12/5/20: While the President of the United States punts on his duties
as leader of the Free World, COVID-19 rages across the land.
____________________
“I expected the worst, and it was worse than I expected.”
Patricia
O’Toole, presidential historian, quoting Henry Adams
____________________
And he rages about the stolen election, himself. In the last week, Mr. Trump has tweeted 145 times about the election he lost – which he insists he won – only four times about the pandemic – and then only to say he was right all along about what was going to happen, and the experts were wrong.
Classic Trump tweets include:
“NO WAY WE LOST THIS
ELECTION,”
“We won Michigan by a
lot!” (Actually, he lost the state by 154,000 votes.)
If he [Biden] is inaugurated
under these circumstances, he cannot be considered ‘president’ but
instead referred to as the #presidentialoccupant.”
When a pair of Republican governors refused to overturn election results in their states, Trump blasted them both in another tweet, howling that Brian Kemp (in Georgia) and Doug Ducey (in Arizona) “fight harder against us than do the Radical Left Dems.”
Later, he vented for 46 minutes, in a rambling videotaped speech: “Many people in the media — and even judges — so far have refused to accept it. They know it’s true. They know it’s there. They know who won the election, but they refuse to say you’re right. Our country needs somebody to say, ‘You’re right.’”
(No
judge, presented a case by Team Trump, has ever said the election was stolen.)
Peter Baker, in The New York Times, reports that some have compared Trump’s behavior to Shakespearean characters, King Lear and the like.
“Students
of the American presidency, on the other hand, could think of no recent
parallel. ‘As we move toward Inauguration Day, I have thought almost daily of a
remark attributed to Henry Adams: “I expected the worst, and it was worse than
I expected,”’ said Patricia O’Toole,” author of several biographies of American
political figures, including Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
*
MEANWHILE, CDC has reported three days in succession with more than 200,000 cases of coronavirus. We have piled up more than 1,000,000 new infections in the first five days of this month.
Health experts had predicted we were in for a brutal winter. President Trump, of course, said we weren’t.
The coronavirus death toll, each day:
12/1:
2,461
12/2:
2,762
12/3:
2,861
12/4:
2,439
12/5:
2,310
_________________
12,833
That toll would be roughly equivalent to losses in killed, wounded, and missing for the Union Army at the Battle of Antietam.
With Trump’s grip loosening, as his
time in office trickles away, the real scientists are speaking up. The CDC, for
example, has recommended “universal mask wearing” for all
Americans in all activity outside the home. Or you could attend President
Trump’s rally in Valdosta, Georgia on Saturday and shout and scream and spread
some germs:
 |
Rallying and sneezing at Valdosta. |
*
The president and other members of a deranged cult.
PRESIDENT TRUMP is pulling out every stop to overturn the clear vote of the American people. His Saturday evening rally in Georgia, ostensibly in support of the two U.S. senators from Georgia, who face runoff elections on January 5, had a message that could be boiled down to three words.
I WAS ROBBED.
The president babbled for an hour, but that was his real message. Or, if you’d like more detail, a paraphrase:
I was robbed. Democrats are robbers. I was robbed by the
robbers. Joe Biden is the worst robber of all. His middle initial, “R” stands
for “robbery.” No way did that guy get 81 million votes. At least 60 million of
those votes were robbed from me. This was the biggest robbery in the history of
U.S. elections. It was like Bonnie and Clyde were in charge of the voting
machines.
We are going to prove that I was robbed, as soon as all the
judges, several of whom I appointed, stop throwing out my lawsuits. Also,
Attorney General Barr, whom I appointed – he’s robbing me too. The Republican
governor of Arizona has robbed me of his state’s electoral votes. That stinking
robber! The Republican governor of Georgia is the Jesse James of governors. The
Georgia Secretary of State is a “RINO” and a thief. We should execute all
robbers and I should get a second term, and then a third, because I was robbed.
And remember, I am the only person you can trust to drain the swamp and uphold
the U.S. Constitution!
Thank you, my loyal MAGA fans for listening this evening,
chanting, “Lock (fill in the blank) up,” standing or sitting close, not
wearing masks, and acting like members of a deranged cult.
THE END.
As if we didn’t already have enough problems, on Saturday evening, likely provoked by the president’s baseless conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen, armed Trump supporters gathered outside Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s home. There they shouted…baseless conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen. Benson’s 4-year-old son was home at the time and neighbors were drawn into the fray in her family’s defense.
In a statement soon after, Benson thanked the Michigan Attorney General for quick action to protect her and her family (you’d think Trump might care about her son’s safety, but then again: We’re talking Trump). “Through threats of violence, intimidation and bullying, the armed people outside my home and their political allies seek to undermine and silence the will and voices of every voter in this state,” Benson said, “no matter who they voted for.”
She said she wouldn’t be intimidated.
*
MEANWHILE, a star witness in the fight to overturn Biden’s victory in Michigan turned out to be a questionable character for sure. Mellissa Carone, who swore she had been witness to massive voter fraud, turned out to have been on probation in an earlier case, involving a sex tape (in which Carone played a starring role), her boyfriend (co-starring), a computer, and her boyfriend’s ex-wife.
As HuffPost explained, Carone had been “charged under the name Mellissa Wright with first degree obscenity and using a computer to commit a crime. Under a plea agreement, she reduced her charge to disorderly conduct and received 12 months of probation,” that ended September 13.
That is, Carone sent the video to
the ex-wife and then tried to frame her and make it seem as if she had stolen
the tape.
As for Carone, and her actual testimony before a hearing of Michigan lawmakers, with crack Trump campaign lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis at her side, this blogger could never do justice to the lunacy as well as Saturday Night Live.
And yes, Rudy did punctuate the testimony at times with a barrage of farts.
FUN FACT: A poll of Republican members of Congress reveals that only 27 of 249 senators and representatives are willing to acknowledge Biden’s victory. Trump, outraged, called those 27, collectively, “RINOS,” which must make them a herd.
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