Tag: Trump

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Reigny Night in Georgia — The Trump Dump Continues

Reigny Night in Georgia

The Trump Dump Continues

December 5th, 2020

Trump is in Valdosta, Georgia tonight, still insisting he won and the Democrats cheated. Yes, in Georgia, where the governor, Brian Kemp, is one of the most notorious election cheats in America. Between 2010 and 2018, he purged 1.8 million names from Georgia voter rolls (about 18% of the total population of the state, and in a state that has gone red since 1976, the majority were Democrats. What are the odds that a party that makes up about 30% of the population could result in 12% of the names being purged? That’s over a third of the Democrats in the state! Quite a few of the names were reinstated when it turned out the individuals involved were not dead, in jail or fled to the Maldive Islands. He also managed to prevent between 55 and 85 thousand votes from being cast in 2018, when he was both one of the candidates for governor and the guy overseeing the election. Most Democratic voters, of course.

I laugh at the bozos running around saying Kemp stole the election. Certainly he tried, but it was FOR Trump, not AGAINST him.

This, supposedly, is the evil genius who stole the election for Biden in Georgia.

So if you’re Donald Trump and you think this man stole the election from you, what do you do?

Why, you go to him and secretly ask him to steal the election back! Makes perfect sense, right?

According to the NY Times, “He began the day with a telephone call with Gov. Brian Kemp, ostensibly to offer his condolences to the governor about the death in a car accident of a young man who was close to Mr. Kemp’s family.”

Nothing like exploiting a personal tragedy for political gain. This is the sort of vileness that makes Trump such a fine humanitarian in the eyes of his deplorable followers.

Maybe Kemp was confused, and thought Trump was the Democrat and Biden the Republican, and he was just being loyal to his party. Just a silly typo on one memo, and once Donald convinces Kemp that he’s the Republican, Kemp will flip the Georgia vote and Trump will be King of the Confederacy?

Turns out that Brian Kemp wasn’t interested in committing an act of treason so egregious that he would be at serious risk of being seized by an angry mob and thrown into a dumpster and set on fire, so he politely demurred. He did, however, make a point of leaking the conversation to the press.

The White House declined comment, which was a curious stance for a White House to take when a governor from the same party says that the president in effect asked Kemp to commit several felonies in order to stage a coup against America. Granted, if they did deny it, only the ignorant morons who still support Trump would believe it, or at least pretend to believe it.

The Washington Post did a survey of Republicans in Congress and found that 27 of them admit that a) Biden won and b) should be President on January 20th. Trump’s response, in part, explains the cynical cowardice of the GOP; he demanded the names of the renegades who admit Trump lost the election. In a hilarious response, NewsMax celebrated the spineless dishonesty of Republicans with the headline, “222 Republican Congressmen Won’t Say Biden President-Elect.” OK, granted, Newsmax is a trash right wing website and nothing more, but they don’t realize that come 2022, Democrats will be using that headline to show how morally and ethically bankrupt their Republican opponents were in this time.

Kemp didn’t have authority to audit the vote, let alone override the slate of electors, and I’m sure that entered into Kemp’s calculations. If he did have such power, he would have groveled to Trump and screwed the country. He’s just that kind of dirtbag.

Trump did what he always does in this sort of situation: he lied. “Your governor could stop it very easily if he knew what the hell he was doing,” said Trump. “Stop it very easily.”

Well, you know, Republicans have rigged the vote against Republicans, so there’s no point in voting, and be sure to go out and vote in the Senate run-off races next month.

It’s fun watching Trump screw Republicans because he’s having a hissy-fit. Really, I could watch that all day. I don’t have any sympathy for the Republicans Trump is now attacking—most are corrupt, venal, amoral scumsuckers, no better than Trump himself, and they created this monster for their own gain.

The trouble is, if you hire certifiable lunatics to do your dirty work for you, eventually you lose control of them. And sure enough, we have a party civil war now, crazies against fascists. May they do one another great harm.

I fully expect the extremists supporting Trump to try something awful between now and Inauguration Day. Blow up a school, maybe, or try to arrest the Supreme Court, at least the ones who aren’t religious nuts. Trump seems to be putting stiffs in the Pentagon with an eye to paralyzing the incoming Biden administration, or perhaps to force the Pentagon into an ill advised military action, such as a wag-the-dog operation in Iran, or a fuck-the-libs operation in Portland Oregon.

It will (most hopefully) fail, and that will be the end of the Trump movement aside from some whirling nuts in the right wing sections of the web.

Some part of the GOP might survive, but it is tainted with Trump and won’t escape it.

Further, if Biden is humane, determined, competent and compassionate, the GOP will find their usual mix of ersatz moralizing and declamations of fiscal irresponsibility no longer work. Most of America is fed up with that bullshit after four years of craven Republican silence under Trump, and won’t have it.

Keep the countdown going. Forty-six days until Inauguration Day.

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It’s Here – Election time

It’s Here

Election time

10/30/20

There’s going to be an election next Tuesday.

People who read me are more woke and aware than the common rabble, so chances are many of you already knew that. Anyone who didn’t know that, drop everything and start doing a lot of reading over the weekend. Prepare for some nasty shocks. Yes, Donald Trump is the incumbent. Believe it or not, it goes downhill from there.

So, what should we expect from this election?

The signals from the polls are significantly stronger this time then they were in 2016. The polls are narrowing in the final days, but a) over half the population have already voted and b) it’s still over 8 points.

There’s been a lot of propaganda about how the polls are meaningless, and of course, polls taken more than a couple of weeks before an election generally are meaningless. And there are a lot of crap polls out there. Rasmussen is little more than a GOP cheering squad, and Zogby doesn’t even qualify as a bad joke. We all remember one poll that nobody had ever heard of before (or since) that showed McCain leading Obama a few weeks before the election by 20 points.

But the legitimate polls are accurate. Those showed Clinton winning the popular vote by 2-4 points, and she won by 2.5 points. Well within the range of error. The polls are narrowing in the final days, but a) over half the population have already voted and b) the Biden lead over Trump still over 8 points.
I’m expecting that come Wednesday morning, Trump may actually be leading in the electoral college count. The reason for that is that early voting has been mostly Democratic, and come election day, as many as 100 million people may have voted. That would be nearly as many who voted in total in 2016.

Now, if we wake up Wednesday morning and Trump is leading in all fifty states, then it’s safe to assume that Putin and/or the people conducting the cyberattack on hospitals this week have taken over counting the votes, in which case the question you have to ask yourself is not “Who won?” but rather, “Will I still be alive three months from now?” If Putin does scramble the election results, it won’t be because he has our best interests at heart. No, Donald, not even your best interests. He isn’t your buddy. He would find an America in chaos and severe civil strife most amusing as he started swallowing eastern European republics like they were popcorn.

But if you wake up that morning, and the electoral maps on the TV are similar to those of 2016 and show a Trump win, don’t panic.

There is a tidal wave of blue votes yet to be counted. Remember all those banana-republic type eight-hour lines to vote we’ve been seeing for the past month? That’s the early voters—85 million of them as of yesterday. Most of them are Democrats, and there’s a fair number of Republicans who are furious at the party for fucking up the mail service, messing with their ability to vote, and jamming their nasty little fascist theocrat down our throats that they decided to make a protest vote.

But all the early votes get counted—by hand—starting when the polls close. Those will take days, and even weeks to tabulate.

And that’s OK. It used to be that it was normal to have to wait a month or two to find out who won the presidential election, and it was the reason why the actual transfer of power took place four months after voting day. As recently as 1960, it wasn’t clear from the voting who the president was by New Years’. It may have taken a few weeks to determine who won the election in 2000, were it not for a decision by the Supreme Court that was so illegal they make the unique stipulation that Bush vs. Gore never be used as a precedent. (Kavanaugh the Klueless proceeded to try to do that just last week, of course.)

It may take a few weeks to know definitively who won. The Republicans will do everything to stop the counting, including trying to get their toy justices to rule that Trump is God because GOP. Those six clowns will have to decide whether they want to please Donald and lose their credibility and authority forever, or take a stand and prepare for a miserable couple of months compared to risking their lives betraying their country.

Oh–and even if you live in a state where the Presidential race is all but settled, such as California or Kansas, vote anyway.  The downticket races are a lot more fluid, and this year especially, more important.  Its a Census year, and your vote now determines the influence your vote will have over the next ten years.

There’s a lot of speculation about post election violence, but I don’t really see that happening while it’s still being decided who won. After that, well, we’ll just have to see. Hopefully the results will be clear enough, and have enough legitimacy, that the losing side will feel a patriotic duty to accept those results.

When the dust settles, probably around the 15th, Biden should have 350 of the 270 EVs needed to win. And the US will have taken its first big step back toward being a free and democratic republic.

Then we have the next nightmare to endure: a panicked, furious, frightened Trump. Let’s just hope he doesn’t decide the world must pay for failing to adore him.

 

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The Abyss Stares Back – If Friedrich Nietzsche wrote comedy, America 2020 would be it

The Abyss Stares Back

If Friedrich Nietzsche wrote comedy, America 2020 would be it

October 17th, 2020

Well, nobody said the home stretch of the 2020 election was going to be boring. OK, so we all thought the polls would be a lot closer now than they are, portending as they do an utter bloodbath for the GOP. And of course we all worried about how many dirty tricks Trump and the GOP had. Some were predictable: the Hunter Biden “bombshell” in which a computer turned up at some repair shop on which there was supposedly a whole bunch of emails that said stuff like “Hey, my dad wants you to have a bunch of military secrets if you’ll just fire this one judge.” Some of the emails were tracked back to a Russian disinformation outfit, but what really made the whole thing moot was that the right-winger truther who owned the repair shop said the computer, along with two others, were dropped off by someone who could have possibly been Hunter Biden on April 12th, 2019, but the firmware on both the computer BIOS and the hard drive showed that the system had been manufactured on April 19th 2019, a week after Hunter dropped it off. My god, the man can TIME TRAVEL! He’s an existential threat to the entire universe, and you libtard sheeplings are just sitting around making Guiliani jokes!

Voting fuckery is widespread, of course. Abbott, the fascist running Texas, arbitrarily decreed that each county should only have one dropbox. Other GOP states reduced the number of polling places, resulting in line of voters in scenes one expects in fascist banana republics. Like the sort the GOP wants to turn all of America into. In California, GOP outlaws set out phony dropboxes.

Trump has openly said that one reason he wants the godstruck vacuity Barrett on the court by the election is in case he needs the court to rule that those silly old votes don’t matter, and the GOP gets to appoint electors in order to ensure a Trump victory. Given the size of the popular blowout the polls forecast, such a move would result in a popular revolt and even possibly a civil war, but Trump figures he has command over the military, and should the Pentagon decide that they promised to spend some quality time with their cats rather than gunning down Americans, he also has a pack of heavily armed street nazis.

It’s not clear what the military would do in the face of a coup. Trump is commander in chief; but his orders would be illegal if not flat-out treasonous. The street nazis would be faced with a situation where even if they did prevail, they would have absolutely no popular support, even among most Trump supporters. And a hundred million or so people looking for ways to ambush and kill them. They might be vicious crazy bastards, but they aren’t stupid. The leaders know they can’t possibly hold power with a coup that has absolutely no popular support.

Trump himself may be aware of that, or at least suspect it. He joked the other day about leaving the country if he lost the election because losing to “Sleepy Joe” would be so embarrassing. Trump very famously does not joke, but he does have plenty of reasons to flee if he loses. There’s a tidal wave of criminal and civil proceedings awaiting him the minute Biden is sworn in as President, along with many angry creditors, including quite possibly organized crime.

He may well owe hundreds of millions of dollars to Russian interests, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Putin has assured him that if he defects with most or all of America’s military and strategic secrets, Putin would take care of all those nagging debts and set him up in a dacha on the Black Sea. Trump would certainly be willing to entertain such an offer, especially if Putin assured him he would be a hero, nay, a GOD to the peoples of all the Russias, and they would praise him and lionize him for the rest of his life. Oh, and think of all the American liberals who would be sooooo pissed off if he did that!

That would leave Mike Pence as acting president, and he would be an extraordinarily unpopular leader of a country in chaos, head of a party reviled by 70% of the population as traitors. Pence will try to present himself as an expression of God’s Will, and when that falls apart, he’ll resign. The Senate will note that Trump didn’t formally resign, and vote that treason and fleeing the country are not impeachable offenses. It’s not like the GOP will have anything to lose at this point, and chaos might result in a long-hoped-for corporate takeover of the country. Except the country would be disintegrating at that point, with several powerful blue states voting to secede. The Senate will then convict Trump, accept Pence’s resignation, and dump the whole mess in Pelosi’s lap. That may be enough to avert collapse, assuming the Qanon nuts don’t just assume that Pelosi is an intergalactic lizard with a taste for human babies who wants to take their guns. Which she is, of course. The tail is a dead giveaway.

Now, people have said that I’m too conventional, too cautious in my political forecasts, and that may be true. I didn’t even mention North Korea invading the state of Washington, or proof that there is no such thing as COVID-19 coming out. Those could muddy the waters, sure. But I live and die by Occam’s Razor, and manage to look unshaven despite that.

So there’s your immediate future, America. Jokes by Friedrich Nietzsche, screenplay by Garth Ennis, directed by David Cronenberg.

Get a good night’s sleep, folks. You’re gonna need it.

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The Burning Man – Trump’s 42 days in the desert

October 10th 2020

The real polls are shifting, and the shift is enough that I’m starting to feel reasonably secure that the Republican fascists may not be able to steal this election. I figure that what with the gerrymandering (both built-in with the Electoral College or created by corrupt state legislatures), the powerful propaganda arm, the sabotage of mail-in voting and further sabotage of in person voting, the Dems would need about an 8 point lead in the polls to actually win over the fascists.

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com, the most accurate of the aggregate pollsters, had Biden’s lead over Trump rock steady between 5.5 points and 7.5 points for three months following the end of primary season. Normally, that would be an unassailable lead, but the extent of Republican malfeasance made it, at best, too close to call.

At the beginning of the GOP convention, it was at a seven point lead. The Democrats had run a extremely well-crafted four-day infomercial, and the GOP was going for a semi-live show with small audiences rather than the virtual effort by the Dems. Manly men don’t fear the reaper, even if at the time it had already killed some 170,000 Americans. The polls, I reasoned, would have to be above five points for Biden to for him have any chance at all to make up the three more points needed to overcome Republican cheating and lying. And given how entrenched both sides appeared to be, that would take a miracle.

But a week after the convention, the polls hadn’t budged. Seven points. The American public, which largely avoided the four day Donald Trump Show, was unimpressed by all the screaming and lying the GOP put on.

I watched, and during the show I tried pretending to think like an average Republican voter. China and Iran wanted war with us. Russia was our friend, and we could deal with North Korea as equals. The deficit didn’t matter, and Trump was good for the economy. Trump was a godly man who just happened to be a genius at business negotiations. Dems wanted to take everyone’s guns and tax us all to death. Liberals really did sell children as sex slaves in the basement of pizza joints…well, ok. Not even Republican voters believed that one. But they did believe that Hunter Biden was up to no good, abusing his father’s connections, but Don Jr, Eric and Ivanka weren’t.

Even trying to wear that mind set, I found the show unconvincing. From a more sane perspective, the show was an orgy of loud lunacy.

I was pleased, but I misinterpreted that unwavering result. I assumed it meant the body politic had become utterly intransigent, and nothing was going to change anyone’s mind. Anyone who still supported Trump at that point either dismissed or accepted the utter chaos, incompetence and dishonestly of his administration. Hell, the First Lady could tear up the Rose Garden, or get taped saying “Fuck Christmas” and it wouldn’t change anything, right? Well, funny story…

The turning point came an eternity ago—September 20th. That’s when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Yeah, just three weeks ago. Hard to believe, isn’t it?

Her death horrified liberal Americans. What followed horrified most other people. Trump and McConnell, in a massive fireworks burst of hypocrisy and willingness to commit a massive power grab, immediately nominated a replacement for Ginsburg. Not just another tiresome and in all likelihood corrupt neoliberal hack like his first two; this time he picked a god-struck woman whose closest literary cognate is the mad Ignatius J. Reilly from Confederacy of Dunces. The cult she is a member of apparently formed the basis of the cult that destroyed America and enslaved women in Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale. Her position is so extreme it overcame America’s reluctance to attack Christians on the basis of religion.

The willingness of the Republicans to set aside legislation desperately needed to keep thousands of people alive, fed and in shelters in order to ram though the nomination of this viciously unsuitable woman dismayed a large majority of voters—including Republicans, who uneasily remember the Republican stance of no nominations during a presidential campaign that the Republicans used to ignore the nomination of Merrick Garland in Obama’s final year. It was such rank hypocrisy that even the shills at Fox News had trouble selling it, pretending instead that the Garland nomination never happened.

Then the presidential debate showed the world that Trump was a braying, vacuous bully with no answers but lots of empty demagoguery.

Then he got sick. Under just about any other circumstances, a sick leader would have gotten a sympathy bounce in the polls. But his attitude had been so reckless and foolhardy, and so damaging to the country, that most people thought he brought it on himself. People were appalled at the sight of him recklessly endangering the lives of others around him in his mad drive to show that this disease that has killed 215,000 people in his own country is no big deal and can be safely ignored.

There were a dozen other self-immolations. Dissing the troops. Attacking Gold Star families. And finally, becoming totally unhinged and largely incoherent.

So yeah, suddenly, Trump has managed to fall to 10.1 points behind Biden. It seemed impossible three weeks ago, but Biden now seems to be beyond the point where Republicans can steal it.

But remember. This all happened in three weeks. That’s an eternity in politics. We still have three more weeks to go before the election.

Don’t relax.

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Don’t Be Stupid – Don’t Be Donald

Don’t Be Stupid – Don’t Be Donald.

October 5th 2020

I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M. Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 5, 2020

If anyone doesn’t understand the difference between courage and foolhardiness, this tweet will stand as a terrific example. It leaves me hoping that his health will take a turn for the worse (and normally I would want him to live to lose the election and stand trial for his many crimes) because telling his idiot followers that COVID is nothing to fear will get hundreds of thousands killed, on top of the 170,000 or so who have died as a result of his attitude.

Donald Trump stands to kill more Americans than Hitler did, and for similar reasons. Contempt for Americans, and utter hatred of a free and open society.

The sad thing is that it won’t be just the fools who worship him. In Biblical times it was a golden calf. Now it’s an orange jackass. Oh, they’ll die by the thousands, but mostly the victims will be people around them—their family, their friends, their co-workers, people in stores and restaurants that they casually infect.

A leader will often exhort this countrymen in times of great peril. FDR, upon his inauguration in a time of economic collapse, and again in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Abraham Lincoln when a third of the country chose treason for the sake of slavery. Churchill facing down Hitler. There are times when it is a leader’s right and duty to call on his people to make sacrifices and risk their lives for the greater good.

But a leader doesn’t have any right to tell his nation’s children to go play on the freeway, or smoke cigarettes for national profit. Don’t step out in front of buses.

Trump just wants people to piss away their lives because he’s trying to protect Wall Street and because he believes, for some demented reason, that only a weak leader tackles a national crisis and it’s the role of a strong leader to pretend it isn’t happening.

Trump went back to the White House today, sweaty and gasping for breath, and it’s the nature of this disease that he isn’t out of crisis yet, and that he has a pretty good chance of taking long-term damage above and beyond what he’s already at risk for. Just for mindless showmanship. And he’s putting hundreds of lives at immediate risk just by wandering the White House unmasked.

How crazy is it going to get? Trump campaign aide Erin Perrine went on Fox News today to suggest that President Donald Trump is a better leader than Democratic candidate Joe Biden because he has the “firsthand experience” of being infected with COVID-19.

That’s a bit like saying you should be appointed city commissioner of public transportation because you got drunk and walked in front of a bus and got run down. Trump got stupid(er) and caught a disease he could have readily avoided. You might survive sticking your tongue in a wall socket, but boasting about it to others isn’t going to make them think you’re intelligent, or even sane.

Trump is neither intelligent nor sane. Foolhardiness isn’t a legitimate form of “first hand experience.”

Should you be afraid of COVID-19? Well, as of this evening, we have 7,679,644 cases. 215,032 of those cases resulted in death. 4,895,078 people have recovered. Now for the really alarming news: 2,569,534 have not recovered, and have spent weeks and even months fighting this disease and still are. Many of them will have compromised health going forward for the rest of their lives. Over 14,000 of them are presently in critical condition, their lives in the balance. They will never recover.

Donald Trump, in his psychotic need to pretend everything is OK and he is a great leader, is rolling the dice. He’s far sicker than he’s letting on, probably sicker than he’s admitting to himself. He may end up as the poster boy for the non-lethal damage this disease causes. And of course, he might drop dead at any point over the next few weeks.

Should we be afraid of COVID-19? No.

But we should treat it with respect, and not follow a fool who says for his own self-aggrandizement that there is nothing to be afraid of, masks are for weaklings, and he is the example of that. He’s lying to you right now, and he’ll keep right on lying no matter how bad it gets for him because he can’t stand to look weak or wrong.

But he is weak. He is wrong. He is the drunk who wandered out in front of a bus, and somehow survived, and wants that to be a gleaming example so you might step blindly off the curb, refusing to be cowed by buses.

That isn’t courage. That is stupidity.

Don’t be stupid. Don’t be Donald. Wear a mask. Maintain social distancing. And don’t walk out in front of buses.

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Poor, Brave Trump! – The fearless folly of the Donald

October 3rd, 2020

Trump got squeezed into one of his poor-fitting suits and sat in front of a US and Presidential flag that utterly failed to conceal that he was in a hospital room and made a four minute video for the nation. This normally would be a very good thing, since a sick president leaves the entire country unnerved and in need of a calming voice. Such reassurances are usually…staged. Some never existed: the country may have felt reassured at the story that as he was being wheeled into the OR after being shot, Reagan gave the doctors a cheery thumbs-up, but much later we learned that was strictly PR bullshit.

Trump looked better than some of the more dire stories had it but the makeup and his seated position couldn’t quite hide the fact that he wasn’t 100%.

Characteristically, he took the opportunity to praise his heroism and courage:

“But I had no choice because I just didn’t want to stay in the White House. I was given that alternative. Stay in the White House, lock yourself in, don’t ever leave, don’t even go to the Oval Office, just stay upstairs and enjoy it, don’t see people, don’t talk to people and just be done with it and I can’t do that. I had to be out front and – this is America, this is the United States, this is the greatest country in the world, this is the most powerful country in the world. I can’t be locked up in a room upstairs and totally safe and just say: ‘Hey, whatever happens happens.’ I can’t do that. We have to confront problems. As a leader you have to confront problems. There’s never been a great leader that would have done that.”

Mind you, Mister “Whatever happens happens, I can’t do that” said of the same disease just two weeks ago, “It is what it is.” Stoicism is an easy way to cover up moral and mental bankruptcy. Trump is trying to pretend he was out, ignoring the danger, doing the people’s business and fulfilling his duties as president.

In reality, he’s still the same indolent buffoon he’s always been, going out only to play his indeterminable games of golf and hold his super-spreader rallies, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk to fill his mindless need for adulation. Even then, at a recent rally in a display of what passes for humor with Trump, he told his audience that he wasn’t taking any risk—he was ‘way up on his dais, well away from the people he privately calls ‘disgusting.’ All those braying morons, going home to infect friends, family, associates, because Trump felt personally safe. He must have been really tickled pink over that.

He expressed gratitude for all non-American leaders who wished him well. Some, like Boris Johnson, were undoubtedly sincere. Kim Yong Un was probably fairly pro forma. His country isn’t allowed to admit that COVID-19 exists. Trump didn’t want to admit Joe Biden and the Democrats exist, either, and so ignored their well wishes.

Then there’s Putin, and Russia. They have a radio show called 60 Minutes that resembles the American television show of that name much the way OAN resembles Walter Cronkite. The Russian version had its own unique take on it, per the Daily Beast:

Discussing Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis, Evgeny Popov, the host of Russian state media news talk show 60 Minutes, said, ‘Our candidate got sick.’ His co-host Olga Skabeeva reminded the viewers that Trump is in a high-risk group, due to being elderly and overweight. Referring to former Vice President Joe Biden, Popov added, ‘The other one may get sick too.’”

Davis said commentary also included condolences to the president who was taken to Walter Reed Hospital late Friday, and that Popov and Skabeeva also commented that the Democrats were “celebrating” Trump’s health woes, only to have reporter Denis Davydov in the U.S. point out that “Trump’s Twitter mentions are filled with messages of support,” to which Popov shot back, “Those are just the Russian bots.”

Ha ha ha. Very droll, comrade. ‘Russian bots.’ Must mock foolish Americaner intelligence. After show, we get drunk, go in alley way and urinate on pussy cats, no? After all, there is full Moon!

Trump’s opaque and dishonest reign has made Kremlin watchers out of all of us, where we all feverishly scan minutiae in hopes of determining what few morsels of truth may exist in the White House sewage. Now that he’s ill and even possibly critically ill, the versions regarding what’s going on are a deep and wide river. It’s safe to assume 90% of it is utter nonsense, and 9/10ths of the rest exaggerations of reality.

Three Republican Senators have tested positive over the past few days, raising the interesting prospect that for the next month or so, the Senate may actually have Democrats in control. At least two of the Senators sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will be having what the GOP jokingly refers to as “hearings” on Amy Barrett next week. Maybe. At least one reputable source opines that some or all of the Republican Senators may fake claims of having the disease in order to avoid voting on her, since it’s obvious to one and all that she is a poison pill that will destroy the GOP. At least five Republican Senators who had reasonable leads just two months ago in November’s races have seen their leads dwindle to ties and even losses. They have to be feeling desperate right now. Their leader’s bad habit of making them all swim in a Petri dish in order to pretend the pandemic isn’t a problem may actually take them off the hot seat and even possibly save their careers.

Republicans have suddenly rediscovered compassion and empathy in the past day, but I have my great big “fuck you” potato gun ready for any that try pulling that crap on me. It’s manipulative bullshit, and I’m not going to play that game.

Meanwhile, keep an eye on the news. We live in interesting times.

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Trump and COVID — Republicans prove that yes, there is a pandemic.

October 2nd 2020

The news that Trump’s open contempt for science and public safety finally caught up to him is one of the most expected shocks in history. For the past six months or so, I’ve expected to wake up to a headline reading “Trump rushed to Walter Reed with Respiratory Distress.” Or those in utter awe at my prognostication abilities, I also predicted the Dodgers would have a good season, California would have wildfires in the late summer, and bell bottoms would make a comeback. I am like unto a God.

Historians will never figure out why the Trump administration was openly contemptuous about wearing masks, still the single most effective way we have to slow the spread of COVID-19. After all, psychiatrists can’t figure out the motivation now.

Authoritarians are famous for denying the obvious when it’s obvious that things are going to hell and it puts them in a bad light. The story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned is apocryphal, but Roman leaders told many reassuring lies in the centuries of Rome’s decline. Hitler pretended all was well and German victory inevitable as late as April, 1945. Baghdad Bob swore there were no American troops were in Baghdad and what’s more, Homer Simpson was screwing their wives while they fought overseas.

But few governments told such transparent lies with so little hope of a good outcome under circumstances that weren’t yet dire.

It’s a sign of the intellectual rot infecting American society that conspiracy theories already abound. Some Republicans have claimed that liberals put the virus in a solution and painted it on Trump’s microphone and dais before the debate. (The only way it would work in reality would be if they painted it on Putin’s penis.) Another was that the Chinese somehow infected Trump because he was about to reveal that they deliberately released the virus.

Just to show that the idiocy is bipartisan, some liberals are claiming Trump is faking the whole thing as a sympathy ploy and/or an excuse to skip the debate.

Well, the good news (sorta) is that with two dozen or so people who have been exposed to Trump getting sick themselves make the odds that Trump is “faking it” vanishingly small. I doubt we’ll get much in the way of accurate and full information going forward. That isn’t even just a matter of Trump’s veracity: historically Presidents and their staff have lied about their health. Few people knew Harrison was dying until after he died. Teddy Roosevelt hid an injury from an assassination attempt and gave a speech. (Points for a gutsy move, though!). Woodrow Wilson had a major stroke and his WH concealed his incapacitation for almost 18 months. Eisenhower concealed the severity of his heart attack because he believed the thought of a Nixon presidency would panic the country.

But with this administration, I have little hope of any transparency. The Trump crowd lie just because they lie. They don’t even need a reason.

Despite his general health, the odds at this point are in Trump’s favor. The disease kills about 5% of those who catch it. For someone in Trump’s observable condition, that rises to about 15%. And given that he is showing symptoms, it’s likely that he will have knock-on health problems for the rest of his life. It’s reasonable to expect that he will walk out of Walter Reed in due course—a few days, a few weeks, a few months. But he won’t be the same man who went in today.

Just the fact that he got sick is going to utterly destroy the anti-mask, anti-science Republican movement that is the main reason COVID-19 has been and remains out of control in America. People who persuaded themselves that it is all a hoax are going to have to reassess that view. Trump’s open contempt for masks and social distancing have caught up to him. People may continue viewing evolution and climate change as commie plots, but the fact that it has laid their hero low means they will have to be circumspect about this one. Some of the smarter ones will start wearing masks. The dumber ones will isolate into non-mask communities, and evolution will take its course. It won’t cure America of its fevered infection of utter stupidity, but it will put a dent in it.

We’re already in one of the most chaotic periods in American history since the Civil War, and this will make things that much worse. If he’s in the hospital for more than a week, Republicans will say the elections must be postponed. Trump will probably get a sympathy bounce in the polls, but it’s unlikely that will translate to more votes. Everyone will be watching Pence for signs he’s preparing to become America’s 46th president. With Trump ill and the nation in crisis, the grotesque drive to rubber stamp Amy Barrett onto the Court may have to actually suspend. For one thing, Trump’s reckless approach to social distancing has infected a number of Senators, all Republican. (Barrett has been exposed to Trump and his Petri dish of a White House over the past week, but there are reports that she tested positive for Covid last summer and is (presumably) immune.

We can’t control events stemming from this latest crisis except for one: Don’t be stupid. Mask up, keep your distance.

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Shitshow One — Trump vs Trump, and both sides lost

September 29th 2020

Well, that was…something.

I won’t call it a debate. For the most part it consisted of Trump braying lies at the top of his lungs, trying to prevent Joe Biden from making a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition. (Definition courtesy of all the Bruces and Sheilas at the University of Wallamazoo). He was trying, with limited luck, to shout down Biden, and doing somewhat better at bullying the moderator, Chris Wallace, who spent a fair bit of time fluttering and repeating, “Mister President, Mister President.” Give Wallace credit though: in his position, I wouldn’t have reached the hour mark in the debate without shouting, “Hey, asshole! Shut your bloody gob!”

Well, Wallace is considered the voice of restraint and reason at Fox News. Granted, that’s a pretty low bar, and they’ll probably fire him before the end of the year as a part of their self-lobotomizing drive, but he did manage to stand up to Trump a few times.

Biden only blew his cool once, referring to Trump as “that clown” and an expression instantly flickered across his face, knowing he had said something that by his standards, was intemperate. Never mind that he was right. It wasn’t something a former Senator would say about an opponent. He did call Trump a liar several times, but even amongst Trump’s dwindling band of supporters there would be considerable reluctance to die on the hill of Donald’s veracity. Trumpkins may be willing to die stupid, but most of them don’t want to hear a bunch of snorts and giggles from those around them as the light fades away.

I had one of those “debate bingo” cards, laden with the various lies, strawmen, and fear-mongering that makes up an average Trump speech. I ticked off 15 of the 24 spots, an amazing display of…well, no. I’m not going to say Trump was showing restraint. My guess is the Adderall caused him to forget half his talking points. So we weren’t treated to slogans like “Our response was perfect” “Lowest fatality rate in the world” or “Nobody tougher on Russia.” He didn’t quite dare call Biden “Sleepy Joe” with Joe standing a careful six feet away, and obviously not in the least bit sleepy.

The loud idiocy partially concealed the horror that is Trump. Asked to condemn white nationalism, he couldn’t do it. Indeed, he said that on election day, Proud Boys should stand down “but stand by.” Street Nazis, Assemble!

At one point, responding to Biden’s mention of Trump thinking of soldiers as loser and suckers, Trump claimed Biden called the soldiers “stupid bastards.” Against all odds, there was actually a grain of truth there; according to the Guardian, “This is true – but it was a joke. During a 2016 speech in Abu Dhabi, Biden addressed troops and told them: “Notwithstanding what you may hear about me, I have incredibly good judgment. One, I married Jill. And two, I appointed Johnson to the Academy, I just want you to know that.”

He was referring to Lt Karen Johnson, of Wilmington, Delaware. After a pause, Biden said: “Clap for that, you stupid bastards.”

The former vice-president also praised the troops, saying that Americans “appreciate, but they don’t fully understand the incredible sacrifices you make for our country”, Biden added. He thanked the soldiers and their families.”

I won’t bother with Trump’s lies, which were legion and mostly obvious. You know he’s a liar, I know he’s a liar, we all know he’s a liar. ‘Nuff said. At one point though, he said that whenever you saw Biden, he was wearing a mask, while pointing to Biden, who of course was not wearing a mask. Adderall or dementia? You be the judge.

I only caught Biden on one misstatement, when he said Trump stood to be the first president to have a net loss of jobs at the end of a term. He’s actually the third, behind Hoover but slightly ahead of George W. Bush.

People were watching the debate. In the final 60 minutes, the Biden campaign got an extraordinary $3.8 million in donations, by a considerable margin the biggest hour fund-raising in presidential campaign history.

The debate was a complete shitshow, and while Wallace wasn’t a great moderator, most of the blame rests with Trump, who showed beyond any reasonable doubt what a vile, filthy, prevaricating piece of shit he really is. Anyone still supporting him at this point needs to look in the mirror and ask themselves what sort of person they have become.

Two more debates to go. Sigh. Don’t expect statesmanship from Trump. On the other hand, he’s sinking himself quite well, so it isn’t a complete waste.

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Trump Must Go — Insane President crosses the line

Trump Must Go

Insane President crosses the line

September 24th, 2020


Brian Karem: “Will you commit to make sure there’s a peaceful transferral of power after the election?”

Trump “We’re going to have to see what happens, you know that. I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.”

Karem:“I understand that, but people are rioting. Do you commit to make sure that there’s a peaceful transferral of power?”

Trump: “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it. And you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”

The only decent thing Trump could do after a statement like that is to resign his office. No President has ever said those sort of things, that no matter how the vote went, he would be staying. Not Madison during the War of 1812. Not Lincoln during the Civil War. Not Hoover during the economic crisis of 1932. Not FDR during the second world war. Not Nixon. No president has ever effectively said, “Fuck how the vote goes; I’m staying.”

Trump has been signaling for months that he would lie, cheat, steal, even stage a coup to stay in power. He knows that once out of office, his only realistic future is prison. He may even suspect that after years of lies, vilification and murderous disregard for the lives of Americans, nobody outside of his worshipful cult is interested in cutting him any slack. He might argue he made too many enemies; the fact is that he simply betrayed and hurt too many people.

We’ve watched him subvert the entire governmental apparatus, filling hundreds of positions with servile and corrupt lackeys. He has even trashed the integrity of the CDC rather than have any authority admit that due mostly to his cruel incompetence, the US still has a raging pandemic that is likely to kill another two hundred thousand people in America before the spring arrives. The GOP was on a steep downward moral and ethical trajectory before Trump ran for office, but now it is nothing but a pathetic collection of hypocrites, apparatchiks, cowards, traitors and brownshirts. The best of Trump supporters are blank-eyed cultists. The worst are pure filth, the sort of people who enabled Hitler in the 1930s.

An electrifying article the day before in the Atlantic detailed a scheme the White House was contemplating to have the republican-held assemblies in such states that go blue in November simply select their own cadre of electors so the state would vote for Trump in the electoral college, regardless of public vote. It’s not clear as to whether this subverts the Constitution or not, but it was a clear move to override the will of the people.

The best thing Trump could do right now is resign, and throw himself on the mercy of the public. He won’t do that, of course. Even to save his life he won’t do it, because his entire pampered, wastrel life was spent simply bullying and lying his way through every crime and breach of decent behavior he ever committed. He even robbed and cheated the people who helped him commit those crimes and transgressions.

That should be a warning to his supporters (a warning vividly made by Michael Cohen his book, “Disloyal”). If you think supporting Trump after all he’s done will protect you and put you in positions of power afterward, remember what happened to the brownshirts in Hitler’s Germany. Trump won’t respect you, he won’t protect you, he will betray you. He doesn’t appreciate you, and he won’t trust you. After all, by supporting him and making him emperor, you’ve already betrayed your country once. You’re weak links. You need to be voted off the island.

And he would be right. If you support Trump now, you support a traitor, and whether you believe it or not, you are betraying your country. Trump knows that, and doesn’t mind taking advantage of you now so he can discard you like a used condom later.

As for Trump himself, we know he won’t resign. If he manages to destroy the election (and he’s doing everything he can to destroy a fair and full election, including destroying the post office and brainwashing people into thinking America is incapable of an honest vote count) then the American people will have to come for him, and dig him out of the White House like a rat from its hole. If he rejects the election results, don’t wait for inauguration day: take him out of office and throw him in prison right way.

Trump, pampered and isolated his entire life, has no idea what he is fucking with. When the people decide enough is enough, no force can stand in their way.

Yes, that’s a coup. But it’s a counter-coup, a coup FOR America. You aren’t overthrowing a legitimate president.

You’re taking out vicious, malicious trash. You are saving America.

Trump must go. It’s either him or us.

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Ducks in a Row — Trump continues to self-destruct

September 6th 2020

In a month that has been an utter catastrophe for Donald Trump, what with the convention and the Atlantic’s report on his attitudes toward the military, and all it needed was one more mishap that would not only put the GOP in a negative light, but be ridiculous and hilarious. Despising Trump and all that he stands for is wearisome. We needed a good laugh.

So the Texas Republicans decided that what was needed was a boat parade for Donald. So they had an excursion on Lake Travis, which for some reason isn’t named for a country and western singer. This has been a thing with GOP’ers, who think that having a bunch of RWCs poncing about on luxury boats is just what the GOP needs to do to reach out to the working class. But some weather cropped up. Nothing real dramatic—no twisters or hurricanes. Just rain and gusts of wind, but as we’ve had ample opportunity to learn over the past few years, money doesn’t buy knowledge or competence. Several of the boats—at least four, probably more—foundered. I would say that no souls were lost, but this was a GOP parade—you would have to find some souls first. Let’s just say there were no injuries. Which is a good thing, I guess.

As a result, I couldn’t help but think of Stephen Leacock’s The Sinking of the Mariposa Belle. Stephen Leacock was Garrison Keillor or Stuart McLean long before either was born, and doubtlessly inspired both. Mariposa Belle is a 1911 story known to every Canadian schoolchild, about a steamboat which sets out on the waters of Lake Wissanotti with 150 revelers on board to celebrate Excursion Day, which was probably Dominion Day, which is now Canada Day, but is still held July 1st (April 11th in the metric calendar). Fate strikes about mid afternoon when the ship sinks. Frantic villagers send a rescue boat out to rescue the revelers, but it, too, sinks. However, tragedy is averted when the would-be rescuers hop out of the boat and wade over to the Belle, which is sitting on the lake bed in several feet of water, and they all end up wading to shore. The ship’s engineer had been busy below decks, using pitch to patch over the hole and a bilge pump to get rid of the four feet of water, and once everyone is off, the Belle pops right back up and floats back to the home dock, and one hundred and fifty people have lurid and spectacular tales to tell about how they survived the Sinking of the Mariposa Belle.

What a metaphor for Trump’s reelection effort that is! People were already invoking the Titanic in a variety of ways, many of which were time-honored, and now we can combine that image with one of ducks in a shooting gallery. Or if you happen to be one of the many working-class Americans who own a yacht, shooting skeet.

OK. Let’s take Skeet as an example.

Pull! “Let’s force schools to reopen and reassure the public that it’s GOOD of many of them die in the name of herd immunity!”

Pull! “Let’s turn the convention into a weird promotion of cult-of-personality and conspiracy-mongering!”

Pull! “Let’s fuck with the Post Office and side with a crazed murderous vigilante on a law-and-order platform.”

Pull! “Let’s assure the veterans that they’re OK by us but they really are losers and suckers!”

The rest of us can just visualize a line of Titanics, each in turn hitting the iceberg and sinking.

This sort of buffoonery merely underscores the undisciplined and essentially vacant mind of Donald J. Trump. He fits the stereotype of “the idle rich,” complete with high levels of corruption and depravity.

But what is going to kill him politically is another trait of a social class willfully alienated from a society at large—contempt for the military. The items in the Atlantic piece aren’t all that revelatory, except for the memorable “losers and suckers” quote. Trump’s willingness to disparage the military in general, his open contempt for POWs, Gold Star Parents and Generals was already well-known. The Atlantic simply put it all together in one damning package.

Now, the Trump cult are trained like circus seals to automatically reject any reporting that is detrimental or disparaging toward Beloved Leader, so nobody expected them to accept the Atlantic reporting. And Trump, cunning enough to realize he was taking monstrous damage from pissing on the troops, vehemently denied the story, going so far as to demand Fox News fire one reporter who corroborated the story. (Fox, to their faint credit, didn’t fire the reporter). But nobody expected Trump’s followers to suddenly start thinking, and to nobody’s surprise, they didn’t.

But it was amazing how many people outside of the cult looked at the Atlantic piece and went, “Oh, my goodness! I had no idea!”

The fact is that Trump’s contempt and loathing for the military have been staring us in the face right along. He openly mocked the Gold Star family that appeared at the Democratic Convention in 2016. He refused to appear at a cemetery in France to lay a wreath to the fallen American dead because he didn’t want to get his hair wet. Hundreds of retired line officers have spoken out against him, describing him as unfit to be commander-in-chief because he has no respect for those who serve.

If you are in the military or have relatives and friends in the military, hearing that Trump thinks of them as suckers and losers because they are in the military, would you trust Trump to have the safety or welfare of the troops in mind when and if he faces a military crisis? Or would he just throw them away like used condoms?

Finally, Trump has nothing but contempt for just about any value Americans have. Environment, human rights, civil rights, basic decency, rule of law—Trump pisses on all of those. He comes from a long line of draft dodgers. Granddaddy got kicked out of Germany as a draft dodger and wound up running whorehouses in the Yukon. Daddy threated to cut anyone from the will if they joined the military or the peace corps. Donnie himself got a completely bogus medical deferment so he didn’t have to go to Vietnam. His entire class of society regards the military as a tiresome and expensive way of maintaining their wealth, and as a general rule, see military service as something little people with no future do. Not for their pampered and dissolute spawn. Donald is much too good to hobnob with the likes of Tammy Duckworth or Colonel Vindeman.

Maybe this will be what finally destroys Trump. Something must, because his moral and ethical vacancy will eventually destroy us.

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