Monday, March 28, 2022

November 24, 2020: Trump Pardons "Corn" and "Cob," Courts Slap Trump & Co.

 

11/24/20: President Trump shows his sour mug for a 173-word “press conference.” It’s over and done, like bad sex, in 64 seconds.

 

Mike Pence is by his side, perhaps to grab him and bum-rush him from the podium if he goes off on some weird rant.



For once, Trump hands pardon to a non-felon.

 

____________________

 

“The last gasp of a pathetic presidency in its dying days.”

 

Conservative writer, Max Boot

____________________

 

 

The president speaks in tone-deaf fashion:

 

Well, thank you very much, and I just want to congratulate everybody. The stock market – Dow Jones Industrial Average just hit 30,000, which is the highest in history. We’ve never broken 30,000, and that’s just – despite everything that’s taken place with the pandemic.

 

I’m very, uh, thrilled with what’s happened on the vaccine front. That’s been absolutely incredible. It’s – nothing like that has ever happened medically, and I think people are acknowledging that, and it’s having a big effect.

 

But the stock market's just broken 30,000 – never been broken, that number. That’s a sacred number, 30,000. Nobody thought they’d ever see it. That’s the ninth time since the beginning of 2020, and it’s the forty-eighth time that we’ve broken records in – during the Trump administration.

 

And I just want to congratulate all the people within the administration that worked so hard, and most importantly, I want to congratulate the people of our country, because there are no people like you. Thank you very much everybody. Thank you.

 


Exit, stage right.

 

Good news on the vaccine, for sure, with hope healthcare workers and frontline personnel can be vaccinated as early as the second week of December. No comment from the president on all those for whom a vaccine has come too late. On Monday, the U.S. was hit with another 157,531 cases.

 

Another 1,058 Americans died. But the stock market was up again 30,000 “a sacred number.”

 

So f**k those dead people, right?


 

*

 

NO DOUBT, the president felt worse and worse as the day progressed. True, he managed to pardon the Thanksgiving turkeys, “Corn” and “Cob,” which I think should have been named “Donald J. Loser” and “Lame Duck Don,” instead.

 

(That’s just me.)

 

Then a double whammy. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania certified its election results and Governor Tom Wolf signed off on its 20 electoral votes going not to Trump, but to Joe Biden.

 

Not long after, the Nevada Supreme Court certified Biden’s win and awarded the former Vice President six more electoral votes.

 

The handwriting had been on the wall since Saturday, when Michigan certified its votes for the challenger.

 

That certification came after a federal judge batted aside a Trump challenge to the Pennsylvania vote. (That challenge had revolved around the claim that in some counties voters were allowed to fix errors on their mail-in ballots. In other counties that offer was not extended.) 

Not long after the judge ruled, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) urged the president to accept reality, and move forward with the transition process, which Trump had so far blocked. “President Trump has exhausted all plausible legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania,” Toomey said in a statement. It was time to face the truth.

 

* 

LATE TUESDAY, we learned that the U.S. had set another record, not just a stock market high. Hospitalizations for the coronavirus reached a new level, with 88,080 Americans too sick to go home.

 

Many of them are going to die and tens of thousands will miss Thanksgiving with their loved ones.

 

*

 

FOX NEWS takes a sock to the “Fake News” chin when it is forced to settle a suit brought against the company by the family of Seth Rich. If you don’t remember, Rich was the young staffer, murdered on the streets of Washington D.C. in July 2016. According to several of the talking heads on Fox – or in this case the spewing heads – Rich had leaked thousands of emails damaging to Hillary Clinton and Clinton and her people had somehow had him knocked off.

 

Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs both pumped up the conspiracy theory. Once the case went to court, and they realized they might have to testify in court, the parent company realized the better part of valor was to tell the Fox lawyers to settle. Also involved in fueling the story were Fox reporter Malia Zimmerman, Edward Butowsky, a wealthy GOP donor, and at the time an unpaid Fox News consultant.

 

There was even a cameo for Sean Spicer, who met with Butowsky at the White House in April 2017.

 

*

 

TRUMP’S LAWYER in Wisconsin, Jim Troupis, is fighting to have tens of thousands of ballots throw out, including absentee ballots which were voted in person. His legal case is not helped when he admits he and his wife voted by absentee ballot.

 

In person.

 

*

 

LONGTIME CONSERVATIVE WRITER, Max Boot, warns in an opinion piece that the president’s desperate attempts to overturn the results of the election represent “the last gasp of a pathetic presidency in its dying days.” If Trump decides to run again in 2024, Boot says, the Republican Party “will do nothing to check his authoritarian impulses.”

 

“Much of the GOP has already decided that achieving its policy preferences is more important than preserving America’s democracy,” he adds.


 

BLOGGER’S NOTE: In January 2021, with only six days remaining in the star-crossed Trump presidency, Aaron Rich, the brother of Seth, also wins a settlement against Butowsky and Matt Couch, a right-wing activist.

 

Having both worked hard to spread the Hillary-had-Seth-murdered myth, both apologized, apparently, as part of the court agreement.


 

“A single source, who we now believe provided us with false information.” 

“I never had physical proof to back up any such statements or suggestions, which I now acknowledge I should not have made,” Butowsky wrote in a Twitter post, which he deleted as soon as he had met his legal responsibilities. Briefly, however, he admitted, “I take full responsibility for my comments and I apologize for any pain I have caused. I sincerely hope the Rich family is able to find out who murdered their son and bring this tragic chapter in their lives to a close.” 

Couch ate his own slice of “Fake News” pie, admitting that his reports on the Rich murder “were largely driven by information [given to] us by a single source, who we now believe provided us with false information and who, as of this date, has retracted his statements. Today, we retract and disavow our statements, and [we offer] our apology to Mr. [Aaron] Rich and his family.” 

And that is how you tell what’s “Fake News.” See also: Lou Dobbs, et. al., at Fox, getting sued by voting machine companies after claiming that their machines used during the 2020 election were rigged. 

Dobbs even loses his job in the debacle.

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