (the irony of a name) Committees also agree that there is no merit to the Trump claim that he was spied upon by any organ of the federal government—of the United States.
Now we have had paranoid presidents before but I am not even sure Nixon was paranoid because by the time he got to the White House he had screwed so many people there were really folks out to get him. And get him they did, with his cooperation. (Imagine if he had burned the tapes).
The same is likely to be true here. Trump is just paranoid and he may have every reason to be given the huge swath of people he has vilified. I am sure even the Russians don’t know what to do with the new president at this point and when you can confuse better than the old KGB hands, you are really good at confusing.
I have always thought that Drs. DePinho and Chin were just as confusing.
I vividly remember sitting through one of Lynda’s spectacular shows with videos et al. and asking her whether any of her genomics studies would matter if someone discovered a drug to cure a cancer tomorrow—like Gleevec. To her credit, she admitted that it would not. I think I really asked what would happen if a Gleevec for all cancer came along using serendipitous empiricism as opposed to Big Data. I think my path to success is more likely than hers.
As for her husband and his pledge to cure cancer in five years, what happened? He doesn’t even have one drug for any cancer yet and we are halfway through year six. But he’s in the rearview mirror now.
I am not at all sure how people like Donald Trump, Ron DePinho and Lynda Chin get other people to believe in them, invest money in them, or trust them with the guidance of critical major institutions. It keeps happening though. Just like Bernie Madoff, they get people to buy in and then take them for a ride.
I suggest that the American people step back and realize that the man they elected president has more than a few screws loose and that the people in Austin charged with caring for the UT System take a good hard look at what their predecessors gave them at 1515 and act accordingly, which they now will have to do.
These huge exaggerations of reality need to stop. It’s not healthy.
It is highly unlikely that President Obama spied on Donald Trump prior to or after the election. It is likely that President Trump heard this hogwash on an alt-right venue and repeated what he heard on TV. He likes TV. Reading not so much.
We now know that Dr. DePinho did fail at being president of MD Anderson by his own metrics—curing cancer. No drugs, no breakthroughs, no successful shots to the moon.
Next time, how about a hefty dose of reality. Find someone who actually understands human cancer to the extent possible in 2017 to be the next president of MD Anderson. Things will go better.
