The Brother Heart, 41st of the Dog Days, 526 M.E. (Betelgeuse): In the 1979 Stephen King novel The Dead Zone, an ambitious and corrupt demagogue grabs a young child on stage at a campaign rally and hoists him up as a human shield after an assassin opens fire. A photograph of the act gets picked up by the press and destroys the politician's career. 

That's fiction. In real life, the Stable Genius was in in Ankara, Turkey last month for a NATO summit. Concerned about his proximity to Iran and Iran's death threats against him, he boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras to leave for England, and then snuck into an airport catering container and was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane, not Air Force One or the new Boeing 747-8 gifted by Qatar.

The press corps and White House staff flew in the Old Air Force One as human decoys in case Iran tried to launch a missile (they didn't). They were told to keep the window shades down, but believed the President was on board the plane with them.

Hiding curled up in a little catering container mounted on a mobile scissor-lift is hardly the macho-man symbol of strength the Stable Genius thinks he projects. Letting the press and his staff serve as unwitting decoys may not be as viscerally shocking as holding up a child as a human shield from an assassin's bullets, but it's just as cowardly.  The ethical thing to do in that situation would have been to secretly board the third plane, and then announce that the Air Force One flight was unexpectedly delayed and keep it on the ground until the Stable Genius appeared publicly in Britain, so that would-be assassins knew their target wasn't on the plane.

But just imagine - curled up in a ball in the fetal position in a catering container, sweating your balls off in the summer heat of Ankara while smelling your own farts and adult diaper during the bumpy ride from one plane to the next, all because you're too afraid to fly in the Eastern Hemisphere.

When the news leaked that he wasn't flying home in the new Qatari gift jet that he had flown on to Turkey, but it was still believed that he had left in the old Air Force One with his staff and the press, the Stable Genius sought the telephone records of several New York Times journalists and their relatives, including one reporter’s mother, in its effort to unmask the confidential sources of the leak. Now we know why he was so sensitive and so freaked out by the reports - the truth of the matter unmasks not only his own cowardice but the lies that he and his black-out drunk Secretary of Defense keep telling about the war in Iran. 

They insist that they've won the war, that they have air supremacy, and that Iran has no military assets left after their relentless bombing. If that were the case, what were they so afraid of? Hiding in a little caterer's cart from one plane to the next sure doesn't look like "winning" to me. It looks like weakness. It looks like losing. It looks like cowardice. 

That act alone should be enough to derail a person's political career, but in the anything-goes, "grab 'em by the pussy" Age of the Stable Genius, it's just another news cycle.