2/27/19: “Disgraced felon” Michael
Cohen is set to testify publicly before the House Oversight Committee.
It’s interesting to note that the term “disgraced felon” is
coming from Press Secretary Pinocchio and other White House aides. That makes
me wonder. Aren’t all felons “disgraced?”
Or: just the felons who might have dirt on President Trump,
both before he took office and after?
*
PERHAPS you are familiar with the famous words of Pastor
Martin Niemöller. Having watched the rise of the Nazis in Germany he summed up
their march to power and tyranny this way:
First they came for the
socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade
unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and
I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me – and
there was no one left to speak for me.
This week, former White House advisor Sebastian Gorka decided
to offer up his own variation of this tale, in an effort to
scare the right-wing base. In Gorka’s eyes, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a
Nazi in waiting, because she wanted to address climate change (which, by the
way, would be coming for us all.)
“First,” he offered, “they came for the hamburgers.”
But he wasn’t a hamburger? Was that his message?
“Then they came for our condiments?”
Is that what he was trying to say?
“Then they came for our sesame seed buns?”
Yeah. It was a stupid comparison to try to make. But this is
Team Trump we’re talking about, so they’re always trying to scare the base.
3/2/19: President Trump shows up
Saturday at the CPAC convention and unloads the junk drawer of his mind.
____________________
A litany
of idiocy
____________________
For two hours, two minutes, seventeen seconds, he rambles
across the right-wing landscape, getting lost in the woods, getting tangled in
briars, falling into fast-moving streams, climbing out dripping wet, and
tripping over every stone of veracity in his path. The Gettysburg Address this
speech is not.
First, he wanders on stage and humps the American flag. From
there, it goes downhill. At one point, he admits:
You know, I don’t know, maybe
you know. You know, I’m totally off script, right … You know, I’m totally off
script right now. And this is how I got elected, by being off script. True. And
if we don’t go off script, our country is in big trouble, folks. ’Cause we have
to get it back.
The president hits all the old notes from Beethoven’s Liar’s
Symphony No. 9. Hillary colluded with Russians, not him! The Mueller probe is a
“hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Democrats “don’t care about crime.” They want MS-13
gang members to rape and kill. Climate change isn’t real and socialists – basically
Democrats – want to take away cows, cars, and planes. It’s a litany of idiocy,
but the crowd cheers every syllable.
At one point, Trump is feeling sorry for himself. Why, oh,
why, did he ever appoint Jeff Sessions!
The
attorney general recuses himself and I don’t fire him. No obstruction. That’s
the other thing – if you use your rights, if you use your power, if you use
Article Two, it is called obstruction. But only for Trump, for nobody else,
Unfortunately, you put the wrong people in a couple of
positions, and they leave people for a long time that should not be there, and
all of a sudden they’re trying to take you out with bullshit.
Trump continues:
Robert Mueller put 13 of the
angriest Democrats in the history of our country on the commission. How do you
do that? These are angry, angry people. You take a look at them. One of them
was involved with the Hillary Clinton foundation, running it. Another one has
perhaps the worst reputation of any human being I’ve ever seen. All killers.
(Okay, that sounds nuts.)
Trump isn’t done trashing the people he chose to fill his
cabinet back when he was promising to surround himself with “the best people.”
Another target of contempt is former Secretary of Defense James Mattis.
I said, “We’re going to give you
a new nickname because ‘Chaos’ is not a good nickname.” So we changed his name.
We called him “Mad Dog.” But it wasn’t working too well. Mad Dog wasn’t working
too well. So what happened is, I flew to Iraq. I wanted to meet the people
on-site because I learn more sometimes from soldiers what’s going on than I do
from generals. I do, I hate to say it. And I tell it to the generals all the
time. But I didn’t have to go there. I didn’t have to go there.
But, hey, look at me, Trump wants everyone to think. I did
go. I’m a hero. Forget about that time I had those bad feet.
Chain
migration and the First Lady’s family.
As for the president, he’s on to the next topic. He’s listing
his greatest hits. He’s talking immigration:
We need workers to come in. But
they need to come in legally, and they’ve got to come in through merit, merit,
merit. They’ve got to come in through merit, they have to be people who can help
us, they have to be people who can love our country, not hate our country. We
have people in Congress right now, we have people in Congress that hate our
country. And you know that. And we can name every one of them if they want.
They hate our country. Sad. It’s very sad. When I see some of the things being
made, the statements being made, it’s very, very sad. And find out: How did
they do in their country? Just ask ’em. How did they do? Did they do well? Were
they succeeding? Just ask that question. Someone would say, “Oh, that’s
terrible that he brings that up,” but that’s okay, I don’t mind, I’ll bring it
up. How did they do in their country? Not so good. Not so good.
“These people are sick,” Trump adds, describing Democrats,
liberals and critics in a way meant to stir visceral hate.
Again, the crowd goes wild. No one stops to wonder: How did
the parents of the First Lady manage to enter this country?
What merits did they bring?
And what about all those undocumented workers who are surfacing, working at Trump golf clubs?
No one in that CPAC throng stops to wonder. They cheer.
Trump spends a significant chunk of his two hours plus
howling about the Green New Deal. He doesn’t
have any plan to address the threat of climate change, mainly because he
doesn’t understand science.
His base isn’t any smarter when it comes to the subject. So,
he’s going to scare the hell out of them by portraying a call for America’s
leaders to address the danger into a plot to pull up capitalism by the roots
and stamp out the American Dream.
Apparently, if you broach the matter of climate change it
means none of us will ever be able to fly or drive a car or turn on lamps
again:
No planes. No energy. When the
wind stops blowing, that is the end of your electric. Let’s hurry up. “Darling,
darling, is the wind blowing today? I would like to watch television, darling”
... Their plan would remove every gas-powered car from American roads. Oh,
that’s not so bad. They want you to have one car instead of two. And it should
be electric. Okay. So tell people, no more cars, no more cars ... It would end
air travel. But you’ll get on a train, don’t worry about it. You just have to
cross off about 95 percent of the world. And it would force the destruction or
renovation of virtually every existing structure in the United States. New York
City would have to rip down buildings and rebuild ’em again. I don’t think so.
This is the craziest plan. And yet I see senators that are there for 20 years,
white hair. See, I don’t have white hair. I don’t have white hair. I see these
white hairs, longtime senators, standing behind this young woman [he means:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], and she’s ranting and raving like a lunatic[emphasis added], and these senators: “Yes, I agree with this. Yes I
agree.”
Like most of the fear the right likes to stir up – death panels
for granny – Obama is coming for all the guns – transgender people are lurking
in the next bathroom stall – this is rank manure.
And the crowd shouts with glee.
Has
there ever been a president quite as great?
Mercifully, Trump runs out of steam. He closes by bragging
about his success on the world stage. Has there ever been a president quite as
great as him?
And just in finishing up, as you
know, I just returned from Vietnam, where I had very productive meetings with
Chairman Kim Jong Un. We get along. We’ve developed a good relationship, very
good, and made great historic progress…One administration gave billions of
dollars to him and got nothing. We haven’t given him anything yet. I look
forward to maybe doing something at some point. But I know one thing, I am
going to get other countries to give. Maybe not us, but I’m going to get other
countries to give, if it all works out, if it all works out. But I had to walk,
because every once in a while, you have to walk. Because the deal wasn’t a deal
that was acceptable to me. I don’t like these deals that politicians make. They
make a deal just for the sake of doing it. I don’t want to do that. I want to
make a deal that either works, or let’s not make it. But the one thing we have
done is we have no testing, no missiles going up, no rockets going up. No
nuclear testing…We got our great people back. We got our great, great people.
And that includes our beautiful, beautiful Otto. Otto Warmbier, whose parents
I’ve gotten to know, who’s incredible. And I am in such a horrible position
because, in one way, I have to negotiate. In the other way, I love Mr. and Mrs.
Warmbier, and I love Otto. It is a very, very delicate balance. He was a
special young man, and to see what happened was so bad, was so bad…And a lot of
what I do with respect to North Korea, and any success that we hopefully have,
and we’ve had a lot, we’re given no credit.
Yes, yes, it’s very sad. No one gives Trump any credit.
So, let me see if I understand Trump Logic. If a country
doesn’t test nuclear weapons (but has them), or fire missiles that can reach
the USA (even if they proved they can), then that’s Trump magic?
2/15/21: A powerful winter storm slams
Texas and large swaths of the Great Plains. Temperatures plunge. Numbskulls
insist that a few record-cold days prove climate change is fake.
Someone should point them to the list of the ten hottest years recorded by the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for help.
One of the numbest skulls belongs to first-term Republican congresswoman,
Rep. Lauren Boebert. With winter weather slamming the Plains, she figures out
what has happened, tweeting:
Rolling blackouts from ND to TX have turned
into lengthy power outages in freezing conditions.
Biden needs to lift his oil & gas ban as we
need reliable energy sources.
The Green New Deal was just proven
unsustainable as renewables are clearly unreliable.
This is particularly dumb, even for Boebert, who habitually
sounds dumb, because:
A.Zero elements of the Green New Deal have been
enacted.
B.She might just as well have blamed the outages on
Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
C.Heavy snow and ice storms like the one that just
hit tend to knock out power lines.
D.Downed lines are the problem. The current outages
have little to do with how much power is available.
E.The U.S. achieved “energy independence,” broadly
defined, a few years ago. So we don’t lack energy.
F.We became a net exporter of natural gas in 2017.
G.President Trump (speaking of numbskulls) bragged in 2019
about his success in this regard, saying, “We are independent and we do not need Middle East oil.”
In scrolling through Twitter, however, I discover that Texas
Sen. John Cornyn sounds equally numb in the cranium.
His tweet on the storm reads: “Rolling blackouts in Texas and spiking gas and
power prices amid a cold snap show the folly of eliminating natural gas – and coal.”
In
the real world, where this blogger tries to live, it is factually correct to
say that no one has eliminated natural gas
production at all; plus, coal production has fallen because prices for natural
gas and even wind and solar have dropped below the cost of mining coal. So the
blackouts in Texas have nothing to do with what President Biden or the
Democrats might eventually do. (See: 2/24/21.)
POSTSCRIPT: You may recall President Trump’s promise to end the “War on
Coal” and save tens of thousands of coal mining jobs.
During his four years in office, the number of
jobs in the mines continued to
decline. Coal production was lower in 2019 than in any year since 1978. This
decline was not the fault of Mr. Trump. Then again, neither was the decline
under his predecessor, although Trump said it was.
3/5/21: I woke up late today, tugged
at the curtain and peaked outside to see if Trump fans were partying in the
Glendale streets. The sun was shining gloriously; but revelers were absent.
I stayed up late last night, waiting for Donald J. Trump to
come riding back on a golden moonbeam. The QAnon folks promised he would come again,
like Jesus, only fatter, and without the positive message for humankind.
According to “Q,” Trump was going to return on March 4, the
old date for presidential inaugurations.
____________________
Trump will not be returning in the nick of time to save Mr.
Potato Head’s potato penis.
____________________
So I kept vigil till midnight. Nothing. I thought maybe “Q”
meant Pacific Coast Time. I drank coffee and waited until 3 a.m. here in Ohio.
More nothing.
I thought: Well, maybe “Q” meant Hawaiian time…or American
Samoa time…but even the coffee failed.
I drifted off to sleep.
*
NOW, IT’S MORNING, and the QAnon believers are feeling glum.
Joe is still in the White House. He didn’t spontaneously combust.
That means America is doomed, at least by “Q” standards. For
example, let’s consider what the right-wing talking heads have been insisting
is a current critical issue. If you missed the story, Hasbro decided to get
“woke” and pretend Mr. Potato Head was no longer a “Mr.,” and his lovely spud
spouse, Mrs. was no longer a “Mrs.,” and our children would all have to grow up
playing with Lesbian Potato Head. Now we know the bitter truth. Trump will not
be returning in the nick of time to save Mr. Potato Head’s potato penis.
It was bad enough to learn that Mr. Potato Head had lost his
manhood. It got even worse for the Q Crew this week when the estate of Dr.
Seuss decided not to print any more copies of six of his works.
A close scrutiny of the imagery and captions in several of
Dr. Seuss’s works revealed biases that no longer seemed acceptable. To be
frank, this blogger had never heard of five of the six titles dropped from publication. He shall
not therefore mourn the loss of McElligot’s Pool. What I do know,
however, is that every talking head on Fox News and Newsmax – speaking of
potato heads – was flipping out this week over the loss of the possibly racist
literature. Tucker Carlson swore that if we lost Dr. Seuss, we would “lose
America.” That seemed hyperbolic.
TUCKER CARLSON VIDEO OF SEUSS….
In fact, we were not “losing” Seuss, even. We were “losing”
select Seuss books, possibly with good reason.
I know many of Dr. Seuss’s works hold up brilliantly. At
least one book dropped, The Things I Saw on Mulberry Street, my children
enjoyed. I had a vague memory of a possibly racist drawing of an Asian person
in that book; and the Seuss estate cited that drawing as reason for dropping
publication of the work. I had also seen cartoons of Japanese Americans done by
Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss before he became Dr. Seuss) after the attack on Pearl
Harbor.
If you wanted to stir up fear – and then lock up 110,000
people, including 77,000 U.S. citizens – a few racist cartoons never hurt.
Irrational fear led to the internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans.
In any case, when I heard Tucker howl it struck me that
Carlson was having a tough time coming up with new and ever more absurd ways to
scare and distract his avid fans. The right, generally, is having a hard time looking
for stories to petrify the Trump base. That meant they had to resort to
attacking the Biden family dog (see the entry for: 2/23/21).
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Green New Deal have been
good for a thousand days of right-wing rage. But that story down in Texas, that
the whole power grid froze solid because of the Green New Deal didn’t hold
up any better than the Texas power grid in a deep freeze. Even Gender Neutral
Potato Head could have told you – for starters – that the Green New Deal has
never been implemented. So to blame Ocasio-Cortez would be akin to saying
the Cat in the Hat did it. In fact, when this blogger bothered to check, he readily
discovered that wind turbines can be winterized to work in much colder
weather than Texas suffered recently. In Canada, for example, which is, I
believe, farther north than Texas, wind turbines actually work harder in winter when strong Arctic
winds sweep across the country.
So, did liberals with their climate change agenda cause
the Texas fiasco? Or was it Texan politicians and poor planning and
preparation? I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t Sam I Am who did it, either.
*
American
Petroleum Institute may endorse carbon
emissions tax.
IN FACT, there are much bigger concerns to address than the
question of Gender Neutral Potato Head’s genitalia. Climate change would
certainly deserve more coverage at Fox News and Newsmax and on Rush Limbaugh’s
daily radio hour from Hades. Not the “it’s a hoax” kind of attention. Rather, the
“handwriting’s-on-the-wall” biblical kind of s***. If you missed the real news,
because you spent an entire day listening to Fox News rail about the left-wing
“cancel culture,” we had more proof this week that the Green New Deal, or
something akin to it, may soon be forced upon us by grim reality. Even the
American Petroleum Institute is preparing to endorse a proposal which would tax carbon
emissions.
Reality is sinking in around the globe. Volvo became the
latest automobile manufacturer to announce it was pushing faster in the
all-electric-car direction. By 2025 the company promises at least half of new
vehicles will be electric-powered. The rest will be hybrids. The company will
have at least a million electric vehicles on the road by the end of that year.
By the end of the decade, the Swedish manufacturer will be producing nothing but electric vehicles. By the time this blogger’s new twin grandsons (now one month
old) are big enough to drive, the gasoline-combustion-powered auto will be as
much a memory as the Stanley Steamer.
Climate experts have already pointed out the dangers that accelerating
changes pose to human life on Planet Earth. Alterations in the jet stream, for
instance, have allowed colder Arctic weather patterns to drop farther south
into the U.S. in recent years.
Think: Texas Deep Freeze 2021.
Now we have a climate change effect you may have never heard of,
or worried about, but should. The biggest “river” in the world is actually the
Gulf Stream current, which sweeps out of the Caribbean, passes along the
eastern shore of the U.S., and then bends across the North Atlantic. This warm
current helps keep Great Britain, and large swaths of Europe warmer than
would be normal at such latitudes. And if the current fails, the ramifications
would be huge. Now scientists warn that increasing melting of the Greenland
ice cap is altering the balance of the waters of the North Atlantic. The
“river” is being slowed. Its flow is being disrupted. A complete failure could
ruin a country like Scotland, which sits on a latitude as far north as the
southern tip of Greenland, and Ireland, which might end with a climate more
like Newfoundland.
Someone should explain this to Tucker Carlson.
POSTSCRIPT: Before some right-wing
numbskull interjects, “Oh ho, so now you claim parts of the world are going
to get colder because the climate is warming…” let’s stick to the simplest
possible facts. NOAA reports that the ten hottest years (globally) in recorded
history have been:
2016
2020
2019
2015
2017
2018
2014
2010
2013
2005
As for Rejected-President Donald, I predict he’ll go down in world
history as a central villain in the story of how mankind either failed or
succeeded (despite him) in addressing the premier challenge of the twenty-first
century.
