While we're debating the future of medical care in this nation, to wit whether anybody should get any or whether we should just cut to the part where three quarters of us exist primarily as spare parts factories for the one percent, here's Team Trump's just-appointed assistant secretary for health technology at DHS, a big-deal title that sounds like it should be staffed by someone with at least a minimal degree of competence, talking in his 2006 book about how having tattoos is a sign of drug addiction.
[O]bviously, not all who have a tattoo are addicts. A sailer who gets a single tattoo on his arm or an adult woman who has a small butterfly tattooed on her lower abdomen are not necessarily drug addicts or even rebellious — just dumb, at least temporarily! [...]
On the other hand, kids who seek a more substantial expression through body art do tend to get involved in drugs. The most likely connection between body art and drug use involves rebellion, or the subculture within what we can generalize and call the counterculture. The “Goth” or “punk” movements are specific counterculture groups. [...] Not all Goths are drug addicts, but a high percentage experiment with all types of drugs, including hallucinogens.
So now we're left picturing ex-congressman John Fleming, a man with the persona of a white-painted fencepost dug into the center of a gravel driveway, sitting down to write a "drugs and parenting" book by pulling his notions about What People With Tattoos Are Like and What Those Goth Kids Do All Day from deep within his own tapioca psyche.
The effort it must have taken, from Trump's team, to ensure each and every last appointed hire was plucked from the bin of stupidest Americans alive—it's exhausting just thinking about it. You'd think one or two competent people would slip through here and there, just as matter of odds, but no. When it comes to hiring goofballs and lunatics, the Trump vetting is top-notch.