THE EFFECT OF GAMMA RAYS ON MAN-IN-THE-MOON MARIGOLDS

I’m resurfacing to report that I just got my (CDC-approved and doctor-recommended) Pfizer booster.   As with the two original shots I got in February and March, the only down side is that I’ve become highly magnetic.  I’ve had to replace all my metal cutlery with plastic to avoid flying utensils.  It’s a small price to pay for not dying or being hospitalized or spreading a highly contagious and potentially deadly disease.  Oh, and it was free, too.

I can’t help but think back to the summer of 2020, when the reality of COVID became impossible to deny but the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were still months away from readiness.  It was then that Donald Trump blazed the trail that brought vaccine hesitancy into the mainstream, making it a political, rather than public health, issue.    

Trump insisted on speaking at daily COVID press conferences, while actual medical experts squirmed in the background.  He touted bleach, sunlight, hydroxychloroquine, anything random Facebook rumor, as long as it wasn’t endorsed by the medical establishment.  The Very Stable Genius desperately wanted to be the one who discovered the cure for COVID.

 Trump’s transparent eagerness to prove himself smarter than his experts turned out to be the Rosetta Stone that explains his cult’s fondness for off-label uses of veterinary products and household cleaners.  They desperately want to outsmart the “so-called experts” – virologists, epidemiologists, and anyone else with credentials and an informed opinion.  Some of them want that badly enough to die for it.

The poet e.e. cummings wrote, “there is some shit I will not eat.”  Anti-vaxxers turn that on its head, insisting not only that they have a right to eat whatever shit they want, but that they also have a right to smear some on you.  Their motto is:  “My health is my business.  And your health is my business too.” 

Their rights supersede your rights.  They acknowledge no responsibility to avoid harming others.  They claim a right to risk contracting a potentially deadly disease.  They have a right to become contagious, and to pass COVID to anyone they please.  And they have a right to use scarce hospital resources as they choke out their last breaths.  Owning Libs makes them happy, and the pursuit of happiness is their constitutional right, QED.  Isn’t that what made this country great?

It took me way too long to figure this out, but it is clear that, for the fools and sociopaths that comprise Trump’s base, the efficacy of a medical treatment doesn’t matter.  Rejecting masks and vaccines is a test of their faith, kind of like speaking in tongues and snake handling.  Vaccines and masks are bad for … reasons, I guess.  The only rational excuse I’ve heard was that the FDA had yet to fully approve any of the COVID vaccines.  And now, they’ve lost that excuse.

 But never fear, the anti-vaxxers will keep moving the goalposts.  Early on, they said it was a fake disease.  Whole lotta people dying of that fake disease, but OK, let’s game this out.  If you come down with symptoms of this fake disease, they must be fake symptoms.  Man up, snowflake, and save the hospital beds for people who are really sick. 

 Or maybe you’re very devout, and you’re convinced that God will protect you.  Swell.  But if that’s your position, don’t go to a hospital when you’re having trouble breathing.  Stay home and pray.  Out loud.  While coughing on nearby loved ones.  God will know his own, as your Puritan predecessors used to say. 

(I wonder why, if they’re confident that God will protect them from COVID, so many of them are also gun nuts.  If God is protecting them, why do they need that arsenal?  What, they believe in a God who can stop a virus, but not a bullet?  Apparently, their God’s powers are limited.  Or maybe it’s their faith that’s limited.) 

Or how about this?  Maybe you think Bill Gates is using the vaccine to inject you with his patented “Mark O’ The Beast” microchips.  OK, but prove it.  Show your work, because the burden of proof is on you.  There are anti-vax medical professionals with accest to vials of Pfizer and Moderna vaccine.  Smear some on a slide and put it under an electron microscope.  Show us the chips.  Or shut the fuck up.

In the wake of President Biden’s COVID vaccination mandate, some anti-vaxxers are trying to play the sincerity card.  Gosh, they’re really, really, sincere in their opposition to getting vaccinated.  Maybe some of their stories tug at your heartstrings. 

But consider the question from a public health perspective.  Does an anti-vaxxer’s sincerity make him non-contagious?  Or even less contagious?  I’m skeptical, but I’m open to proof, if they have any.  Which they don’t. 

And if not, why should they get a pass?  I mean, rabid dogs may be sincere as all get out, but they’re in the grip of a deadly virus and their very sincere bite will still kill you.  Sincerity is irrelevant.  It’s just another attempt at misdirection and gaslighting.  Cynical or sincere, unvaccinated people are a public health threat. 

The first responsibility of any government is to protect its citizens.  That’s why we have smoking bans, seatbelt laws, and yes, all those long-standing vaccination requirements (chicken pox, DTaP, polio, hepatitis A & B, measles/mumps/rubella, and more) that Americans have been living with for decades.  I want the governments I support with my tax dollars to protect me from these COVID sociopaths. 

The Resistors and the Hesitators have had eight months to watch the vaccinated population NOT drop dead, grow extra heads, or have other unforeseen side effects surface.   They’ve had at least that long to watch their fellow cultists get sick and die by the thousands.  But instead of listening to experts, they did their own “research,” which consists of finding and repeating each other’s looney conspiracy theories.  And then complaining that Mainstream Media doesn’t take them seriously. 

In July, NATIONAL REVIEW published an article that reached peak both-sides-ism: “Vaccine resisters can’t be persuaded if they feel disrespected.” 

Maybe so.  But who cares?  Why should I respect those idiots?  This is just gaslighting.  Insisting that persuasion is the only option amounts to holding smart people responsible for the behavior of stupid people; it’s tantamount to holding honest people responsible for the behavior of dishonest people.  We don’t blame the bank teller if she can’t talk the crook out of robbing the bank.   

Yes, yes, there are people with legitimate medical reasons to avoid this vaccine, and others – mainly children – who can’t get the vaccine yet.  Those are good reasons.  But folks with immune issues and children under 12 can also contract and spread the virus, so it’s important that they mask up if they’re not isolating.  

I also kind of understand the vaccine hesitancy on the part of some minorities, whose treatment at the hands of medical authorities in the past has been disgraceful.  None of which means they can’t get the virus and pass it on to others.  Whatever their race, whatever their cultural history, whatever their reasoning – unvaccinated people are a public health threat.  For me, that settles the issue. 

A.R. Moxon put it succinctly on Twitter: “We’ll see real change affected when we stop being so concerned about whether we’ve changed the minds of selfish assholes….  Selfish assholes are making life difficult for all of the rest of us. Let's make a society where being a selfish asshole is difficult.”

Second the motion.  Judging from their public posturing, many anti-vaxxers see themselves as freedom fighters, striking a blow against Anthony Fauci, or Bill Gates, or someone else in their extensive pantheon of bogeymen.  But the only freedom they care about is their own.  Their motto is “freedom for me, even if it means death for thee.”  How many deaths will it take ‘til they know that too many people have died?

THE ALL AMERICAN BULLET HEADED SAXON MOTHER'S SON

The opportunistic grifters who comprise the leadership of today’s Republican Party are, each and every one, bad people.  Some of them – the Mitch McConnell wing of the party – are fairly bright; they’ve figured out how to get rich by gaming the system.  Most of the rest are at least smart enough to keep their heads down while cashing checks from their megadonors.  The irredeemably dumb ones tried to form a House America First Caucus.

They issued a vision statement of sorts: “America is a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon traditions.”  There are a lot of dog whistles in that sentence, but “uniquely Anglo-Saxon” is the loudest.

I feel I have a right to comment on this “Anglo-Saxon traditions” thing because according to Ancestry.com, I’m 94% Anglo-Saxon.  I take a lot of pride in being a descendant of the valiant warrior race that stood up to William “the So-Called Conqueror” and repelled the Norman Invasion in 1066.  And furthermore…. 

Wait, what’s that you say?  The Anglo-Saxons – spoiler alert – DIDN’T repel the Norman Invasion?  You’re telling me that my ancestors (or 94% of them, anyway) lost to a bunch of cheese-eating surrender-monkeys?  That’s a cold shot. 

But that information begs the question of what other uniquely Anglo-Saxon traditions are floating around out there that we commoners are supposed to respect.  Some scholars have mentioned “wergild” – the practice of letting rich people commit crimes (up to and including murder) and pay a fine to avoid additional punishment.  That’s a tradition that would obviously appeal to wealthy criminals, many of which occupy positions of leadership in the Republican Party. 

But what other traditions are there?  The most famous Saxon king was Ethelred the Unready, whose name doesn’t stir the blood the way Alexander the Great or Ming the Merciless might.  Of course, the most famous early British ruler was King Arthur, but – assuming he existed at all – Arthur would have been a Celt, not a Saxon.  As a Celtic king in the 6th century, Arthur certainly wouldn’t have had much respect for Anglo-Saxon traditions.  He’d have killed as many effing Anglo-Saxons as he could. 

It is, as the saying goes, a puzzlement.  After much deliberation, however, I have a hypothesis. 

Call me a cynic, but I think the America First Caucus expects us to understand “Anglo-Saxon” as a synonym for “white.”   Shocking, I know, but that interpretation helps illuminate the rest of their statement.  The “border” provision, which regular folks might take as a throwaway line, serves to remind True Believers of that Wall that Mexico totally paid for, as well as those dreaded migrant caravans that pop up every two years during election season.  A national border, in their minds, is basically a “get off my lawn” sign. 

The common culture they yearn for is equally bogus.  You think Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Jim Jordan spend time reading Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare?  Who cares about boring old coastal elitist literature, even if it’s limited to the Dead White Male canon?  No, the America First Caucus’s “common culture” is grounded in the imperialist fantasies of propagandists like Rudyard Kipling and John Louis O’Sullivan, who imagined “the white man’s burden,” and “manifest destiny.”  Not that the America First Caucus reads those guys either.  The AFC isn’t big on reading.  Their version of common culture comes from mid-20th century American TV and movies.  Father knows best, but only if the father is Anglo-Saxon.  And there are no Normans in the neighborhood.

And that’s it.  Manifest Destiny, with its foundation of racism, is the dog their dog whistle rhetoric is trying to summon.  Oh, they’ll bob and weave – it didn’t take long for the “leaders” of the America First Caucus to see their shadows when they got a little pushback.  But shortly thereafter, fellow traveler Rick Santorum kicked the can a little further down the road by opining on CNN about the absence of “culture” that 16th and 17th century Europeans found when they encountered the indigenous populations in the New World. 

To be fair, many of those civilizations were decimated by mass die-offs from Old World diseases to which they had no immunity.  But that was a long time ago, and as today’s anti-vaxxers like to say, they’d have died of something by now anyway, so what does it matter?

Republicans argue that our primary responsibility is to be fair to the descendants of the real “first Americans” – the ones who came over on the Mayflower.  They did the best they could, but they were prevented from Anglo-Saxonizing the country when what was left of the original inhabitants kept complaining that the land belonged to them?  Show us the paperwork, buddy, or take a hike.  And so the indigenous populations hiked.  All the way to Oklahoma, some of them.  The ones who survived.

What I’m saying, in my usual roundabout way, is that Joe Biden’s election helped this country dodge a bullet.  Or, more likely, an extinction level event comparable to the Chicxulub meteor strike 66 million years ago.  The bad news is that there are lots more Republican meteors out there.  They know they can’t win honest elections, and they won’t give up without a fight. 

The bad guys won an important battle in 2020, when Trump’s minions screwed up the census count.  It’s not clear that they gained an immediate advantage – their two most reliable pockets of electoral votes come from Florida and Texas, who (like Arizona and California) might have missed out on an additional congressional seat and electoral vote due to the Hispanic undercount – but the Republican Party has succeeded in muddying the waters, and that’s before they start gerrymandering.

As the Irish statesman John Philpot Curran said, “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.” 

That kind of sucks.  I just turned 74, and I’m tired of vigilance.  But a feller’s gotta play the hand he’s dealt.  We aren’t out of the woods yet.  The lesson of the Trump Era is probably that we’re never out of the woods.  We get comfortable under our little tree, and then Antifa activates a Jewish Space Laser.  Voila, we’re looking for yet another safe space to lead our lives. 

Wrapping this up, as some of my FB friends have politely noted, my output has slowed lately.  Mostly that’s because I feel a lot less urgency now that the Former Guy is safely former.  I’ve had both of my shots (Pfizer, represent).  Most of my friends are my age, and have had their shots too.  It won’t be long until I can begin to hang out with my friends again.  The star-spangled banner yet waves. 

But it’s hard to escape the knowledge that a lot of Republicans would +be happy to see it replaced by the Confederate battle flag.  Or maybe a mid-20th century German battle flag.  Hey, today’s GOP is a big tent, and every flavor of bigotry has a place in today’s Republican Party.  Why limit yourself to just one when there are so many people to hate? 

In other words, the war’s not over, and I will soldier on – likely a bit more slowly than heretofore.  Thanks for the kind words and birthday wishes.  I appreciate my readers.  Especially you. 

HOW DO I KNOW? THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO

Comes a new poll indicating that the number of Americans who say they have “a religious affiliation” has dropped from 70% in 2000 (where it had been holding steady since the first such poll in 1930) to 47% today.  As the song goes, “there’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.”  Naturally, I have a theory.  Naturally, I blame the Republican Party.

Or, more precisely, I blame the racism and sexism that undergirds so much of American Christianity, which in turn serves as the foundation for Republican support.  If you zoom out a bit – well, there are a lot of patterns to see, and of course all of them make a difference.  But we’ve evolved a distinctive national religion, which mixes theology and politics into a stew that has increasingly little to do with anything in the New Testament. 

To some extent, such an evolution is natural.  When Christianity began to spread north and west, into what we now call Europe, the Church accommodated local pagan customs to some extent, in order to ease the newly Christianized tribes’ transition into a very different religion.  It was a smart strategy, since even monotheism, never mind complex theological issues like the Trinity and transubstantiation, must have been largely incomprehensible to these new “Christians.” 

And those accommodations didn’t end back in the days of conversion by the sword.  Take, for instance, the widely held (or at least, widely espoused) belief that God has a special love for America and Americans.  God’s original Chosen People had their chance, goes the argument, but the Hebrews were too stiff-necked to make the most of it.  Now Trump-loving evangelical Christians are the new Chosen People.  Surely God will extend his protection to them like he did with the Children of Israel back in the Old Testament days. 

To which I say, be careful what you wish for.  I wonder how many of those “American Exceptionalism Christians” have actually read much Old Testament, which is basically a history of God’s exasperation with his Chosen People.  Even the most famous OT incident of God intervening on behalf of the Hebrews – the parting of the Red Sea and the escape from Egypt – was followed by forty years in the wilderness.  The God of the Old Testament tried everything – patriarchs, kings, and prophets – with pretty with the same result.  No matter who God asked to ride herd on them, sooner or later His Chosen People fell into idolatry.  

Two thousand years later, it’s still happening.  The Republican Party worked for 25 years to weaponize its twisted version of Christianity, and what’s the result?  Trump supporters who are jockeying for positions of leadership in the Republican Party have turned to idolatry.  If some unholy amalgamation of Trumpism, Qanonsense, and evangelical Christianity catches fire, future historians may regard the 2021 CPAC convention as the modern equivalent of The Acts of the Apostles.  Lo, the spirit of the Holy Trump Family descended upon the multitudes, and everyone began speaking gibberish.

Seriously, the hit of the convention was an actual, literal graven image, a gilded statue of the Former Guy.  Apparently, none of the CPAC attendees were familiar with the Exodus narrative, and that unfortunate Golden Calf incident described in Exodus 32.  Or maybe this is one of those “take God seriously but not literally” arguments.  I mean, God was obviously peeved about the Golden Calf, but he didn’t say anything specifically about a Golden Jackass.    

Any Christians who think they can absorb Trumpism and QAnon without compromising essential articles of faith are kidding themselves.  If they knew anything about Christian history, they’d realize that this sort of co-optation has been tried – and didn’t work.  People like Trump were around in the First Century – e.g., Tiberius, who was emperor when Jesus was crucified.  Ditto for Qanon, once there was a Christian orthodoxy to deviate from (pick your favorite gnostic – Simon Magus, Valentinus, Marcion, Bogomil, whoever).  Emperors come and go, but it took early Christians centuries to purge the influence of successive waves of gnostic heretics.  Today’s Q-curious Christians will be just as susceptible to those twin heresies (paganism and gnosticism) as their predecessors in the 2nd century.

But this time, I suspect, it’ll be Q that absorbs this branch of Christianity, rather than vice versa.  The Q Believers have bored into this uniquely Republican version of Christianity like a termite colony.  They didn’t meet with much resistance, because there wasn’t much Jesus left in Republican Christianity.  The only reason they haul out their Bibles is to claim some unearned moral authority.  But what they really care about is earthly power.  Pro-gun, anti-mask.  Pro-tax cuts for the rich, anti-COVID relief.  Anti-abortion, but also anti-contraception, anti-funding pre-natal health programs, early childhood education, etc.  NASCAR and football stir the blood.  But don’t talk to them about turning the other cheek.

It may be that one of Trump’s tame preachers will come through with one of those famous personal revelations that allow them to ignore the actual text of the Bible.  “And it came to pass that Donald Trump gazed upon the graven image of Himself, and saw that it was good.”   

The thing that surprised me most as I watched these new Republican Christians over the past few years is that, for many of them, the Bible doesn’t seem to matter that much.  They can’t say that out loud, of course, but the implication is clear.  The argument seems to be that if God spoke directly to his prophets and apostles in Bible times, why would he stop before he raptures his believers?  Why leave a two-thousand-year gap in the narrative?  How do you know that God isn’t speaking to his people today in exactly the same way that he did in Bible times, but they’re just not listening?  And if that’s true, who are we to dispute some jake-leg preacher’s personal revelation?  (Or hallucination, or scam?)   

The truth is, the people behind both Trump and Q basically ignore the actual Bible, which has way too many nit-picky rules and way too few fun stories of God smiting their foes.   Soon enough, a lot of MAGA true believers will gravitate to a preacher (religious or otherwise) who’ll tell them to forget all that stuff about loving thy neighbor.  The whole point of Christianity is to get rich.  Or to smite people they don’t like.  Whatever the voices in the preacher’s head told him. 

And who knows?  Maybe God doesn’t care that much about graven images anymore.  In fact, given what we’ve learned about the private lives of some prominent evangelical leaders, quite a few of the traditional Ten Commandments may be up for reconsideration in Qristianity.  The commandments against lying and committing adultery will probably be the next to go, because Republicans obviously find them inconvenient. 

The Biblical Moses was so pissed off about the original Golden Calf that he smashed the tablets upon which God inscribed the original Ten Commandments.  But the most famous Qristians – I’m thinking of Paula White, Ken Copeland, people like that – aren’t going to jeopardize their gravy train.  They’re fatally compromised.

It took the early Church centuries to sort out the true Gospels from the false prophets, but for Qvangelicals, the only false prophets are the Libs.  The people behind the early Trump/Q movement made it up as they went along, which means they’ve left some loose ends.  That probably works to their advantage.  The Q stuff is vague enough to attract a broad spectrum of conspiracy theorists, from anti-vaxxers to Kennedy assassination buffs to sovereign citizen nincompoops.  “We hate everybody but us” may not be their motto, but it should be. 

I may not live long enough to see it, but the logical conclusion of the Qvangelical movement is a new codicil to the Bible – a New Improved Testament, though they won’t call it that.  Maybe the “Q Testament,” featuring excerpts from Trump’s speeches and tweets (printed in red), Q’s collected “clues,” and some yet-to-be-determined personal revelations from whichever pastors wind up on top in the new religion. 

In terms of revised ethical precepts, I think there’ll be a movement to drop the word “commandment” for most of the new rules.  The word “commandment” is kind of harsh, anyway.  Maybe they’ll save it for the really important rules – “Thou shalt have no other leader before Trump,” and “Remember the Second Amendment and keep it holy.” 

But all those annoying dietary rules, and the original Ten Commandments themselves that pop up in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy?  No reason to follow a set of behavioral precepts that are impossible to follow, or even understand, in a 21st century context. 

I have a feeling that the old Austin Lounge Lizards joke is about to come true.  Get ready for the Ten Suggestions. 

I'D MAKE A FEW CHANGES, THAT'S JUST WHAT I'D DO

I bow to no one in my affection for Dr. Seuss, but no one is above criticism.  Now the folks who hold Seuss copyrights have decided to retire a few of his books.  They include some titles that I remember fondly, and others I’d never heard of.  (The Boners Omnibus is not one of the banned Geisel titles, by the way.)

Two brief points.  First, the decision not to republish six Seuss titles was made by his estate, the trust that administers his copyrights.  It was certainly not “censored” by any government, local, state or national.  As far as I can determine, there wasn’t even an attempt to generate public pressure to suppress the books by any organized group, Left or Right.  There is no First Amendment issue here. 

Second, there were definitely racist aspects to a couple of the Seuss books I’m familiar with – caricatures of African savages and Chinese coolies.  These weren’t the dominant theme of those books, but they were there.  It’s easy to be outraged about some generic cancellation of the beloved Dr. Seuss, but harder to make the case that kids today have a compelling need to see those images. 

Harder, maybe, but not impossible.  “Kids” aren’t the standard by which publishing decisions ought to be made, Huckleberry Finn, and all that.  If it were me, I’d have rolled the offending titles up into one deluxe slipcase edition at a premium price, complete with a prologue featuring Geisel’s antifascist cartoons, and a serious discussion of midcentury ethnic stereotyping and how it hurt those it parodied.  The price of such a volume would probably limit most sales to archives and serious collectors, but it would have been a way to avoid charges of wokeness. 

On the other hand, this may have been a clever “do well by doing good” marketing strategy.  Whether team Seuss planned it this way or not, Amazon reports that other Seuss books are flying off the shelves.  Good for them, as far as I’m concerned.  Long may they wave.

THE ELEPHANT SNEEZED AND FELL ON HIS KNEES

“I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true.”  So said Georgia’s Q Lady, Marjorie Taylor Greene.  She got a standing ovation from her Republican caucus, but those grumpy old Democrats are never satisfied.  I mean, sure, she supported murdering Democratic politicians, but what’s a few death threats among colleagues?  Whatever happened to unity and moving on.

The poor woman was “allowed to believe,” another innocent victim of the faceless bureaucrats in the Ministry of Belief Allowance.  As non-apologies go, MTG’s was more “non” than usual.   It’s not uncommon for public figures to slide into the passive voice when trying to strike just the right balance between “I am now sadder but wiser” on the one hand, and “it was mostly somebody else’s fault” on the other.  But Ms. Greene’s approach is sufficiently eccentric to suggest that she hit upon it herself.  Things were done TO her, not BY her.  Properly understood, she’s the victim here.  If there is blame, it must fall on those who allowed this reputational calamity to befall her.  She bears no responsibility for what she believes.  Got it. 

Let us stipulate, for the sake of the argument, that there were folks in MTG’s life who “allowed” her to become radicalized.  Let us further stipulate that it isn’t Ms. Greene’s fault that her favorite conspiracy theories had flaws of fact and logic that she wasn’t bright enough to notice.  Is she therefore blameless?  I think not. 

I would argue that MTG is still accountable for how she ACTED ON the untrue things she was allowed to believe.  She had the option of thinking her crazy thoughts in the privacy of her own home, harming no one but herself.  Instead, she sought out other crazy people, and helped make them crazier.  She was basically an internet troll, or in pre-internet days, the crank whose constant stream of letters to the newspaper drove the editors to distraction.  Until recently, that would have been her ceiling.

But that was before Donald Trump came along, blazing new trails in getting away with transgressive behavior.  Hey, performative outrage is fun!  Trump became a blank screen upon which his followers could project whatever fantasy they wished. 

Speaking of which, I wonder if Trump has seen the video of the campaign event in which Ms. Greene unveiled a life-size cardboard figure of Trump and ostentatiously rubbed his crotch area.  Is she auditioning to be the next Mrs. Trump, once Melania files?  Certainly, Trump and Greene are kindred spirits – trolls who love a good conspiracy theory and an opportunity for a little risk-free bullying.    

Some folks argue that Ms. Greene’s expiration date is fast approaching.  Her win was a fluke, they say, and she makes a lot of Georgia legislators nervous.  They’ll redistrict the Q Lady out of a job in 2022.  Maybe.  But people like her are the near-term future of the Republican Party.  Anyone who disagrees is obliged to explain why the House GOP caucus voted 199-11 to support her.

Whatever her career may look like in the future, MTG has played her cards pretty well so far.  At a minimum, she’s leapfrogged poseurs like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley in the hearts and minds of MAGA fans.  They know she’s one of them, and they know that Cruz and Hawley aren’t.  Congressional Republicans, including those who’d love to be on the GOP ticket in 2024, need MAGA votes.  But they also need funding from big money donors, with whom they have a natural affinity.  Appeasing the monied interests is simple.  Give them an occasional big tax cut, roll back some environmental regulations, and appoint Federalist Society judges who’ll return us to those thrilling days of 18th century jurisprudence.  But the MAGA crowd wants raw meat.  Donald Trump didn’t draw cheering crowds because he spoke eloquently about the virtues of constitutional originalism.

In MAGA World, outrage is the coin of the realm.  Truth?  Not so much.  Did rich Jewish financiers use a space laser to set wildfires in California?  You might begin to interrogate such an assertion with logic, asking why the Rothschilds would waste their time setting random wildfires when they could burn Mar-A-Lago to a crisp and do us all a favor.  But using logic on a Q Cultist is a waste of time.

As to the more basic question of whether Jewish Space Lasers even exist, the only reasonable response is, of course not, and who cares?  Certainly not Marjorie Taylor Greene.  She’ll say whatever she thinks will keep her famous.  And if it backfires, it’s not her fault.  She was allowed to believe things that weren’t true.

It’s hard to imagine a set of circumstances in which the Republican Party repudiates Trumpism, even if Trump himself is forced to spend the rest of his life fighting against criminal and civil lawsuits from various quarters.  Trump has zombified the GOP, to the point where it is less of a political party than a cult. 

Since George Washington in 1789, we’ve had 46 presidents.  I’m old enough to have been alive for the most recent 14 of them, beginning with Harry Truman.  I’ve lived through good presidents and bad ones, through depressions, recessions, and prosperity, through times of peace and times of war (hot and cold).   I thought nothing could top 1968 as the worst political year I’d ever see.  Boy, was I naïve. 

In school, I was taught that no one was above the law, not even presidents (who were generally presumed to be honest, like George Washington, who could not tell a lie, and Honest Abe).    Until recently, we took it for granted that our chief executive was supposed to obey the laws just like everyone else.  Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton were called to account for sketchy decisions, and Nixon was forced to resign. 

But my favorite example of presidential submission to the rule of law happened in 1872.  Republican Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant was president.  Apparently Grant was always in a hurry, and tended to ride his horse through the national capitol at a full gallop.  D.C. Policeman William West arrested the presidential scofflaw, and wrote him a speeding ticket.  Interestingly enough, West was a former slave, who had served under Grant in the occupation of Richmond in 1865.  As a free man and a law enforcement officer seven years later, West arrested his former commanding officer. 

Did President Grant try to have West fired, or claim he was “allowed to believe” that he was exempt from speed limits?  He did not.  Grant paid his $20 fine and commended the man who arrested him. 

And Grant has gone down in history as presidential failure – a great general, but indifferent to the corruption in his administration.  When I was in school, his name appeared alongside those of James Buchanan and Warren G. Harding on the list of worst presidents in history.  A more recent contender came along a few years later, and I’d always assumed that Richard Nixon would hold the title belt in perpetuity.

For now, Donald Trump is the undisputed heavyweight champion of bad presidents.  But Marjorie Taylor Greene, or someone like her, is waiting in the wings.  Let’s not allow that to happen.

REPEAT QUOTATIONS, DRAW CONCLUSIONS ON THE WALL

As the 8th century BCE wound down, the people of Judah were scared.  The revived Assyrian Empire had conquered the Kingdom of Israel, and an invasion force was headed south, towards Jerusalem.  Maybe they should simply surrender and join the empire.  Rumors swept the land, to the point where the Good Lord apparently felt it was necessary to summon the prophet Isaiah (8:12 NKJV), essentially instructing him to tell the Judeans to chill:  “Do not say, ‘A conspiracy,’ concerning all that this people call a conspiracy, Nor be afraid of their [j]threats, nor be]troubled.”  Put your faith in God, in other words, and stop scheming about which set of bad outcomes you prefer. 

Let’s fast forward 2500 years or so, and listen to the words of Ulysses S. Grant:  "There are but two parties now: traitors and patriots. I want hereafter to be ranked with the latter.”

Having repeated a couple of quotations, I will now proceed to draw some conclusions on my FB wall.  I don’t have Grant’s perspective, much less that of the Prophet Isaiah.  I could be wrong.  It’s happened before.  Time will tell. 

And with that out of the way, whew, what a week.  I must say that some of Trump’s seemingly random actions right after he lost the election now make more sense, and appear to be part of a pattern connected to the January 6 coup.  (I’m not going to call it an “attempted coup” or a “failed coup,” because I don’t think it’s over yet.  I think there will be at least one more big attempt to stop, or at least disrupt, the inauguration.  It’s way too soon to declare victory.) 

I’m not saying that Trump masterminded the January 6 scheme, or even understood it in any great detail.  But I believe he knew something illegal would go down on January 6, and it’s a matter of public record that he invited his thugs to come to Washington on that day and get “wild.”  When Mike Pence decided that he’d rather stay out of jail than help Trump steal the election, Trump concluded that Pence had outlived his usefulness. And now the VP seems to have a price on his head.  One of Trump’s lawyers even suggested that Pence be executed by a firing squad for refusing to assist with Trump’s coup.  

Trump also took steps to make sure that once the violence started, it would be allowed to run its course.  His firing of Secretary of Defense Mark Esper on November 9 – the day that all the swing states were called for Joe Biden – makes sense in that context.  He couldn’t risk having some Goody Two Shoes calling up the National Guard before the Proud Boys had a chance to reason with members of Congress.  Or hang them.  Whatever.  In addition, coup preparation also explains why Trump pardoned a raft of rogue cops and war criminals right before Christmas.  Gotta let the troops know the general will have their backs.

Don’t be fooled by the clownish aspects of this practice coup.  While some of the January 6 mob were generic Deplorables, content to shout slogans and take selfies, there was among them a cadre of men dressed in tactical gear that weren’t fooling around.  They were on a coordinated hunt for specific people – Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, in particular.  They carried weapons, IEDs, and flex cuffs to restrain prisoners, so they probably weren’t autograph seekers.  My totally speculative guess?  They were going eliminate as many people in the line of presidential succession as possible, giving Trump an opportunity to pick someone like QAnon favorite Mike Flynn as his new VP. 

Or maybe they were just probing, seeing what they could get away with.  Could they get into the Capitol building?  Could they get into the Capitol wearing military outfits and carrying weapons?  Could they count on help from some of the law enforcement personnel on the scene?  On January 6, the answers to those questions were yes, yes, and yes.  If and when they decide to stage another raid on Congress, they can hunt their prey more efficiently.

The death toll from the insurrection has already exceeded that of the infamous attack on Benghazi.  Republicans spent four years investigating Benghazi.  Remarkably, though, those same Republicans have shown very little interest in getting to the bottom of the January 6 coup.  It’s a time for healing now, that’s the ticket.  Maybe they’re afraid of what an investigation might find.  Or – this is my theory – they already know what it will find, and they’re scared shitless.  I’ll bet that when the dust settles, we’ll learn that more than one Republican congressman/woman actively assisted the coup plotters.

And the cherry on top of that particular sundae is the report that at least one person arrested required a Russian translator.  Computer security in Congressional offices and meeting rooms must be presumed to be completely compromised.  That, all by itself, should enrage every Republican who complained about Hillary Clinton’s email problems. 

One wonders why less than a quarter of the DC police force was on duty when the riot started.  One also wonders, for the cops who were on duty, which side they were on.  Video from different points of the mob action suggests that some officers did their best to hold the line, while others appeared to be helping the insurrectionists – opening doors open, giving directions to congressional offices, even helping one member of the mob make it down a set of stairs.  For sure, local law enforcement wasn’t being aggressive in arresting people at the scene of the crime. 

Oh, and by the way, the heads of the police departments of the DC Metro and the Capitol police have resigned or been fired.  I look forward to finding out the rules of engagement those cops were working under.  Something seems a little fishy on the law enforcement end of things.    

Of course, there’s dark money behind the January 6 coup, and some of it has already come to light.  Seems there’s this group called the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), which has a “Rule of Law Defense Fund,” full of large contributions from the usual suspects – Koch, Walmart, NRA, etc.  One hears that the Republican attorneys general of Alabama and Utah helped organize the “protest” that turned into June 6 coup.  People like Rudy Giuliani, Gini Thomas (Mrs. Clarence Thomas), Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, and Lauren Boebert also encouraged the mob.  They have blood on their hands, and they’re unrepentant.

Donald Trump still has eight days to wreak havoc, and his acting head of Homeland Security just resigned unexpectedly.  One wonders what plans Trump might have shared that made one of his loyalists quit on the spot.  Homeland Security oversees the Secret Service, so Biden people and Congressional Democrats might want to watch their backs for a few weeks.

There has been some good news as well – over and above seeing Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz incinerate their presidential ambitions.  It looks like House Democrats will impeach Trump again.  There are complexities around the timing of the Senate trial, but I believe there are also workarounds.  The larger question is whether there are 17 Republican senators who’ll have the integrity to vote to convict this time around.  But even if this second effort falls short, it’s worth doing just to force members of the RAC (Republican Asshole Caucus) to take a public position on sedition. 

Here’s my personal advice for the first month of the Biden Administration.  I’ll waive my usual consulting fee.

It’s time to teach the bad guys a lesson.  Prosecute the hell out of them.  If a few hundred, or even a few dozen, of the January 6 mob wind up spending the next ten years in a federal prison, it will scare off the dilettantes and deprive the committed traitors of some of their protective cover.

Next, censure and expel any member of the House or Senate who actively supported the coup.  And prosecute them, if their support amounted to anything more tangible than the junior senator from Missouri’s patented Heil Hawley fist pump.  Censure and expel the House Republicans who refused to wear masks while they were waiting to be rescued, and passed COVID on to some Democratic colleagues in the process.

And definitely impeach and convict Trump, invoking the ban on holding public office ever again. 

Once we settle the score for January 6, I hope AG Garland will follow up on Trump’s corrupt pardons (of which there will surely be many more), investigate issues left hanging in the Mueller Report, and prosecute the guilty.  And on a parallel track in New York and other jurisdictions, I want local prosecutors to investigate money laundering and other illegal activity on the part of the Trump Crime Family.  I want justice, in other words.

Republicans have suddenly become passionate about “healing,” by which they mean “let us get away with it one more time.”  But America has been sweeping its dirt under the rug for too long.  At least since Reconstruction, we’ve avoided looking too closely at our mistakes.  We’d rather outrun our problems than solve them.  And so we’ve played whack-a-mole with bad guys from Nathan Bedford Forrest to Donald Trump.  The names of the generals change, but the war drags on.

On a recent podcast, James Carville said that Joe Biden’s top three priorities should be: 1) Get Merrick Garland confirmed and get him working on bringing the coup plotters to justice; 2) implement a crash COVID vaccination program; 3) make sure Mitch McConnell doesn’t talk Joe Manchin into switching parties.  To which I would add 4) see if any of the GOP senators who’ve expressed outrage about the coup might be interested in switching parties, or becoming independents and caucusing with the Democrats.  Will Senators Romney, Murkowski, Collins, and Toomey be enthusiastic about caucusing with the likes of Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz?  Seems to me it’d be worth asking.

Really, it’s not that complicated.  No justice, no peace.  Honesty is the best policy.  Let’s try to get it right this time.

MY MONSTER FROM HIS SLAB BEGAN TO RISE, AND SUDDENLY

Most of you aren’t old enough to remember the early days of television, when many local stations drew a cult audience to the late, late show by programming 1930s monster movies on a Friday or Saturday night.  Suddenly, Frankenstein and Dracula were cool again.  And since nature and Hollywood both abhor a vacuum, a raft of new films began to ring changes on the old Universal horror pictures.

One of them was FRANKENSTEIN 1970, which was released in 1958.  It had its world premiere in Wichita, Kansas, which tells you what the producers thought of its box office chances.  But who was I – an 11 year old Wichita kid – to pass up the world premiere of a monster movie?  (In the interest of full transparency, I’ll confess that I don’t remember a damn thing about the movie itself, only about going downtown to see it.)

Today’s Republicans, though, make the cinematic monsters of yesteryear seem almost like Sesame Street characters.  The Mummy, the Wolfman, Dracula, and Frankenstein all had more interesting backstories than their modern counterparts in the GOP, but the contemporary Republican Party is way more destructive.

I’ve often cited William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” as an appropriate metaphor for the Trump Era.  The center is struggling to hold, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.  Can blood-dimmed tides be far behind? 

To which I’ll add the (translated) words of Antonio Gramsci, who nearly a century ago, wrote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” 

What’s the harm in letting Trump vent for a few days before he concedes, his Republican enablers asked?  Off the record, of course, because Trump would mean-tweet them in a heartbeat if they said it publicly.  Well, now we know the harm, or at least part of it.  With three weeks to go before Joe Biden is sworn in, Trump is talking openly of sedition, and most congressional Republicans are too scared of him to utter a peep. 

Our Monster-In-Chief understood that he’d lose if all the votes were counted, so his inner circle devised a plan to steal the election by not counting all the votes.  We know this because Trump bragged about it repeatedly.  In public.  Maybe it’s a rich man’s power move – telling the competition what you’re going to do and daring them to stop you.  In politics, though, it’s risky to share details of your brilliant plan with the competition. That’s especially true if your plan involves breaking lots of laws. 

And while I realize that hindsight is 20-20, I have to believe that future historians will question the wisdom of putting Larry, Moe, and Curly (sorry, I meant Rudy, Lin, and Sidney) in charge of executing this brilliant plan.  The kraken they released turned out to be as ephemeral as Tinker Bell, whose very existence (in the theatrical version of Peter Pan) depended on the audience’s willingness to clap for her.  They should have brought in Jeb Bush to reprise is famous “Please clap” moment. 

As all good MAGA cultists know to be true, Trump can never fail.  He can only be betrayed.  The deep thinkers among them quickly speculated that all those judges and politicians who stabbed Trump in the back must have been bought off.  But by whom?  Suspicion currently centers on China.  And if MAGA rumors are correct, China’s treachery is worse than that.  Did you know that China has invaded the United States?  And not Guam, or some other remote territory, either.  No, if the galaxy brain MAGA thinkers are right, the People’s Liberation Army has boots on the ground in Maine. 

How could such a thing happen?  Blame Canada.  Apparently the perfidious French-Canadians are in league with the Chinese, and those miserable poutine eaters have turned Quebec into a staging ground from which units of the People’s Liberation Army can cross into the United States.  It’s not clear what China wants with Maine – lobsters, maybe – but presumably they’re installing rigged Dominion voting machines everywhere and leaving a network of 5G towers in their wake.  Sherman’s march to the sea pales in comparison.  Can sharia law be far behind?

(Speaking of perfidious Canadians, the Q people have figured out that Justin Trudeau is the illegitimate son of Fidel Castro!  The beard is a dead giveaway.)

And if all this is news to you, it only proves how widespread the conspiracy is. 

Or else – and we can’t overlook this possibility – Trump and his people are idiots.  And now, with time running out, the dumbest people left standing are recommending that he stage a coup.  Technically, a weird form of autogolpe, but the more common word will do.  Whatever else we call it, though, we need to call it illegal.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that Donald Trump is a profoundly ignorant man.  He has demonstrated time and time again that he has no clue about how American government is supposed to work.  But Republicans in Congress know.  And they’ve remained silent.  Republicans in Congress know abuse of the pardon power when they see it, but they remain silent while Trump pardons war criminals, traitors, and any accomplice who might rat him out.  Republicans know what he’s doing.  They could stop it if they wanted to.  They don’t want to. 

In Mary Shelley’s novel, a mad scientist creates a monster, and dies trying to destroy it.  In the new Republican reboot of the Frankenstein legend, the monster is the hero of the story.  And that angry mob carrying torches and pitchforks?  They aren’t after the monster.  In the GOP’s FRANKENSTEIN 2020, the mob is coming for you and me.  Most of it is performative bluster, but it only takes one well-armed fanatic to get that blood-dimmed time rolling in.   

THE PARDONER'S TALE

CNN reports that there is only one topic that can distract Donald Trump from his fantasies about a second term.  He’s fascinated by his pardon power, and is said to relish discussions about which of his henchmen have been loyal enough to warrant a pardon.  Or which ones know enough dirt to be dangerous, should they decide to cut a deal with a prosecutor. 

Marcy Wheeler, at Emptywheel, tags no fewer than 25 likely pardon recipients –  Allen Weisselberg, Bijan Kian, Brad Parscale, Corey Lewandowski, Don Jr., Eric Trump, Erik Prince, Felix Sater, George Papadopoulos, Igor Fruman, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Jason Miller, Jay Sekulow, Jerome Corsi, John Dowd, Keith Schiller, KT McFarland, Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Robert Costello, Roger Stone, Rudy Giuliani, Sam Clovis, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon. 

As a fairly obsessive tracker of Trump perfidy for the past four years, it pains me to admit that I didn’t recognize either Bijan Kian (Mike Flynn’s partner in criming) or Robert Costello (attorney for Bannon and Giuliani).  But birds of a feather flock together, or so they say.

I dare say any of our first 44 presidents would have been at least mildly embarrassed about the fact that so many members of his inner circle are criminals. But since this is Donald Trump we’re talking about, the guy who only hires the best, the real mystery is why the list isn’t longer.

As Sherlock Holmes advised, it’s important to pay attention to the dogs that don’t bark.  Where’s Mike Pence, whose account of his interactions with Mike Flynn during the transition didn’t entirely add up?  Did Bill Barr bail out early to avoid being tainted by Trump’s pardoning spree?  Or did he negotiate a pardon for himself on the way out the door?  What about other current/former Cabinet members?  No Elliott Broidy or other shady donors like the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre.  No governors or state officials, not even Texas’ hapless Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General who got laughed out of the Supreme Court for trying to help Trump steal the election.

That’s as scurvy a gang of failed coup plotters as this country has ever seen.  But wait – what about some of the foot soldiers of the MAGA movement– the St.  Louis gun couple, for instance, or Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenage kid who killed some people in Kenosha, WI, or the yellow-kilted Proud Boy flashers in Washington DC, or the drunk lady that Rudy G recruited for his bogus #StoptheSteal hearing in Michigan?  Surely Trump won’t leave these martyrs of the revolution behind.

Well, it’s early days yet.  But the two names I’m waiting to hear are Trump himself (will he try a self-pardon?) and Jeffrey Epstein’s pal Ghislaine Maxwell (whose testimony Trump probably fears more than anyone else’s).  Not that I want either one of them to evade justice; I assume their criminality extends to the state as well as federal level.  But I kinda hope Trump goes for it.  If he’s going down this road, I want him to go all the way, to thoroughly discredit himself in the eyes of every rational person.

And maybe even in the eyes of some irrational folks as well.  QAnon cultists are adept at cognitive dissonance, but as they’ve zigged and zagged to accommodate failed prophecies, they’ve held fast to one absurd premise:  All opposition to Donald Trump is grounded in pedophilia.  They even believe that Trump – Jeffrey Epstein’s pal – has a secret plan to round up thousands of prominent pedophiles and send them to Gitmo. 

Trump pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell would make their heads explode.  Someone, no doubt, will pick up the torch, and concoct a tortured story that “proves” that this is all part of the master plan.  Just like losing the election, and all those court cases.    

Of course this is all hypothetical.  Trump’s pardon tsunami hasn’t happened yet, and maybe it never will.  But it will.

IF I LET YOU GET AWAY WITH IT ONCE, YOU'LL DO IT EVERY TIME

In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln said this: “Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy...Whoever rejects [majority rule constrained by constitutional checks and limitations] does of necessity fly to anarchy or despotism.”

Once again, a gaggle of secessionists are about to fly to anarchy or despotism.  We haven’t had a physical act of war yet, but Trump’s zombie army of inept attorneys have basically mounted a philosophical argument against federalism.  The argument has repeatedly failed to pass constitutional muster, but that doesn’t matter to Trump and his followers. 

Take Ken Paxton, for instance.  A reasonable person might wonder why the Attorney General of Texas thought he had the right to tell Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania how to run their elections.  The case was so weak that the Supreme Court refused to hear it.  Since there is clearly no legal authority for the Texas suit, something else must be going on.  Actually, two something elses are going on – one personal, the other political.

The personal motive is easy to discern.  Call me a cynic, but I have to wonder if Paxton’s sudden interest in how other states run their elections has anything to do with the fact that he is under indictment for felony securities fraud.  When the long arm of the law has you dead to rights, who you gonna call?  Why, the Grand Old Pardoner himself, of course. 

But Donald Trump’s window for exercising his pardon power is closing fast, and apart from his inner circle, no one rides for free.  Paxton knew he was in a pay-to-play situation; the simplest explanation for the Texas lawsuit is that Paxton figures that if he helps Trump fundraise off MAGA rubes for another week or two, Trump will owe him.  If that’s his plan, I hope he got something in writing, because Trump rarely pays his debts, and he’ll be especially pissed off now that the Supreme Court has told Paxton to buzz off.    

But the politics behind the Texas suit are more sinister.  Up until now, the only interest Texas Republicans ever took in election fraud was to encourage it.  Republicans like election fraud.  It’s the only way they can win national elections.  No, the political goal for Texas and its Republican allies wasn’t to stop election fraud, or even to win the suit they filed.  They aren’t that stupid, even if their followers are.  They were laying down a marker, a declaration that Republicans aren’t obliged to respect the results of any election they lose. 

They will certainly keep pushing their “one law for them and another law for us” position once Joe Biden is president.  The question is whether they’ll get away with it.  One thing that would slow them down is a vigorous investigation and prosecution of Republican crimes during the Trump years.

I know.  The usual suspects are already doing the “Look forward, not backward” dance. “Don’t give him the spotlight he craves.  Don’t make a martyr out of him.”  Those arguments have a certain logic to them.  President Biden will have a lot on his plate without the added melodrama of a new Trump investigation.

On the other hand, there’s something to be said for not letting criminals get away with their crimes.  As for making Trump a martyr, that train left the station a long time ago.  The party that once scorned minorities for “playing the victim card” has dealt itself in.  Donald Trump spelled it out last weekend in Georgia: “We’re all victims.  Everybody here, all these thousands of people here tonight, they’re all victims.  Every one of you.” 

Self-pity much, MAGA folks?

The thing is, we have a considerable body of evidence that suggests that looking forward not backward only encourages Republican misbehavior.  Every Republican president since Ford pardoned Nixon has left office with potential legal exposure, primarily because they ignored laws limiting their ability to meddle in the affairs of foreign countries.  Iran/Contra, arms for hostages, the misbegotten wars in the Middle East – all Republican scandals.  And every time, their Democratic successors did the “look forward, not backward” dance.  And the next Republican presidential scandal was worse.

Donald Trump’s thorough trashing of the Constitution is the logical culmination of the Republican Party’s drift towards authoritarianism that began with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964.  Trump and his enablers are doing their best to establish a “stab in the back” narrative that will keep their deluded followers in a state of permanent outrage.  MAGA vigilantes have already threatened violence against local election officials who refuse to falsify results.  Sooner or later, this vigilantism is going to get somebody killed.

Those deaths will be over and above the 300,000 somebodies who have already died due to Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic.  The Thanksgiving superspreader holiday is having predictable results two weeks later, boosting us to new daily records for COVID fatalities.  Two more superspreader holidays – Christmas and New Year’s Eve – are coming right up.  By the time Joe Biden takes the oath of office, the COVID death toll on Trump’s watch may approach 500,000.    

Naturally, today’s anti-maskers will be tomorrow’s anti-vaxxers.  With luck, they’ll mostly infect each other, which might be considered poetic justice if they’d all agree to face death stoically at home, like John Wayne would have.  But no, these COVID denialists will clog our already overburdened health care system, wheezing about their “rights” with their dying breath.  They’ll die owning the libs, though, so I guess that’s something.

Speaking of dying breaths, all that Republican support for the frivolous Texas lawsuit makes it clear that there’s no  going back to a pre-Trump “normal” GOP.  75% of all states with Republican governors joined Paxton’s suit, as did 126 Republican members of the House – well over half their caucus.  There was even a right-wing joker claiming to represent the “State of New California and New Nevada,” who filed a brief with the Supreme Court in support of Paxton.  We’ve yet to hear from Atlantis and Narnia. 

Right on cue, Rush Limbaugh (who would better spend his remaining time in prayerful repentance) has injected secession into the conversation.  We’ll hear more secession talk, and most of it will be performative bluster.  Like Allen West, chair of the Republican Party of Texas, who issued a press release stating “Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution.” 

I hate to break it to him, but that very sentence is unconstitutional.  Not to mention that it’s already been tried.

After five years of Trumpism, it has come to this.  The majority of people who call themselves Republicans now refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of any election they lose.  Either the GOP is full of cynical hacks who don’t care about American democracy, or the GOP is full of cynical hacks who are actively trying to destroy American democracy.   

This might all be amusing, except for the fact that feral Trumpers are impressionable sorts.  They take Trump and his minions both seriously and literally.  Out of Trump’s millions of heavily armed followers, there are bound to be a few who’d love to go down in history as the guy who fired the shot that sparked the Big Boogaloo.

Nothing good will come of allowing this to fester.  I say, crack down hard on hooliganism (all across the political spectrum), and investigate Trump and everyone in his orbit.  Follow the evidence wherever it leads – into Congress, into statehouses and legislatures.  Let the punishment fit the crime, but let’s not pretend that crimes weren’t committed. 

What we need is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that might help rehabilitate Republicans who have seen the error of their ways.  What we’ll get instead is a Republican Party split between a large and very loud Trump Uber Alles faction and a smaller (and very quiet) group of establishment Republicans.  The latter group will often claim to be concerned and occasionally even troubled by the excesses of their Trumpier colleagues. In the end, of course, they’ll do whatever Mitch McConnell tells them to do.

I hold out some hope that Trump’s inner circle will eventually pay some sort of price for their crimes.  Even if Trump pardons everyone in sight (up to and including Ghislaine Maxwell) for their federal crimes, many of them will still be on the hook for breaking state laws. 

Whatever else the Biden Justice Department decides to do, my hope is that they will release the unredacted case files of everyone who accepts a pardon from Donald Trump.  And while they’re at it, let the public see all the parts of the Mueller Report that Bill Barr covered up. 

I’d love to see videos of Bill Barr busting rocks on a chain gang, but I’d settle for an honest accounting of what he and his co-conspirators did while they were in power.  Surely we’re entitled to that.

I SEE NO REASON TO FORGET THE TREASON

In 1951, Hannah Arendt anticipated the process that Donald Trump would use to take control of the Republican Party and try to overturn the results of a presidential election.  She wrote, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi… but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

It took seven decades, and a lot of help from people like Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh, but after only five years in politics, Donald Trump has created a nation of rubes – over 70 million of them – who believe in his bizarro-world America.  74 million citizens are having a mass hallucination.  They looked at the least intelligent, least competent, most dishonest president in our nation’s history, a man whose criminal negligence has led to over 250,000 avoidable deaths, and they wanted more.  I’m still at a loss to explain it. 

OK, it was a “middle finger election,” and it’s no surprise that Trump’s people have signed onto the  I understand the “fuck your feelings” attitude.  I get wanting to own the libs, and I get that losing sucks.  But how do they get from there to Crazy Town?  A Republican who is still tethered to reality might say, “I don’t understand Biden’s appeal.  Why did so many people vote for him?”  That’s a fair question, for which there are many reasonable answers.  Come, let us reason together!

But there’s no reasoning with people who argue, in effect, “I don’t like it, and therefore it didn’t happen.”  They’ll embrace absurd, impossible conspiracy theories rather than accept the fact that 81+ million people voted for Joe Biden. 

Where did those votes come from?  Apparently millions of Americans have embraced the existence of a hypothetical plot against Donald Trump, led by the Chinese government and abetted by the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.  Those worthies coordinated with the usual rogues gallery of Q bogeymen – Hunter Biden, the Clintons, the Obamas, the Bushes, George Soros and Bill Gates – as well as the entire Democratic Party and all of mainstream media.  Only in this bizarro world, Fox is now part of MSM, and some prominent Republicans are part of the conspiracy as well.  Seriously, who can you trust these days?    

Among the many ludicrous aspects of this theory is that it only works if several thousand people (at a minimum) keep the secret.  Surely at least one co-conspirator would have cracked by now, either through simple carelessness, or to cash in on the reward money that Republicans have promised in return for evidence of election fraud.  I wouldn’t do that, or course; my lips are sealed.  But I’m surprised that some conspirator with fewer scruples hasn’t flipped. I guess that just proves how powerful the conspiracy is.

Not all Republicans are gullible enough to swallow this whole.  Some of them are fundraising off the conspiracy theory.  Others are terrified of physical violence from feral Trumpers.  And all of them fear a primary challenge from some Q-addled Instagram influencer that might derail their gravy train.  But I feel safe in saying that anyone who pushes the theory that this election was stolen from Donald Trump is either crazy, stupid, dishonest, or all three. There’s nothing patriotic, or even conservative about their clown car coup.  Given a choice between preserving American democracy and keeping Trump in power, Republicans will choose Trump every time.   

Of course, there are risks involved in that choice as well.We seem to have begun the Reign of Terror phase of Trump’s interregnum.I mean, jeez, when even Bill Barr is under suspicion, no one outside the immediate family is safe.And Barron might want to watch his back.

EVERYBODY HAS A LAUGHIN' PLACE

Last weekend, I wrote a long post comparing Donald Trump to the French anti-popes of the 14th century.  I speculated that Trump would refuse to concede and set up an anti-presidency in Mar A Lago, where he’d plot his comeback in 2024.  Sadly for my deathless prose, cooler heads in the White House finally prevailed. 

Someone on Trump’s staff tweeted the closest thing to a concession that we’re likely to get.  Trump pretty obviously didn’t write it – the language wasn’t his, and the nursing of grievances was minimal.   But he must have signed off on it, and that, I assume, signals a transition to a new stage of Trumpian Grief.  The next phases are pardons, followed by revenge.    

Remarkably, there are low information voters who watch Rudy Giuliani’s traveling circus and believe that Trump is on the verge of magically overturning the election results.  But Rudy’s “elite strike force” is just comic relief.  When Trump’s actual attorneys are in actual courtrooms in front of actual judges, they sing a different tune.  As of this writing, Trump’s legal eagles have won two minor cases and had 34 cases laughed out of court.  His last gambit is to try to persuade Republican legislatures in a few states to go rogue.  I doubt if he can manage it.      

And he’s kidding himself if he thinks he can mount a comeback in 2024.  His physical and mental health are in steep decline.  Even assuming he negotiates a pardon from Mike Pence for his crimes as president, after January 20, he and his family will spend a lot of time chatting with New York’s attorney general about money laundering, income tax evasion, and other financial crimes perpetrated by the Trump Organization.  Trump, at least, could plausibly plead diminished capacity.  Ivanka, Jared, Don Jr., and Eric don’t have that excuse, although they could try to plead stupidity.  My prediction is that if Trump is still alive in 2024, he’ll be in some sort of assisted living facility.

But revenge?  He can certainly exact a measure of revenge between now and 2024.  The question is, who is he mad at most.  Right now, his anti-Democrat rants seem rather pro forma.  His most passionate grudges at the moment seem to be against his former allies in the GOP and Fox News who betrayed him in his hour of need.  Dolchtoss here we come.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out what he’s planning for the two months he has left in office.  Apart from golfing a lot, and continuing to spew nonsense about election fraud – partly because spewing nonsense is what he does, and partly because he needs an angle to continue bilking his fans.  All this is reprehensible, but not surprising.

What puzzles me is the purge of the leadership our defense and security agencies.  Why might a lame duck president with only two months left in office suddenly fire top officials in the agencies that collect sensitive information about national security?  Of course, he wants people in those positions who’ll do his bidding without asking questions.  But what is he asking them to do?    

The question is complicated by the fact that Donald Trump isn’t a strategist, a tactician, or any kind of planner at all.  He acts on impulse, and he’ll opt for short term gratification every time.  And there are other actors in his orbit – Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence among others – who are pursuing their own personal agendas. 

(My favorite loose cannon so far is the inimitable Roger Stone, who began a social media campaign urging voters in Georgia to write in Donald Trump – for both empty seats – in January’s senate runoffs.  That same thought occurred to me.  Feral Trumpers are already furious at Georgia’s Republican governor and secretary of state for refusing to cheat on Trump’s behalf.  Some of them even say they’re going to boycott the runoff, or write in Donald Trump.  As Brer Rabbit would say, please don’t throw me into that briar patch!  Helping elect two more Democrats to the Senate is the perfect way to own the libs.  But I digress.)

So.  Maybe Trump is just thrashing around in pain, and firing people helps him blow off steam.  We know he likes to fire people.  But why hasn’t he fired a few folks in Agriculture, Interior, and HUD as well?  The blowing off steam theory fails to account for his apparent targeting of the defense and intelligence leadership.

Maybe it’s something relatively mundane, like removing barriers to sketchy arms deals with countries that might be in a position to do him favors once he returns to civilian life.  What kind of favors?  Helping him pay off his family’s massive debts, for one.  Making sure he and his family have a safe landing spot if prison seems like a realistic possibility, for another.

Maybe he wants to go out with a bang and intends to start a war he thinks he can win by January 20.  And if things go wrong, it’ll be Joe Biden’s problem soon enough.  Maybe he’s planning a hasty withdrawal of American troops from the Middle East, or from Europe – one last favor for his pal Vlad. 

More likely, in my view, is that Team Trump wants to be able to rummage around in classified files without interference from any Goody Two Shoes who might have a few scruples left.  None of the newly appointed acting administrators are remotely qualified for the jobs they hold.  Their chief skills are a willingness to lie for Trump, and to look the other way (or actively abet) whatever cover-ups might be necessary. 

I’m sure that if they see a chance to make some easy money, or if they find embarrassing information about members of the Democratic Party, they’ll jump on it.  But I think their top priority is to sanitize the files and destroy any evidence they might find of high crimes and misdemeanors (e.g., the truth about the bone saw murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the parts withheld from the Mueller investigation, and anything that might compromise Don Jr., Ivanka, or other members of the inner circle).  I expect that the grand finale will be a wave of pardons, perhaps ending with Trump’s own pardon, if he can cut a deal with Mike Pence.    

The good news is, Joe Biden will be our next president.  Unless Trump resigns and Mike Pence gets there first. 

I CAN LAUGH WHEN THINGS AREN'T FUNNY

Kuru (aka transmissible spongiform encephalopathy) is a fatal neurodegenrative disease associated with the Fore people of Papua New Guinea.  One of its symptoms is uncontrollable laughter.   It turned out that the Fore practice of cooking and eating the bodies of their dead in order to free the spirits of their deceased relatives.  Remarkably, the disease has an incubation period of anywhere from 10-50 years, which meant that even when the Fore abandoned cannibalism, kuru didn’t disappear until about 2010. 

Or did it?  Check out the YouTube video link below.  It features the Trumpvangelical prosperity gospel huckster Kenneth Copeland, of Lubbock, TX.  Makes you wonder what he and his congregation have been eating for lunch.

(And damn, come to find out that this is the same guy, recording as Ken Copeland, who had a minor hit in 1957 with “Pledge of Love” – a song I actually liked, and which you can find on YouTube if you care to look.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=Y06qvqAGpP8

AND THE TIME IS RIGHT FOR DANCING IN THE STREETS

Donald Trump predicted riots in the streets if Biden won.  Sure enough, there was a lot of street action when the networks finally called the election, but it was more like the fall of Pinochet, or when the Berlin Wall came down.  The word “celebration” doesn’t quite do it justice.

Oh, there were some disturbances during the interminable stretch between Wednesday and Friday, but they were Republican riots, as MAGA types did their best to intimidate poll workers. 

Will Trump leave peacefully?  Who knows?  The terms of his departure are the last real bargaining chip he has left.  I’ll say this – Trump’s not a fighter.  He’s a bully and a cheat, but he won’t stand and fight. 

To be sure, it wouldn’t matter if he did.  Joe Biden will become president when he’s sworn in on January 20.  If it were me, I’d be tempted to spend the first couple of weeks at Camp David while a hazmat team fumigated the White House.

If anyone close to Trump really cared about him, they’d begin slipping tranquilizers into his Diet Cokes, a little more each day, until he zoned out.  But his pack of grifters are too busy squeezing the last dollars out of their followers to take care of dad.  And of course, with the possible exception of Ivanka, the feeling is probably mutual.  Trump would sell any of them out in a heartbeat to save his own skin.

It’s fun to fantasize about Trump being forcibly removed, kicking and screaming, from the White House.  My dream scenario, should it come to that, is that federal marshals bring some K-9 units to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  Give them an article of Trump’s clothing to sniff, and say sic ‘em.  Trump is phobic about dogs; he’d run screaming at the sight of a couple of german shepherds heading his way.

If I had to bet, though, my guess is that one of the following two scenarios will play out.  Most likely, Trump will eventually be persuaded that a new career as glorious martyr-cum-media magnate is his best case scenario, and that he’ll leave the White House early to plot his revenge.  He’ll spend inauguration day sulking at Mar A Lago.  Maybe they’ll stage a boat parade for him.

Or – and I’m not exactly predicting this, but it wouldn’t shock me, either – I think it’s highly likely that Trump will try to negotiate a pardon (or series of pardons) from Mike Pence.  I don’t know if Pence will bite, and it will be interesting to see how he plays the interregnum with an eye to 2024.  But if Trump resigns with a pardon, Pence would become 46, albeit only for a few days or weeks, depending on the timing of the pardon.  Then on January 20, Biden would become president number 47.

Something to consider if you’re buying Biden 46 merch.  Of course, this scenario might make those Biden 46 items more valuable.  Can’t go wrong either way; be the first on your block to collect ‘em all.

I DONE SEEN BETTER TIMES, BUT I'M PUTTIN' UP WITH THESE

When I went to bed last night, I felt a lot like I’d felt four years earlier, when I wrote, “This is not what I expected.”

I don’t feel as bad today as I felt four years ago, because it appears that Joe Biden will be our next president, and I got to vote in a blue state for the first time in my life.  To recap, if you’re keeping score at home, I was right about Biden carrying AZ, and about Mark Kelly beating Martha McSally.  I was wrong about a Biden landslide, the makeup of the Senate, and the expansion of the Democratic House majority.  But apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

It could be worse.  But not by much.  Here’s something else I wrote on election night four years ago:  “Right now, 2016 feels like the worst political year of my long lifetime. I’m beyond surprised. I’m shocked and disheartened. That will remain true even if Clinton wins the popular vote, and even if she somehow ekes out a narrow Electoral College victory. I wrote last summer that there was a large pool of racist, sexist voters in this country, but I had no idea that it amounted to half of the electorate. I’m ashamed to be an American.”

Change 2016 to 2020, change Clinton to Biden, and that’s pretty much how I feel this morning.

What mystifies me is that most of those same 2016 Trump voters, and even some new recruits, took a look at the past four years and said, sign me up for four more.  I mean, the racism and sexism are pretty much baked in at this point, but couldn’t those folks find someone competent to rally behind?  Nope.

Byron York, editor of The National Review, argued that Trump voters would make this a “middle finger election.”  I think he got it right.  Sixty five million people hate me (and people like me) enough that they’ll happily vote for the guy who has presided over 220,000+ preventable deaths, with a third wave building up steam. 

I don’t get it.  I quite literally don’t understand it.  Last night as I was trying to get to sleep, I tried to think of synonyms for what I was feeling.  Confusion, incomprehension, bafflement, gobsmacked, etc.

I’m writing this on Wednesday morning.  For the moment, it appears that disaster has been averted.  I was hoping for better than that.  I’ll opine at greater length once the dust settles (and I get a little more sleep.)

THE WORDS OF THE PROPHETS ARE WRITTEN

Comes the news that a Russian oligarch named Vladimir Marugov, known colloquially as “the Sausage King,” was murdered.  With a crossbow.  In a sauna.  I haven’t played Clue in a long time.  Maybe the newest versions of the game have crossbows and saunas as options – Colonel Mustard in the sauna with a crossbow.  If they don’t, they’re missing a bet.  Adding a few new Russia-specific murder tools – crossbow, polonium soup, defenestration – would lend a 21st century perspective to the game. 

Since we’re now living in a world where billionaires are killed in their saunas with crossbows, is any political prediction or projection implausible?  Hold my beer.

Call me a cockeyed optimist, immature and irretrievably green, but I’m feeling pretty good about the outcome of the election.  Of course, I felt the same way four years ago.  I thought Hillary Clinton would win going away.  Live and learn.  Or maybe, live and repeat your mistakes.  We’ll know soon.

So my prediction is that Joe Biden will win the presidency going away.  His margin of victory will put him far enough beyond cheating distance that Trump’s shysters won’t find it worth their while to file bogus legal challenges.  I predict that Biden will carry Arizona, and at least four of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Texas. 

I predict that Democrats will wind up with a new Senate majority (with Mark Kelly replacing Martha McSally in AZ) and a somewhat larger majority in the House.

I’m writing this on Monday, November 2, the day before the election.  It’s funny that I still think of an “election day,” even though I voted weeks ago.  Maybe more accurate to say that I’m writing this before the votes have been counted and before the outcome is known. 

I’m a lot less worried this year about third-party voters and non-voters.  For some reason, Jo and Howie don’t seem to have the charisma of Gary and Jill.  So instead of hectoring folks who are opting out of the binary race, I’ll content myself with a few questions for them. 

Are you voting third party, or refusing to vote at all, to send a message?  If so, who are you sending that message to?  What evidence might indicate that they heard you?  If they didn’t hear you, what alternatives do you have to boost your signal next time?  Are you content to experience future presidential elections as Groundhog Day, poking your head up every four years, seeing your shadow, and diving back into your hole until the next election.  Or are you willing to put some work in?

Until recently, I’ve believed that, as a practical matter, it was impossible to create a viable new political party in the United States.  Today, I’m not so sure.  I think whichever party loses the presidency has the potential to splinter, kicking off a major political realignment in this country.  I think the splintering is much more likely to happen in the GOP than in the Democratic Party, but on the off chance that I’m wrong, I wonder whether progressives who despise Democrats are prepared to take advantage of this hypothetical new opportunity. 

I’ll be writing more about that in future posts.

SHE GOT EVERYTHING THAT UNCLE JOHN NEED

When it comes to taking it to the streets, I’m a bit long in the tooth.  But once, in the dark days of 2017, I did join a protest at the office of then-Congresswoman Martha McSally.  At the time, McSally represented AZ CD2, which rightfully belongs in perpetuity to Gabby Giffords.  But that’s water under the bridge. 

McSally lost her House seat in 2018, but failed upwards, thanks to the Republican welfare state.  John McCain’s death left a Senate seat open, and Arizona’s Republican governor picked McSally.  Her temporary term is up this year, and – in the words of Rodney Dangerfield – she can’t get no respect.

Not that she deserves much respect.  She wasn’t in her Tucson office during the protest I attended, so I asked her local office manager to relay a message:  please ask the Congresswoman to insist that Donald Trump obey the Constitution.  Not exactly controversial, I thought, since Trump had taken an oath to do just that not long before.  But her local rep said, “she’s just a second termer.”  I replied, “Why did she want the job in the first place?”  He didn’t have an answer for that.

That may be one reason why she’ll be out of a job pretty soon.  McSally chose to embrace Donald Trump, apparently unaware that everything Trump touches, dies.  At a rally in Phoenix on Tuesday, she was hoping for an enthusiastic endorsement from the great man.  Instead, Trump introduced her this way:  "Just come up fast. Fast. Fast. Come on. Quick. You got one minute! One minute, Martha! They don’t want to hear this, Martha. Come on. Let’s go. Quick, quick, quick. Come on."

McSally will be an ex-senator soon, replaced by Gabby Giffords’ husband, Mark Kelly.  Maybe what goes around really does come around.  Stay classy, Republicans.

THEY CALL IT MELLOW YELLOW, QUITE RIGHTLY

I’ve got a lot of miles on my odometer.  With luck, I’ll add a few more before I’m done.  A year ago, I would have argued that 1968 was the worst year in American politics during my lifetime.  But today brings news of a Rudy Giuliani sex tape.  OK, 2020, you win.    

Rudy’s been busy lately, so maybe he needed a release.  I won’t judge, as long as I don’t have to watch. 

And I’m paranoid enough, at this point, to wonder what other bad news the release of a Giuliani sex tape is calculated to cover up.  My sense now is that Team Trump is desperate.  They’re frantically playing 2016’s greatest hits, and seemingly not finding much traction.  He’s got his base, and he’s not getting much more. 

One reason why is that it’s becoming clear that, for Trump and his followers, cruelty is the point.  We know now that Donald Trump’s incessant interruptions of Joe Biden in the first presidential debate was a strategy, designed to rattle Biden into a stuttering spell.  That genius strategy was devised by Chris Christie.  Not only did the strategy fail – that debate may have been the point of no return for the Trump campaign – but Christie was rewarded by a few days in the ICU.  Karma?  I report, you decide.

During the Democratic primaries, Pete Buttigieg this:  “To be the kind of human being who would seek to turn someone against his own son, who would seek to weaponize a son against his own father, is an unbelievably dishonorable thing.”

And Rudy Giuliani said, “hold my beer.”  With the help of a Russian spy, he concocted this story.  Hunter Biden, who lived in California, decided to drop off three laptops at a roadside repair shop in Delaware.  And not pick them up.  And the repairman is legally blind, which must make his work challenging.  And the blind repairman keeps changing his story.  But never mind.  The blind repairman makes a copy of one of the hard drives, and gives it to Rudy Giuliani.  As one naturally would.  Rudy hangs onto it for a while, and shops it to Fox News.  Fox calls bullshit and says no thanks.  But luckily there was a bottom feeder who took the bait.  Take a bow, New York Post.  Your founder, Alexander Hamilton, would be proud.

I’d assumed there was no real end game to this latest exercise – just the usual attempt to sow confusion and discourage turnout.  But I’ve heard another theory, which aligns with the Chris Christie strategy for the first debate.  Put enough pressure on Hunter Biden, and he’ll crack – go back to using.  And if Hunter cracks, maybe Joe will too. 

Given the Trump gang’s track record, this explanation strikes me as plausible.  Not proven, but plausible. 

Or maybe it’s just a re-run of the 2016 October surprise.  Which is also plausible.  The Trump people pretend to be galaxy brain geniuses, but they look more like one trick ponies to me.  Trump has even taken to pleading with Bill Barr to pull a James Comey, and deliver a few last minute indictments of prominent Democrats. 

Barr, who’s been conspicuously silent since the Amy Coney Barret superspreader event, may be debating how badly he wants to tarnish his reputation.  Has he done enough to go down in history as worse than Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell, who actually served time in prison?  Or will it require one more audacious travesty of justice to secure his place in history?

But the weirdest thing about this story is that it has been thoroughly investigated multiple times – by Republicans – and who have failed to find any evidence of criminality.  Right wingers ask why Burisma appointed a guy like Hunter Biden, with no background in energy extraction, to their board.  They pose the question as though it were some kind of unsolved mystery, an ultimate gotcha.

But, my goodness, isn’t the answer obvious to anyone who knows what boards of directors do?  Companies want people on their boards of directors who can help them make more money.  They don’t go all in on one person; they appoint lots of people they hope will be rain makers.  Obviously, they wanted Hunter Biden because of his last name.  Whether he did them any favors or not – and there’s no clear evidence that he did – he was being paid for his potential as an influencer.  This is not mysterious.

And guess what?  It’s also not illegal.  If it were illegal, the Trumpian Empire would have indicted him by now.  They haven’t, which means they’ve got nothing.

Now, if you think the whole board of directors arrangement looks a little sketchy, you might be right.  But if you start pulling on that thread, you may have trouble finding a place to stop.  Whatever corners Hunter Biden may have cut, whatever legal loopholes he may have exploited?  All that is business as usual here in the USA.  And if you want to make an example of someone, maybe you should take a look at Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric (who has already been forced to testify before a grand jury investigating his business practices earlier this month).  Let’s prosecute them before we put the screws to Hunter Biden.

Oh, and also?  Donald Trump has a secret Chinese bank account.  And he paid more in taxes to China - $188,561 – than the $750 he paid to the United States treasury.  No wonder China could afford to build their Great Wall.

GIVE HIM THE BOTTLE WHEN HE GOT DRY, AND BRUSH AWAY THE BLUE TAIL FLY

The difference between left-leaning and right-leaning reactions about last night’s VP “debate” was so vast that the two sides might as well have been watching two different events.  National Review, for instance, published several short takes from its contributors, all of which concluded that Pence destroyed his opponent.  Did Pence “mop the floor” with Harris, as one of them put it?

It didn’t sound that way to me, although my wife turned the radio off about halfway through the program.  Frankly, I was relieved.  But the next morning, when I checked other sources, there weren’t many observers outside the Trump bubble who saw much mopping going on.  As Paul Simon observed in the waning days of the Nixon Administration, “a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” 

For what it’s worth, here’s what I heard.  It’s fair to assume that I disregarded the rest.

First, Pence’s “debate” performance demonstrated that Trump is not uniquely obnoxious.  Or rather, it demonstrated that while Trump is indeed uniquely obnoxious, the difference is more a matter of degree than kind.  Let’s face it, Republican men are insufferably rude.  Why?  Because they got bored with pretending to value virtue and civility.  What fun is that?

Just in the nick of time, Donald Trump showed them a better way.  He gave the entire GOP, or at least the men in the party, permission to be assholes.  They tried it, and they liked it.  It turns out that it’s a lot easier to have attitude than to have principles, especially when a vocal segment of the electorate eats it up.  Gotta look manly for the Base.   

Of course, only men can be manly.  Manly behavior from a woman would get her labeled as a bitch.  In fact, any woman who has the temerity to disagree with a Republican man is a bitch by definition.  Bitches get stitches.  Real men prefer handmaidens!  (It’ll be interesting to watch Nikki Haley try to thread this needle in 2024.)

Second, it’s time to disband the Commission on Presidential Debates (the group that organizes these ridiculous affairs).  In their minds, it’s still 1960, and the candidates are Kennedy and Nixon – polite, knowledgeable, and articulate.  They learned nothing from the 2016 Trump-Clinton debates, or from the first Trump-Biden debate last week.  If presidential debates are worth doing at all (an iffy proposition at best), then Democrats ought to insist on organizers who understand 21st century political, cultural, and technological realities.

Third, Mike Pence looked unwell.  It’s a matter of record that he’s been exposed in multiple ways to the Trump superspreader event.  Whether that accounts for what appeared to be pink eye and a cold sore, I don’t know, but conjunctivitis, at least, is a possible symptom of COVID.  Pence recited his talking points mechanically, but his obvious contempt for the two women on the stage with him was manly, I guess, in the Republican sense of the term. 

My final grades:  Harris’ forbearance earned her a qualified A-.  It’s no use calling out Pence, but I wish she’d called out the totally useless moderator.  I wish she, or Biden last week, had said to the moderator du jour, “Are you getting paid for this?  Because if you are, you’re stealing money.  C’mon, do your job.”

That moderator, Susan Page, gets an F for failing to do her job.  Mike Pence also gets an F, for being a typical Republican asshole. 

The fly gets an award for best performance by an insect in a supporting role. 

PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF, I'M A MAN OF WEALTH AND TASTE

“It affects virtually nobody.”  So said Donald Trump about a week ago.  He’s a real nowhere man, so maybe he was just being modest.  Or clueless.  My money is on clueless.

As Trump’s enablers (including his doctors!) continue to lie to the public, they seem to be in the midst of a re-enactment of Edgar Alan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” in which a prince and his assembled nobles try to cheat death by throwing an elaborate party.   Or maybe they’re re-enacting Luis Bunuel’s “The Exterminating Angel.”  Or for you youngsters, think of the Eagles’ “you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave,” or Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day,” with added plague.    

In other words, we’ve seen this before, but only in fantastical fiction.  Brace yourself, because now, in the words of the immortal Rod Serling, “That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Twilight Zone!”

Trump’s doctor straight up lied to the press on Saturday.  He admitted it on Sunday.  He probably lied again Sunday, of course.  We can hope that he’ll continue to provide daily updates on which portions of his narrative are no longer operative.  But it’s clear that the Trump “brain trust” (and I use both words as loosely as possible) is dictating what medical professionals release to the public.

I can kind of understand why a generic Republican politician would continue to parrot the Trump line at this point.  Too late to stop now, in for a penny, in for a pound, let’s embrace the sunk cost fallacy. 

But why would a doctor – a professional physician with a couple of decades of practice ahead of him – make an obvious fool of himself in public as Sean Conley is doing, not to mention Ronnie Jackson before him, and Harold Bornstein before that?  The only explanation I can think of is Rick Wilson’s observation that everything Trump touches, dies.  That used to be a metaphor, but it’s becoming more literal every day.

Conley offered an interesting excuse:  "I didn't want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in the other direction.”  What information might Conley have that might alter the course of the illness?  I mean, the virus doesn’t give a damn what Conley says, or what Trump says, or (for that matter) what I say.  Viruses gonna virus. 

I assume Conley’s statement was a tacit admission that his patient was in a fragile psychological state, so he was trying to keep things as upbeat as possible.  But happy talk doesn’t cut it when your patient is the President of the United States, even if he’s the worst one in history, and is about to be voted out of office.  Patients deserve a reasonable amount of privacy, and if Trump were a private citizen, Sean Conley wouldn’t have to tell us a damn thing.  But I’m a taxpayer, and I’m paying Trump’s salary – not to mention his effing hospital bills.  I’m entitled to an honest accounting of how my tax money has been spent.

Conley’s problem is that the course of treatment he describes appears to indicate that Trump is (or at least was) sicker than all the happy talk would suggest.  Dexamethasone, for instance, is a steroid with major side effects, including mood swings and general irritability (with Trump, how could you tell?)  It’s basically the nuclear option in treating COVID-19.  Maybe it was one of those “abundance of caution” things, but look:  the dude is sick.

Now if the issue were only Donald Trump’s health, we might say, so what?  What goes around comes around.  But Trump’s health isn’t the only – or even the most important – issue.  And sure, let’s disregard the health of Trump’s minions.  His victims, as of this writing, include Mike Lee, Kellyanne Conway, Chris Christie, Melania Trump, Hope Hicks, Ronna “Romney” McDaniel, Thom Tillis, Bill Stepien, Kayleigh McEnany, plus an unknown number of Secret Servicemen, housekeeping crew, and other regular folks who were forced to work in close proximity to the Super Spreader In Chief. 

Since Team Trump steadfastly refuses to even discuss the timeline of Hicks’ and Trump’s positive COVID
 tests, I think it’s safe to assume that the Trump campaign knew that something was wrong by last Tuesday.  They had agreed to be tested upon arrival at the debate, and to have their guests wear masks.  Guess what?  The showed up late to the debate, didn’t get tested, and refused to wear masks.  Maybe they didn’t have confirmation that they were contagious, but they certainly knew they were putting others at risk.  Did they give a fuck?  Reader, they did not.

Perhaps we can take solace in irony, since it looks more and more  as though the party they threw to introduce the women the were pleased to call “the Infamous ACB” – Amy Coney Barrett, the pretender to the throne of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Barrett may yet be confirmed, but she’ll have to climb over a mountain of corpses to claim her seat.

Republicans talk about running government like a business.  Any business that was at the epicenter of a major COVID outbreak like the White House has been, would shut down for as long as it took to guarantee a safe workplace.  Instead, Trump is running the government like he runs his own businesses – steal what you can and sell the rest off for parts. 

A month to go.  Eyes on the prize.

NOW I WANT SOME ANSWERS, MISTER, I NEED TO KNOW

In 1963, about a week after President Kennedy was assassinated, Malcolm X gave a speech in which he referred to the murder as a case of “chickens coming home to roost.”  He didn’t use the term “karma,” but he was suggesting that what goes around, comes around, and that America’s hands weren’t clean.  Of course, he was right. He was also roundly denounced by respectable people on every side of the political spectrum.  A little over a year later, Malcolm X was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bullet.  There was a lot of that going around in the ‘60s.

I lived through that history, and it informs my reaction to the news that Donald Trump has tested positive for COVID-19.  As October Surprises go, this one will be hard to top.  To be quite honest, I don’t know what to think.  A prudent man would wait for more information before opining.  But here I am anyway.

There are people who argue that Trump is faking, and while I’m not ready to go that far, the official story seems kind of fishy.  The timing is off, and we don’t know who knew what, when.  Trump has strongly implied that he got it from Hope Hicks, who (according to Trump) got it from hugging some random cop or soldier.  Apparently her job requires her to hug a lot of men in uniform.  Maybe that’s how it all went down, but it seems just as likely that Trump himself was Patient Zero in the White House outbreak. 

I ask myself, why not just take the news at face value?  But nothing about the Trump presidency should be taken at face value.  Trump was having a disastrous week.  His tax returns, the debate fiasco, Melania’s “fuck Christmas” tape, Brad Parscale’s meltdown and arrest, and polls that refuse to get better no matter what he tries.

What does Donald Trump do when he’s had a bad day?  He changes the subject.  Here’s a new scandal to distract you from the old scandal.  And so far – it’s early days, admittedly – it seems to be working. 

It would be entirely on-brand for Team Trump to use a staffer’s COVID diagnosis as the basis for an elaborate story that not only changes the subject, but also provides him with an excuse to skip the next debate.  On-brand, of course, is not the same thing as true.  Add that to the fact that Trump and the people around him are inveterate liars, and it would be naïve not to entertain a suspicion or two.  But suspicion isn’t certainty.

No matter how improbable the official story may seem, the alternatives seem even less rational.  So I’ll wait for future developments before diving further down that particular rabbit hole.  But if Trump tweets at his usual pace for a few days and then pops out of quarantine early claiming that he kicked the virus’s butt, you’re damn right I’ll be suspicious. 

For the moment, I’m less concerned about Trump’s health than I’m relieved that Joe Biden and his wife have tested negative.  This despite the best efforts of Team Trump, who recklessly refused to wear masks at Tuesday’s debate in defiance of the ground rules they’d agreed to.  That also is entirely on-brand for the guy who bragged about engaging in unprotected sex. 

And for everyone who’s insisting that the only proper response to the Trump/virus news is to wish them all a speedy recovery, I would argue that in this case, while compassion is necessary (always), it’s not sufficient.  Trump needs to be held accountable for spending the past eight months vehemently downplaying the seriousness of the virus.  As recently as Tuesday’s debate, he mocked Biden for wearing a mask. 

If Donald Trump is a victim, he’s a victim of his own narcissism.  He took deliberate risks, very much like someone who drinks and drives, or enjoys a weekly game of Russian Roulette, or handles poisonous snakes in church every Sunday to prove his faith.  You can get away with those things – for a while. 

But he should have known better.  And his responsibility is greater because he’s supposed to be the president. He set a bad example, but that’s the least of it.  His dishonesty and incompetence have already led to 200,000 deaths and counting. 

“Get well soon” doesn’t quite do justice to the moment, in my opinion.