Trump Himself Is The Reason The GOP Will Dump Trump After The Midterms

I think you’re correct about Cheney, along with her father’s old establishment pals being the only chance of returning to a functioning, if heartless when it comes to the lives of average and poor Americans GOP. The thing is, the odds are long. I’m thinking back to when I was very young watching the later Mercury, then Gemini and finally Apollo launches. I of course learned all I could about the astronauts but wouldn’t learn so much of the whole story, all the testing of high altitude rocket-power planes that began with Chuck Yeager’s breaking the sound barrier in the X-1 back in the late forties. Many high performance and, because they were cutting edge and designed for high speed at altitude jet aircraft were also designed and tested, and a lot of people few outside of the flight-test world have ever heard of died over decades before designs and engines become relatively more reliable. (And people still die, more often than you realize)

Besides Yeager, Scott Crossfield was a legend in the rocket powered plane era. There was a deadly phenomena with rocket planes which were essentially a tube containing a rocket engine with razor thin wings and tail & tiny airelons. Engineers developed the term “Inertia Coupling” for it which as Yeager many who flew the things was useless in understanding the problem, much less dealing with it. Basically, the plane would lose control on all three axes, tumbling end-over-end, spinning and rotating. Completely out of any control. The test pilots called it “uncorking”, and it was almost ALWAYS fatal. Every prospective test pilot out at Edwards was required to watch a “film” (a still camera behind the head of the pilot that took one frame per second) of Mel Apts’ last, fatal flight in which his rocket plane uncorked. It was eery as hell for them, one second looking down almost straight at the ground, the next up into a blue sky, the next with Apt’s head bashing on one side of the cockpit or another, or against the instrument panel. The awful part was they knew as they watched the final frame and the screen went black the pilot they’d been watching would be dead.

Crossfield was one of less than a handful of pilots to survive it. And actually did so twice. He said each time he wound up taking his hands off the stick, holding them in his lap and putting things into the hand of a supernatural power. And as author Thom Wolfe wrote in The Right Stuff, that was about the only choice you had. For those very luck few the plane would somehow wind up in some terrible, often fatal situation like an inverted spin but for something like that, at least a test pilot had things to do to try and get out of it in one piece.

That’s how I see where Cheney is with the GOP. They have “uncorked” and she, and all of us for that matter have to hope that SOMETHING, some combination of luck and aerodynamics, say a blast of wind from just the right direction at just the right time put the plane in “only” a very bad, often fatal situation. If that happens maybe, just maybe she can get the thing under control and land it. Probably a rough landing and the plane will need untold and complicated repairs to be airworthy again, but maybe that can happen.