9/9/20: Team Trump, to use a sports
metaphor, finds itself trailing after an errant pass from quarterback D. J. “Bone
Spurs” Trump is intercepted by journalist Bob Woodward, and run back 105 yards for
a pick-six.
____________________
“We’re in crazytown.”
White House Chief of
Staff Gen. John Kelly
____________________
Or to put
in political terms, for some inexplicable reason, President Trump decided to
begin talking to Woodward, the man who helped bring Nixon down, sitting with or
talking by phone – on the record – a total of eighteen times. Considering
Woodward’s first book on the Trump years was titled Fear, and the next,
out Tuesday will bear the title Rage, you wonder what Trump was
thinking.
Ego and
narcissism likely blinded the fool.
So, far,
what we’re hearing is even worse than what we read in Fear, if we were
the reading type.
Also known as: "Crazytown."
For today,
let’s stick to revisiting some of the quotes Woodward provided in Fear:
On page 47,
Steve Bannon described Trump, after his surprise election victory: “This is a
guy totally unprepared….Trump hasn’t spent a second [emphasis added, unless
otherwise noted] getting ready for this moment.”
Gary Cohn, Trump’s
chief White House economic advisor, told Woodward what he was most proud about
having done before he resigned: “It’s not what we did for this country,” he explained.
“It’s what we saved [Trump] from doing.” (xix)
Cohn
eventually came to see Trump in a stark light. “He’s a professional liar,”
he told people. (209; 338)
Former White
House aide Rob Porter seconded Cohn in his thinking: “A third of my job was
trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and
try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.” (xix)
Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson famously described the president this way: “He’s a fucking
moron.” (On page 225, Woodward explained why.)
Trump’s
first White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, offered a clear-eyed view of
his former boss. “The president,” he said, “has zero psychological ability
to recognize empathy or pity in any way.” (235)
Nor was Priebus
impressed with Trump’s management style. When “you put a snake and a rat and a
falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls,” he said, “things
start getting nasty and bloody.” (237)
Gen. John Kelly,
who replaced Priebus, was no more a fan. “The president’s unhinged,” he warned at one point. “He’s an idiot,” he
told other top aides after one more disastrous meeting. “It’s pointless to try
to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown.” (263;
286)
John Dowd, the
lawyer charged with building a defense during the Mueller investigation,
despaired at times. During a prep session, in case Trump had to testify under
oath, he realized that if Trump didn’t know an answer, “He just made something
up. That’s his nature.” Eventually, Dowd reached a startling conclusion. “Don’t
testify,” he told the president. “It’s either that or an orange jump suit.” (353;
354)
In fact, I
think we can assume the president was too lazy to read the book, before
deciding to give Woodward access this time.
Fear ends on page 357, with this:
But in the man and his
presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the
evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the
indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not
bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.”
9/10/20: The president and his band
of enablers spend a hectic day trying to explain away the damaging revelations included
in Bob Woodward’s latest book. Several news agencies have advanced copies and begin
quoting select passages from a work titled simply, Rage.
(This blogger is definitely buying one Tuesday,
when the book goes on sale.)
If the
quoted passages and stories are indicative of the full portrait Woodward paints,
it may stand as the most damning work ever written about a U.S. president. It certainly
should be enough to give even ardent Trump supporters pause on November 3.
(Okay, we know it won’t.)
____________________
Mattis would pray for the
country every Sunday.
____________________
First,
remember, President Trump agreed to go on record in talking to Woodward.
So, we often get Trump unfiltered. That is: Trump at his manic, lying,
bragging, ill-informed best. Or: his worst.
Woodward sums up the man in full, writing that
Trump has “enshrined personal impulse as a
governing principle of his presidency.”
At one point, Trump makes clear to the journalist (he called Woodward a
“whack job” on Thursday, after hearing some of what he wrote) that one of his
main goals as president has been to undo Obama’s accomplishments: “Ninety
percent of the things he’s done, I’ve taken apart,” Trump boasts. Policy
differences from one administration to another are to be expected. For Trump this
is more than policy or the give-and-take of partisan politics. It’s personal. It’s
an obsession. He hates his predecessor. He can’t help himself. And if that
means he must stand on a pile of wreckage that will represent his
presidential monumentin the end, he gladly will. Smash Obamacare.
Bulldoze DACA. Withdraw from the Iran deal, all of these with nothing to show
for the effort. Quit the Paris Climate Accord.
Watch the world burn, like Nero writ large. Like Nero, take pride in
your fiddle-playing expertise.
Woodward also has many who worked in Trump’s administration on record,
including several who have not spoken out before. Secretary of Defense James
Mattis would go to church every Sunday and pray for the country, Woodward
writes, not just in the normal way, but knowing the danger his boss represented.
True to an
unspoken code in this country, Mattis said when he resigned his cabinet post in
2018, that he owed his commander-in-chief a period of silence. It is tradition,
in this country, that generals and admirals do not undermine civilian
leadership, as in your typical banana republic.
Mattis had
warned that his silence would not be permanent. Woodward puts him on record, describing Trump as both “dangerous”
and “unfit.”
*
THESE
AREN’T ANONYMOUS SOURCES, as Trump’s lackies said just days ago, in trying to
blunt the damage done by stark revelations in The Atlantic (see: 9/5/20 and
9/6/20). These are men who worked for Trump, who were chosen by
Trump.
These
voices tell us what should be obvious to all by now. Trump is a liar. Even worse,
he’s the kind of liar who falls for his own lies.
Woodward includes
a telling anecdote involving Dan Coats’s wife. At a dinner one evening, Marsha
Coats sits next to Vice President Mike Pence. Appalled by what she has seen of the
president, and what she has heard about him behind the scenes, “I just looked
at him, like, how are you stomaching this?” she tells Woodward. “I just looked
at him like, this is horrible. I mean, we made eye contact. I think he
understood. And he just whispered in my ear, ‘Stay the course.’”
Vice
President Pence might have the capacity to hold his nose and back the president
in the name of policy or personal gain.
It’s hard
for others to ignore the stench wafting from the Offal Office.
“Truth is no longer governing
the White House.”
A reporter
for Business Insiderpicked outsome of Mattis’s other comments from the Woodward book.It
has long been known that Mattis and the president disagreed about policy. Normal
in any administration. But Mattis came to see Trump as a danger to the nation.
Like many of us, watching from the sidelines, watching up close, he found it
impossible to understand why Trump kept picking fights with allies, while
sucking up to some of the world’s worst dictators.
“What we’re doing is we’re actually showing
[emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] how to destroy America,” he says of
his old boss. “That’s what we’re showing [our enemies]. How to isolate us from
all of our allies. How to take us down.”
Mattis is not the first survivor of this administration to describe the
president as ill-informed. He is one of the most potent. Trump “doesn’t
understand,” Mattis tells Woodward. The president “has no mental framework for
these things. He hasn’t read.” In one brutal passage, Mattis
vents to Dan Coats, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. “The president,” he says, “has no moral compass.” Coats
doesn’t disagree. He doesn’t try to calm his colleague.
“True,” he
replies. “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t
know the difference between the truth and a lie.”
Coats is as true a
conservative as ever lived, a Republican, heart and soul. Yet during his entire
tenure as Director of National Intelligence, he finds it impossible to shake
the feeling that Vladimir Putin “had something” on Trump. There seemed no other
way to explain the president’s reluctance to confront one of America’s most
dangerous rivals. “He suspected the worst but found nothing that would show
Trump was indeed in Putin’s pocket,” Woodward writes. “There was no proof,
period. But Coats’s doubts continued, never fully dissipating.”
Trump’s own words, in
this regard, are deeply troubling. He may not be able to get along with Merkel
of Germany, or Macron of France, two of our top allies. Yet he fits in well with
the authoritarian crowd. “It’s funny, the relationships I
have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,”
the president tells Woodward. “You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”
I would
argue that Gen. Mattis already has. Trump is a man with no moral compass. He
has no overarching goals or principles, except to do and say whatever he has to
do and say to make himself look good.
In eighteen
separate interviews – all on tape – the president reveals who he is. The picture
is ugly. After the Saudis murder the Washington Post writer, Jamal
Khashoggi, and cut his corpse up with a bone saw, Trump does not stand up for
the free press in a contest with killers. He does not seem to know that
Khashoggi’s children are U.S. citizens and deserve support. When U.S.
intelligence agencies make clear there could be no murder without the approval
of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Trump refuses to face the
fact. He brags to Woodward, saying of the Prince, “I saved his ass.”
“I was able
to get Congress to leave him alone,” Trump said. “I was able to get them to
stop.”
Trump stopped lawmakers
from slapping Saudi Arabia with stiff sanctions, arguing in part that
the Saudis bought billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. weapons. So what if they
cut up a reporter?
No moral compass.
None.
Quoting a mass murder to denigrate a
former U.S. president?
Even weirder, if possible, is Trump’s love
affair with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. While Trump may rage about our
relationship with South Korea, and insist we’re “suckers” for defending our
allies, he tells Woodward that he and Kim, a bloody killer, have some kind of chemistry.“You
meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it’s going to happen.”
(Just
be glad Trump didn’t try to grab Kim’s pussy.)
“I don’t think Obama’s smart,” Trump tells Woodward at one
point. “I think he’s highly overrated. And I don’t think he’s a great speaker.”
Trump adds, as if in validation, that Kim Jong-un thought Obama was “an
asshole.”
Quoting a mass murder to denigrate a former U.S. president? Something
is fundamentally wrong, at his core, with Donald J. Trump.
Trump tells Woodward that he was awestruck meeting the North
Korean dictator for the first time in 2018, thinking to himself, “Holy shit,”
and finding Kim to be “far beyond smart.” Trump bragged that Kim “tells me
everything.” That included a graphic account of Kim having his uncle killed.
A week later, on December 13,
2019, when Woodward returned to interview the President again, Trump was still
fixated on the photos [he had of his meeting with Kim] and insisted on giving
Woodward a poster-sized print of Trump and Kim.
“Do you have a round thing for
this so he can take it? Or even a rubber band or something. Because you can’t
fold it, you’ll ruin it. I don’t even know why I’m giving it to you. That’s my
only one,” Trump said.
Some people – teenage boys
– want posters of super models and sports
icons to grace their walls.
Trump?
How would you like a poster of him and the guy who has
starved millions of his people, and slaughtered critics with anti-aircraft
guns?
“Like a
minus number.”
Woodward manages
to get the normally discreet Dr. Anthony Fauci on record, though until I see
the book, I suspect he has been quoted second hand. In one meeting with top health
officials, including people like Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the CDC, Dr.
Fauci says that in dealing with the coronavirus, the president’s attention span
“is like a minus number.” He warns the others that Trump “is on a separate channel.” The
president, he says, is “rudderless.” According to Woodward, Dr. Fauci came to believe
that Trump’s “sole purpose was to get reelected.”
Perhaps most telling, and most damaging, are Trump’s own words
on his handling (or mishandling) of the coronavirus crisis. Ina recorded conversation on
February 7, Trump makes it clear he knows the virus is deadly. “You just breathe the air and that’s
how it’s passed,” he says. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very
delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeats for
emphasis.
Trump’s defenders will try to blame Dr. Fauci and others
for giving the president bad advice in those early days of crisis. Here we have
Trump explaining that the disease is easily spread through the air. It’s far
more dangerous than flu. Yet when Trump speaks in public, he will discount
wearing masks for months. He will tell the nation that COVID-19 is in fact no
worse than flu. His supporters will hear his words – will repeat them and
spread them like a second kind of virus. Rush Limbaugh and the fools who pose
as pundits at Fox News will pick up the story and spread it as surely as a sick
patient spreads disease by coughing on a nurse. Hundreds of healthcare workers
will be infected and die. Millions of Americans will be infected. Nearly
200,000 will die. Other nations will face the threat with clear eyes and honest
leadership and handle it with greater success.
In fact, Trump
admits in a March 19 call to Woodward that he has deliberately minimized the danger. “I
wanted to always play it down,” he tells the reporter. “I still like playing it
down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
The danger Americans face is acute. In April, at the same time he is calling on states to reopen, he
warns Woodward about the virus.
“It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it.”
Thursday, with all these damaging revelations dominating
the news, Trump picks that one word, “panic” from his conversations with the
author. He claims that even though he knew how the disease spread, how easily, how
dangerous it was, he was discounting the danger because he wanted the American
people to remain calm.
By the way, let’s show up for big rallies and celebrations,
and wear our red MAGA hats, but not masks.
As Mattis and Coats and many others who have seen Trump up
close, could tell us, the president was going to lie.
And, once again, he had.
It didn’t matter to Trump if tens of thousands of Americans
died. His only purpose was to win a second term.
*
FINALLY, a minor matter to discuss, but a
telling one, nevertheless. Woodward himself learned how ill-informed Trump
could be, or perhaps how happy he was to lie. “I’m number one on Twitter,” he boasted
during one conversation. “When you’re number one and when you have hundreds of
millions of people, whether they’re against you or not they still read what you
say,” Trump continued. On Twitter, actually, he has 88.5 million “followers”
and that includes people like me, who only go to his threads to find out how insane
he sounds.
It would no doubt pain the president to know
that his nemesis, Barack Obama, has 122.4 million followers on Twitter.
(Trump also trails a number of celebrities,
including Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna, and Taylor Swift.)
Often, in their conversations,
Trump is suspicious about what Woodward will do with what he says. “You’re
probably going to screw me,” the president predicts. “You know, because that’s
the way it goes.”
On the contrary, from what we
know of the book so far, the president screws himself. He reveals
himself.
“When
his performance as president is taken in its entirety,” Woodward finally writes,
“I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.”
POSTSCRIPT: Even the Taliban have the brains to wear masks in a time of
COVID-19, and their only profession is murder.
Above, a
Trump crowd, from a September 10 tweet by the bombastic liar, President Donald
J. Trump.
A reporter
for The New York Times tweets another picture of this rally, noting that
not one in ten in the audience is wearing a mask. Security tracks her down,
using her picture, and has her thrown out.
Putin and
Kim and their ilk would understand the president’s impulse to stifle the free
press.
Give Trump
a second term. Maybe we’ll have anti-aircraft guns and bone saws in the next
four years.
July 1, 2020: President Trump attacked
former Vice President Joe Biden today, accusing him of speaking coherently.
After Mr. Biden appeared for a press conference yesterday,
his first in three months, and spoke in complete sentences, the president exploded.
Trump claimed without evidence, that Biden had been fed
questions and was reading prepared answers off a teleprompter. Trump
was upset because Biden used big words like “rigorous” and “exhorted,” pronounced
them correctly, and knew what they meant.
Biden blasted Trump for his bumbling effort to address the
COVID-19 outbreak. He said the self-styled “wartime” president had
“surrendered” and had no plan to address a renewed spread.
The Centers for Disease Control reported that for the day, the
U.S. set a record for most cases in a 24-hour period:
54,357 fresh
infections.
*
____________________
If we all wore masks, we could avoid an additional five
percent reduction in GDP.
Goldman Sachs analysis
____________________
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, Mr. Trump turned up on Fox Business for a
fluff interview with Blake Burman. Burman started off by
noting that Goldman Sachs estimated a national mandate that we all wear masks
would slow the spread of the virus. If we all wore masks, we could avoid an
additional five percent reduction in GDP. If, Burman wondered, such a mandate would be a
“net positive” for the economy, and save thousands of lives, why didn’t Trump
call for a mandate?
The president claimed he was “all for masks” in the fight
against the virus. He said he had worn one himself. People had even seen him! (Melania,
Barron?) Burman let Trump get by with saying he liked the way he looked in a
mask. Trump said he thought he resembled the Lone Ranger, assuming the
Lone Ranger had been a doughy, orange septuagenarian with bad hair.
And wore a mask over his mouth and nose, not his eyes.
___
7/2/20: A ray or two of light have penetrated
clouds of gloom hovering over the U.S. economy.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that the U.S.
economy “added” 4.8 million jobs in June.
You don’t have to be a Trump fan to be happy to hear that
news, nor to be relieved that the figure for May was revised upward to show
that 2.7 million jobs were “added” the previous month.
The broader picture is grim. The unemployment rate stands
at 11.1%. Only a massive infusion of federal Monopoly money has kept the
economy from sinking like a Trump-shaped chunk of granite to the bottom of the sea.
In another sign of trouble, the labor participation
rate
remains depressed, at 61.5%. That’s 1.2 percentage points lower than the day
Trump took office. We’ll need to add 1.9 million jobs next
month, and avoid further layoffs, just to get back to the level where we were
when President Obama left the White House.
*
IF YOU WANT unalloyed good news, we have some. Ghislaine
Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime companion and alleged accomplice in a decades-long
sex abuse operation, was arrested by F.B.I agents in Bradford, New Hampshire. Maxwell’s
indictment charges her with “helping Epstein to recruit, groom,
and ultimately abuse” more than a hundred girls, some as young as 14. She is said
to have been an enthusiastic participant in the abuse, as well.
Expect prosecutors to slap her with as many felonies as they
can think of, in hopes Maxwell will sing about the rich and famous who took
part in the debauchery at Epstein’s mansions, apartments and island homes round
the world. England’s Prince Andrew has been accused of involvement. A victim has
claimed that Alan Dershowitz, staunch defender of President Trump during
his impeachment “trial,” took part in the debauchery. Even more depressing, Donald Trump is known to have hung out with Epstein.
THE NEWS concerning the coronavirus is not good. For a second
day the U.S. surpassed the fifty-thousand mark with,
52,730 new
cases.
___
7/3/20: Sometimes I like to check in with
Fox News, just to see what the other side is saying. Today the topic is statues.
According to Fox, if we let people knock over statues of assorted
Confederate generals, slave owners and slaughterers of Native Americans, we
won’t be the country Fox viewers love. According to Fox anchor Carley Shimkus, an
attractive young blonde, if we allow the statues to be toppled, democracy is
doomed. Capitalism is finished.
Hey? Where’s Ed Henry?
Oh yeah. He got fired for sexual harassment, joining Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Eric Bolling and
James Rosen on the Fox News sidelines.
*
Round
table discussions at Hooters!
ANYWAY, statues, Ms. Shimkus says, are the real issue and we
have to save capitalism. Someone should explain to the Fox News host that slave
trading was considered a good business model under the capitalist system. Today,
Big Pharma displays the same level of ethics.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New
York has announced that Novartis, the Swiss drug manufacturer, has admitted to an
illegal kickback scheme to boost sales of its fine products. Doctors were treated to meals at the world’s finest restaurants,
with “top-shelf alcohol” to wash down viands, to golf outings, and to
round-table discussions at less impressive eateries. Such as Hooters.
Nothing says, “We are here for serious discussion,” like
holding a round-table at Hooters. Doctors who pushed enough of Novartis’s drugs
could be awarded “honorariums” for speaking at seminars, worth as much as
$300,000.
According to prosecutors, Novartis spent hundreds of millions
over the course of a decade to perpetuate this scheme. It worked well and
doctors prescribed billions of dollars’ worth of Novartis drugs, at exorbitant prices.
Fraudulent prescriptions were filed with Medicare, Medicaid, and Veterans
Affairs.
After fighting a lawsuit, touched off by a whistleblower
complaint, Novartis has agreed to pay a fine of $678 million.
*
AT FOX NEWS, they’ve been working hard to scare viewers with
talk of socialism on the march across America. Team Trump has already started marching.
(See, for example, billions in payouts to farmers, to make up for damage done
during Trump’s tariff war with China.) Now the federal government is taking a
30% stake in YRC Worldwide, a struggling trucking company.
In return, “We the People,” will hand over $700 million. YRC
Worldwide caught a break because it hauls military equipment for the Department
of Defense. That means the company is considered a “critical vendor.”
Interestingly enough, YRC is also being sued – by the U.S. government – for ripping off
taxpayers.
It’s like “We the People” are suing ourselves.
*
IN OTHER FOX NEWS, we learned Thursday that Andy Puzder is
excited. He says we’re in a “V-shaped” economic recovery. This is exactly what President
Donald Trump has been predicting!
Unfortunately, worrisome signs abound. Macy’s reported this
week that it suffered a second quarter loss of $3.58 billion. The company will cut 3,900 corporate and
management level positions. General Motors reported a 34% decline in sales. Fiat Chrysler sales slumped 38.6%. McDonald’s
announced it will pause a planned reopening for dine-in
service. Even more troubling, while the U.S. economy was “adding” millions of
jobs in June, in the last weekly reporting period an additional 1.4 million
Americans
filed for unemployment. That was the fifteenth week in a row with more than a
million needing help. In other words: not a V-shaped recovery.
*
THE
CORONAVIRUS continues to sweep the country. For a third day in succession, the
number of new cases tops 50,000:
57,718.
Those infected this week include Herman Cain, former
Republican presidential candidate, last seen at a Trump campaign rally in Tulsa,
Oklahoma; Kimberly Guilfoyle, main squeeze of Donald Trump Jr.; and eight members
of Vice President Pence’s Secret Service detail.
In a ripple effect, Greg Gianforte, GOP candidate for
governor of Montana, and Kristen Juras, his running mate, are
self-quarantining, after Juras and Gianforte’s wife attended a fund-raiser with Guilfoyle.
___
7/4/20: Happy birthday, America! You
still look sexy at 244! True, your boyfriend, is an oaf, with authoritarian
instincts.
Still, election in November!
____________________
“Their
goal is not a better America. Their goal is to end America.”
President Trump
____________________
Speaking of President Trump, he gave a big speech last night in front of a crowd at Mt.
Rushmore. It was a pro-Trump crowd. That meant almost no one wore masks
or made any attempt to social distance.
First, the audience was treated to video of Trump bragging about
what once had been. Just short weeks ago, we were doing “better than any
country had ever done in history,” he said on film. “Film Donald” touted his
own greatness while In-the-Flesh Donald gazed at “Film Donald” with rapt admiration.
The coronavirus had sent the economy into a tailspin. Now, said “Film Donald,” we
were “close to fighting our way out of it.” “We have a country that’s really
making a comeback.”
In-the-Flesh Donald smiled broadly as he watched himself brag
about himself. “We had the best unemployment numbers, we had the best employment
numbers, we had the best stock market numbers that we ever had, we
were doing better than any country had ever done in history.”
Other than that, Trump’s speech was “American Carnage
Revisited.” The radical left, he said, was a “growing danger,” killing off many
of our bronze statues. R.I.P.: Don Juan de Oñate. No one really cared who you
were, even when your statute stood there on that pedestal in Albuquerque for
decades.
Trump’s political foes didn’t just want to expand Obamacare, raise
the minimum wage, and allow LGBTQ individuals to have jobs. They didn’t just
believe cops should stop kneeling on people’s necks until breathing stopped. “Our nation is witnessing
a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our
values and indoctrinate our children,” Trump glowered. “Their goal is not a
better America. Their goal is to end America,” he cautioned.
What
about all those people marching for justice? Who were they? Trump wanted his
almost entirely-white audience to know, and to know he would defeat them. “We will not be terrorized, we will not be
demeaned, and we will not be intimidated by bad, evil people,” the President of
the United States promised, denigrating
a large percentage of the citizens he was elected to serve. “It will not happen.”
The people protesting the death of George Floyd and other
African Americans, weren’t interested in justice, he said. They formed “angry
mobs.” They wanted to “deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a
wave of violent crime in our cities.” Trump foes wanted to “attack our liberty,
our magnificent liberty,” he told fans. They “must be stopped.”
They “will be stopped very quickly,” he promised.
The president said it was his job (with the aid of his followers)
to “protect our nation’s children, end this radical assault, and preserve our
beloved American way of life.”
Who were the enemies – besides protesters? They were legion.
“In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new
far left fascism that demands absolute allegiance.” Trump blamed liberal
Democrats who run most of our cities, for “the violent mayhem we have seen.” Protesters
weren’t mad because police kept killing black people for little or no reason.
Trump claimed that the mayhem was “the predictable result of years of extreme
indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions.”
If I caught his meaning right, he was going to save American
culture from…cultural institutions.
In any case, we had to save the children from America’s
teachers! “Our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to
believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were
villains,” the president said. He was stirring his base, as only an individual
with hateful instincts can stir a base. His opponents, that large part of the
U.S. population who felt we could do better in the battle against racism, were
dangerous radicals. Their “view of American history is a web of lies,” Trump shouted.
He turned to defending the four men whose stone visages appeared
behind him on the mountain. As a former history teacher, I could do the same. Since
I know the history, I could do it better, because when it comes to history, our
current president is a dolt.
It’s not a “web of lies” to point out that a pronounced vein
of hypocrisy ran through the writings of Thomas Jefferson. Trump called him “an
architect, an inventor, a diplomat, a scholar, a founder of one of the world’s
great universities, and an ardent defender of liberty.”
In my class, I used to have students memorize the key
84-word passage that is the soul of the Declaration of Independence. I
wanted them to answer six questions about the ideals set forth therein. Those
ideals are at the heart of what makes this nation unique. Still, it’s not a “lie”
to point out that Jefferson had time to dabble in architecture because slaves performed
the drudgery at Monticello. Jefferson could study and invent because others
tilled his fields without pay. He was “an ardent defender of liberty,” but only
for some Americans. He fathered several children by one of his slaves and could
have sold them, had he so desired.
Ah, but the ideals laid down in the Declaration, those
are truly great; and the battle since has been to live up to them.
Not down, as under Donald J. Trump.
There’s
your fascism, right there.
I doubt our current president knows much about any of the four
figures immortalized in Mt. Rushmore granite. I could tell him that George
Washington was an admirable leader in almost all respects. Unlike Trump, our first
chief executive lived by a code of conduct that stressed honor, duty,
and respect for others.
I could also explain to Mr. Trump (and his fans) that when
British warships sailed up the Potomac River in 1781, a number of General Washington’s
slaves grabbed their personal belongings and rushed to the waterside, to be
taken aboard. This country is supposed to be about liberty – and at its best it is, or tries to be. Washington
understood the virtues of freedom.
Those escaping slaves did too.
I could wax eloquent about Teddy Roosevelt and Abe Lincoln. No
bone spurs for Teddy, and off he went, a volunteer, to fight in the Spanish-American
War. Lincoln? “With malice toward none,” he said. That’s a sentiment you’d never
hear escaping from Donald Trump’s intolerant lips.
I may be a liberal. But I don’t have any desire to “end
America.” Neither do any of the people I know, most of whom are liberals of
varying shades. We just don’t think Trump is a good president or even a good
human being.
In his speech at Mt. Rushmore, Trump promised to save the nation’s
statues and establish a “National Garden of American Heroes.” It would be a vast
outdoor park, he said, filled with statues of “the greatest Americans to ever
live.”
You know he envisioned himself, at least ten times larger
than life, looming over that garden.
With a final flourish, the President of the United States
assured all Trump-loving Americans that they had nothing to fear but fear
itself. And other Americans. He cried out against those who might dare to vote him
out of office. “They think the
American people are weak and soft and submissive,” he said. “But no, the
American people are strong and proud, and they will not allow our country and
all of its values, history and culture to be taken from them [emphasis
added].”
Yes, the American people would not allow
the American people to…what? Exercise the right to protest? Use the vote in
November to “take” America from Trump-loving Americans?
There’s your fascism, right there.
*
REMEMBER when Trump called himself a “wartime president?” We
seem to be in full retreat.
Florida set a record on the Fourth of July, with 11,458
new COVID cases. That broke the record set on July 2, when the state had 10,109.
France, which aided us with troops, supplies and ships,
and did so much to help Washington and his men achieve our independence, had 480 cases on July 3 and 448 on July
4.
Across the U.S., new cases of coronavirus piled up again,
with,
52,228 on Independence Day.
POSTSCRIPT: Some years ago, fireworks at Mt. Rushmore were banned,
after bark beetle infestations killed much of the pine forest surrounding the
mountain. Climate change had allowed beetles to survive winters that used to be cold
enough to kill their larvae.
Trump helped overturn the fireworks ban at the monument,
explaining in his typical, clueless style: “What can burn? It’s stone.”
BLOGGER’S NOTE (7/15/21): Governor Kristi Noem, who
invited Trump to speak at Mt. Rushmore, and gave him the bust, went on to
become one of the leading suck ups in the GOP. For a
time, there were even rumors that she might replace Mike Pence on the 2020
ticket. At one point, she scored points with anti-maskers by riding mask-less
into an indoor rodeo show on her horse (named “Hydroxychloroquine?”).
Naturally, she had an American flag in one hand, the other on the reins. As for
the danger of the coronavirus, Rolling Stone reports,
“I choose to rely on science and data and
facts,” said Noem, despite disregarding the actual science and data.
Then she pushed in all her chips. In
August, she urged Americans to ride into Sturgis for the annual motorcycle rally. “We hope people
come,” Noem told Fox’s Laura Ingraham. She lambasted the left’s negativity.
“We’re in a good spot.” So the Harleys came and their riders drank beer and
shot pool in crowded bars. They stood shoulder to shoulder, all 366,000 of
them, as Smash Mouth’s
singer screamed, “Fuck that
Covid shit!”
In January 2021, Gov. Noem campaigned against two
Democratic candidates in a special Georgia senate election. She called them
“communists,” which would be about as accurate as insisting that Noem was a
member of the Nazi Party. She isn’t. She’s just an imbecile. Or, as a writer
for Rolling Stone
describes her, “Trumpism with a cowgirl face.”
Gov. Noem also plays fast and loose with facts. In 2010
she won a seat in Congress, as her political star began to rise.
Noem
was added to the House committee dealing with estate-tax issues, and in 2015
took to the floor and spoke about how the federal government made her family’s
situation ever more desperate.
“It
wasn’t very long after [her father] was killed that we got a bill in the mail
from the IRS that said we owed them money because we had a tragedy happen to
our family. … I chose to take out a loan, but it took us 10 years to pay off
that loan to pay the federal government those death taxes. It is one of the
main reasons I got involved in government and politics, because I didn’t
understand how bureaucrats and politicians in Washington, D.C., could make a
law that says when a tragedy hits a family, they somehow are owed something
from that family business.”
The
only problem was that her story is, charitably, a tall tale. The IRS doesn’t
send a tax bill after a death; it waits for you to file a tax return first.
Both USA Today and
Huffington Post pointed out that while
Noem’s family did pay roughly $169,000 in estate taxes over a decade, it was at
the hardly onerous rate of four percent interest. In addition, the entire tax
could have been avoided if Arnold [her father] had simply updated his will,
something he hadn’t done for more than a decade. That small act would have
allowed for a tax-free transfer. The media also noted that during the time
Noem’s family was paying off their low-interest debt, they received $3.7
million in farm subsidies. Arnold also had left his wife a $1 million insurance
policy that easily could have paid off the tax, but a smart accountant probably
figured carrying a loan at four percent was a good deal.
Noem
alternated between saying the law was still a bad law and keeping her mouth
closed when confronted by Capitol Hill reporters. Mostly she just kept walking.
Next step was a successful run for governor of her state –
and what at least one critic has called “arguably the worst response” to the
coronavirus threat of any governor in the nation.
As far as her commitment to science, on the day she took
office “she held a prayer service that included a minister who called for all
the demons in Pierre [the state capital] to be vanquished.”
Other than galloping around on her horse, Noem seemed not to
do much of anything about the health crisis, except to hope it went away, and
make the situation worse with her rhetoric.
Something often
misunderstood about masking in South Dakota — and perhaps a reason for the
initially low infection rate — is that many of South Dakota’s towns and cities
invoked their own policies during the outbreak’s early days. But when the plague
didn’t come immediately, South Dakotans rebelled against their more
conscientious political leaders. Noem offered no support, and a masking mandate
crumbled in Sioux Falls when the Republican mayor voted against it. Across the
state, in Rapid City, Common City Council President Laura Armstrong created a
Facebook page promoting local businesses complying with CDC guidelines as well
as mask-required businesses for those worried about contracting the virus.
Conservative activists likened her to a Nazi and brought pictures of yellow
Stars of David to council meetings. They threatened her on social media and
trespassed on her isolated property (multiple times), and a colleague of hers
had the lug nuts loosened on a family car. Noem said nothing.
Or said something stupid, actually. In October 2020, she
traveled to Naples, Florida to give a speech. With her went Corey Lewandowski,
of Trump 2016 campaign fame. Rolling Stone sets the scene:
Noem
and Lewandowski headlined their own event on October 9th, 2020. Trump was still
in quarantine after his Covid sickness, but that didn’t stop a maskless Noem
and Lewandowski from speaking to 250 people in a Naples, Florida, VFW Hall.
“At
some point we have to let Americans live,” shouted Lewandowski. Noem added, “If
someone is concerned about these events they can stay home.”
It was just more of the simplistic kind of garbage that
Trump and people like Noem had been peddling for months. You could, as
Lewandowski so cluelessly suggested, stay home from such events. What you
couldn’t do was avoid contact with fools who attended, who might talk to you
later at the supermarket, or if you were a clerk at the grocery, might sneeze
on you while they checked you out. If your daughter dated the son of a father who
went to hear Noem speak, and that father got infected, his boy might pass the
virus on to your daughter, and then to you…
That’s the dilemma Noem refused to face.
At the same time Noem and Lewandowski spoke, Donald J.
Trump was still in quarantine, himself, after a very close call and a trip to
the hospital by helicopter, after he caught COVID-19.
___
7/5/20: Deep in the bowels of the
Trump administration, someone realizes we can’t have an economic rebound till we
control the coronavirus.
With another big rally scheduled for July 11, in Portsmouth,
New Hampshire, there’s a change in messaging. In a news release, campaign press secretary Hogan
Gidley announces attendees will be provided
with face masks. This time, they will be “strongly encouraged” to wear them.
____________________
Educated people also have a low opinion of the president. Because
they’re educated.
____________________
It
could be that recent poll numbers are rattling Team Trump. The president spent most
of today golfing. (Round #275 since he took
office.) With no public events scheduled and nothing better to do with his
time, when he returned to the White House, he flipped on the TV.
Fox
News was reporting on a recent CNBC poll. Former Vice President Joe Biden had healthy
leads in six battleground states. Trump exploded. He snatched up his iPhone and
began whacking at keys, like a chimp hurling feces.
Out
popped this Twitter gem: “@FoxNews
weekend afternoons is the worst! Getting into @CNN and MSDNC territory. Watch
@OANN & @newsmax instead. Much better!”
The president wouldn’t feel any better if he checked the
latest Gallup numbers. According to their most recent survey, Trump
has a 91% approval rating with Republicans. That’s fine. You expect numbers
with Democrats to be poor, but 2%!?! More importantly, only 33% of
independents approve of the job he’s doing. His rating among women is an
abominable 32%. Educated people also have a low opinion. Because they’re
educated! Only 30% approve.
Trump aims for his base.
On the other hand, Trump is working hard to solidify his standing
with racists, some fraction, however large or small, of his base. (I’m
conservative, estimating 10%. It could be higher; I doubt it’s lower.) Among
other baffling moves, he promises to veto a defense spending bill if it
includes language requiring the Department of Defense to drop names of bases
honoring Confederate generals.
7/6/20: Deep into the gravest
health crisis our nation has faced in a century, Donald Trump still hasn’t figured out the basics. Faced with a mountain of evidence to the contrary, ignoring
logic and math, he continues to insist that he has done a fantastic job of handling
the virus. We have the best testing in the world, he brags. “Now we have tested over 40 million people,” he says. “But by so doing,
we show cases, 99% of which are totally harmless.”
On July 6, we had
46,329 new cases.
Let
us now turn to computation. As of this morning, (posting on July 8), Johns
Hopkins University reports that 131,480 Americans have been killed by COVID-19.
For starters, to argue that 99% of cases are “totally harmless,” you would have
to believe 13,148,000 Americans have been infected. Then you would have to
pretend the Centers for Disease Control was run by “Deep State” scientists and
they were lying about the number of Americans who have been or are currently laid
up in hospitals.
Then
you would have to ignore the numbers coming from the states. A check this
morning shows Texas has had 211,000 cases of the virus,
including 10,028 on July 7, the worst day yet. According to the Texas
Tribune, working from state health department figures, more than 9% of those
infected are
spending time in hospital beds.
So,
if 99% of the cases are totally harmless, and in Texas, we have 9,286
individuals in hospitals, that would have to mean 928,600 Texans were currently
infected. And then we’d have to multiply all the dead by 100…
…And
did I mention, Trump is terrible with math?
Also,
scientists believe that a gene sequence inherited from
Neanderthal ancestors may increase our likelihood of catching the COVID-19
virus.
So,
there’s that.
FUN FACT: On a rare positive note, Peyton Manker, an 18-year-old high
school senior, was denied by the spreading virus a chance to attend her senior
prom. Undaunted, she came up with a creative way to memorialize her
lost opportunity. She fashioned a “prom dress” out of duct tape.
It
has a lovely COVID-19 theme.
___
7/7/20: Seven days into July, and what
is the president’s focus? He’s mad about polls. He’s mad about Bubba Wallace,
the only African American driver on the NASCAR circuit. He wants Wallace to apologize for thinking a noose found in his garage was a
racist symbol. He’s mad at NASCAR and wants them to allow the Confederate flag
to fly again at races. He’s mad because the Washington Redskins might change their name. He’s mad because he says
“anarchists” tore down a statue of Frederick Douglass, the great African
American abolitionist. (At least he has finally figured out that Douglass, dead
since 1895, is not alive.) Trump says that proves the radical left
doesn’t know what it’s doing. But the man responsible for putting up the statue
fears it may be “retaliation” by right-wing nut jobs. Police have made no
arrests. So, Trump could (in theory) be right. More than likely, he has a
ventriloquist butt.
With
the United States set to pass the three million-mark for confirmed cases
of the virus, the president has had to start slinging some serious bull. He’s reduced
to claiming that the “Mortality Rate for the China Virus in the U.S. is just about the
LOWEST IN THE WORLD!”
We have said this
before. The president dabbles in facts. Here are some mortality
rates for other countries. According to Worldometers, as of July
7, 405 Americans per million have died from COVID-19.
Deaths
per million:
Argentina:
36
Austria: 78
Australia: 4
Brazil: 315
Canada: 231
Costa Rica:
5
Denmark: 105
Ethiopia: 51
Finland: 59
Germany: 109
Greece: 29
Haiti: 10
Iceland: 29
Ireland: 353
Israel: 37
Japan: 8
Jordan: 1
Mexico: 241
Netherlands: 358
New Zealand: 4
Nigeria: 3
Norway: 46
Peru: 332
Poland: 40
Portugal: 160
Singapore: 4
South Korea; 6
Switzerland: 227
Thailand: 1
Ukraine: 29
*
NETFLIX has a miniseries out on Jeffrey
Epstein, and it might make you ponder a few important questions. First, how did
such a sleaze get away with molesting so many young girls?
F.B.I. agent breaks down in
tears.
If you think his behavior was terrible, the series
makes clear it was worse than you imagine. This blogger already knew Epstein
got a sweet deal from a federal prosecutor named Alexander Acosta (last seen serving
in President Trump’s cabinet). He did not know that a female F.B.I. agent broke
down in tears when an investigation she was helping run was suddenly shut down.
Nor had the blogger ever heard of Epstein’s work with Steven Hoffenberg. In the documentary, Hoffenberg describes Epstein
as a “criminal mastermind,” and says he helped Hoffenberg devise and run a massive
Ponzi scheme. Hoffenberg eventually admitted bilking investors out of $475
million. He spent 18 years in jail and had to pay $463 million in
restitution.
Epstein managed to skate.
(It made this blogger think again about
George Floyd, who died because he tried to pass a counterfeit $20.)
Then this blogger picked up a newspaper and
saw a story about Deutsche Bank. That bank has agreed to pay $150 million in
penalties for green-lighting questionable money transfers, initiated by
Epstein. According to spokesman Daniel Hunter, the bank is sorry it did a lousy
job of keeping tabs on a man with a well-known criminal history.
“Our reputation is our most valuable asset and we deeply regret
our association with Epstein,” Hunter said Tuesday.
*
ANYTHING ELSE to worry about? Fires are
burning across Siberia, a region where, as National Geographicnotes,
“landscapes that are
typically too cold, wet, and icy to burn” have ignited.
The problem? Climate change has been thawing layers of
permafrost that have been frozen for thousands of years.
Thus the name: permafrost.
Till now.
*
WE ALSO learn that Team Trump can’t get the simplest
tasks done right. Paycheck Protection Program loans, intended to save struggling
small businesses, went to TB12, a lifestyle-brand company owned by Tom Brady,
former star New England Patriots quarterback. Apparently, Brady couldn’t
keep workers on without a bailout, because his latest contract, with the Tampa
Bay Buccaneers, is worth a piddling $50 million. His wife Gisele Bündchen, the super model, is worth a paltry $400 million.
They needed help.
A boxing promotion firm run by Floyd
Mayweather also snagged a PPP loan. Mr. Mayweather, who earned an estimated $1 billion in prize money in the ring, somehow needed help. The poor gentleman could
hardly get by, what with paying a personal chef to prepare every meal, at a cost of $1,000
per, his $1,000 per haircut grooming habits, his penchant for wearing new
underwear daily, rather than wash old (a $6,500-per-year habit), his $20,000
gold-painted Bentley golf cart, his $50,000 diamond iPod phone case, his $4.8
million race car, his $18 million watch, and his $25 million dollar mansion.
Also receiving PPP loans: rock groups whose
tours were canceled, including the Eagles, Guns N’ Roses, and Green Day.
According to Forbes, the Eagles took in $100 million in 2019.
So, bail those dudes out.
That might not be the worst. In a rush to revive
a moribund economy, and get those “Economic Impact Payment” checks out (and maybe
win more votes for Trump come November), the federal government handed out a
total of $1.4 billion to people who were – frankly – dead.
FUN FACT – RELATIVES: We should note that the president’s niece,
Mary Trump, has a new book out.
“His ego is a fragile thing that must be
bolstered every moment.”
Among her most shocking revelations, she says
Uncle Donald paid to have someone else take his SAT test, so he could get into an
elite college. She says the president “embraces” cheating “as a way of life.”
She describes Fred Trump Sr., the president’s
father, and her grandfather, as a “high-functioning sociopath.” Her father,
Fred Jr., and her Uncle Donald were “scarred” for life under his hand.
Ms. Trump, who has a doctorate in
clinical psychology, says that her uncle is more than a garden-variety
narcissist. “Donald is not simply weak,” she writes, “his ego is a
fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down
that he is nothing of what he claims to be.”
She also quotes
the president’s sister, Maryanne (and has her on tape), assessing her brother’s
run for president. “He’s a clown – this will never
happen,” her aunt assured her not long after Donald announced
his candidacy. Aunt Maryanne was amazed to see evangelical Christians warm to her
brother. “The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there,”
Mary writes, quoting her aunt. “It’s mind boggling. But that’s all about his
base. He has no principles. None!”
___
7/8/20: The federal deficit hit $2.7 trillion for the first nine months of Fiscal Year 2020.
During President Obama’s eight years in
office – and he inherited a mess – the deficits for FY’s 2010-2017 totaled $6.528 trillion. Republicans were furious. Now Trump – who didn’t
inherit a mess – will likely top that total in one term. The estimated
deficit for all of FY 2020 is $3.8 trillion, meaning Trump will have racked up
$5.563 trillion in FY’s 2018-2020.
The deficit in FY 2021 will almost surely be a
trillion plus and could easily top twice that.
*
NOT TO MENTION, Trump has managed to get
travelers from the U.S. banned in many countries!
He brags about banning travel from China, to
stop the spread of COVID-19. Now, under his guiding hand, we’re the hot spot. Five Americans who landed in Sardinia,
hoping for a relaxing vacation, were told to get back on their private jet and
fly back home. Canada fined two young American visitors for “flouting tougher
entry restrictions.” Even governors of Mexican states are trying to block
American tourists. Germany, like the other members of the European Union, has
also banned U.S. visitors.
U.S. travelers banned.
___
7/9/20:
President Trump wakes in a sour frame of mind. He can’t get a grip on the
coronavirus. The Supreme Court is about to render two important decisions in cases
involving subpoenas against him. The first regards a state request to see his tax
and business records. The second involves his bid to refuse compliance to a congressional
subpoena.
___________________
“The public has a right to every man’s evidence.”
Chief Justice John Roberts
___________________
Mr.
Trump starts his day, as he awaits the news of the Court decisions, by doing
some serious tweeting. First, he defends his handling of the COVID crisis. “For the 1/100th time, the reason we
show so many Cases, compared to other countries that haven’t done nearly as
well as we have, is that our TESTING is much bigger and better.”
The virus keeps spreading,
no matter how fast and furiously the poor fool tweets. By day’s end, we have an
additional:
59,260 cases.
*
THE U.S. SUPREME COURT renders its decision in the case of Trump
v. Vance. The president’s legal team had argued
that
his “duties as chief magistrate demand his whole time for national objects.”
For
that reason, his attorneys claimed, Donald could not legally be served a
subpoena to produce his tax returns.
That
is, a president who has time to tweet 50,000 times, cannot manage to put
together requested documents, despite the assistance of multiple accountants. A
man who has spent 29%
percent of his days in office at private golf resorts cannot
be distracted from putting and driving and cheating on his score, to deal with a
subpoena. A man who devotes endless hours to watching TV, and ranting about
“Fake News,” is too busy to deal with a court challenge involving potential tax
evasion and breach of campaign finance law.
In
the end, the Court makes quick work in blowing Trump’s defenses to bits. The
decision is 7-2, with dissenters in actual agreement with the majority on several
key points. Chief Justice Roberts, in writing for the majority, notes that
previous chief executives, from James Monroe to Jimmy Carter, accepted that they
were “subject
to subpoena and have uniformly agreed to testify when called in criminal
proceedings.” In all previous cases, however, presidents had been involved in
cases involving federal crimes and investigations.
He lies “like most of us brush our teeth.”
Trump’s
lawyers claimed that this case, involving a subpoena from a New York State
prosecutor, was different. If presidents could be forced to answer subpoenas
from the nation’s 2,300 locally elected prosecutors, their ability to perform
their duties would be impaired. They would be subject to “diversion, stigma,
and harassment.” Trump’s lawyers, backed by political appointees at the
Department of Justice, who filed briefs in support, argued that a “heightened
standard of need” should apply. A president should only be asked to respond to
subpoenas in cases of…
Well, in
Trump’s cases, never.
After
all, the president had already dodged a subpoena from Robert Mueller for more
than two years.
Chief Justice Roberts blew up Trump’s first, second and third
lines of defense in the first sentence of his opinion. In our system of
government, he wrote, “the public has a right to every man’s evidence.” Since
the earliest days of the Republic, he wrote, “every man” has included the
President of the United States.
Yes, Roberts noted, a president’s communications as president
are “privileged” and rarely subject to exposure. In this case, the information
being subpoenaed related solely to Trump “inhis private capacity and
disconnected from the discharge of his constitutional obligations.”
In common law, Roberts explained, the only exception
involving a duty to testify in response to subpoena had been in “the case of
the king,” whose “dignity” was seen as “incompatible” with appearing “under the
process of the court.” But, as Chief Justice John Marshall explained in 1807, “a
king is born to power and can ‘do no wrong.’ The president, by contrast, is ‘of
the people’ and subject to the law.” The case of Richard M. Nixon is cited
repeatedly in the Vance opinion, as is the case of Clinton v. Jones,
involving a matter of civil liability. The Court had previously ruled,
“unequivocally and emphatically” that “Presidents are subject to subpoena.”
The court did rule that the president’s legal
team could go back to the lower courts and file motions to have the document
requests narrowed. But we can now be sure that Trump is going to have to
cough up a stash of tax records. Given his long battle to keep them secret, it’s
highly likely that what they reveal will not be flattering. As
former U.S. senator Claire McCaskill put it recently, this is a president who
lies “like most of us brush our teeth.” The chances that he didn’t cheat on his
taxes are somewhere between zero and nil.
*
The
justices rightly sniffed out authoritarianism down.
THE DECISION in the second case, Trump v. Mazars, went
against the president in much the same way. In this case, Trump’s lawyers were
suing his accounting firm, to keep them from compiling with a congressional
subpoena for his tax records. This time, Trump’s defense rested on the argument
that Congress lacked a “legitimate legislative purpose” in seeking his
financial documents.
Once again, Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion.
First, Roberts dismissed the idea that “executive privilege” could shield a president’s
tax records, prior to the time he was elected (or since). Trump’s lawyers were
arguing for what would amount to blanket protection from congressional subpoena.
The justices rightly sniffed out authoritarianism and shot the argument down.
The idea that any chief executive could thumb his or (someday)
her nose at the legislative branch would, Roberts wrote, give “short shrift to Congress’s important interests in
conducting inquiries to obtain the information it needs to legislate
effectively.” The Court did hold that Congress might abuse its subpoena powers,
and that federal courts must be mindful of such danger. Therefore, the
courts should permit subpoenas that were “no broader than necessary.”
The Court further noted a number of other possibilities– where the
legislative branch might overstep its bounds – but remanded the case to the lower courts for
review, where the president’s legal team has met a series of defeats. Roberts
agreed that the president and his lawyers “could raise additional
constitutional and legal questions in the lower courts.”
So, not all hope for Trump was gone.
His team immediately made it clear. They would
be raising every question they could think of, including whether or not liberal
justices on the Supreme Court were part of a satanic cult, and practiced child
sacrifice and pedophilia in their spare time. Okay, I’m kind of joking there (but
see, my post for 8/20/20, and you’ll realize it’s not entirely a humorous
situation.)
In reality, the only consolation for the
president is that his attorneys have a real hope of stalling Congress and
making sure lawmakers don’t glimpse the president’s tax records until after the
November election.
POSTSCRIPT:
Adding insult to injury for the day, German Chancellor Angela Merkel clearly has
Trump in mind when she
compares her approach to handling the COVID-19 crisis to his.
“As we are
experiencing firsthand, you cannot fight the pandemic with lies and
disinformation any more than you can fight it with hate or incitement to
hatred,” she tells reporters.
“The limits of
populism and denial of basic truths are being laid bare.”
___
7/10/20: Two men testify before Congress. Which witness will be punished? Which
will be rewarded by Team Trump?
You be the judge!
____________________
“The
grand jury is designed to help the state proceed with a fair accusation against
a person, while protecting that person from being chargedwhen there is
insufficient evidence.”
The Ohio Supreme Court
____________________
Witness A vs. Witness B
Witness A: This man tells the truth as far as
he can see it.
Witness B:This man lies to the congressional
committee hearing his testimony.
Witness A: His testimony is later backed up
by former National Security Advisor John Bolton.
Witness B: With investigators hot on his
trail, this man earns an extra felony count for threatening Witness C.
Witness A: This man does not get charged with
any felonies.
Witness B: Counting that extra charge, this
man is charged with seven felonies, after a grand jury decides there is ample evidence
to pursue a case against him.
The grand jury is an accusatory
body. It does not determine guilt or innocence. The grand jury’s duty is simply
to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to make a person face
criminal charges. The grand jury is designed to help the state proceed with a
fair accusation against a person, while protecting that person from being
chargedwhen there is insufficient evidence.
At his criminal trial, Witness B is represented
by high-priced lawyers. He is still convicted on all seven counts by a jury of
his peers. His legal team couldn’t convince a single juror that there was
reasonable doubt about a single one of the crimes Witness B was accused of
committing. He might as well have hired Mr. Blogger to be his lawyer, for all
the good it did.
Witness A: He is a decorated combat
veteran. He was awarded a Purple Heart for service in Iraq.
Witness B: He used to work for a lobbying
firm that burnished the reputations of scumbag dictators and world leaders.
That firm became known in Washington D.C.
as part of the “Torturers’ Lobby.”
Witness A: This man was recommended by superiors for promotion to the next highest rank in
the U.S. Army. His record was clean, his service meritorious.
Witness B: This man was called in by the
judge, while out on bail, after he seemed to threaten her life.
“Significant national
security implications for our country.”
If you haven’t already guessed, Witness A,is Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman. He testified truthfully in front of the
House Intelligence Committee.
While under oath he made it clear he believed
President Trump had held up critical military aid to Ukraine to force the
president of that country to help gather dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden.
At the time, Lt. Col. Vindman explained his decision to come before Congress and give testimony:
I
want to emphasize to the committee that when I reported my concerns on July 10 [2019]
relating to Ambassador Sondland and on July 25 relating to the president, I did
so out of a sense of duty. I privately reported my concerns in official
channels to the proper authority in the chain of command. My intent was to
raise these concerns because they had significant national security
implications for our country. I never thought that I’d be sitting here
testifying in front of this committee and the American public about my actions.
When I reported my concerns, my only thought was to act properly and to carry
out my duty.
Witness B is, of course, Roger Stone, man of
zero integrity. At his trial, the prosecutor pointed out that all the lies that
Stone told served to protect the president.
To give you some idea of who Stone is, he has
a tattoo of disgraced former President Richard M. Nixon on his back.
So, which man would you reward? And which
would you punish?
Lt. Colonel Vindman is leaving the U.S. Army
after saying that he has faced retaliation for testifying. His promotion,
which the Army said he earned, was blocked.
Roger Stone, the seven-time felon, has had
his prison sentence commuted by President Trump, without ever spending a day in
jail.
POSTSCRIPT: You have to follow matters closely to grasp the full extent of how
sleazy this president is, and how sleazy so many of the men and women Trump attracts
to his service are. Stone, you may remember, lied about ever meeting with any
Russians during the 2016 campaign. A second gentleman, who helped set up
Stone’s parlay with the Russian, and said he forgot about it too, who then amended his testimony to avoid a
perjury count, still has a job deep in the large intestine of the Trump
administration.
That would be Michael Caputo.
He was quietly posted to serve as assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human
Services in April. Tweets immediately surfaced, with Caputo showing his chops
for public affairs, by calling multiple women “dogface,” and making racist
comments. Call the spreading virus what you want. Caputo decided to “focus” on HHS
matters by denigrating Chinese people. “Millions of Chinese suck the
blood out of rabid bats as an appetizer and eat the ass out of anteaters,” he tweeted.
In Caputo’s mind eating anteater ass completely explains the spread of COVID-19.
When
other Twitter users questioned his comments, he responded with….more racism. “Don’t
you have a bat to eat?” he asked one Asian American. “You’re very convincing,
Wang,” he replied to another.
A person
not named “Wang.”
What happened to Vindman and what happened to
Stone, with Michael Caputo for dessert, tells you everything you need to know
about Trump and his scuzz bag crew.
___
7/11-12/20: Time to catch up on a few of the failures and threats to the rule of
law perpetrated by Trump and his team of miscreants.
____________________
A $1.3 billion contract to build more than 40 additional miles of
border protection.
____________________
First, unemployment is rising rapidly. If you
need work, however, you may be able to get it, repairing a section of Trump’s
border wall. This section was completed in January by Fisher Industries,
a company out of North Dakota.
Due to erosion, this spanking new section is
in danger of toppling into the Rio Grande. That means Mr. Trump has to start
blaming his “enemies.” In a Sunday tweet he claims, “this very small (tiny) section of wall” was built
by a private group and “only done to make me look bad.”
This would make sense if you were high on
powerful narcotics and too lazy to check for information readily available thanks
to the free press doing its basic job. (Or you could read my blog for 12/13/19.)
First, the “tiny” section is three miles long. It was built not by “enemies” of
the president, but with help from a group that raised $25 million online. Their
sales pitch: they supported Mr. Trump.
Called “We Build the Wall,” the group attracted powerful friends of the man in the White House. Steve
Bannon joined the board. Kris Kobach, once tasked by Trump with finding those
3-5 million illegal voters who pulled the lever for Hillary, became general
counsel. Trump endorsed him in his 2018 bid for the governorship of Kansas.
Kobach didn’t win, and never did find those imaginary illegal voters.
Tommy Fisher, owner of Fisher Industries, isn’t an “enemy” of the
president. He appeared repeatedly on Fox News, where he
praised the president effusively. This no doubt helps explain how his company
got a $1.3 billion contract to build more than 40 additional miles of wall. You can read all about it in that bible of builders, Construction
Dive, if you’re not a lazy ignoramus, like President Twitter Thumbs. Senator
Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, was stoked about the contract when it
was announced in May 2019. He pointed out that the wall would be painted black
for aesthetic reasons, and also to make it too hot to climb.
Unless, of course, climbers waited until
nightfall. Or waited a few months until the barrier toppled over.
*
“An ex-telemarketer repeatedly
accused of fraudulent practices.”
AT LEAST THE WALL that Fisher built stood for
several months. That’s a better record that a company called Fillakit
can boast. Team Trump paid $7.3 million to that company, a fledgling Texas operation,
which promised to supply tubes used for coronavirus testing.
As ProPublicaexplains, FEMA “signed its first deal with Fillakit on May 7, just six days after the company
was formed by an ex-telemarketer repeatedly accused of fraudulent practices
over the past two decades.” Officials in several states quickly learned that
when the federal government is contracting for critically needed healthcare
supplies, inking contracts with former telemarketers might not be the optimum
strategy.
The containers weren’t what the doctors ordered:
[Officials] say that these
“preforms,” which are designed to be expanded with heat and pressure into 2-liter
soda bottles, don’t fit the racks used in laboratory analysis of test samples.
Even if the bottles were the right size, experts say, the company’s process
likely contaminated the tubes and could yield false test results. Fillakit
employees, some not wearing masks, gathered the miniature soda bottles with
snow shovels and dumped them into plastic bins before squirting saline into
them, all in the open air, according to former employees and ProPublica’s
observation of the company’s operations.
“It wasn’t even clean, let alone
sterile,” said Teresa Green, a retired science teacher who worked at Fillakit’s
makeshift warehouse outside of Houston for two weeks before leaving out of
frustration.
*
THE BIG NEWS continues to be the spreading
virus and the question of what must be done to blunt the damage. Saturday,
President Trump finally wore a mask in public. Of course, he was visiting
injured servicemen and women at Walter Reed Hospital. Masks were required.
White House aides were quick to trumpet his bold
mask-wearing leadership. One even tweeted, “Joe Biden is finished,” as if Trump
had ended the crisis by doing what sensible Americans had been doing for weeks.
We don’t usually quote Democrats. But this is
too good
to pass up. “Trump finally puts on a mask,”
strategist Jesse Lehrich responded, “and his campaign applauds him like he’s a
child who just tied his own shoes for the first time....It would be comical if
it weren’t all so tragic.”
“He’s made a lot of mistakes.”
Sunday, the State of Florida set a grim record:
Most cases of virus by any one state in one day:
15,300.
The disastrous spread in states like Florida,
Texas and Arizona has left the White House scrambling for someone new to blame.
The current scapegoat is Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading
expert on infectious diseases. “He’s made a lot of mistakes,” the president
said of his adviser last week, as if to say he, Donald, had made none.
A split seems to be developing. Fauci has
said that he doesn’t know where Trump gets some of his ideas – for example,
that 99% of COVID-19 cases are totally harmless. The president has said we’re
“doing great” in handling the crisis. “As a country,” Fauci said four days ago, “when you compare us to
other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re
just not.” Top Trump aides have been
complaining that Fauci doesn’t have the president’s back.
He’s not supposed to have the president’s
back or anyone else’s. He’s a scientist. He’s supposed to explain science.
Trump is an idiot and hasn’t talked to his leading expert in weeks.
Admiral Brett Giroir, the man in charge of
the U.S. coronavirus testing program, could get the orange cold shoulder next.
He admitted Sunday that “stringent lockdowns” may be necessary again in states
where disease is exploding. Giroir said that all Americans should wear masks when they go out in public. In areas where cases are
skyrocketing, he warned that restaurants and bars should close immediately. He said
hospitalizations and deaths were likely to rise. At a peak, in April, we had
85,000 people hospitalized. Giroir said we were now at 63,000. “But we do
expect those [numbers] to go up.”
We’re not doing great. According to the CDC,
the numbers for July 11
were:
62,918 new cases.
On July 12, we racked up another,
60,469.
(This is getting really
depressing.)
___
7/13/20: The rising death toll and rising number of Americans hospitalized with
COVID-19 are bad enough.
High unemployment expected
to persist until 2022.
Even if you don’t get sick, the pressing
question is what kind of economic damage you and your family might suffer. In
the last reporting period another 1.3 million workers applied for unemployment.
Damage can be found on every hand. Brooks
Brothers, founded in 1818, and famous for dressing every president
since Abraham Lincoln, has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Barring some miracle, United
Airlines will lay off 36,000 workers in October. AMC, the largest theater chain
in the country, is trying to restructure debt, as fear of catching COVID-19 in a dark
theater strangles business. The company lost $2.2 billion in the first quarter
of this year. The college football season is in jeopardy, with each lost game
meaning lost revenue from TV rights, ticket sales and concessions. The Ivy
League has canceled all games. The Big Ten is eliminating all but contests
against conference opponents. In other pandemic-related news, 2.3 million pounds of peanuts, usually consumed by fans during
baseball season, are sitting, unnibbled in warehouses.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development warned this week that high unemployment will likely persist in the U.S. and among its other 37 members, until
2022. If the United States has a second wave of cases (and, so far, we can’t even
swim back from the first) we could be looking at an unemployment rate of 12% at the end of this year.
Sen. Mitt Romney has been one of the few Republicans to
have the courage to call Trump’s pardon for Stone what it is. “An American president commutes the sentence of
a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president,’ he
tweeted. He described Trump’s
decision to keep his pal out of the slammer as “unprecedented, historic corruption.”
Robert Mueller, whose investigation helped
bring Stone to justice, broke his silence in an editorial, explaining,
I feel compelled to respond both to broad claims that our
investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific
claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office.
[When a witness lies repeatedly]…it strikes at the core of the
government’s efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable [emphasis
added].
Attorney General Bill Barr, who has
carried water for the president through thick and thin, decided even he didn’t
want to take credit for this move. He let it be known that he had recommended the president not step in for Stone, and Stone
should go to jail. (See: 7/10/20.)
*
THE DAMAGE from the spread of the coronavirus continues to
show in a multiplicity of ways. A new report finds that 5.4 million Americans have lost healthcare coverage
in the last four months.
That’s more than the 3.9 million who lost coverage during the
entire 2008-2009 Great Recession.
Assuming he were capable of introspection, you’d expect Trump
to be feeling foolish about now. In reality, he’s incapable of anything
remotely like honest self-examination. Back in June he got mad because he wanted
to hold the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Trump
was angry because the Democratic governor refused to assure him that he could
have the huge, mask-less, non-social-distancing crowds he hankered after – just because the governor
wasn’t sure that the coronavirus would be under control in August, when the
convention was scheduled.
Trump kicked over the game board, like a sulky child. He’d go
play in Florida, he grumbled.
Now Florida is one of the hottest hotspots in the world for
disease. Suddenly, plans to hold the GOP convention in Jacksonville aren’t
looking so good.
Whose fault is it that the coronavirus is running rampant?
According to anonymous White House aides, Dr. Anthony Fauci!
A little free press digging reveals the truth. The anonymous source
is Press Secretary “Birther” McEnany, who compiled a list of Fauci’s “mistakes” and supplied it to
the Washington Post.
Even her list was botched. Dr. Fauci was quoted as downplaying
the threat of the disease. On February 29, in an interview, she had him saying:
“At this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a
day-by-day basis.”
He did say that.
Only, those words were taken out of context, making it seem the
doctor had led poor “Drink Bleach” Don astray. “Right now, the risk is still
low, but this could change,” Dr. Fauci went on to add in an NBC
News interview. “When you start to see community spread, this could change and
force you to become much more attentive [emphasis added] to doing things
that would protect you from spread.”
Apparently, the president stoppered his ears when Fauci said
that.
McEnany denied that there was a rift between the president
and the expert. Then she tried to play dumb. (She’s had a lot of practice.) She
told reporters the Post had asked a specific question, and all she did was
provide “a direct answer to what was a direct question.” And if that answer
made Dr. Fauci look bad?
Go figure.
If you want to know how screwed up this White House and this
administration and this president are, consider who now decides if Dr. Fauci
can give an interview on TV. If any network should ask him to appear, requests
are handled by Michael Caputo, a top spokesman at the Department of Health and
Human Services. Caputo is the guy who helped Roger Stone set up a meeting with
some Russian dude in May 2016, at which the dude said he had dirt on Hillary
Clinton.
Yeah. Caputo. Guardian of truth. (See: 7/10/20.)
*
REPORTED CASES of COVID-19, July 13:
58,858.
___
His top writer was a flaming racist.
7/14/20: In
case you missed it, because you’d rather go out and catch COVID-19 than watch
Fox News, Tucker Carlson is headed
for vacation. This hiatus for the popular nighttime
host is likely related to the firing of Blake Neff, top writer
for his #1 primetime telecast, Tucker Carlson Tonight.
____________________
“Would u let a JET BLACK congo n****r do lasik eye surgery on
u for 50% off?”
____________________
Even worse, if you love Tucker and Trump and racist bums, CNN
was responsible for Neff’s demise. Or, more accurately, Neff was responsible
for Neff’s demise. All CNN did was expose him as the
author of misogynistic and racist posts on a secretive internet site called AutoAdmit.
CNN found, for example, that Neff had responded to a thread
started by another user in 2018 with the subject line, “Would u let a JET BLACK
congo n****r do lasik eye surgery on u for 50% off?”
Of course, the n-word (not edited in any of the following
cases on AutoAdmit) didn’t bother Mr. Neff in the least. “I wouldn’t get LASIK
from an Asian for free, so no,” he replied.
On June 5 – this year – he wrote: “Black doods staying inside
playing Call of Duty is probably one of the biggest factors keeping crime down.”
Neff, who has never married (and now we understand why) started
several threads mocking women, after seeing posts they put up on social media.
He urged others to make fun of one who had written about her unsuccessful dating
life. This past March, he started a thread mocking an older woman “with whom he
was connected on social media. The woman had posted about freezing her eggs.” Neff
titled his thread: “Disaster: WuFlu outbreak endangers aging shrew’s quest to
freeze eggs.” Neff posted on this thread himself, and “racked up dozens of
comments as users ridicule[d] the woman, as recently as June 28.”
On what he thought was an anonymous forum, Neff revealed his heart.
When not insulting African Americans, or trolling women, he joked about “foodie
faggots” in a 2014 post. In August 2019, he jumped on a thread titled, “We
should just buy Canada and kick the Canadians out.” Ever the wit, albeit the racist
wit, Neff commented, “Okay but what do we do with the millions of Chinese
people.”
(Canada has had a wave of Chinese immigrants in the last few years. In a 2019
survey, 20% of the population of Vancouver identified as “ethnic Chinese.”)
Neff was always looking for new groups to insult. This past February,
he decided to insult Mormons. He called their faith “an inherently cucky
religion.” If you’re like me, you’d have to look up the definition for the
slang “cucky.” According to the internet, it derives from cuckhold: “The shortened form
‘cuck’ arose in this manner as an Internet insult, and it also refers to a
genre of interracial pornography in which a white married woman spurns her
white husband for sex with a black man. The white husband is
thus cuckolded or ‘cucked.’”
On May 27, Neff warned fans that Representatives Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, four Democratic
lawmakers of color, want to “MAKE YOUR COUNTRY A DUMPING GROUND FOR PEOPLE FROM
THIRD WORLD SHITHOLES.”
In terms of gainful employ, Mr. Neff found the perfect home
on Fox, writing for their #1 show. As CNN noted, on June 27, Neff jumped in on an
internet discussion about whether “whites fear what’s going to happen to them
in 10-20 yrs.”
Neff wrote that he had “no plans
to stay” in the country that long. In December 2019, he said that “once
Democrats have the majorities to go full FUCK WHITEY, things are going to get
really wacky really quickly.” He argued at the time that there is a “large
minority of whites who are fully supportive of a Fuck Whitey agenda” and that “there’s
a suicidal impulse to Western peoples that honestly feels almost biological in
origin.”
The racism of others never daunted Neff. CNN found that he
had replied to a thread with the title, “Mary Poppins getting raped by a pack
of wild n*****s at the park; kids watching.” He also commented on a thread
titled, “DIKES get wrong CUM at CUMBANK. N*****R pops out.”
“Literally
our greatest ally on air.”
This is who Neff is. And he wrote extensively for
Tucker Carlson’s show. Language that flowed, on-air, from Carlson’s lips,
mirrored comments made by Neff, using a pseudonym, on AutoAdmit. Only Carlson’s
racism was more subtle, and in many ways more dangerous for that reason.
Not everyone was fooled by Carlson’s clever wording. The founder of Daily
Stormer, a neo-Nazi publication, caught the hidden meaning in many of his shows.
Tucker Carlson Tonight, he told his neo-Nazi buds,is “basically Daily
Stormer: The Show.” Carlson, he added, is “literally our greatest ally” on
air.
*
IN OTHER NEWS, a Kansas gentleman (and we assume a fan of
President Trump) made it clear he wasn’t going to be forced to wear a mask.
Also, you could pry his cold dead hands off his BBQ ribs because he knew his
Second Amendment rights. When an employee at the Bob-Be-Que Shack in Mission,
Kansas told the customer he’d have to mask up if he wanted to pick up a carry-out
order, he raised his shirt and flashed a gun. This proves that the more guns
Americans carry, the safer we all are.
Unless the gun-toting nut starts to sneeze.
*
COVID-19 cases in the U.S.A., on July 14:
60,971.
___
7/15/20: Grab your AR-15’s Trump fans –
but not your masks, because masks are for sissies. (See: 7/21/20.)
In a baffling, stream-of-consciousness press conference
yesterday, the president gave voice for more than an hour to whatever
random fragments of thought percolated to the surface of his consciousness and
spilled from his lips.
If you missed it, or plowed through and read a transcript,
you had to feel sorry for reporters stuck listening in the Rose Garden, tasked
with deciphering the message. It was a sticky day in
Washington and Trump started by apologizing. He said there might be time for
questions, “maybe at the end,” if ‘it’s not too hot.’”
You might imagine the U.S. is facing a health crisis. Not so,
said Trump. “So,
we’ve had a big day in the stock market,” he noted.
“Things
are coming back, and they’re coming back very rapidly,” he added, “a lot sooner
than people thought. People are feeling good about our country. People are
feeling good about therapeutics and possible vaccines.” If you’ve never
noticed, Trump often substitutes the words “thing” or “things” for facts when
he speaks. But Americans were “feeling good” he claimed.
He cared about
protesters in faraway cities.
Trump’s
rambling discourse started off almost normal. He said he would be punishing
China for “its oppressive actions against the people of Hong Kong.” He said the
Chinese government was “extinguishing Hong Kong’s freedom.”
“We’ve all watched what happened,” Trump continued. “Not
a good situation. Their freedom has been taken away. Their rights
have been taken away.” He wanted the world to know he cared about protesters in
faraway cities. He just wasn’t a fan of protesters in front of the White
House.
After that, it was off to the races, except that Trump had no
idea which way he was running or why. He bragged about how he was making China
pay “massive tariffs” and how he was using billions of dollars raised by tariffs
to help America’s farmers. “I’ve given quite a bit to thefarmers and ranchers of our
country because they were targeted,” by retaliatory Chinese tariffs.
The
president still didn’t understand how tariffs work, or how importers pass costs
on to consumers. He said he’d given the farmers and ranchers $12 billion. Then
he gave them $16 billion more.
Trump didn’t
give them a dime. Consumers footed the bill.
Had he
mentioned Joe Biden? He thought he should. “Joe Biden’s entire career,” Trump explained,
“has been a gift to the Chinese Communist Party and to the calamity of – of errors that
they’ve made.”
Did he
mean “comedy” of errors? There’s no way of knowing when this president speaks.
He might have meant “cornflakes.”
Why was
he elected? Trump said, it had to do with “a lot of bad things; things related
to trade.” No telling what things he meant. He didn’t like the World Trade
Organization. That was for sure. And China had been ripping us off for years.
Whose
fault was that?
Biden!
He’s coming for your
windows and your eyeballs.
Trump wanted us to know. Biden was bad. He was in favor of
the Paris Climate Accord. “No good,” Trump grimaced. Okay. Sure. Two hundred other
countries signed the Accord. Trump said he saved us. He got us out of a bad
deal. A terrible deal. “I’ve been given a lot of credit for what I did there,”
Trump insisted. “It took a certain amount of courage, I guess, because it
sounds so nice – the Paris Climate Accord – but it wasn’t good for us at all.”
(See: 7/16/20.)
If Joe Biden got elected, we’d all be screwed. That would be
it for the windows we used to love.
Also. Our eyeballs! Our eyeballs would be wrecked. Trump
explained. Biden and the Democrats wanted to:
….mandate net-zero carbon
emissions for homes, offices, and all new buildings by 2030. That
basically means no windows, no nothing. It’s very hard to do. I tell
people when they want to go into some of these buildings, “How are your eyes?” Because
they won’t be good in five years. And I hope you don’t mind cold office
space in the winter and warm office space in the summer, because your air
conditioning is not the same as the good old days.
Trump’s aides must have told him he was polling poorly with
white suburban women. Trump wanted them to know that Joe Biden had a dastardly plan.
He wanted suburbs to allow low income housing to be built outside of cities.
Trump hates American cities. Too many Democrats!
He explained the threat:
Abolish – in the suburbs, you’re
going to abolish the suburbs with this [emphasis added]. Enforce
Obama-Biden’s radical AFFH – that’s the AFFH regulation that threatens to strip
localities of federal affordable housing funds unless they change their zoning
laws to fit the federal government’s demands. So what you have – I mean,
I’ve been watching this for years in Westchester, coming from New
York. They want low-income housing built in a neighborhood.
Biden! Biden wanted poor families to have better lives. He
wanted their kids to go to school with yours.
He wanted to abolish the suburbs.
Well, I’m ending that
rule. I’m taking it out, so – I spoke with Ben Carson the other
day. We’re going to be taking it out. I’ve watched that whole thing
go, and now they want to make it twice as bad in the suburbs – in the suburbs.
Mothers aren’t happy about that. Fathers aren’t happy about
that. They worked hard to buy a house, and now they’re going to watch the
housing values drop like a rock, and that has happened. It dropped like a
rock. So we’re not going to do that; we’re going to do the exact opposite.
According to Trump, Biden wanted “to defund our military.”
Not Trump. He wanted to spend more money. Because China is “building a massive
military.”
Trump did not call China’s president Xi Jinping his friend, as he so often has before. That’s not working out
so well, lately.
As for
the coronavirus, Trump bragged that he took care of it himself, with the China
travel ban. “And I was a crowd of one, because even experts didn’t want to do
it. They thought it was a mistake.” It came at us, the disease. It wasn’t
his fault it spread. “But we did what we had to do, and now we’ll put out the
flames as it – as it happens. We have to get the schools open. We
have to get everything open. A lot of people don’t want to do that for
political reasons, not for other reasons.”
That is
why, in one recent poll, nearly 70% of parents said they worried about
sending kids back to school.
“He’s really bizarre.”
For
most of an hour Trump babbled on about Joe Biden, and what a terrible person he
was. Biden,
he insisted, “He’s really bizarre.”
The president riffed about face masks. He didn’t like them. “I
see people now, friends of mine – they walk up, they want to say hello, and
they have to keep their distance, and they’re all covered up, like you’re all
covered up, with facemasks,” he said, motioning at reporters, cooking in the
sun.
Trump eventually
pulled out a list his aides had prepared, and ticked off all the mortal sins of
the former vice president. Biden is all for letting MS-13 gang members come to
the U.S., commit heinous crimes, and avoid deportation. “So, in other words,
we’ll take all of these people – many of whom are in prison for rape, murder, lots
of other things.” It wasn’t clear how, but Trump insisted Biden wanted to
“incentivize illegal-alien child smuggling.” By comparison, he claimed he had built
“259 miles…of great, powerful wall.” Not counting the part that fell down
earlier in the week. (See: 7/11-12/20.)
Trump said
that we had great asylum agreements with other nations in the Western
Hemisphere. Trump named three: Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Rather
than people coming here as refugees, he said those incredibly poor countries had
shouldered the load.
Who wants
refugees, anyway? I think that’s what Trump meant. At that point you had to
listen carefully to get what the president was trying to say, and even then,
you probably couldn’t.
In
fact, we might as well let the comedian Sarah Cooper take over for this quote:
Trump
wanted everyone to know, he had a “great meeting last week with the President
of Mexico. Great guy. Friend of mine – become a friend of mine.” The
two had never met before. This claim reminded me, when I read through the
speech, of other friends Trump has said he has.
Kim
Jong-un.
Xi
Jinping.
Jeffrey
Epstein. (Okay, that one is kind of a joke.)
The
wall with Mexico. It was genius, Trump said, “because it stopped people coming
in from heavily infected areas of Mexico.”
What
about that infection? That COVID-19? “But it’s still – we’ve done a
great job; get no credit for it,” Trump complained. “And I don’t want the
credit.”
(You know he did.)
He said
he had kept people out of this country “that are going to come in and blow up
our cities, do things.” Maybe the “liberal Democrats running the cities”
wouldn’t mind if people came in and blew them up. “But I would mind,”
Trump said, “and the people of this country mind.”
That’s
how Trump’s press conference went. He didn’t think the people in the cities
would mind if they got blown up.
But he
would mind – even though he hated Democrats in the cities.
Joe Biden hates statues.
Also, Joe Biden hates statues. Trump? He loves statues.
Really, he loves Confederate statues almost as much as grabbing women’s….
Where were we? Yeah. Terrible people wanted to destroy our
best statues. Terrible people. Like African Americans.
And liberals.
But this has been going on, and
I found an act that we’ve used. And we have many, many people in jail
right now – many, many people in jail, all over the country – because they
tried to destroy or, in some cases, got – got it down, a federal statue or
monument.
I signed an executive order a
couple of weeks ago, and it says very simply, “Ten years in jail.” You do
it, 10 years in jail. The amazing part is we’re able to catch everybody
because, thanks to all of you on television – we appreciate it – but we have
their pictures. We have the man standing on Andrew Jackson’s
horse.
Roger
Stone? Seven-time convicted felon? No. No jail time for him.
Eventually, the president took a few questions. Was he down
in the polls, a reporter asked? “Do you see yourself as an underdog in this
race?”
Trump
said no. “I think we have a really good poll numbers.” His good poll numbers
were not fake. How could he be so sure? “You look at the Intracostal in
Florida. You look at the lakes. You see thousands of boats with Trump
signs, American signs. You’ve got the Trump-Pence sign all over,” he explained. “You
look at what’s going on. You look at bikers, for miles and miles, riding
up highways proudly with their signs.”
Bikers
with signs had nothing to do with actual polls, but you figure reporters were
nicely browned after an hour in the sun, and only hoped to get away before
Trump bragged about himself for another hour.
*
TRUMP ALSO FOUND TIME in his schedule the same day to pose
with an array of Goya food products, while sitting at the Resolute Desk in the
Oval Office. The company owner had praised Trump’s bold leadership. Latinos,
who love Goya foods more than they love Trump, called for a boycott.
7/16/20: Many Trump supporters believe
that the COVID numbers they are seeing have been faked. Scientists are lying.
Doctors and nurses and healthcare professionals are lying. Democratic governors
and mayors are lying. But would the NCAA lie when the college football season
is endangered?
The N.C.A.A. on Thursday updated
its guidelines for bringing back college sports this fall, and they included
universal masking on all sidelines, daily coronavirus symptom checks and social
distancing on and off the field.
But if there are going to be
sports this fall, the pandemic has to be more under control. And it’s not
looking good right now.
“Today, sadly, the data point in
the wrong direction,” Mark Emmert, the president of the N.C.A.A., said in
a statement. “If there is to be college sports in the fall, we need to get
a much better handle on the pandemic.”
College
sports now at risk.
The Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, made up of 11
historically black colleges, had already joined the Patriot and Ivy Leagues in suspending fall sports. The Big
East had announced that “its schools would exclusively play in conference for
men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s cross-country, volleyball and field
hockey, following in the footsteps of the Big Ten and the Pac-12.”
Even the mighty SEC is unsure. Sports like volleyball,
soccer and cross-country would be postponed until at least September.
Football? No one knows.
Sports Illustratedwas blunt, noting that pessimism had taken root in NCAA circles, with the
nation “speeding in the wrong direction in terms of combating the
coronavirus pandemic.” One casualty this fall might well be “an endeavor
millions of us want and every college athletic department needs.” That is:
college football.
“If the season dies, we know who had the biggest hand in
killing any chance of it happening: Donald Trump.”
When he inevitably gets around to Twitter-ranting
about what has happened to the sport, Trump should instead do what he never
does –
accept some accountability
for the state of affairs. By blowing the summer he’s jeopardized the fall,
doing more to endanger the college football season than anyone in America.
*
Gutting the “Bill of Rights” for the environment.
STILL, it
could be worse. You could live in low-lying areas along the U.S. coast. The National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has just released a detailed study of coastal flooding, noting that sea levels have risen thirteen inches since 1920.
That
doesn’t mean people along the coast need to walk around in waders. It does mean
scientists have plentiful evidence of climate change – and the real problem
isn’t Joe Biden and his threat to America’s windows (see: 7/15/20).
Thirteen inches might not sound like much. Small differences can be
problematic. Corpus Christi, Texas had only three days of tidal flooding in
2000. Charleston, South Carolina had two. In 2019, they suffered 18 and 13 days
of flooding, respectively. According to NOAA, Charleston had only 13 days,
total, in the first fifty years records were kept. Eagle Point, Texas
reported 64 high-tide flooding days last year.
Coast flooding in Newport Beach, California.
Nor was
that the only bad news when it came to climate change. Even Fox News felt bound
to report: “The World Meteorological Organization said it expects
global temperatures will rise ‘at least’ 1
degree Celsius (1.64 degrees Fahrenheit) in each year of the next five
years, far above levels not seen since the Second Industrial Revolution.”
That’s a poorly worded sentence, if my retired-teacher-self
ever spotted one and circled it in red. If true, we’d all be cooking our brains
in the next twenty years. What WMO really said was that we could expect an increase of 1 degree Celsius in the next
five years, not every year. There’s also a 20% chance that global
temperatures will rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius in that period.
There’s a 100% chance that President Trump won’t do anything
about the problem, except make it worse.
*
IN OTHER BAD NEWS, methane emissions hit a record high in 2017.
Methane can be up to 86 times more harmful in the atmosphere than CO2.
Nevertheless, Trump appointees at the Environmental No-Protection Agency have
worked hard to roll back rules passed by the Obama administration to curtail
methane emissions.
Scientists are increasingly worried. “Terrified” might be a
better word, except scientists don’t use words like “terrified,” and try to
stick to science:
Emissions of methane, a potent ingredient
in global warming, have hit an all-time record high equivalent to putting 350
million more cars on the world’s roads, according to new research.
Left unabated, that level of
methane emissions could help heat the earth to dangerous temperatures before
the end of the century.
…The results of the study, conducted by scientists from
several institutions including NASA, Yale and Stanford, were published Tuesday….
Methane emissions are largely driven by coal mining, oil production, natural
gas production, landfills and cattle and sheep ranching.
As soon as Trump fans see the words “cattle and sheep,” they
revert to talking about liberals who want to take away guns and farting cows.
And now gaseous sheep!
Leading environmental groups have accused the president and his fossil fuel buds of
gutting a core rule, meant to protect the nation’s air, water and resources.
For half a century, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has required
the government to consider “environmental and community concerns before
approving pipelines, highways, drilling permits, new factories, or any major
action on federal lands.” Now protections will be relaxed. Polluters will be
able to skirt the rules and Trump’s E-no-PA administrators will turn a blind
eye.
The Sierra Club is opposed to the changes. So arethe Wilderness Society, the
League of Conservation Voters, Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural
Resources Defense Council, the Colorado Wild Public Lands
and Independence Pass Foundation, and just about every
other environmental group you might name. The Wilderness Society compares NEPA to a “Bill of Rights” for the environment.
*
S.O.S.:
Save Our Showers.
SPEAKING from the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday, the
president explained his decision to roll back almost every regulation designed
to protect the environmental that he could think of.
“Shower heads,” he said.
“We’re bringing back consumer choice in home appliances so
that you can buy washers and dryers, shower heads and faucets,” he said. “So,
shower heads,” he continued. “You take a shower, the water doesn’t come out.
You want to wash your hands, the water doesn’t come out. So, what do you do?
You just stand there longer or you take a shower longer? Because my hair – I
don’t know about you – but it has to be perfect. Perfect.”
Dishwashers, too.
“Dishwashers,” Trump said. “You didn’t have any water, so you
– the people that do the dishes – you press it, and it goes again, and you do
it again and again. So, you might as well give them the water because you’ll
end up using less water. So, we made it so dishwashers now have a lot more
water. And in many places – in most places of the country – water is not a
problem. They don’t know what to do with it. It’s called ‘rain.’ They don’t
have a problem.”
Yes! It’s called rain! Who knew!
Trump also bragged about bringing back the old incandescent
lightbulbs – because Trump isn’t worried about the environment.
7/17/20: As a retired teacher, Mr. Blogger hopes schools can open safely in a
few weeks. The children would benefit. Parents would breathe a sigh of relief.
Many could go back to work. That doesn’t mean it won’t be dangerous for older
teachers, janitors, cafeteria workers and others. You also have the grave risk
of children passing around infection and carrying it home to families and
causing collateral damage.
____________________
This
was the president trying to warp the narrative to suit his twisted intent.
____________________
There’s
no easy answer. Yet some of the fools who work for Trump claim there is. See,
for example: comments by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Or watch the clueless
Larry Kudlow, below.
What I
don’t understand – and no rational human being should accept – was a decision by
Team Trump to block experts from the Centers for Disease Control from testifying before Congress about plans to reopen schools safely. As
always, this was the president trying to warp the narrative to suit his intent.
He wants schools open because he wants parents back to work. He wants parents
back to work because he doesn’t want to be running for reelection with an
unemployment rate in double digits. Trump wants to win in November.
He
doesn’t care about kids, or school staff, or parents, or how many people die or
get sick if reopening goes badly.
Trump
is always in it for himself.
More and
more Americans have come to realize this. In a new poll 64% of us say we don’t believe what he says when he talks about the virus. Still,
1 in 3 do believe when he talks about scientists “rigging” numbers of deaths
and hospitalizations. The president’s problem, and therefor ours, is that he can’t
BS his way out of the corner he painted himself into in the early days of the COVID
crisis. He can’t call for the kind of controls we need because he mocked those
controls. If he changed now, his stark failure would be clear even to his
followers.
That
means we’re going to have to ride it out. It won’t be easy. The State of Texas has
decided to continue with online school classes until November. Hard hit
by a wave of infection, the state has seen 543 people die from the coronavirus in five days. Another
10,632 Texans are hospitalized with COVID-19.
As long as the virus continues to spread, the country will
continue to suffer economic dislocation. Colleges, employees of colleges, and
college towns are suffering cascading financial losses. The
University of Akron voted last week to lay off one fifth of its unionized work
force. The school reorganized 11 academic departments and merged them into
five. The University of Michigan cut 40% of the 300 lecturers who carry most of
the campus teaching load. Ohio University has had three rounds of layoffs. Experts
warn we could see a 15% drop in college enrollments in the fall. That would represent
a $23 billion loss of revenue.
Towns near national parks face similar damage. Reservations for visitors to Yosemite
have been capped. This has led to a major drop in business at nearby towns and
inside the park. Twelve thousand workers in Coconino County, home to Grand
Canyon National Park, have jobs reliant on tourist flow. The park has 3,500
employees in the summer and 2,500 year-round. Any decline in travel spells
trouble. And any visitor from a state where infections are spreading could
bring the virus inside the park, resulting in catastrophic economic loss.
*
ON A LIGHTER NOTE, Kanye West says he’s running for
president. (I, for one, hope he will make Taylor Swift his running mate.)
Mr. West may be a bit of a loose musical cannon; but he’d
still be a better president than the one we have.
West says, if elected, he will offer all Americans “free
weed” and if anyone has a baby, they will get $1 million.
*
ON JULY
17, a grim record for the spread of the coronavirus is set with
74,710 new cases.
___
7/18/20: You can’t say President Trump isn’t up to making crucial decisions in
time of crisis!
He has
decided to remove the pictures of Bill Clinton and
George W. Bush from the entrance hall of the White House. They will hang in a
little-used dining area where no one will see them, especially Trump. Clinton’s
picture reminded our thin-skinned chief executive that Hillary won the popular
vote. Bush’s picture reminded Trump that none of the former presidents like
him.
Having
made the tough decision, Donald knocked off work on Saturday and went golfing again
at his Potomac Falls, Virginia resort.
*
IF YOU THINK BACK to 2016, when President Obama was still
running the country, you may remember he had a chance – with nine months left in
office – to fill a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Senate Leader Mitch McConnell refused to give his nominee a
hearing and said it was up to the “people” to decide who filled the opening.
If they voted for Clinton, she could fill the vacancy. If Trump won, Trump
could.
Now, Team Trump and his enablers are not only playing a
different tune. They are going to toss the musicians off a cliff.
White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows made clear this week. On hearing that Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg was ill, he told ABC News, “I can’t imagine that if [President Trump] had
a vacancy on the Supreme Court that he would not very quickly make the
appointment and look for the Senate to take quick action.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary
Committee, agreed that it would be a brilliant concept to ignore the people in
this case, with four months to go until the next election. “Merrick Garland was
a different situation,” he said. “You had the president of one party
nominating, and you had the Senate in the hands of the other party. A situation
where you’ve got them both would be different.”
Sen. McConnell was even more blunt. “Yeah, we’d fill it,” he
said in a February interview.
7/19/20: In an interview with Chris Wallace
today, President Trump insisted that he was “a believer in masks,” but wanted “people
to have a certain freedom.”
What? To cough snot on one another?
____________________
“His failure to understand this simple public health measure,
his reluctance to accept the advice of all his public health experts, makes me
wonder whether he really is qualified to manage this.”
Dr. Jonathan Reiner
____________________
He said he wasn’t convinced masks did all that much good in
the fight against the virus. Trump went on to cite Dr. Anthony Fauci, who said,
back on February 29, that Americans didn’t need masks.
It was as if, the President of the United States had learned
nothing since that moment.
(Probably
because he hasn’t.)
On that final day in February, the U.S. had just reported its
first death from the coronavirus. Dr. Fauci was worried
because ordinary citizens might hoard masks that could be needed for healthcare
workers. So, he did say, at the time, that ordinary citizens didn’t need masks.
He has long since changed his position.
After watching a clip of Trump’s interview with Wallace, Dr.
Jonathan Reiner told CNN that there was “no downside” to wearing masks. If all of us did, we would have a
much better chance of reopening schools safely. We could revive a stalled
economy and even save fall sports, like NFL football. “He’s unteachable,” Dr.
Reiner grimaced, when asked about Trump,
and I can’t understand it. His
failure to understand this simple public health measure, his reluctance to
accept the advice of all his public health experts, makes me wonder whether he
really is qualified to manage this [emphasis added]. This is not a
sophisticated question where experts differ.
Dr. Reiner said Trump’s failure in regard to such a simple
matter “raises serious doubts about his competence.”
*
WE DO HAVE some evidence that the U.S. economy may be stabilizing
and may recover. I don’t like this president any more than I like stewed beets.
But I hope I’m wrong because I can’t see it.
New data indicates that at least four million Americans who have
kept their jobs during the pandemic agreed to pay cuts. Some experts believe
the figure may be closer to seven million. An additional ten million have seen
hours reduced. Buying power for roughly 1 in every 8 employed persons has been curtailed,
which would represent a serious drag on any economic rebound.
Jamie
Vagedes, an accountant for a travel rewards company, is typical. He took a 20%
cut in April. That pay reduction could last for another six months if more
Americans don’t start traveling. He was luckier than many co-workers. A quarter
of his peers were laid off or furloughed. Fortunately, under the CARES Act, Vagedes
was able to delay mortgage payments. Eventually, however, he’ll have to come up
with the difference. “Doing everything on 20 percent less – it’s challenging,”
he told a reporter. “It’s a real kick in the shins.”
If the president still isn’t sure masks do any good, and if
he still believes the Bill of Rights grants Americans freedom to sneeze on
innocent bystanders, multiple major retailers are instituting mask requirements.
Starting Monday, Walmart will require customers at its 5,000 stores to don
masks. Walmart joins Apple, Best Buy, Costco, CVS Pharmacy, Kroger, Starbucks,
and Target, among others. It will be a sad day, then, for the unmasked man who
recently pulled a gun and threatened to kill a masked customer who
criticized him in a Florida Walmart.
*
NEW CASES of coronavirus, July
19:
63,201.
*
A
campaign ad for Biden.
TO SAY that Mr. Trump’s interview with Chris Wallace did not
go well would be an understatement. Critics described the president’s
performance as “wild,” “shocking,” and an “unmitigated disaster.” Anthony
Scaramucci, his former communications director, said the interview was so bad, it could have been a
“campaign ad” for Biden. A reviewer for the Washington Post said Wallace
reduced the president to “a sputtering, sweating
mess.” (It was held outside on a White House terrace, and Trump was visibly
dripping sweat, in a coat and tie).
A journalism professor told ABC it was like watching a
well-prepared prosecutor cross-examine a guilty witness. Megan McCain said, “it
was the first time I’ve really seen President Trump squirm.” Under Wallace’s
grilling, a reporter for The Hill said Trump looked “flustered, confused, angry, baffled and unable
to substantiate any one of his standard big lies.”
If you didn’t watch, and you had
any doubt about how it went, you knew Wallace had revealed the emperor in all
his nakedness. On Twitter, Trump fans were furious.
Someone called “Catturd” posted: “Retweet if think Chris Wallace
belongs on Fake News CNN – and you’re sick and damn tired of hearing his lying
mouth on Fox News.”
Rob G., another fan of the president, and a true patriot (I
guess) by virtue of his six flag emojis, had this to say:
POSTSCRIPT: Trump spent the next few days trying to spin the interview as if he gave an Oscar-winning performance.
The comics disagreed. Here was
Trevor Noah’s take:
___
7/20/20: Daily deaths from the
coronavirus are trending upward across the U.S., even though on Sunday, the
president told reporter Chris Wallace, that we had the lowest mortality rate in
the world. The current toll, using Johns Hopkins University’s tally, stands at 140,536.
____________________
“Many
people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask.”
President Trump
____________________
Meanwhile, pandemic-related damage continues to rattle the
economy. From February to May, the number of Americans signed up for food stamps
rose 17%, to roughly 43 million. Hardest hit states
include Florida, Georgia, and Michigan (all with increases of 30% or more). If
the spread of the virus cannot be contained, it’s a cinch that on Election Day
more Americans will be receiving food assistance than the 42.7 million on the rolls when President Obama left
office. Congress may be forced to offer a second massive aid package to keep
the economy afloat.
On Sunday, for example, Mr. Trump told Wallace he absolutely
expected a payroll tax cut to be included in any new stimulus bill. And why
not! With just a little more oomph, Don can get us to a federal deficit of
$4 trillion in Fiscal Year 2020!
*
THE BIG NEWS for the day? The Slow-Learner-in-Chief finally
figured it out. Wearing a mask helps blunt the spread of disease. Today, Trump tweeted, “We are United in our effort to defeat the
Invisible China Virus, and many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face
mask when you can’t socially distance. There is nobody more Patriotic than me,
your favorite President!”
And there he was:
*
CONFIRMED new cases
of coronavirus for the United States, on July 20 – and this is relatively good
news:
57,777.
___
7/21/20: Tuesday afternoon Mr. Blogger listened to an
entire press briefing delivered by Mr. Trump. Mr. Blogger rarely makes it
through these talks because the president’s propensity for lying and grating style
of speech are more than he can stand. Still, Mr. Blogger wanted to see who
would be there and hear what Trump would have to say about masks.
Right away, you noticed, none
of the health officials who used to flank him during such extravaganzas were
present. The only disease “expert” in evidence was White House Press Secretary “Birther”
McEnany.
____________________
“I wish her well, frankly.
I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm
Beach.”
President Trump
____________________
Most of the “briefing”
involved Trump reading a statement chock full of cherry-picked facts and
figures. His message boiled down to this:
First,
his administration was doing a fantastic job in this crisis; but it
would “probably unfortunately get worse before it gets better.”
Second,
lots of countries were doing worse than we were. So, if you thought about it
that way, Trump was doing great!
– and, astonishingly –
He
said he wished Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged accomplice in a
child sex trafficking ring, well!
Trump with Ghislaine Maxwell.
Let’s start with that stunning
comment. After the president finished prepared remarks, he took questions.
A reporter wondered if he had
any thoughts on Maxwell’s arrest. She had been hiding out on a farm in New
Hampshire (which she purchased secretly for $1 million in cash this past spring)
until the F.B.I. tracked her down and arrested her July 2. She had disguised the
fact she was the purchaser and hired ex-British military for protection, rarely leaving the property
herself. Maxwell has tens of millions stashed in bank accounts around the globe,
so she could afford protection. That assumes you don’t mind guarding a woman
accused of molesting young girls and making it easier for Epstein and an ever-changing
array of perverted high rollers to bed teenagers as young as 14.
Now that Maxwell has been
apprehended, even her high-priced legal team can’t spring her from jail. During
a bail hearing, two alleged victims spoke out. One told the court that “without
Ghislaine, Jeffrey [Epstein] could not have done what he did.” A second warned
that Maxwell was herself “a sexual predator.” Maxwell’s lawyer offered to post a $5 million bond. He said his client
wasn’t the “monster” portrayed in the news. And she was suffering, having gone
72 hours without a shower while in custody!
The judge was unmoved by her
bathing problems, and, deeming her a serious flight risk, ordered her remanded
to custody. Maxwell faces up to 35 years in prison and a few thousand years in
hell (if there is a hell).
When the reporter asked Trump
about Maxwell, you would never have expected the answer he supplied. He didn’t
mention the alleged victims, and there were reportedly scores.
Many suffered sustained abuse.
“I wish her well, frankly,”
Trump replied. “I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I
lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they [Epstein and Maxwell] lived in Palm
Beach.”
“I wish her well,” he said
again, and then moved to the next question.
*
MOST OF THE BRIEFING was
devoted to Trump trying to make Trump sound like less of a chump. He said
(after months of saying the opposite) that he really liked masks. He’d worn a
mask “many times,” he claimed. He was all in on social distancing. No one was a
bigger fan of social distancing than him. He always tried to distance, himself,
and hoped his MAGA fans did too.
Trump was lying. In March he had
labeled himself a “wartime president,” but since then had been ordering his
troops to charge up the wrong hills. He was no advocate for masks. As late as
Memorial Day, he mocked Joe Biden for wearing one. Earlier this month, his fans crammed together at Mt.
Rushmore to watch fireworks and spray tiny droplets on each other when they
talked.
His bedrock principle is to deceive rather than
admit mistake.
As expected, Trump twisted
facts out of all resemblance to reality. He said we were testing more than any
other nation on earth. That was the reason we had so many cases. He was right
when he said we had done fifty million tests. He was wrong when he said, “India
was next, with twelve million,” then “seven, six, and four” for the third,
fourth and fifth nations doing the most.
I knew he was wrong because I’m
not a lazy ignoramus. I check facts. For Trump, his bedrock principle is to
deceive rather than to admit mistake. According to Worldometers, the U.S. has conducted 49,876,031 coronavirus tests.
So, he got that right!
India has done 14.4 million
tests. I think that number was posted right before Trump gave his briefing – so
not actually wrong.
Russia was second, however, with
25.4 million tests. The United Kingdom was fourth with 13.6 million. Germany
had done 6.9 million tests, so call that the “seven” in the president’s telling.
Spain and Italy had both done more than six million. So, the “four” in Trump’s listing
was nonsense.
You can’t get around certain bedrock
truths, no matter how devious you are. That means, if you’re Trump, or
his disingenuous press secretary, you have to hope supporters don’t check out what
you say. Germany hasn’t tested as much as we have, even adjusted for population.
But that’s because they
haven’t needed to.
They bent the curve long ago.
Germany has 110 deaths per million in population. We have 438.
Anyone who tries to tell you
our mortality rate is the best, or even one of the best, is lying, or
delusional.
*
NEW CASES of COVID-19 for the
United States, on July 21:
63,028.
___
7/22/20:
I have a simple way of telling which politicians I like and which ones I don’t.
I don’t
like crooks.
Stick a
“D” after their name. Don’t like ‘em. “R,” “KN,” whatever. I don’t like ‘em if
they’re Know Nothings.
____________________
Don’t be stupid. Not all politicians are alike.
____________________
Our example for today is Larry Householder (R), Speaker of the
Ohio General Assembly. The Speaker has just been busted by the F.B.I. and
charged for his alleged role in a $60 million bribery scheme.
Householder, former Ohio Republican Party chairman Matt Borges, and a variety
of lobbyists and aides were taken into custody. What did FirstEnergy, an
Akron-based company, get for its supposed $60 million bribe? The company convinced
lawmakers to provide a $1.3 billion bailout for two failing nuclear powerplants.
That’s an
excellent business model, you might say, with a return of $22.67 per bribe dollar
spent. At least it was an excellent model until F.B.I. agents showed up. “This
is likely the largest bribery, money laundering scheme ever perpetrated
against the people of the state of Ohio,” said U.S. Attorney David DeVillers,
whose office will prosecute. More arrests are likely. “We’re not done with this
case,” DeVillers added. “There are a lot of federal agents knocking on a lot of
doors.”
FirstEnergy
executives might want to ask Ghislaine Maxwell for tips about how to evade
capture. (See: 7/21/20.)
*
SO,
HERE’S HOW IT GOES. If you don’t understand the importance of the free press in
ferreting out crooks in government (or in this case, spreading the news), you
need to get out of your house more often. That’s one reason this blogger fears Trump
and his attacks on “Fake News.” Better “Fake News,” than politicians doing crooked
deals in the dark.
Look,
no one likes paying taxes. But taxes to bail out companies that are
bribing elected officials?
Again, not all politicians are
alike. If you find yourself saying that, or thinking that, slap yourself. When
four members of the Toledo city council were arrested and charged in a bribery and extortion scheme in June, those four, all Democrats, were crooks. Eight council members were not.
In 2014 Illinois State Representative Keith Farnham (D) was
convicted of distributing child pornography. Most men, of all political
persuasions, are absolutely not into child pornography.
Not
all politicians are alike. Some have sticky fingers. That same year, Kansas
State Rep. Trent K. LeDoux (R), pled guilty to one count of bank fraud.
He got 18 months in prison for ripping off Farmers and Merchants Bank to the
tune of $460,000. Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives Mike Hubbard (R), was convicted on
12 of 23 felony charges in 2016. In 2019, Alabama State Senator Zeb Little (D),
was convicted of stealing
money from client funds.
Not all politicians are alike.
You would not want Bill Clinton around your 26-year-old daughter, if she interned
in the White House. No one accused Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush of sexual
improprieties.
Congressman John Lewis, a Georgia
Democrat, who died last week, was known as the “conscience of Congress.”
John Lewis and James Zwerg, after a mob bloodied them both, in a battle over civil rights.
Congressman Jim Traficant, an Ohio Democrat,
was found guilty on ten felony counts of financial corruption, sentenced to
eight years in prison, and expelled from the House of Representatives in 2002.
Traficant,
who had ties to the mob, was no John Lewis; and John Lewis who had the courage
to stand up to racists mobs in the 1960s, even after being badly beaten, was no
Jim Traficant.
Different
mobs.
Politicians aren’t all the same, and you have to do due
diligence and sort out those you like from those you don’t. Some politicians
want to end abortions, even in cases of incest or rape. Some politicians think
women have the right to choose. Some want to raise taxes on the top 1%. Some
think the top 1% worked hard and should be able to keep more of their money. President
Obama expanded healthcare under the Affordable Care Act. President Trump said
the ACA was a badly flawed plan and promised to repeal it. Some politicians
would raise the federal minimum wage to $15. Others would not, saying it would
hurt small business. Some are “friends of the environment” and push for increased
funding for national parks. Others think environmental rules and regulations
hamstring business and want rules and regulations curtailed.
Some politicians think climate change is a serious threat.
Some think it’s a hoax. (It’s not a hoax. Don’t be stupid!)
Me? I like national parks. I like clean air. I’m for raising
the minimum wage. I approve of Obamacare, even though it’s expensive and even
though I have good health insurance through the State Teachers Retirement System.
I’m conflicted when it comes to abortion, but I don’t believe women should be
told what to do in the first trimester, or (scratching my head) the second.
I subscribe to the idea that “power corrupts, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely.” That goes for “money power,” too. I’d raise taxes
on the 1%.
It’s too easy to shrug our shoulders, or wash our hands and say,
“All politicians are alike.” Because they’re not.
*
She can
take a scarf and do 15 things with it.
PROOF ENOUGH that not all politicians are alike: President
Trump. He might not listen to healthcare experts when they explain the value of
mask wearing. He did make it clear today that he has been really impressed with
Dr. Deborah Birx. “An unbelievable woman. A woman of tremendous substance. And
style, frankly. She has an amazing style. She walks into the room and she can
take a scarf and do 15 things with it,” he explained in a talk on Fox News.
Yes, indeed. Scarves were his focus. It would be sad, if it weren’t
indicative of the danger Trump’s cluelessness represents for all Americans. Confirmed new cases of
COVID-19 for July 22:
70,106.
*
IF WE TUNE IN to Fox News, we find commentators and guests
trying to scare viewers into forgetting all about the pandemic. What about this
“Black Lives Matter” movement? What does Fox want its audience to think?
Ben Shapiro, the young conservative pundit appears on Martha
MacCallum’s show to talk about a poll that shows 56% of Americans believe
American society overall is racist. That horrifies Shapiro, who posits two possible
explanations. “Either the majority of Americans
believe that their family, friends and neighbors are actually racist,” he says.
Here, viewers at home are supposed to shake their heads, and
say, “Naw, not me and Maw. We ain’t no racists.”
Or, Shapiro continues, “they believe that the institutions of
American society are so deeply corrupt and systematically racist that they have
to be razed to the ground. The only solution if you believe that society, at
this moment in 2020, is systematically racist or inherently racist is complete
destruction of the system from within.”
Now, viewers are supposed to rush out and buy more guns, and
hammer “Trump 2020” signs into their lawns. Maybe using the butts of their
semi- automatic rifles.
Because, if they don’t, Shapiro says, “complete destruction”
lies ahead.
SAD FACT: A nurse’s union places 164 pairs of white shoes on the Capitol Hill lawn, to mark the death of 164 nurses, infected and
killed, while trying to help repeated waves of coronavirus sufferers.
Conservatives respond by bitching about having to wear masks,
because it’s all a plot so the government can control us.___
7/23/20: Today, we learned that in the last reporting period another 1.4 million Americans filed for unemployment. That’s eighteen weeks in a
row with more than a million people losing jobs.
____________________
31,802,715 claiming
unemployment benefits
____________________
According
to the Department of Labor, “The total number of people
claiming benefits in all programs for the week ending July 4 was 31,802,715, a decrease of
200,615 from the previous week.”
The unemployment
rate in June was 11.1%.
*
UNFORTUNATELY,
the coronavirus is not going away, even as time to reopen school approaches. In
one recent poll only 8% of Americans think schools should reopen like normal. Another 14%
support reopening with minor adjustments. Even Barron Trump’s school will not fully reopen for in-person instruction. Today, the U.S. passed the four
million-mark in total confirmed cases.
At the
same time, the White House has placed Dr. Anthony Fauci in timeout, after he told
reporters it would be unsafe to send everyone back to school unless strict
guidelines were followed.
Dr. Deborah
Birx, the one health expert Trump is not trying to muzzle (yet), says children
with “underlying conditions” should remain home. Teachers with a variety of
risk factors would also be unsafe. Older teachers, for example, would be endangered,
in much the same way doctors and nurses have been.
As for
getting the spread under control, we aren’t. On
Tuesday, more than a thousand Americans died from coronavirus, the first time
the daily toll had risen above that number since June 10. On Wednesday 1,135 Americans died. California reported a new high of 12,800 cases in
one day. Texas hit new highs with 197 deaths and 10,893 patients hospitalized. Hidalgo County had so
many dead, local officials were forced to use refrigerated trucks to store
bodies. Thursday, at least 1,014 Americans
died. The Florida Department of Health announced its highest one-day death toll, 173,
and another 10,249 confirmed cases.
You figure tens of thousands of our fellow Americans are
getting hit with huge doctor bills, even if they recover.
*
WE HAD
another truth-teller this week. The president has been boasting about acing an
“intelligence test.” Joe Biden, he has insisted, couldn’t pass it. Neither
could Chris Wallace, Trump said.
On
Wednesday, the president was still touting his cognitive skills. “Person,
women, man, camera, TV,” Trump repeated several times during a press
conference. He wanted all Americans to know, he was asked to listen to those
five words, and repeat them, in order, during his test in 2018.
And he
nailed it!
Later,
he said doctors asked him to repeat those words again. And he nailed it again!
It was a great moment in American history.
“And you go: ‘Person. Woman. Man. Camera.
TV.’ If you get it in order, you get extra points,” Trump claimed. “They said
nobody gets it in order. It’s actually not that easy, but for me, it was easy.”
Trump also wanted us to
know, he got all 35 questions right. Doctors were amazed! No one had ever shown
such mental acuity. He scored, like 105%, what with bonus points.
Only,
he was lying, or exaggerating, as is his wont. The Canadian doctor who designed the test weighed in:
Dr. Ziad Nasreddine, who developed
the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) in the early 1990s, told CTVNews.ca that the
30-question test is used as a screening tool to identify cognitive
dysfunction [emphasis added], including early signs of Alzheimer’s disease
and other forms of dementia.
“The average score for normal
individuals is 27, the cut off for normal is 26 so anything above 26 is
considered normal. When [Trump] got 30 out of 30 on the test, it’s still considered
to be normal performance,” Nasreddine said in a phone interview on Thursday.
It’s a bad sign if you’re taking
the test; because it means someone is worried you might be showing signs of
dementia.
(This would be the logical
explanation for the last three years of the Trump presidency.)
“Some
problems that’ll all work out.”
THEN AGAIN, in terms of what
matters, the president is as clueless as ever. A German shepherd puppy has a better handle on
the pandemic crisis than the dope in the Oval Office. At a press briefing today,
he stood in front of the map shown below and told reporters, if you ignored the
red, where the virus was rampant, the United States was doing great fighting
the coronavirus.
“You can see from that it’s in great shape, lots of it,”
Trump said, turning to point at the map. “The northeast has become very clean.
The country is in good shape, other than if you look south and west — some
problems that’ll all work out.”
Trump was probably the only fool in
America that believed the country was in “great shape, lot’s of it.”
*
SPEAKING OF TRUMPIAN CLUELESSNESS,
a new study, published in the Reviews of Geophysics journal warns that current rates of deforestation
and burning of fossil fuels will have devastating ramifications.
A team of twenty-five researchers,
working for four years, warns that unless we wake up, global temperatures will
rise anywhere from 4.1° to 8.1°F in the next fifty years.
And we’re stuck with a dunderpate who
thinks windmills cause cancer and says climate “changes both ways.”
FUN FACT: Mattel announces it beat sales estimates for the second quarter of the year. Kids stuck at
home have been buying more Barbie dolls and families have been purchasing decks
of UNO cards. Baby Yoda plush toys are popular. So, at least one company was
thriving during the pandemic.
FUN FACT – FINES: The argument that we can always trust business
leaders, and we never want more government regulation takes another in a
lengthy list of hits.
Taro Pharmaceutical agrees to pay a $205.7 million fine and admit to conspiring to fix the price of
generic drugs. A spokesperson for the Department of Justice notes that the
company will “continue to fully cooperate with the government on its
ongoing investigation into the generic pharmaceutical industry.”
___
7/24-25/20: We have a few positive stories to report. On Friday every
player and coach on the New York Yankees and Washington Nationals took a knee
before their opening game of the much-delayed season. It was their way of
showing support for the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
Then again: The president has said he will not watch any game
where kneeling occurs. Not baseball. Not chess. Not Scrabble.
____________________
The
Department of Homeland Security “was not established to be the president’s
personal militia.
Former
Secretary of DHS, Tom Ridge
____________________
Kneeling is bad! But obstructing justice? That’s cool. Trump
also announces that he would consider pardoning anyone implicated in the
Mueller investigation. In another one of his near-nightly call-ins to Sean
Hannity’s show, he says, “I’ve looked at a lot of different
people. They’ve been treated extremely unfairly, and I think I probably would,
yes,” Trump says. He would pardon them.
Fortunately, we can also report there are some Republicans
who have spines and understand the reason the U.S. Constitution is replete with
checks and balances. Former Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, made it
clear this week that he believes Trump has leaped over the constitutional line by sending federal paramilitary
forces to cities and states where mayors and governors have not requested them.
As first head of Homeland Security, Ridge noted that his department was established to protect America
from “global terrorism.” In a radio interview he explained, “It was not
established to be the president’s personal militia.”
Ridge
would have been happy to work with state and local leaders if asked. Otherwise,
“it would be a cold day in hell before I would consent to an uninvited,
unilateral intervention” into any American city.
Michael Chertoff, another former
head of Homeland Security, and another Republican, similarly faulted the president for tone and tactics. Trump
wasn’t helping with his “very belligerent, aggressive tone,” Mr. Chertoff cautioned.
“You can protect federal property, but that doesn’t mean it’s an unlimited
license to roam around the streets [emphasis added] and pick up people
based on some suspicion that maybe they’re involved or gonna be involved in
something.”
Neither Ridge nor Chertoff were condoning
violence. Nevertheless, there are reasons the U.S. Constitution limits
situations in which a president can call out troops and send them into states
without governors asking. This new tactic, sending in Immigrations and Custom
Enforcement officers and heavily-armed tactical teams from a variety of federal
agencies (not technically U.S. military forces) sets a dangerous precedent.
Think Hong Kong 2020, or Tahrir Square 2013.
Or Boston Massacre, 1770.
“Whatever the statutory
authority is, we still have a Constitution and that requires reasonable
suspicion to stop somebody,” Chertoff added. We require, “probable cause to
arrest them. And it’s not clear to me that that is being applied in this case.”
Chertoff told ABC News he wished
Team Trump would do more to safeguard the next election and quit focusing on
mail-in balloting as a problem. “There is zero evidence that mail-in voting
creates widespread problems in an election,” he said. “It’s not of the
scale that could possibly impact on a national election. So, there is zero
evidence for this.”
Chertoff later spoke to a
reporter from the Washington Post, and said sending in forces to cities
where they were not wanted would damage DHS. “It undermines the credibility of
the department’s principal mission,” he warned. “While it’s appropriate for DHS to protect
federal property, that is not an excuse to range more widely in a city and to
conduct police operations, particularly if local authorities have not requested
federal assistance. That’s our constitutional system.”
Chertoff also had concerns because
Trump had singled out Democratic cities. “Essentially, he’s suggesting this is
a political maneuver. As someone who’s spent four years at the department, the
idea that people would be suggesting that it’s going to be a tool of political
activity is very unsettling.”
“It’s very problematic
legally as well as morally.”
In
an interview last week he too blasted Team Trump for sending men in uniform to crush protests in
American cities. That uniform, he said, “represents the cloth of our nation” and
“it’s not to be used as an instrument of protest suppression.” Real soldiers,
he added, “don’t just walk up to people and start beating them…with batons.”
IN OTHER GOOD NEWS, the judicial
branch continues to rebuke the man in the White House.
We know Trump has a soft spot for
felons, accused (Ghislaine Maxwell) and convicted (Gen. Michael Flynn, Roger
Stone, Paul Manafort), just not felons who lied for him, but later decided to
cooperate with investigators. Flynn, who admitted perjury – in return for dodging a variety of additional
charges – got his case thrown out entirely,
thanks to Trump. Stone, with seven felonies, never spent a day behind bars. Paul
Manafort, with ten felonies, has been released from the slammer due to
age and health concerns in a time of coronavirus. Yet, Team Trump, working
through the Department of Quasi-Justice decided one felon, Michael Cohen, with
eight counts against him, should definitely remain in jail.
A judge has ruled that the DOJ sent Cohen, the
president’s former personal lawyer, back to jail in “retaliation for his
plans to publish a book about the president [emphasis added].” The judge
noted that Cohen’s First Amendment rights had been violated.
Cohen hopes to have his book done before the election, but was
offered a chance to remain free if he promised not to talk to the media about
his plans or work on his story. He decided to fight his case. And lest we
forget, Cohen went to jail for committing felonies involving a co-conspirator, labeled
“Individual 1,” in his indictment. That unnamed accomplice? His initials are
DJT.
Nor is this the first time Team Trump has tried to ban a book
that might be damaging. They tried to block publication of John Bolton’s book,
and Mary Trump’s book, too. (See also: Fire and Fury, 1/3/18.)
*
On Saturday, the first anniversary of President Trump’s call
to the President of Ukraine, Lt. Colonel
Alexander Vindman posts a tweet. “One year since The Call. Much has changed
for me and so much more has changed for our country,” he says. “I rest well knowing
I did my duty.”
7/26/20: I swear, I’m going to keep
this short. Short sentences.
Short!
____________________
“From my observation, those demonstrators – our fellow American citizens – were engaged in the peaceful
expression of their First Amendment rights.”
Maj. Adam DeMarco
____________________
If you missed the story, Sen. Tom Cotton offered up an
interesting take on American history Sunday. He’s against the 1619 Project.
That initiative, backed by The New York Times, is a free teaching
resource. The emphasis is on the impact of slavery and racism in our nation’s history.
Sen. Cotton is against it. He explainedhis opposition:
We have to study the history of
slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because
otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was
the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a
way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.
See, African Americans! Stop protesting! The suffering of
your ancestors was a “necessary evil.”
Get over the fact that slaves labored without pay for 246 years.
The Founding Fathers were working hard for the “ultimate extinction” of their bondage.
Also, don’t be mad, just because the Founding Fathers counted five of you as
three white people, when determining state population.
Don’t be mad about another century of Jim Crow laws. Don’t be
mad because white people used to lynch your ancestors with impunity. Don’t be
mad because many states figured out ways to keep you from voting until the 1960s.
Don’t be mad because some states still try to keep you from voting today.
Maybe pretend George Floyd is sleeping.
Also, if you don’t like it here, you can leave. No kneeling allowed! So says former
Chicago Bears coach, Mike Ditka. “If
you can’t respect our national anthem, get the hell out of the country,”
he grumbled last week.
*
SPEAKING OF ASSHOLES, last
week the president mocked
the mayor of Portland after he was tear-gassed during a protest. That is how
you support local government. Send in quasi-military forces. Don’t ask mayors
if they want help.
Also gas a wall of mothers.
Trump described the glorious scene to Sean Hannity, another
asshole in our story. Mayor Ted Wheeler, said the president, “made a fool out
of himself. He wanted to be among the people, so he went into the crowd and
they knocked the hell out of him. That was the
end of him. So that was pretty pathetic.”
Helpful words from the Asshole-in-Chief.
As for those mothers, they had linked arms across a Portland street.
They hoped to keep Trump’s paramilitary forces and protesters apart. Trump’s
boys unleashed the gas. Well, you couldn’t put anything past this president!
“The ‘protesters’ are actually anarchists who hate our Country,” he tweeted Sunday. “The line of innocent ‘mothers’ were
a scam that Lamestream refuses to acknowledge, just like they don’t report
the violence of these demonstrations!”
Scam mothers!
*
One does
not testify against this president and thrive.
ALSO, WE HAVE scam majors! Maj. Adam DeMarco has braved fire
before, during a combat tour in Iraq. Tuesday, he plans to testify before Congress.
Expect him to take “friendly fire” from the president.
As a top commander of the Washington D.C. National Guard, he
issued a statement Monday. It relates to the events of June 1. This was the day
President Trump made his thousand-foot “Selma March” in reverse. That evening,
peaceful protesters were driven away from the White House. Trump and a party of
toadies walked one-fifth of a mile –
so brave – so brave.
Then Donald stood before a nearby church and hoisted his favorite book to not
read in triumph.
DeMarco’s statement makes clear. He plans to testify in keeping with
his “oath to support and defend the Constitution.” He will describe the
scene that night. Park Police, he noted, were armed with tear gas. He was told
it was not to be used. “From what I could observe,” he plans to say, “the
demonstrators were behaving peacefully, exercising their First Amendment
rights.”
He saw Attorney General Bill Barr trundle out from the White
House at 6:05 p.m. and confer with law enforcement officials. Gen. Mark Milley,
chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was there. He told DeMarco to be sure
National Guard troops remained calm. Milley said “that we were there to respect
the demonstrators’ First Amendment rights.” A curfew was set to go into force
at 7 p.m. Barr (or someone else) ordered Lafayette Park cleared.
DeMarco will testify that tear gas was used. After the mayhem
subsided, he found “spent tear gas cannisters” on the street.
Team Trump has denied that gas was deployed.
Maj. DeMarco will cite the example of the late Congressman
John Lewis in testifying. Lewis lay in state Monday in the U.S. Capitol.
(President
Trump, petty as ever, was a “no show.”)
…the events I witnessed at
Lafayette Square on the evening of June 1 were deeply disturbing to me [DeMarco
will say], and to fellow National Guardsmen. Having served in a combat zone,
and understanding how to assess threat environments, at no time did I feel
threatened by the protestors [emphasis added] or assess them to be violent…
From my observation, those
demonstrators – our fellow
American citizens – were engaged
in the peaceful expression of their First Amendment rights. Yet they were
subjected to an unprovoked escalation and excessive use of force.
As the late Representative John
Lewis said, “When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you
have a moral obligation to say something, to do something.”
The oath I swore as a military
officer, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, is a
bedrock guiding principle and, for me, constitutes an individual moral
commitment and ethical instruction. It is the foundation of the trust safely
placed in the Armed Forces by the American people. And it compels me to say
something – and do
something – about what I
witnessed on June 1 at Lafayette Square.
Like Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who testified in regard to Trump’s
problematic phone call with the president of Ukraine, we must assume DeMarco is
going to ruin his career. One does not testify against this president and
thrive.
___
7/27/20: Even the Reagan Foundation poked
the current president in the eye this weekend. The Trump 2020 Campaign has been
informed it may not use President Reagan’s image to sell products or raise
funds.
This made the man in the White House mad. Fox News polls made
him madder. Those polls showed him trailing Joe Biden. In a testy tweet, Trump blasted Fox News. He also labeled former
U.S. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan a “RINO.”
According to the president, the Fox News poll was fake. So
are all the other polls that show him behind.
Which is all of them.
*
AS FOR THE PRESIDENT, he spent the weekend at his resort in
Bedminster, New Jersey. On Saturday he went golfing. It was so much fun he went
golfing again Sunday. His partner for that round was former NFL star Brett
Favre.
That man just loves to play golf. Trump has now shot 282
rounds since taking office, or a round every 4.6 days.
*
HOW ARE WE DOING on the COVID-19 front? According to the CDC 1 in 3 persons infected suffer from “prolonged
illness,” including younger adults.
We know the toll is rising. Last week more than 1,000 Americans died from the coronavirus, five days
in a row. Not good at all.
Call it the equivalent of four commercial airliners crashing
per day, with all onboard perishing.
The recently infectedinclude Trump’s National
Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien. Major League baseball’s Miami Marlins are canceling their home opener – which will disappoint all the fans not allowed to
attend. An even dozen players and a pair of Marlins coaches have tested
positive. New cases of coronavirus in the United States, July 27:
Favre
has become embroiled in the largest case of public fraud in Mississippi
history, involved in a scandal that, according to a state audit, has seen at
least $77 million of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds line
the pockets of rich and powerful Mississippians. Six people have been arrested,
five of whom have pleaded guilty for their involvement. Favre has denied
wrongdoing and has not been criminally charged.
Favre is accused of steering $8 million in TANF funds to his old
alma mater, to build a new gym – which definitely does not put food on needy
families’ plates. As for his share, Favre was accused of taking $1.1 million for speeches he didn’t
(technically) give. He did repay the loot.
I mean “return” the funds.
Or another way to put it: Favre would be the perfect guy to play
golf with a grifting president, and enjoy the time.
___
7/28/20: If you wished to capture one
moment that encapsulated the flawed and fumbling response of Donald Trump to
the coronavirus crisis, you had it yesterday. On Tuesday, the president was
forced to defend his decision to retweet a video featuring Dr. Stella Immanuel.
____________________
When
having demon sex be sure to use a condom.
____________________
Dr. Immanuel first gained the president’s attention when she
claimed hydroxychloroquine is a “cure” for COVID-19. The president had been criticized
for touting the drug himself. Now he saw her claim as validation.
Even Don Jr. got carried away by the news. He retweeted the
same video, labeling it “a must watch.”
There was joy in Trumpistan.
Sad to say, the free press started digging. It was revealed that Dr. Immanuel had once
claimed alien DNA was being used in medicines. Also, women can develop
gynecological problems after dreaming about sex with demons. Which we can all agree proves
– when having dream sex – be sure the demon wears a
condom.
The good doctor, who doubles as a pastor at a church she
founded, has a whole year’s worth of weird claims to flesh out her sermons. Scientists,
she says, are developing a vaccine to prevent people from becoming religious.
(And you thought people were losing faith because of quacks like Dr. Immanuel!)
According to the Daily Beast, she has also claimed that the government is partly run by “reptilian
spirits.” These people are “half human and half ET [emphasis added],” she
believes.
If you’re wondering how the
demons manage to get into your dream pants, she can explain that too. “They
turn into a woman and then they sleep with the man and collect his sperm,” she
has said.
If you’d like to know how to get
rid of any demon sperm you might be carrying, you can go to Dr. Immanuel’s
website. Be sure to DONATE (that word is in capital letters at the top) while
you’re there. Then read her 72 easy steps for stopping Satan’s sperm from
working. We should also point out that if you do get pregnant by a demon, too
bad. Dr. Immanuel opposes abortion.
As you might expect, the doctor
is also a mask-denier. We don’t need masks to stop the spread.
We don’t need social distancing.
We don’t need shutdowns of bars
and restaurants and sporting events. All we need is a slug of the magic elixir.
In any case, we should know soon whether or not Immanuel has
a direct line to God. She warned yesterday that if Facebook, which had blocked
her videos, refused to put them up again, her celestial friends would destroy the
platform. “You are not bigger than
God. I promise you,” she said. “If my page is not back up face book will be
down in Jesus [sic] name”
When asked yesterday to explain why he posted a video
featuring the woman, Trump said he didn’t know much about her. He also mused
about his low popularity, compared to Dr. Anthony Fauci.
For some reason, many more Americans trust Dr. Fauci to tell
the truth about the virus than “Demon Sex” Donald.
According to Reuters, 1,300 Americans died on Tuesday from the
coronavirus. Six states, including California, Florida, and Texas, set one-day
records for fatal cases. New virus cases, July 28:
59,862.
*
AMERICANS MIGHT BE DYING by the
thousands, but what really makes Trump sad is the fact that most of us still
breathing think he’s doing a lousy job of handling the pandemic. A new Morning
Consult poll released Monday finds that 59% of
voters do not approve of his handling of the pandemic. Only 36% do.
During a White House briefing today,
the hurt-feelings president addressed this matter directly. (Another poll finds
that only 30% of Americans trust Trump to give them good
information on the coronavirus. And that includes, we assume, the Demon Sperm
Lady. By comparison, 65% trust Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.)
“It’s interesting, he’s got a
very good approval rating and I like that,” Trump says. Although you know he’s jealous. “It’s good. Because remember,
he’s working for this administration. He’s working with us. We could’ve gotten
other people. We could’ve gotten somebody else. It didn’t have to be Dr. Fauci.
He’s working with our administration. And for the most part, we’ve done pretty
much what he and others ... recommended. And he’s got this high approval
rating, so why don’t I have a high approval rating ... with respect to the
virus?”
In other words, Trump is a great
leader because he picked Dr. Fauci to help him. And he’s doing what Dr. Fauci
says. “Why don’t I have a high approval rating, and the administration, with
respect to the virus?” he continues, with a spritz of self-pity.
At any rate, Americans should vote
for him in droves in November, assuming they have not been wiped out by this
“flu,” as he has called it.
*
IF YOU EVER WONDER why liberals think maybe you can’t trust
everyone in business, and so government regulations are often necessary,
remember David T. Hines. (Okay, and the Sackler family. And Trump University.)
And what better way to move more furniture than to purchase a
super-luxury Lamborghini Huracan Evo. For $318,497 dollars.
Hines also spent thousands on dating websites, jewelry, and
clothes, and paid for stays at high-end hotels on Miami Beach.
He was arrested recently.
___
7/29/20: The U.S. has passed the
150,000-mark for deaths from COVID-19.
Let’s stop and remember when President Trump said we were headed to zero cases soon. That was February 26.
____________________
“Well, it will go down to zero, ultimately.”
President Trump
____________________
Two months later a reporter asked the president, and here I
am paraphrasing, “Sir, do you regret
that idiotic prediction?”
Trump being Trump, never batted an eye. “Well, it will go down to zero, ultimately,” he said,
indicating that he had been right all along.
Another three months passed. According to Johns
Hopkins University, the U.S. has logged 4.4 million confirmed cases. We just passed France, hard hit in the first wave, in deaths per
millions in population: 465 vs. 463. France, which had 1,392 new cases today,
has done a good job of flattening the curve. Under Trump’s guiding hand, we
haven’t flattened the curve a bit. According to Worldometers, the U.S.A. had
66,921 new cases and 1,485 new deaths today.
Only fifteen French died of COVID-19 during the
same 24 hours.
___
SPECIAL
POST
Rep. John Lewis, who spent his life fighting for
justice, passed away on July 17. He had been beaten badly, more than once, for
standing up for human dignity. He had seen the worst of Jim Crow justice and
helped destroy it at the foundation. He had been elected to high office, after
growing up in an era when most African Americans in the Deep South were denied
the right to vote. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, he penned the following tribute to those
millions who had stood up to protest.
It was released on the morning of July 30, a few hours before
his funeral service began:
While my time here has now come
to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you
inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great
American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society.
Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens
of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age,
language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.
____________________
“Good
trouble, necessary trouble.”
____________________
While my time here has now come
to an end, I want you to know that in the last days and hours of my life you
inspired me. You filled me with hope about the next chapter of the great
American story when you used your power to make a difference in our society.
Millions of people motivated simply by human compassion laid down the burdens
of division. Around the country and the world you set aside race, class, age,
language and nationality to demand respect for human dignity.
That is why I had to visit Black
Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, though I was admitted to the hospital the
following day. I just had to see and feel it for myself that, after many years
of silent witness, the truth is still marching on.
Emmett Till was my George Floyd.
He was my Rayshard Brooks, Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor. He was 14 when he
was killed, and I was only 15 years old at the time. I will never ever forget
the moment when it became so clear that he could easily have been me. In those
days, fear constrained us like an imaginary prison [emphasis added], and
troubling thoughts of potential brutality committed for no understandable
reason were the bars.
Though I was surrounded by two
loving parents, plenty of brothers, sisters and cousins, their love could not
protect me from the unholy oppression waiting just outside that family circle.
Unchecked, unrestrained violence and government-sanctioned terror had the power
to turn a simple stroll to the store for some Skittles or an innocent morning
jog down a lonesome country road into a nightmare. If we are to survive as one
unified nation, we must discover what so readily takes root in our hearts that
could rob Mother Emanuel Church in South Carolina of her brightest and best,
shoot unwitting concertgoers in Las Vegas and choke to death the hopes and dreams
of a gifted violinist like Elijah McClain.
Like so many young people today,
I was searching for a way out, or some might say a way in, and then I heard the
voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on an old radio. He was talking about the
philosophy and discipline of nonviolence. He said we are all complicit when
we tolerate injustice. He said it is not enough to say it will get better
by and by. He said each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and
speak out. When you see something that is not right, you must say something.
You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each
generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community,
a nation and world society at peace with itself.
Ordinary people with
extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good
trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process
are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a
democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose
it.
You must also study and learn
the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this
soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every
continent have stood in your shoes, though decades and centuries before you.
The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can
help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union
between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our
willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.
Though I may not be here with
you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for
what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that
the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way.
Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.
When historians pick up their
pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your
generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace
finally triumphed over violence, aggression and war. So I say to you, walk with
the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of
everlasting love be your guide.
___
7/30/20: What should scare us most
today? Let’s begin with the fact the president has tweeted out his boldest, most
brazen plan yet to circumvent the Constitution.
He says he thinks we should delay the November election
until it’s safe for everyone to vote, at least those of us not wiped out by the
virus. “Ol’ Twitter Thumbs” has clearly been looking at the “fake polls.” With
95 days left to avoid a beatdown, Trump could use some extra time to turn voter
opinions around. Maybe we could all vote on Christmas? Or New Year’s Eve?
If enough Americans get wasted, Trump might corral the drunkard
vote.
We of a liberal persuasion, and those good Republicans,
conservatives and libertarians who understand the fragility of the system of
checks and balances, have long been worried about the authoritarian
instincts of this president. Now we know. Trump would be happy to pull a Robert Mugabe.
Back in March 2018, we of the liberal stripe paid attention
when Trump said he thought it was cool that President Xi Jinping of China had cleared a
path which would allow him to serve as long as he liked. “He’s now
president for life, president for life. And he’s great,” Trump told an adoring
dinner crowd. “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”
As shocking as it is that Trump is floating the half-baked
idea of moving the election, there’s a second layer to this cake of proto-fascism.
Mike Pompeo, his Secretary of State, as loyal a toady as ever hopped at his
superior’s command, says he didn’t think it was a problem. When members of a congressional
panel asked the secretary if he believed Trump had power to move the day,
Pompeo said he didn’t want to offer “a legal judgement on the fly.” Lawmakers, no doubt bug-eyed in disbelief,
pressed him for detail. Pompeo suggested that Attorney General Bill Barr might
have final say. “In the end, the DOJ, others, will make that legal
determination,” he said.
Others?
The
president, perhaps?
Asked to comment on the president’s latest democracy-killing
idea, most Republicans showed as much spine as a dish of Jell-O.
____________________
“I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion
that President Trump is a fascist.”
Professor Steven
Calabresi
____________________
One leading conservative sounded a clarion warning. In an
op-ed for The New York Times, Steven Calabresi, a co-founder of the
Federalist Society, thundered disdain.
Here, we turn to Fox News’s report on the op-ed – since all
good Trump fans’ eyes glaze over if they hear the words, “The New York Times.” As
Fox explained, Calabresi’s organization helped craft the lists of judges with
whom Team Trump and Mitch McConnell have been filling hundreds of seats on the
federal bench. Many of those seats were open, of course, because McConnell
blocked President Obama from filling them when he had a chance.
(Fox
didn’t say that. Mr. Blogger did.)
Dr. Calabresi, professor of law at Northwestern, wrote that
he had defended Trump against what he called an “unconstitutional
investigation” by Robert Mueller and his team. Now, even a staunch defender of
the president was scared. And rightfully so. Here’s what he wrote:
I am frankly appalled by
the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November
election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the
Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet
is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment
again ... and his removal from office by the Senate.
Calabresi called on “every Republican in
Congress” to tell Trump that postponing the election would be “illegal,
unconstitutional, and without precedent in American history. Anyone who says
otherwise should never be elected to Congress again.”
*
IF THE PRESIDENT hinting at an end-run around the
Constitution wasn’t bad enough, we also learned today that unemployment claims
for the last seven-day period ticked up again, to 1.43 million. Another 830,000 people filedfor help
under a special program aimed at aiding gig workers and self-employed.
The U.S. economy also declined precipitously in the second
quarter. It’s official. We saw a drop in GDP of 32.9%. According to Fox News, unemployment may have
surged again to 14.7%.
*
“All
over the world, they’re having tremendous problems.”
During another free-wheeling, unedifying press conference at
the White House, the president blamed pretty much every case and every death in
this country due to COVID-19 on the Chinese.
He also hastened to point out that it wasn’t just in this
country that cases were skyrocketing again.
“All over the world, they’re having tremendous problems,” he said.
“A resurgence has taken place in many countries that people thought were doing well.”
There had been “a wide range of approaches to the pandemic,” he said, by way of
excuse, although we’re still the only country where our leader suggested
injecting bleach as a cure. Trump wanted to be sure that everyone watching at
home knew there had been a “resurgence in cases… throughout large portions of
our planet.”
He listed Japan, China, Australia, Belgium, Spain, France,
Germany, and Hong Kong as “places where they thought it was – they had really done great. It
came back. And in a couple of cases, it came back very strongly.”
In other words, if we focused on how poorly other countries
were doing, Trump wouldn’t look so bad. So, let’s add a little nuance to what
the president was trying to say. A check for July 30 shows the U.S. had
68,042 new
cases.
Japan, with a population slightly more than a third of the
United States, had 1,323 new cases.
Only 1,008 Japanese have died so far.
If we check all the countries Trump listed, China is suspect.
Government censors take care of anything they consider “fake news” (and they use
the same standard for deciding what news is fake as Trump would apply if he
could; that is, it’s “fake” if it makes the ruling party look bad).
In any case, the Chinese reported 127 new cases on July 30.
More reliably, Australia reported 721, Belgium 673, Spain
2,789, France 1,377, Germany 902, and Hong Kong 149. You can do the math
yourself, but a rough estimate tells me, if Australia had the same population as
the USA, they would have had 9,400 cases. Belgium would have the equivalent of
20,000, still a “bending the curve” level of new disease. Spain would have
20,000. France would be at 7,000. Germany would stand at 4,000. Hong Kong – about to have its freedoms
crushed by Trump’s friend, Xi Jinping – would have the equivalent of 3,600.
Total deaths so far for those same countries, using
statistics compiled by Worldometers, which run slightly higher:
Japan: 1,011 (8 deaths per million population)
China: 4,634 (3)
Australia: 201 (8)
Belgium: 9,845 (849)
Spain: 28,445 (608)
France: 30,265 (464)
Germany: 9,226 (110)
Hong Kong: 33 (4)
—and—
United States: 157,898 deaths (474 per million).
That means, even allowing President Trump to pick and choose
the facts he shares, we’re worse than all but two of the countries he mentioned
when it comes to deaths adjusted for population. As for the continued spread of
the coronavirus, we’re doing worse than them all.
He’s the
Wizard of Oz, only without the kind heart.
Trump wasn’t done trying to bamboozle the American people, or
at least that portion that still hasn’t realized he’s the Wizard of Oz, only
without the kind heart. It’s impossible any longer for Trump to pretend he’s doing
a great job of handling the crisis. His new approach is to argue that everyone
else is failing too. He seemed pleased to report that several states, where
governors had been praised at first for handling the outbreak, weren’t doing so
well either. States “like California, Washington State, Maryland, Virginia,
Nevada, Illinois, Oregon, and many others.…And governors that were extremely
popular are not so popular anymore.”
It didn’t require sharp wits to realize that all the states
he took the trouble to list were led by Democratic governors, save Maryland.
And that state was led by Larry Hogan, a Republican Trump loathes.
The president also wanted
reporters, and people watching at home, to remember that nothing like this
pandemic had been seen since 1917.
It’s a minor point but Trump consistently
gets the year of the Spanish Flu pandemic wrong. It erupted in 1918 and
continued into the next year. Trump doesn’t do the homework needed to
get even basics right.
More importantly, Trump is
incapable of showing empathy. More than half our deaths, he reminded everyone,
“come from less than 1% of our population.” People in nursing homes, he said. People
in assisted living. “Think of it,” he explained. “The average age of those who
die from the illness is 78.”
They were almost dead already,
he meant.
He also mentioned the great job
some states were doing, bringing the numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths down.
He thought they were doing great in Arizona. Florida, too. Also, Texas.
Again, it didn’t take a
physicist to notice that all three states he mentioned had Republican governors.
As for me, I might not be the brightest
blogger in the land, but I do understand day-to-day math. I thought it might be
fun to check a state or two, to see how Trump’s choices stacked up against
others. Oregon? My daughter lives there. On July 30, they had 410 new cases,
one per every 10,287 residents. Illinois had one new case for every 7,151. Virginia had one for every
10,085.
All blue states.
How about those great red
states? How were they doing by comparison? Arizona had 2,521 new cases on July
30. That would be one for every 2,887 Arizonans. Florida had one additional case
for every 2,127 Floridians. Texas had one more for every 3,295 Texans. So,
Trump's favorite states – states he still hoped he might win in November – weren’t
really doing well.
What the hell, I said to myself. I wondered how Maryland was
doing, with a Republican governor Trump didn’t like.
Hmm…892 cases…population 6,045,680…one new sick person for every 6,778.
Trump wasn’t done slinging the
BS. He talked about how his administration was responsible for record-setting
“job creation” in May and June. If you squinted hard enough and then had a
friend brain you in the back of the head with a shovel, you might have missed
the reality of what he was trying to claim.
Yes, in those two months, 7.5
million Americans had gone back to work. Almost every one of those jobs represented
a person coming back from furlough, as the pandemic began to ebb. This
wasn’t “job creation.” When you checked records, you saw that 22 million jobs disappeared at least temporarily in March
and April. An additional check of Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers indicated
that an additional 3 million Americans had dropped out of the workforce.
Eventually, Trump stopped
bragging and lying and took questions. We’ll save time and summarize his
answers.
Democrats and Joe Biden?
Trump wanted us to know they hated
America and wanted everyone to die from higher taxes, or from bad guys breaking
into our homes, and the defunded police not answering 911 calls.
POSTSCRIPT: If you’ve been worried about
the coronavirus and the economy, you may be missing another critical story.
Baghdad set an all-time record of 125.2°F on July 28, an almost unlivable
level of heat. On July 30, Phoenix, Arizona broke a daily record high by three degrees, topping out
at 118°. More worrisome is a fifteen-day streak, where the daily low never
dropped below 90° even at night. That tied the record for most days in a
year with lows above 90°.
To get a better sense of the trend, the 15-day-straight
stretch means 2020 is already tied with 2013 and 2003. There were fourteen such
days in 2018 and 2007, thirteen in 2009-2011. Last year there were twelve. In
2012 and 2006, there were eleven. “Temperatures
during this time of a year are rare and dangerous,” one weatherman warned.
“You just have to really be on guard and respect the heat.”
Rare, heretofore. Not so rare
anymore. Climate change is not a hoax. Future generations will pay the price
for our denials.
___
7/31/20: Trump spent the last day of
the month complaining because the coming election was going to be rigged. It
would be a hoax, a fraud, a calamity, a con, a debacle, a fiasco, and a
five-alarm fire.
He did not spend the day talking to health officials about
how best to address the COVID-19 crisis.
Because: Trump is an idiot.
He did find time to fly to Florida and squeeze in a campaign fundraiser, and
then fly back to Washington D.C.
On this, the final day of a brutal month, the U.S. recorded
68,605 cases of COVID-19. That brought the July total to:
1,916,706.
Trump likes to say he has done more than any other president
in his first three-and-a-half years in office.
You could say he has singlehandedly rejuvenated the mortuary
business.
According to the CDC, on July 31, another 1,371 Americans succumbed from COVID-19. The
death toll stood at:
152,870.
One final bit of Trumpian imbecility. On this last day of July, the
president tells the American people he has the coronavirus on the run, or soon
will. “We’ll get rid of it, we’ll beat it, and it will be soon.”
*
Unlike the President of the United States, this blogger has
no trouble condemning lawmakers who are alleged to be crooks, no matter what side they’re on (see post for 9/1/20). When
Fox News reports on a Tennessee state senator, Katrina Robinson, a Democrat,
who has been charged with stealing $600,000 from a company she owns, Mr.
Blogger does not start shouting that Robinson is being persecuting – as Trump
always says when his pals get arrested and charged.
The senator is accused of using the cash to pay for her own
wedding, to buy her daughter a Jeep
Renegade, and to fund an extravagant lifestyle.
So, if she gets convicted? Yeah. Lock her dumb ass up.
BLOGGER’S NOTE (3/18/22): Robinson
is eventually convicted on two counts, but a judge sentences her to “time served,” and one
year of probation. She had previously been expelled from her seat in the
Tennessee Senate, but called the 27-5 vote a “procedural lynching.”
Appeals and additional sentencing
seem likely.
___
August 1, 2020: August begins the way July
ended, with a dire warning from one who worked inside the White House.
In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, now-retired
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman speaks out against the president. After 21 years,
six months, and ten days, Vindman has left the U.S. Army. Vindman is a patriot
and was scheduled for promotion to colonel. The Army review board said his service had been meritorious.
He deserved to be advanced.
President Trump had other plans. A campaign of retaliation commenced.
The promotion was blocked.
In what way had Vindman sinned?
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, left, testified honorably.
He and his brother, Yevgeny, right, were both forced out of the U.S. Army.
____________________
“In
America, right matters.”
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman
____________________
He had testified under oath, something the president would
never dare. He told lawmakers in Congress that he had heard Trump’s call to
the President of Ukraine. It was, he said, a craven attempt to force the Ukrainians
to help him win re-election in 2020. Lt. Col. Vindman, a national security
expert, warned that by holding up military aid to Ukraine, until the
Ukrainians agreed to “play ball,” the
president had put U.S. national security at risk.
This was what Dr. Fiona Hill and other White House security experts also
said in their testimony.
Vindman promised that in retirement he would not flinch. He
would speak out against any “attacks on our national security,” as he saw them.
He would do all he could to “keep our nation safe and strong
against internal and external threats.”
External threats are a given with every nation on earth,
across the recorded history of all the centuries.
It was those “internal threats” that moved Lt. Col. Vindman
to warn:
At no point in my career or life
have I felt our nation’s values under greater threat and in more peril than at
this moment. Our national government during the past few years has been more
reminiscent of the authoritarian regime [emphasis added] my family fled
more than 40 years ago than the country I have devoted my life to serving.
An immigrant from the old Soviet Union, along with the rest
of his family, Vindman’s career had been destroyed by “a mendacious president
and his enablers.” He did not despair. He had bled for this country, something
no member of the Trump clan has dared during 145 years on American soil.
He continued:
During my testimony in the
House impeachment inquiry, I reassured my father, who experienced Soviet
authoritarianism firsthand, saying, “Do not worry, I will be fine for telling
the truth.” Despite Trump’s retaliation, I stand by that conviction. Even as I
experience the low of ending my military career, I have also experienced the
loving support of tens of thousands of Americans. Theirs is a chorus of hope
that drowns out the spurious attacks of a disreputable man and his
sycophants.
When a member of the congressional committee asked how he had
the confidence to reassure his father that way, Vindman was clear. “Congressman,
he replied, “because this is America. This is the country I have served and
defended, that all my brothers have served, and here, right matters.”
He remained hopeful despite his own fate. He had earned a promotion. It
had been denied. “To this day, despite everything that has happened, I continue
to believe in the American Dream. I believe that in America, right matters.
I want to help ensure that right matters for all Americans.”
*
AS FOR PROOF that Republican lawmakers have their priorities
straight, Oklahoma State Rep. Sean Roberts threatened this week to revoke tax privileges for the N.B.A.’s Oklahoma
Thunder.
Roberts was in a tizzy because N.B.A. players were taking a
knee during the National Anthem. He wanted to ensure Thunder players didn’t get
any commie ideas. As he explained, “By kneeling ... the NBA and its players are
showing disrespect to the American flag and all it stands for.” This
“anti-patriotic act makes clear the NBA’s support of the Black Lives Matter
group ... its ties to Marxism and its efforts to destroy nuclear families.”
And you thought the BLM protesters just didn’t want police to
kneel on the necks of unarmed blacks until they expired, or shoot them dead
while they were trying to sleep in their own apartments!
Saturday, the entire Thunder team donned “Black Lives Matter”
t-shirts and took a knee at the start of its game.
The Utah Jazz team joined them in protest.
*
New cases of COVID-19, for August 1:
58,947.
POSTSCRIPT: It should concern all
Americans to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was compiling reports on both protesters in Portland,
and journalists who covered those protests.
Because what you really need in any authoritarian system is
police who possess knowledge of “unfriendly” reporters.
See: Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Muammar al-Gaddafi and
Vladimir Putin, to name just a few.
Brian Murphy, head of the intelligence branch at DHS, was
reassigned after it was revealed he had disseminated such reports to law
enforcement agencies.
(He should
have been fired.)
Benjamin Wittes, author of the blog Lawfare, was one
target for retribution. He had stirred Murphy’s wrath after releasing an email Murphy
wrote to all federal agents, ordering them to refer to all Portland protesters
as “VIOLENT ANTIFA ANARCHISTS.” You could even hear an echo of the president’s rage
in that memo, complete with Murphy’s use of all capital letters.
BLOGGER’S NOTE (4/5/22), while proofreading older
posts: The claims of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and Fiona Hill were eventually bolstered by Trump’s former National
Security Advisor, the less-than-courageous John Bolton. Bolton saved his
“testimony” and put it in a book for sale. He, too, insisted Trump put U.S.
national security at risk, in service to his own selfish interests. Lt. Col.
Yevgeny Vindman’s promotion to colonel was restored and Col. Vindman continues to serve this
country proudly in uniform.
___
8/2/20: President Trump had a busy Sunday.
He went golfing. Afterwards,
he spent his day rage-tweeting.
Two health experts on his Coronavirus Task Force continued to
undercut his idiot claims. He may have to replace his team of experts – who he
ignores anyway – with the Demon Sperm Lady. (See: 7/28/20.)
____________________
“Pathetic.”
President Trump
____________________
Sunday, both Dr. Birx and Admiral Brett Giroir of the U.S.
Public Health Service cut down some of Trump’s favorite ideas. The president, and
even Don Jr., got excited last week when Dr. Stella Immanuel, the Demon
Sperm Lady, claimed she had treated hundreds of people for COVID-19, using nothing
more than hydroxychloroquine.
Giroir said it was time to “move on” from that idea. On Meet the Press,
he explained that “from a public health standpoint, at first,
hydroxychloroquine looked very promising.” Now there have “been five randomized
control, placebo-controlled trials that do not show any benefit to
hydroxychloroquine.”
So, was
it working?
“There’s
no evidence to show that it is [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted],”
he said.
Essentially, what Adm. Giroir was saying, albeit in less
blunt fashion, is that you would be just as well off mixing dried pine needles
in your Budweiser as taking hydroxychloroquine and hoping for a cure.
The admiral did have good news to report. Healthcare experts
now realize that steroids and the drug Remdesivir (a “bargain” at only $3,100
for a course of treatment) can reduce the death rate. Chuck Todd, his host,
wanted to be clear. What about hydroxychloroquine? he asked again.
“I think most physicians and prescribers are evidence-based
and they’re not influenced by whatever is on Twitter or anything else,” Giroir
continued.
In other words, he meant: DO NOT LISTEN TO THE DEMON SPERM
LADY ON TWITTER.
That left Dr. Birx, who had been criticized earlier in the
week by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The Speaker accused the doctor of
presenting too rosy a picture of how the nation was faring. Sunday, Birx stuck
a knife in the balloon of hot air that is President Trump, whenever he talks
about the virus. Trump had spent the previous week bragging about how great he
was doing, handling this crisis. Kids could go back to school. Everything would
be fine!
Not necessarily, said Dr. Birx. In in an appearance on State
of the Union, hosted by Dana Bash, she offered warning. Birx said she was watching twenty states, where cases were
rising. “We are in a new phase,” she told Bash, “which is why I wanted to make
it clear to the American people.” She said we were seeing some positive effects
from “mitigation efforts” put in place by state governors. “What we are seeing
today is different from March and April,” however. The virus “is extraordinarily
widespread.” It was now in rural settings, as in urban areas. “To everybody
who lives in a rural area, you are not immune or protected from this virus.”
“It’s super spreading events and we need to
stop those.”
She reiterated. We should all wear masks. We should all be social
distancing. We should all practice good hygiene. Not a syllable did she offer
about the miraculous curative powers of hydroxychloroquine.
Bash mentioned estimates that the death toll could rise to
173,000 by August 22. Another estimate suggested 300,000 Americans might die by
year’s end, unless we changed what we were doing.
The doctor was clear. The spread from one individual to
another, that we could handle. “It’s
not super spreading individuals, it’s super spreading events and we need to
stop those. We definitely need to take more precautions.”
Bash wondered if states with
a positivity rate of 5% or higher on coronavirus tests should reopen or
remain closed?
“If you have high case load
and active community spread, just like we are asking people not to go to bars,
not to have household parties, not to create large spreading events,” she said,
“we are asking people to distance learn at this moment so we can get this
epidemic under control.”
This was not what Trump
wanted to hear. That meant more furious tweeting. He accused Dr. Birx of
getting baited by Speaker Pelosi. “Pathetic,” Trump said, summing up Birx’s TV performance.
And that’s what passes, in America, under President Donald J.
Trump, for a “good day” in handling this crisis.
___
8/3/20: Monday turns out to be a
terrible day for President Trump, but possibly a good day for America.
The more his ineptitude is exposed, the greater chance there
is he can be defeated in November. This past weekend, Dr. Deborah Birx admitted
that we were not close to beating the coronavirus, as
Trump claimed Friday.
“What we are seeing today,” she
warned, “is different from March and April.” COVID-19, she continued, “is
extraordinarily widespread. It’s into the rural as equal urban areas.”
Naturally, Trump blew up, in part because House Speaker
Pelosi had recently accused Dr. Birx and the
president of offering up an unrealistically rosy picture of the
situation (see: 7/31/20).
The president didn’t blow up because a thousand Americans
were dying every day, since he wasn’t one of them. He blew up because Dr. Birx
had hinted that he wasn’t doing a good job of meeting this crisis. That meant
it was time for another patented, petulant presidential tweet: “In order to counter Nancy,” he exploded, “Deborah took the bait &
hit us. Pathetic!”
Yes. Pathetic is the word, but applied to the wrong person.
(It probably didn’t help Trump’s mood when Adm. Brett
Giroir, contradicted his repeated claims that hydroxychloroquine would be a
potential treatment for Covid-19.
What Adm. Giroir said, in less blunt fashion, is that you
be just as well off mixing dried pine needles in your Budweiser as taking
hydroxychloroquine and hoping for a cure.
*
IN OTHER STUPID NEWS, Mayor Barry Presgraves of Luray,
Virginia garners widespread condemnation after he posts on social media: “Joe Biden has just announced
Aunt Jemima as his VP pick.”
In a similar vein, a second Virginia Republican, Loudoun County treasurer Roger Zurn, couldn’t resist commenting on
Quaker Oats’ decision to retire the aunt’s name and image from advertising. It
tickled Zurn’s funny bone to suggest she
be replaced with pictures of “Uncle Tom’s.”
*
“They
are dying. It is what it is.”
TODAY, we had hints today from the Manhattan district
attorney’s office that prosecutors may try to make a broad case against the president, possibly against some
of his children, and the Trump Organization.
Citing what they call “public reports of
possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct at the Trump Organization,” investigators
are asking the courts to compel Trump to give up his tax records. These records
might support an indictment. They might even bring the probe to a close and
clear the president’s “spotless” good name.
This blogger is not one to count his chickens before they are
found guilty and sent to prison. But if investigators suspect “tax and
insurance fraud,” as reported, he can think of no man who would be more
inclined to delve into all flavors of fraud than the current occupant of the
White House.
*
PERHAPS WORST OF ALL, if you enjoy having Trump in the White
House, the full interview he gave to Jonathan Swan of Axios has finally
aired. It will not bolster your support for the idea that Donald is a genius.
You can watch the entire 37 minutes if you like. Or Mr.
Blogger can hit the high points – which are really lows – and save you the time
and brain damage that results from listening to this president.
When the video begins, we glimpse “Birther” McEnany lurking in
the shadows. Her job will be to hand the president ridiculous charts to glance at
and pass to Swan – who will view them skeptically. Because he’s not an imbecile.
The interview begins pleasantly. At the 1:58 mark, Trump begins
defending his handling of the health crisis. “I think we’ve done an incredible
job, with the ventilators” and “putting the ban on China, which, frankly, no
one wanted me to do, practically nobody.” Had he not put in place that travel ban,
we “would have lost hundreds of thousands of lives more.” In other words, he’s
not the bumbling fool he seems. He saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
A subtle
example of how ill-informed he is.
He says “nobody knew” what this pandemic would be like, and notes
that we haven’t seen anything like it since 1917. He repeats the date, twice.
It’s a recurrent mistake, and a subtle example of how ill-informed he is. The
Spanish Flu killed millions round the world, starting in 1918.
As he often has of late, the president cites countries he
thinks are doing worse than the U.S., as if to say, “See, I’m not so bad.” At
the 3:40 mark he cites Spain, as having a big spike, and Brazil. Brazil is
doing badly. He doesn’t mention that the president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, is
a virus-denier too. And if Spain is spiking, Italy, Germany, Japan, and South
Korea are not.
At the 4:30 mark Trump says that by shutting down the economy
when he did, “we saved millions of lives.” In just minutes, his claim has gone
from saving “hundreds of thousands” of lives to “millions.”
We’ve seen this guy in action now for years. No one would be
surprised if he claimed he saved “billions” before the interview ends. That’s
how Trump Math works. What the president wants everyone to know is that he’s a
hero. The people “who really understand it,” he tells Swan, say “it’s
incredible the job we’ve done.”
“Who’s they?” Swan interjects.
Trump figures if he keeps gibbering, he can avoid answering any
pointed questions. So, for another half hour we get a torrent of baloney spewed
from his lips. Swan tries repeatedly to pin him down. In June he interviewed
Trump, right before the president went to Tulsa for a rally. He tries to point
out that experts knew then the disease was spreading far and wide.
“Why have 6,000 people crowd together at that rally?” he
wonders.
Trump bristles and says the rally drew 12,000, but the “Fake News”
people won’t report it. (Neither would the Tulsa fire marshal, who said 6,200 people were in the arena when the
president spoke.)
As far as COVID-19 goes, Trump says Oklahoma was doing great
when he visited. Cases “spiked a month, a month-and-a-half, two months later.” He
doesn’t really know. He says that no one wants to talk about it, but “Fox had
the highest ratings” ever for a Saturday night speech when it broadcast his
Tulsa rally.
Americans may be dying by the thousands. Trump is boasting
about ratings. “I’m talking about public health,” Swan says, voice
rising.
At the 7:00 minute mark, the journalist bores in. “Your
people,” he says, “they love you. They listen to you.” He points at his own
head. “They listen to every word you say, they hang on your words. They don’t
listen to me, or the media, or [Dr.] Fauci. They think we’re fake news. They want
to get their advice from you. And so, when you say, ‘everything is under
control, don’t worry about wearing masks,’ these people…many of them are
older.”
“I think
it’s under control.”
“Right now, I think it’s under control,” the president says, defensively.
“How?” asks Swan. “A thousand people are dying a day.”
“They are dying. That’s true,” the president responds,” his
voice also rising, along with his ire. “It is what it is. But that
doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as
you can control it. This is a horrible plague.”
Swan asks, quite reasonably, if the president really believes
this is the best we can do as a nation.
Trump says that his administration has given the governors
everything they need. Then he blames the governors for any problems. He says
some have been “great” and others “not so great.” He cites Arizona, Texas, and
Florida as states where case numbers are going down. On the day the interview is
conducted, numbers in those states are not going down, at least not in Texas
and Florida.
Swan tries to point that out.
Trump deflects. “It should have been stopped by China,” he
says of the virus. “It should have been stopped by China.”
That would be relevant if we were talking about the situation
in January. Swan interjects, “But now it’s here.”
Trump isn’t going to let facts stop him, or nuance slow him
down. He says the U.S. has done more testing than all of Europe. That’s why we
have so many reported cases. He says we’ve done more testing than all of Europe,
“times two.”
That’s a claim he makes around the 9:48 mark on the tape. It
takes me 30 seconds to pause the interview, go to Worldometers, do some quick
estimating…and…okay…Trump is full of guano.
Actual testing numbers: USA 61.6 million tests administered (as of
August 3).
Russia 29.4 million
United Kingdom 16.9 million
Spain 7.1 million
Italy 7 million, etc.
And that doesn’t include France or Germany or Ukraine or
Croatia, or most of the other countries of that continent.
So Trump is lying again.
“There
are those who say you can test too much.”
At the ten minute mark, the president makes the claim that
stuns Swan and anyone watching. At least any viewers whose frontal lobes have not
been irreparably damaged by whacks with a hammer. “You know, there are those
who say you can test too much. You do know that?” the president asks.
Swan’s pained expression says it all.
“Who says that?” he responds.
“Read the books, read the manuals,” Trump says.
“Manuals?”
“Read the books,” Trump says again.
“What books?” asks Swan.
The president doesn’t answer. He tries to explain how hard it
was to deal with the virus because “we didn’t have a test” when it reached our
shores. Swan isn’t buying. “Of course,” he responds. You can’t have a test for
a disease no one has ever seen.
Trump reverts to his more testing, more cases defense. Some kid
gets sick, has “a little runny nose,” it’s a case, he whines.
Swan’s not talking runny noses. “The figure I look at is
deaths,” he says. “Deaths is going up now. It’s a thousand a day.”
At this point the interview becomes embarrassing. Trump has
some charts handy, thanks to McEnany. He offers to show them to Swan. Swan says
he’d love to have a peek. Trump has trouble reading the first chart, clearly confused
by what it shows. “The United States is lowest in numerous categories,” he
offers. He squints at the chart like Mr. Magoo, only dumber, and says, “We’re
lower than the world.”
“The world?” Swan is incredulous.
Watching, so am I, because the chart Trump has in his hands
doesn’t show “numerous categories” with the U.S. lowest in all; it’s not even
set up to show numerous categories.
Trump hands the chart to Swan, who realizes it shows deaths
as a proportion of reported cases. This is the essence of stupidity, and he
knows it. “I’m talking about death as a proportion of population,” he says. He notes
that deaths in this country are much higher than South Korea and Germany.
Trump responds, “You can’t do that.”
It’s an
amazing moment for anyone watching who isn’t blind to reality. And it’s easy to
check. Per million, the U.S. has one of the highest death rates of any nation
on Earth. As of noon, on August 5, when I post, our country has suffered 485 deaths per
million. South Korea: 6. Germany: 110.
The “ice cream” chart.
The next
chart Trump waves around looks like something a third grade teacher would provide
to students to help them learn to read simple graphs. The pink bar might be the
percentage of students that said they like vanilla ice cream. The blue bar
might be the percentage that liked strawberry. If this weren’t the president we
were watching, we might pity the fool.
Swan points out that South Korea has a population of 51
million and only 300 deaths from the coronavirus.
Trump waves around his ice cream chart for emphasis and says,
“Look, we’re last. Which means we’re first.”
Swan knows that talking to Trump is like trying to convince a
three-year-old that he has to put on socks and shoes if he wants to go to McDonalds.
Trump goes back to bragging about how we lead the world in testing. Which is
also terrible. Swan says that would be great if deaths and hospitalizations were
going down. But they’re not. “Sixty thousand Americans are in hospitals,” he
exclaims.
At the 16:30 mark Swan switches topics and asks about reports
Russia paid bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Watching,
my head is about to explode. I start taking fewer notes.
I can’t take much more of this.
This portion of the interview had already been released. It did
not add luster to the Trump star. Swan notes that Trump talked to Putin in a
call on July 23. Did he bring up the topic? Trump says he didn’t because “many
people said it was fake news.”
“What people,” Swan inquires.
A president, one prepared, would respond with something like,
“Secretary of Defense Esper.” Or cite the head of the C.I.A. Trump switches subjects.
He says no one ever brings up China. It’s always, “Russia, Russia, Russia.” He
says nuclear proliferation – and he says he hopes to get a deal done with
Russia soon – is a bigger issue than “global warming, a much bigger problem
than global warming, in terms of the real world.”
(This, too, is wrong, since every person riding the globe
around the sun is going to be or has been negatively affected by climate
change.)
Besides, the president insists, the intelligence on Russia
and the bounties, “never reached my desk.”
Swan can be heard protesting, “It was in your written brief.”
“If it reached my desk, I would have done something about
it,” the president says. This is odd, since he just argued that many people
told him it was “fake news.”
In other
words:
Step 1: Ignore the “fake news.”
Step 2: Do something about it if it reaches your desk.
“We
supplied weapons when they were fighting Russia, too.”
When Swan points out that our commander in Afghanistan warned
in 2017 that the Russians were supplying the Taliban with weapons – and shouldn’t
that have been enough to bring up the matter in a call with Putin – Trump gives
an astonishing answer. “Well, we supplied weapons when they were fighting
Russia, too.”
It’s as if he doesn’t really care that American troops
might be getting killed. He says he didn’t ask General John W. Nicholson Jr.,
our commander in Afghanistan, because he was there before Trump took office (and
still there until September 2018) and “didn’t do a very good job.”
In other
words:
Step 3: Blame the general.
*
SWAN TURNS to the election in November and asks if the
president will accept the results. It’s another stunning moment.
Trump says he can’t be sure. He starts talking about the
dangers of mail-in balloting, which he says is new. Swan points out that it’s
been around since the Civil War, when Union soldiers mailed in hundreds of thousands
of ballots from the front lines and helped ensure Lincoln had a second term.
Trump claims a friend of his got a ballot for a son who died
seven years ago. “Somebody got a ballot for a dog,” he adds. “Absentee
balloting is fine. You have to apply.”
Swan notes: “You have to apply for mail-in ballots.”
I find myself hoping Swan will say, “Sir, you are a numbskull.
Mail-in ballots must be signed. Signatures are compared against signatures on
file. Fido won’t be making his mark with a paw print…”
Trump grumbles about California sending out millions of
ballots.
“No, applications,” Swans interjects.
He points out that the Trump campaign is urging supporters to
vote by mail. Swan holds up an email. Lara Trump, he notes, has been making
robocalls in the state, urging Republicans to request those ballots, get
those ballots filled out, lick those stamps, and get them mailed in time.
I might point out helpfully, that the president’s obsession
with California is clearly not good for his mental health. In the most recent
poll conducted, 67% of Californians said they planned to vote for
Biden.
Trump got 28%.
“Well,
he didn’t come to my inauguration.”
The interview doesn’t get better before it gets worse. Trump
defends his previous good wishes, extended to Ghislaine Maxwell. She’s the alleged
accomplice of Jeffrey Epstein, and herself accused of abusing teen girls. The
president says he does wish her well. He’s emphatic. “I’m not looking
bad for anybody,” he claims. That’s a laugh in itself. Trump is the most
skilled hater to sit in the White House since Andrew Johnson in 1867, if not since
the birth of the republic.
It never dawns on Trump to mention sympathy for Epstein’s victims,
and there were hundreds.
(This is the president’s second chance; he also failed to
mention the victims on 7/21/20.)
The last ten minutes or so, Swan tries to get him to answer a
few questions about the protesters in Portland, and the Black Lives Matter
movement. Trump will only talk about “Antifa,” “anarchists,” “terrorists,” and
how the Antifa crowd wanted to kill the mayor of Portland.
Trump hates the mayor, too.
He claims again that he has done more for black Americans
than “any other president, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.”
“More than Lyndon Johnson, who passed the Civil Rights Act?”
Swans inquires.
Trump replies, “Civil Rights Act didn’t work out so well.”
He’s right for once. Whether or not he realizes – and, of
course, he doesn’t – he just admitted that systemic racism has long been a
problem in this country. His fans won’t notice either. Swan doesn’t have a
chance to ask about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Team Trump has done
nothing to extend.
Swan ends by asking the president about Rep. John Lewis,
recently deceased. Why not attend his funeral?
Trump says simply, “Well, he didn’t come to my inauguration.”
His pettiness could not be clearer.
Was Lewis
an impressive figure? Swan tries again.
Trump says he doesn’t know his story. He knows a lot of
impressive people, some not so impressive.
Here, I must point out that Lewis, as a young man, shed more
blood fighting for justice than all the Trump clan combined, going back to 1885,
when the first Trump landed on these shores. Lewis had his head bashed in 1961
during one of the “Freedom Rides.” Four years later he had his skull broken
when he and others tried to cross the Edmund Pettis bridge into Selma, Alabama.
There they hoped to register African Americans to vote.
Finally, Swan wonders if Trump would approve of a move to
rename the bridge.
“I’d have no problem with that,” he says. He’s not enthusiastic,
of course. Not like he gets all excited when people talk about taking down the
statues of Confederate generals and/or slave owners.
The two men smile at last. Swan thanks Trump for being “so
generous” with his time. The camera pans the room, showing President
Jefferson’s portrait. Then: John Adams. Jimmy Carter. John F. Kennedy. Truman.
Teddy Roosevelt. Lincoln. Richard M. Nixon. FDR. George Washington. Mercifully,
that’s the end of the tape, before my eyeballs melt out of my head.
*
IN OTHER STUPID NEWS, Mayor Barry Presgraves of Luray,
Virginia garners widespread condemnation after he posts on social media: “Joe Biden has just announced
Aunt Jemima as his VP pick.”
___
8/4/20: A conservative friend told me this
week that he intended to vote for Trump again. Trump, he said, had created a
“roaring economy.”
I told him I thought he was wrong, but promised to check my facts.
I’ve been wrong plenty of times. In one post, I originally had Sen. Tammy
Duckworth giving a speech from the floor of the House of Representatives,
a careless error, and a stupid one. She did call the president “Cadet Bone
Spurs,” though.
I still love that.
So, I’m as careful as can be on this blog. I’m also a super
spreader when it comes to typos; so I often go back and edit.
*
I immediately found this graph, showing quarterly GDP growth from 2011 to
2020, for the United States.
Even if we ignore those last two bars, and try to play nice,
Trump hasn’t done nearly as well as his fans imagine. He started off adequately
in 2017, with two quarters of GDP growth of 2.3 and 2.2 percent. Then came four
good quarters in a row: 3.2, 3.5, 3.8 and 2.7. Those results were fueled in
part by massive tax cuts. Those cuts were supposed to juice growth to 4 percent and “pay for themselves.” That
was the “sugar high.” The high wore off. Since then, we’ve had six quarters, when
averaged out, of modest growth: 2.1, 1.3, 2.9, 1.5, 2.6 and 2.4.
The “roaring economy” stopped roaring during the second half of
2018. The federal deficit ballooned.
And that was before the coronavirus hit.
Obama, of course, took over just as the bottom fell out and
the Great Recession began. The U.S. economy stalled and shrank slightly in
2008, shedding more than 3.5 million jobs that year. That wasn’t Obama’s fault.
The plunge continued in 2009. The economy shrank at an annual rate of 2.5%.
Growth in 2010 was solid, at an annualized rate of 2.6%,
weaker in 2011 at 1.6%, okay in 2012 at 2.2%. During Obama’s second term we had
one good year (2.9% in 2015), one decent year (2.4% in 2014), and two weak
years (1.8% in 2013 and 1.6% in 2016.)
Trump took charge and, so far, we have had one good year
(2.9% in 2018), and two decent years (2.4% in 2017 and 2.3 % in 2019).
Unfortunately, during his watch, the bottom has fallen out of the economy again.
*
NEW CONFIRMED cases of coronavirus for today:
49,998.
___
8/5/20: Trump proved once again this
week that when his lips are moving, he’s either lying or super-spreading misinformation.
The man needs to wear a mask to protect others. Or provide us with earmuffs.
____________________
That made the president’s misstatement dangerous, not just
the latest example of how ill-informed he is.
____________________
On Tuesday, in the wake of a massive explosion in Beirut, he decided
to open his mouth and let nonsense pour out. Knowing almost nothing about what
had happened (because he has the intellectual depth of rutabaga), he described the
blast as an “attack.” When reporters asked him, specifically, if he felt it was
an attack, he said that he had met with “some of our great generals, and they just seem to feel” that the destruction
was the result of “a bomb of some kind.”
It didn’t take a demolitions expert
to tell otherwise. The first pictures available indicated the blast area was massive,
too large for any surgical air or missile strike, unless someone hit a vast military
ammunition dump by mistake.
Who then might have had reason to attack Lebanon? Terrorists?
Unlikely. Israel? If it really was an attack, they might have been striking at a
Hezbollah arms storage facility. But this was Trump talking. You wouldn’t have
been surprised if he blamed Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
Unfortunately, across that region, people would assume the
President of the United States knew what he was talking about. In the
Muslim world, where suspicion runs hot, Trump’s words might sound like an admission
that we played a role. Would jihadists seek revenge? Would they insist the
catastrophe in Beirut was the work of a U.S. missile strike? Or an American
super bomb? Muslims have their own conspiracy theorists. They have their Alex
Joneses in turbans.
That made the president’s misstatement dangerous, not just the
latest example of how obtuse he is.
Beirut in ruins.
*
The blast
involved 2,750 metric tons of ammonia nitrate.
IT SOON PROVED not to be an attack, but rather a blast
centered on a warehouse stuffed with ammonia nitrate. This was the material
Timothy McVey used to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. In
that attack, McVey, a right-wing conspiracy crazy, used two-and-a-half tons to
fashion a bomb. McVey killed 168 people, including children at a daycare center
on the first floor.
As terrible as that crime had been, this was worse, Lebanon’s
9/11. The blast in Beirut involved the accidental explosion of 2,750 metric
tons of ammonia nitrate. The material had been impounded in 2014, when a
Russian cargo ship docked at port, but could no longer pay its crew or other
bills. Hundreds are feared dead. At least 5,000 Lebanese are injured. Billions in
damages resulted. The explosion left a giant crater where the warehouse had
been.
The problem is, Trump had informed the world this was an
“attack.” He could have cleaned it up the next day and admitted error. Instead,
he sent his toadies out to say that he was right from the start. (Secretary of
Defense Mark Esper correctly said Wednesday that U.S. intelligence was gathering information, “but most believe it was an
accident as reported.”) That meant it fell to White House Chief of Staff Mark
Meadows to march out, stand in front of cameras, and say the president was
correct.
“The initial reports looked at
the explosion.” As for it having been an attack, he said, “We still have not
totally ruled that out.”
Meadows ignored the fact U.S.
intelligence was ruling out an attack.
“Obviously,” he continued, “there’s
no group that has claimed any responsibility.” That would make sense, since
evidence was piling up that a catastrophic accident had occurred. What “the
president shared with the American people is what he was briefed on,” Meadows
claimed. “And as we look at that, we’ll continue to evaluate it. Hopefully, it
was just a tragic accident and not an act of terror.”
It was a tragic accident.
Within hours everyone knew it. Trump just couldn’t admit he was wrong. This
afternoon, he doubled, tripled, and quadrupled down. Asked during a press
conference about his earlier statement – which some officials feared might
spark an international crisis – you knew Trump was going to have to make sh*t up. The
president did not disappoint.
“How can you say ‘accident’ if somebody left
some terrible explosive-type devices and things around perhaps – perhaps it was that. Perhaps it was an
attack,” Trump explained lamely. “I don’t think anybody can say right now. We’re looking into it
very strongly right now.”
Just about every man, woman and child in
Lebanon realized that the blast was a horrific accident and that 2,750 metric
tons of ammonia nitrate had been left “around.”
Not “explosive-type devices.”
Trump couldn’t let go. He
couldn’t admit error. He couldn’t cite which “great generals” had told him it
had been an attack, because none had. “Some people think it was an attack and
some people think it wasn’t,” he continued, repeating himself, as is his habit.
“In any event, it was a terrible event and a lot of people were killed and a
tremendous number of people were badly wounded, injured. And we’re standing
with that country.”
He had a memo in his hands,
and, as usual, read that last statement in a monotone, as if completing a task reluctantly,
like a child eating lima beans. You knew the president didn’t have a
humanitarian bone in his body. If Lebanon had been wiped from the face of the
earth, he wouldn’t have shed a tear. It’s doubtful he could even find the
country on a map.
Multiple sources, however, contradicted the president’s claim that an attack had occurred. Lebanese
authorities said no. Multiple U.S. officials told Fox News there was no evidence of an attack. CNN said
three Defense Department officials told them there was no evidence. Two officials told the Associated Press the same. Secretary
Esper was already on record.
The best the Pentagon could
do in “support” of the fool in the White House, was to decline comment and tell reporters to go find Kellyanne
Conway or “Birther” McEnany. You could always count on them to back what Trump
had said, even if he claimed his cheeseburgers sometimes talked to him when he
was alone in his private quarters.
You talkin' to me?
*
ARE WE BEATING
COVID-19 yet? No. We are not. New cases in the United States, August 5:
53,685.
___
8/6/20: I pray that Mr. Trump goes
down to defeat in November; but that doesn’t mean I don’t hope for good news
for the country.
____________________
We’re
all in the same boat together. It’s not leaking. We’re not about to sink. But
the guy rowing next to us has the disease.
____________________
Recently, the daily reports from the Centers for Disease Control showed
a decline in new cases of coronavirus. I was hopeful on August 2, when we dropped
to 47,576. That was down more than 21,000 compared to the last day in July.
Then I was disappointed to see that we had nearly 50,000 cases on both August 3
and August 4. Then, on August 5, we had 53,685.
Today: we hit 55,836.
CDC also reported an additional 1,037 dead for August 4,
1,320 on August 5, and 1,340 on August 6.
Even worse, you never know from which direction the virus might be coming. In Ohio, where
numbers have been rising despite a successful shutdown in the spring, a man who
attended church infected at least 53 members of his congregation. They
went home and infected 37 relatives, friends, and neighbors. “It spread like
wildfire, wildfire,” Gov. Mike DeWine explained.
We’re
all in the same boat together. It’s not leaking. We’re not about to sink. But
the guy rowing next to us has the disease.
So
wear a mask.
*
HAVE WE MENTIONED climate change lately? Of course we have.
NASA, relying on satellite imagery, announces that two ice caps in
Canada, formed during the Little Ice Age, or 5,000 years ago, have
melted away.
Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data
Center (NSIDC), told CBS that he first visited the ice caps in 1982. At that
time, “they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape.”
Now: “To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me
away,” he says.
Have you ever heard of NSIDC, Trump fans? Has Trump? Unlikely,
because he’s clueless on the topic of climate change.
It’s here. It’s going to get worse.
*
AS FOR THE PRESIDENT, he’s not worried about climate change,
because he’s a dimwit. He is, however, worried about getting beat by Joe Biden. Today he warned supporters
that if Biden were elected, he would eat all their children.
Well, okay, not quite.
He did say this of his challenger, a practicing Catholic (who
you know has seen the inside of a church more often that Trump ever has): “Take away your
guns, take away your Second Amendment. No religion, no anything,” Trump
predicted, if he went down to defeat. Biden would, “Hurt the Bible. Hurt God.
He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy.”
You
have to wonder why Trump didn’t just keep going. Why not claim, “Biden will
take away your kittens and puppies. He’s against ice cream and cake on
birthdays. He’s against underwear.”
It
would have made equal sense.
*
THE
PRESIDENT also finds time to do a 40-minute radio interview with Geraldo Rivera. He
tells his radio host that he thinks he’s done a “fantastic” job of handling the
pandemic.
(As of
this moment, more than 150,000 Americans have died and almost 5,000,000 have
been infected.)
As for
other countries – they’re lying about their pandemic figures. “We see what’s happening by satellite,” he tells Rivera,
which seems an odd way to describe it. “They don’t report.”
As always, the Liar-in-Chief is
projecting.
*
IF YOU DON’T KNOW already that Trump is a giant hypocrite you
need look at only two stories combined, reported in tandem, by CBS News. First,
we learn that Team Trump is suing the State of Nevada in an attempt to stop
officials from expanding a vote-by-mail program. Under the plan all active
registered voters in Nevada would be sent mail-in ballots for the November 3
election. The Trump campaign claims the measure “makes voter fraud and other
ineligible voting inevitable.”
If the state’s decision stands, Nevada will join seven other states that have plans to send ballots
to all active, registered voters.
Now, consider Florida, where Trump himself is registered to
vote. Trump tweeted on Tuesday that he was encouraging mail-in balloting in the “Sunshine State.” His
reasoning, such as it was:
Whether you call it Vote by Mail
or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried
and True. Florida’s Voting system has been cleaned up (we defeated Democrats
attempts at change), so in Florida I encourage all to request a Ballot &
Vote by Mail!
See if you can guess what the key word in that tweet really
is? If you can’t guess, Trump soon makes it clear. Florida, he says in a press
conference, has “a great Republican governor.”
Nevada: Democratic governor.
Different story.
___
8/7/20: The Bureau of Labor Statistics
announced today that 1,783,000 jobs were “added” to the U.S. economy in July.
That marked the third month in a row, jobs “added” since the pandemic caused
the economy to implode.
In Trumpian circles this was cause for joyous celebration – followed
by presidential bragging. A deeper dive, however, would put an end to self-congratulation.
The unemployment rate remains at 10.2%. The last time the rate was higher was March 1983, when
it stood at 10.3%.
Despite those “added” jobs, the Labor Participation Rate
ticked down, from 61.5 percent in June to 61.4 percent in July.
When an individual stops searching for work the Bureau of Labor Statistics drops
them from the ranks of the unemployed. A lower percentage of Americans are working
now than on the day Trump took office.
That didn’t stop the president from heading for his private
golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey for the weekend. Safe among his superrich
pals, there would be no need to worry about ordinary folk out of work.
*
TRUMP ALSO FOUND TIME to gather several dozen rich buds at
his resort, and invite them to a hastily-arranged press conference. There they had
an opportunity to boo members of the free press for asking questions. Both
Trump’s friends and the long-suffering reporters who follow him were treated to
another one of the president’s rambling discourses, though he did manage to say
that he was all for social distancing, mask-wearing, and regular washing of
one’s hands.
The problem, as reporters noted, was that Trump’s pals,
including children, were clustered together like grapes on the vine.
Not till the free press started tweeting out photos did Trump
aides decide to pass out masks, and only then did a few of Trump’s fat cat friends
put them on.
Meanwhile, the president said again that the coronavirus “would disappear” and don’t
you worry!
*
THE CDC REPORTED that while the president played golf and his
friends booed practitioners of the First Amendment, the nation piled up another
62,042 cases of
COVID-19.
___
8/8/20: On Saturday, Trump played his 287th roundof golf since taking office. Next to tweeting constantly, the
Big Orange Buffoon most lusts for hitting the links.
____________________
President Trump has spent nearly 30% of his time in office at
his own resorts.
____________________
Also, he loves to hang out with MAGA friends, at least those who
can afford to pay fat fees to join his private clubs. As president, Donald has
spent 382 days away from the White House at places he owns. That’s just a shade
under 30% of his time since taking charge of the nation.
As a bonus – for the
president, anyway – the Secret Service pays premium prices for agents guarding
him, when they bed down at his clubs for the weekend.
*
WHILE TRUMP was zooming around the course in his presidential
golf cart, another
54,590 Americans
were diagnosed with COVID-19 on Saturday. Another 1,064 went
to the Big Nineteenth Hole in the Sky.
*
ALSO HAPPENING while the Duffer-in-Chief was out on the
links, ignoring his job as president: Canada’s last Arctic ice shelf collapsed.
Two icebergs broke off, including one chunk of floating ice the size of
Manhattan.
According to Canadian scientists, the shelf was 4,000 years old, and at least 260 feet thick in
places. Temperatures in the Arctic this summer are nine degrees higher than the
1980-2010 average.
___
8/9/20: President Trump is spending
the weekend at his resort in Bedminster, N.J. There’s nothing on his schedule till
afternoon.
____________________
“Money affairs were to be confined to the immediate
representatives of the people.”
Benjamin
Franklin
____________________
Meanwhile, what fresh assaults has he been plotting against
the U.S. Constitution? Saturday (and this is a big one), he signed an executive
order to extend extra unemployment relief to American workers, only choosing to
reduce the amount from $600 per week to $400. This came after Democrats in the
U.S. House of Representatives argued for keeping the figure at $600.
On the other side of Capitol Hill, Senate Leader Milksop
Mitch couldn’t get his GOP band to go along, even with $400. Many favored a
less generous amount. As in $0. Despite the fact McConnell and his party control
the Senate, Trump blamed Democrats for blocking relief to hard-pressed
working folks.
That’s where the president’s most recent and brazen attempt
to usurp the U.S. Constitution commences. If you haven’t read the founding document
(and there’s no evidence that Trump ever has), the House of Representatives
alone can pass bills to raise revenue. The Senate may only “propose” amendments
to spending bills, or “concur” with revenue proposals the House sends its way. Then
they can vote approval or vote appropriations bills down.
If you believe the Constitution matters, Article I, Section
9, Clause 7 is unequivocal. The president can’t spend money unless Congress
grants it. This has much to do with the era of kings, when, for example,
one fourth of the budget of France went to support the lavish lifestyles of
Louis XIV and Louis XV, and all their royal hangers-on. That was before French reformers
cut off Louis XVI’s head.
This is an extreme method to employ to curtail excess
government spending; but it has its merits.
The
“power of the purse” rests not in the president’s hands.
The U.S. Constitution is clear. “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury,” the
Founding Fathers wrote, “but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law, and
a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public
Money shall be published from time to time.”
There was a simple reason the Founders put the “power of the
purse” in the hands of the House, not the Senate or the president. Members of
the House are up for reelection every two years. If voters are unhappy, they
can vote the rascals out. To cite Elbridge Gerry, speaking in 1787, members of the
House of Representatives would be “more immediately the representatives of the
people, and it was a maxim that the people ought to hold the purse-strings.”
Ben Franklin spoke to the wisdom of this provision. Under the
Constitution, senators were not elected by the people, but chosen by state
legislatures. Direct election came only in 1913, with ratification of the XVII
Amendment. The president was chosen by the Electoral College. Only members of
the House were voted on by ordinary citizens (white males only). For that
reason, Franklin said, “money affairs were to be confined to the immediate
representatives of the people.”
Milksop Mitch, however, has decided that he doesn’t care
about trivial details, such as the powers vested in Congress. If Trump wants to
spend hundreds of billions of dollars more, in hopes of getting himself re-elected,
and that helps Milksop get a seventh term in office, who is Mitch to block his path!
“Struggling Americans need action now,” McConnell said in a recent
statement, while taking no action himself. “Since Democrats have sabotaged
backroom talks with absurd demands that would not help working people, I
support President Trump exploring his options to get unemployed benefits and
other relief to the people who need them the most.”
Yes, “other options,” such as ignoring the U.S.
Constitution, because Mitch and his crew can’t devise a compromise.
This blogger is not averse to seeing the unemployed get the extra
money, even the full $600. That doesn’t mean we want a president who can “buy”
votes for himself, when the U.S. Constitution does not give him the power to
allocate any amounts of money he might like.
Or, really, any money.
We should also note, there was one man with courage to attack
President Trump for this blatant overreach.
That was Donald Trump,
who said, while running for office four years ago: “We don’t want to continue to watch people signing executive
orders because that was not what the Constitution and the brilliant
designers of this incredible document had in mind. We need people that can
make deals.”
*
WHILE TRUMP wielded his putter this weekend, the country
passed another grim milestone. Sunday morning we hit the five million-mark for confirmed cases of a virus that he promised
long ago was going away.
In 2016, many of us who wanted change in
the White House took a chance on Donald Trump. We thought he’d lead as a conservative
Republican. Instead, he has imperiled our republic.
We are alarmed by the anti-democratic
tactics and flagrant abuse of power committed daily by Donald Trump.
Heimlich continues:
He has
created a culture of fear within the Republican Party as well as across the
country, demonizing anyone with differing opinions. He belittles, berates, and
ruins the careers of all who oppose him — including his own appointed
government agency heads, respected military leaders and war heroes.
He has
undermined the rule of law, obstructed justice, and issued pardons and
commutations to personal cronies who helped cover up his misdeeds.
The Founding Fathers trusted no man.
___
8/10/20: The Big Ten conference, a pillar
of college football, announces that there will be no games this fall.
No one would have been surprised if President Trump had
announced that this was a “hoax” and insisted that all football players should immediately
report to practice and sneeze on each other.
In other bad news – indicating that the coronavirus is not going
away – the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that 97,000 children tested positive for COVID-19 in the last
two weeks of July. At least 25 died, proving for the hundredth time that when
Trump talks about the spread of this disease, he’s as clueless as a corncob.
Children are not, as he said recently, “virtually immune.” So, good
luck educators, as you reopen schools this month.
*
AS FOR OUR DEAR PRESIDENT, you know he was delving deep into
the details of the school reopening this weekend….
Okay, not. He got in another round of golf on Sunday, his 288th tour
of the links since taking office. I swear, I think he’s
trying to play as many rounds in one term as President Obama did in two – perhaps
realizing that polls indicate (as of now) that a second term isn’t in the cards.
*
____________________
“If 160,000 people had died on President Obama’s
watch, do you think you would have called for his resignation?”
Reporter’s
query for President Trump
____________________
AFTER A BUSY WEEKEND, Trump was back, “hard at work” on Monday.
At a press conference he talked about the challenge we faced in turning back a killer
virus. By way of excuse, he said it was a challenge unlike any seen in over a
century. “The closest thing is in 1917, they say, the great pandemic was a
terrible thing where they lost anywhere from 50 to 100 million people.” Then he
added, “Probably ended the Second World War. All the soldiers were sick.”
The White House later insisted that Trump had suffered a slip
of the tongue. He meant to say, “World War I.”
We all make slips of the tongue, of course. So we might shrug
off the date Trump provides for the Spanish flu pandemic. That pandemic
occurred in 1918, and dragged deep into the following year. But he also gets
the First World War (1914-1918) mixed up with the Second (1939-1945), and
doesn’t know enough to know that what he just said couldn’t possibly be right.
The Second World War ended the year before the poor dunce was
born. He could have listened to his dad tell stories about the war…and how he
dodged service, himself. You know. The family tradition.
As an added imbecile bonus: No historian of the First World
War has ever said the Spanish flu ended fighting because “all the soldiers were
getting sick.” The war ended on November 11, 1918, because the Allies had bled
the German military dry during four years of trench warfare. Once the U.S.
joined the war, and fresh American reinforcements began arriving in France,
Germany had no hope of winning. Over two million German soldiers already filled the cemeteries and
millions more had been maimed by wounds or disabled by lung-searing gassings.
Trump’s wrong-turn into history was prompted by a reporter
asking a “Fake News” kind of question. Here’s the exchange, per Axios:
REPORTER: If 160,000 people had died on
President Obama’s watch, do you think you would have called for his
resignation?
TRUMP: No, I wouldn’t have done that. I think
it’s been amazing what we’ve been able to do. If we didn’t close up our
country, we would have had 1.5 or 2 million people already dead. We’ve called
it right, now we don’t have to close it. We understand the disease.
The president’s answer had several major flaws, not limited
to blundering history. He was both clueless and classless – and a liar. First, he did say Obama should resign when he “mishandled” a
previous health crisis. And he didn’t wait until 160,000 died. When President Obama
allowed seven infected Americans, suffering with Ebola, to return to this
country and go into quarantine, Trump was livid. He predicted “bedlam.” He called Obama a “psycho.” He said his
predecessor didn’t care about the American people. He boiled
with anger, insisting Obama should have to “embrace” anyone who became infected
as a result of his decisions.
He said all of that and more when a total of four moreAmericans were infected in this country. He howled and ranted when two
Americans died. You’d think he’d remember and be humbler today.
Two, Trump fans. A pair of Americans died, and then-Citizen
Trump went wild with fury and hatred.
*
NEW COVID-19 cases for the day:
40,522.
___
8/11/20: The big news today: Former Vice President Joe Biden has selected
Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate. No sooner was Harris tabbed than Trump
was out with his first insult.
He immediately tagged Sen. Harris as “nasty,” which is interesting,
if you ponder his words a moment. This is a man who cheated on his third wife
and current First Lady, so he could boink a porn star. This is the
Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief talking about someone else being nasty.
It can be revelatory to consider who is “nasty” in the eyes of
Trump and who is not. The president has never called any of his authoritarian
pals “nasty.” Putin’s not such a killer, if you think about it, Trump said. Putin’s
was “a leader far more than our president,” he said back
in 2016. Sure: Putin had critics thrown off fifth floor balconies. But, hey, was
Obama even born in America?
*
AS FAR AS Biden’s running mate was concerned, Trump wanted his
loyal but fact-averse followers to be clear. Harris was a bad woman. Speaking
to reporters, the president said she was “extraordinarily nasty” in her questioning of Judge Brett M.
Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Kavanaugh? He wasn’t
“nasty,” even though he had been accused of attempting to rape a classmate in
high school. Yet his questioner was somehow nasty! She was “nasty to a level
that was just a horrible thing,” Trump said. Harris was “the meanest” and “the
most horrible” member of the committee pressing Kavanaugh to explain.
In fact, sounding a note of hypocritical concern, Trump said no one
was as mean to Biden, during the Democratic debates, as Harris. She was – lest
we miss his point – “very, very nasty.”
Here’s a simple list to
explain the Trumpian worldview:
So, there you have it, a quick listing of people Trump considers
terrible, and others he has defended, hired, or hung around with in recent
years. Greene is anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic both. Price and Pruitt had to
resign from the cabinet after wasting millions in taxpayer dollars. Paladino
made racist comments about Michelle Obama, while Higbie suggested going down to
the border and using AR-15’s to do target practice on illegal immigrants.
Nasty?
In the eye of the beholder.
ADDENDUM
Red state politicians, and Republicans, generally, like to howl about socialism
and insist blue states don’t deserve to be bailed out when they run out of
money. Today, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said he really, really hoped the
feds would send his state some more dough, to pay the tab for increased
Medicaid outlays, and to afford the mandated $400 weekly unemployment aid.
That aid was ordered by President Trump. In other words: socialism,
mandated by Trump (the employed paying taxes to help the unemployed).
And increased spending on Medicaid (socialized medicine).
Speaking of socialism: This week it was revealed that Kodak dramatically increased spending on lobbying in the months leading up to the Trump
administration providing the photographic equipment maker with a $765 million
loan.
This liberal blogger might approve of saving jobs at Kodak. Since this
liberal blogger has zero financial interests in Kodak, and neither do most of
you, it’s still a plain example of socialism.
(Kodak had spent only $5,000 on lobbying since the first three
months of 2019. Now, from April through June, they jacked it up to $870,000.)
___
8/12/20: Vice President Mike Pence,
took time out from leading the Coronavirus Task Force to comment on the new
Democratic ticket.
____________________
More
magic math, this time from Mike Pence.
____________________
Naturally, he showed up on Sean Hannity’s show, where he knew
it would be safe to throw out magic math figures without challenge. His host is
a practitioner of magic math himself. So, if V.P. Pence had said Trump had
saved 500 million American lives with his leadership during the coronavirus crisis,
Hannity wouldn’t have blinked.
What Pence did say was nearly as absurd. He claimed that in
the last three months, Team Trump had created more jobs than Obama and Biden
did in eight years.
Let’s go to the source. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, provides job
numbers every month, both gains and losses:
If we start adding jobs created in February 2017, when Pence
and Trump took over, we have,
1,924,000
jobs added (February-December 2017)
2,178,000
jobs added (2018)
2,133,000
jobs added (2019)
465,000 (January-February 2020)
__________________________________
6,700,000
jobs added
22,160,000 jobs lost (March-April 2020)
__________________________________
-15,460,000 net job loss
Then we have:
9,279,000 jobs added (May-July
2020)
__________________________________
That leaves Team Trump (and, Trump fans, feel free to check
my math) with a net loss of:
-6,181,000
JOBS.
As of this moment, in other words, V.P. Pence and “Drink
Disinfectant Donald” have created zero jobs.
0.
And that’s being generous.
Mr. Pence must have tried counting on fingers and toes, and gotten
lost around the time he ran out of toes.
*
BUT WAIT, we’re saved! President Trump has added a new face
to the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Mainly because he didn’t like
listening to the faces he already had, because they kept telling him the
pandemic was getting out of hand.
Now he has Dr. Scott Atlas by his side. Dr. Atlas’ job will
be to tell the president what he really wants to hear. Rush Limbaugh correctly noted that Atlas was there “to counter [Dr.]
Fauci.”
Or, as Bill Gates puts it, “The administration has now hired this Stanford guy who has
no background at all just because he agrees with their crackpot theories.”
One of
Dr. Atlas’ first efforts is to go on camera with BBC News, and insist the U.S.
had done a better job of handling the virus than Europe. And to prove his point
he cited statistics that no one else could verify.
___
8/13/20: We know Vice President Pence
and his boss are consistently baffled by basic math. Yesterday, Mr. Pence annulled
(see: 8/12/20) the rules of addition and subtraction while bragging
about all the jobs Team Trump has created.
Meanwhile, his boss was telling anyone who would listen that
the country was doing great, and the coronavirus was almost disappearing.
Geography also tends to confuse the president. Which means,
he was out with his latest “birther” conspiracy. Someone in the know, Trump explained
during a press conference, was saying that Democratic vice presidential nominee
Kamala Harris was not eligible to run for that high office.
De ja vu!
She wasn’t an American citizen!
____________________
“Under
the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent, she is unequivocally an American
citizen.”
Sen. Lindsey
Graham
____________________
A reporter asked Trump about the story, put forward in an
op-ed piece in Newsweek. The president replied:
So I just heard that, I heard it
today, that she doesn’t meet the requirements....I have no idea if that’s
right, I would have assumed the Democrats would have checked that out before
she gets chosen to run for vice president. But that’s very serious, they’re
saying that she wasn’t qualified because she wasn’t born in this country
[emphasis added].
Got it? “Very serious.”
Even though, “I have no idea if that’s right.”
It was easy enough to check the story – and you might think
some of his aides would – but they were busy trying to spread the story, themselves.
Harris was born in…California …in 1964.
Trump’s latest birther ploy was too stupid even for some of
his stalwart sycophants to swallow. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a prolific kisser of
presidential booty, was clear. There “is no issue as to
whether or not she is an American citizen. She was born in the United States in
1964 to parents who were legally present. Under the Constitution and Supreme
Court precedent, she is unequivocally an American citizen.”
Trump’s
defenders will say it’s a mere coincidence that the two people he said weren’t
American enough to serve in our highest offices (first, Obama, now Harris) just
happened to have dark skin.
White
House aide and pale white guy, Jared Kushner (qualified to comment on all matters
related to government, by virtue of marriage to Trump daughter Ivanka), said,
no, no, no! Trump was not being racist! The president “just said that he had no idea
whether that’s right or wrong,” Kushner told a reporter. “I don’t see that as
promoting it. But look, at the end of the day, that’s something that’s out there.
... I personally have no reason to believe she’s not.”
Yes. We see. It’s
“out there.” No idea whether that’s right or not. Who knows! Personally, Jared
has “no reason to believe she’s not” a citizen. But maybe we had better get a
look at her birth certificate.
*
FINALLY, since we’re talking about Trump and his latest
birther tricks, we should highlight the work of one reporter.
During a White House press conference Thursday, S.V. Dáte, a
reporter for HuffPost, put a question to the president.
As might be expected, Donald J. Trump had no good answer:
*
MEANWHILE, Dr. Robert Redfield warns that unless Americans
take greater precautions, we may be in for the “worst fall” ever, with coronavirus rampant.
8/14/20: I’m not going to deny that President Trump sometimes gets
policies right. It’s mostly dumb luck.
But
he does.
____________________
Trump in line for
second Nobel Peace Prize!
____________________
The
decision to stop a shipment of Iranian oil headed for Venezuela this week was a good one. The
four tankers halted by the U.S. Navy were carrying 1.1 million barrels of oil.
That sanctioned oil will be forfeit and sold, with proceeds earmarked to go to
victims of Iranian terror attacks.
At
first glance, it also looked like a good deal when Israel and the United Arab
Emirates, with U.S. diplomats pushing for an agreement, moved to normalize
relations. The UAE would recognize Israel’s right to exist. Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin “I Am Not Corrupt Up to My Eyeballs” Netanyahu would pause
annexations in the West Bank, keeping a two-state solution alive.
Team
Trump was so excited by developments that talk began of Donald Trump getting a
second Nobel Peace Prize.
National
Security Adviser Robert O’Brien appeared on Sean Hannity’s show to make the case. The president “brought forth
the...vision for Middle East peace to get an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan
back in play and he’s brought peace to Afghanistan, at least between the U.S.
and the Taliban,” O’Brien said. “We haven’t lost a soldier in Afghanistan since
February 29 in combat and we’re going to be down to 5,000 troops in Afghanistan.
And now he’s brought peace to Israel and the UAE.”
Alas, this award may prove as ephemeral as the one Trump “won”
in 2018, when he convinced North Korea to give up all its nukes.
(The North has since given up exactly 0 nuclear weapons.
Rather, they built a few more for fun.)
As always, diplomacy in the real world can be a bitch. Mr. O’Brien
seems to forget. For starters, the U.S. might be getting out of Afghanistan.
Our Afghan allies are stuck. The bloodshed is unabated. You don’t win a Nobel Peace
Prize for quitting a war you can’t figure out how to win.
Trump’s “vision for Middle East peace” also lacks an essential
component: Palestinians. They took one look at the new agreement and accused the UAE of “betrayal.”
To make that point clear, they recalled their ambassador to the Emirates
and asked for an emergency meeting of the full Arab League.
Netanyahu then cast a pall over the deal, saying that he had not
agreed to end annexations in the West Bank – only to suspend them.
*
IN OTHER NEWS, the president did manage to squeeze in a visit
at the hospital, with his ailing younger brother. Then it was off to
Bedminster, N.J. again. A round of golf, and a hard day as president was ended.
The CDC reported another 56,397 new cases of coronavirus for the
day. Friday, another 1,229 Americans died. Since the start of the pandemic, 134,397
healthcare professionals have been infected and 628 have perished. The national
tally of dead, according to CDC has reached:
167,546.
*
THE GOVERNMENT
ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE announces that the two top officials at the Department of
Homeland Security are not serving legally in their posts. Neither Chad
Wolf, the acting head of DHS, nor Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy head, has been
confirmed by the U.S. Senate, as required by the U.S. Constitution.
Cuccinelli is actually
serving in two positions, without being confirmed for either. He’s also acting
director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The virtue of ignoring
the Senate and sticking whomever you like in top roles in government (if you
can get away with it) is you could put suck-ups and sycophants in places of
power and … oh … maybe break a few laws while they ignored what you were
doing. You could reward toadies by giving them important positions and you
could just say, f**k it, and appoint your son, Don Jr., as Secretary of Defense
and appoint a banana crème pie to be the next Attorney General.
(Actually, a crème pie
might not be as bad as Bill Barr, the current occupant of that position.)
POSTSCRIPT: Sen.
Mitt Romney offered biting assessment of President Trump’s handling of the
coronavirus crisis this week. “Short
term, I think it’s fair to say we really have not distinguished ourselves in a
positive way by how we responded to the crisis when it was upon us,” he said in
an interview Friday. “And the proof of the pudding of
that is simply that we have 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent
of the world’s deaths due to covid-19.”
“And there’s no way to spin that in a positive light,” he added.
(See: 8/16/20.)
___
8/15/20: Trump spends another day as
President of the United States at his private resort in Bedminster, N.J.
He plays another round of golf.
He does make time to tell reporters he disagrees with Dr.
Robert Redfield, the man he chose to head the CDC. Wednesday, Dr. Redfield
warned that we could face “the worst fall [season], from a public health perspective,
we’ve ever had.” Trump pushed back on that assessment. “If you look at these
numbers,” he said, displaying a few deceptive charts, “they’re coming down,
very substantially [emphasis added].” He noted that many Americans are now wearing
masks. He said that was good. Then he reverted to blaming Dr. Fauci, who said,
in February, that not everyone needed to wear a mask. “And so did Dr. Redfield,”
the president added.
In
other words: Blame them for the spread. They forced him to scoff at mask-wearing
in March. April. May. June and July.
Trump
repeated himself, saying that when you looked at the numbers, and considered how
his administration has handled the crisis, “We’ve done it right.” Then he insisted,
“It’s very impressive.”
____________________
Trump could be taking some kind of mood enhancer, which would
explain his rosy view of our place in the world.
____________________
Suppose
we fact check Mr. Trump. Japan is currently witnessing what, for them, is a
serious spike in cases. Today they had 1,360. Their population is a third of
ours. We had 55,348. Germany had 1,548, and with one fourth our population you
can do the math. Belgium, with 11.6 million citizens, had 929 cases, a
dangerous increase since early July, when they were under a hundred cases most days.
The state of Georgia, with a million fewer people, had 3,273 infections. South
Korea, with 51.3 million people, had a spike
with 279 cases on August 15. Florida and Texas, with a
combined 51.7 million people, had 6,352
and 8,245 cases.
Combined,
that works out to 52 times as many.
We
can check current death rates: most people
killed by the virus, per million in population. The top ten countries in the
world, including two tiny principalities you never heard of:
San
Marino: 1,237 deaths per million (42 dead)
Belgium:
857
Peru:
789
Andorra:
686 (53 dead)
Spain:
612
United
Kingdom: 609
Italy:
586
Sweden:
572
Chile:
543
USA:
522 (we’re #1 in total deaths, with more than 167,000)
Trump could be taking some kind of mood enhancer, which would
explain his rosy view of our happy place in the world. A realistic look at the
numbers shows his handling of the crisis is not “very impressive.”
___
8/16/20: Sunday,
President Trump spent his 387th day, since taking office, at one of
the private resorts or clubs he owns. That means more than a quarter of his entire
term as president has been spent doing nothing, save for hobnobbing with rich
pals and riding around the links and cheating on golf scores. He plays golf
again: Round #291 since he became president.
*
MEANWHILE, heavily armed right-wing groups are showing up to
harass Black Lives Matters protesters. In Portland, members of the Proud Boys
used mace on opponents and fired paint balls and, reportedly, a pellet gun.
Since they were carrying AR-15s and wearing body armor, the potential for
serious trouble was clear. In Kalamazoo, Michigan, Proud Boy forces clashed
with anti-racism protesters. Several people were injured. White nationalists
showed up at Stone Mountain to confront anti-racism crowds, but only “minor
altercations” resulted.
Trump does find time, once he comes off the links, to retweet
a post by Brandon Straka. Straka, who claims to be a former liberal who has
seen the light, said of Democratic-run cities, that people should leave those
dens of crime.
“Let them rot,” Straka writes.
Trump endorsed the idea in a retweet. So, add city
dwellers to a growing list of Americans the president doesn’t care about – and
in most cases, actively hates.
BLOGGER’S NOTE (3/6/2023): Straka shows up for
the January 6, 2021, attack on Capitol Hill – designed to gift Trump a second
term in office. He gets arrested, pleads
guilty to one misdemeanor
charge and gets three
months of home detention, 36 months on probation, and takes a $5,500 hit to the
bank account.
___
8/17/20: We rarely quote Democrats to make
a case against Mr. Trump. Republican voices normally suffice, including people
Trump chose to work in his administration.
First, let’s quote the most damning voice of all, that of Donald
Trump. At present (and we realize this can change), he trails badly in polls showing which candidate voters
prefer in the coming election.
____________________
“The only way we’re going
to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”
President Donald J. Trump
____________________
You can compare numbers with previous elections if you doubt
the accuracy of such polls. Trump likes to say the numbers are rigged.
Past polls weren’t rigged. Clinton had a lead of 3.2 points in 2016, in a final average of all
polls. She won the popular vote by 2.1 points.
The average of polls four years earlier had Obama ahead by .7 of a point. He prevailed by 3.9, the
biggest polling miss since at least 1996. Obama was expected to win easily, by 7.6 points, in 2008, and did, by 7.3.
Bush 43 had a 1.5 point lead in the final polling average in
2004, and won by 2.4 points.
I am unable to find an aggregate of polls for 2000. Gallup,
however, had Bush 43 with a 46% to 44% lead with two weeks to go before the election.
In the end, Gore captured 48.4 percent of the popular vote,
to Bush 43’s 47.9%; but Bush squeaked by in the electoral vote.
None of the candidates in any of these elections, all but one
of which was much closer than this election looks (as of now) to be, ever complained,
and said the process in this country was “rigged.”
Save one. Trump may be the only candidate in American history
to complain ahead of time that an election was “rigged,” and then win (2016).
Now with polls looking ugly, he seems bent on taking a dangerous turn. If he
loses, he’s not going to accept defeat gracefully. He may not accept defeat at
all.
So it was, Monday, that we had Tin Pot Don railing against the
system. At a campaign rally in Minnesota, he was clear. He was going to win. There was only one way he could lose. “We
have to win the election. We can’t play games. Go out and vote,” he shouted. “the
e [emphasis added], or just make sure your vote gets counted,” he told a red-hatted
crowd. “Make sure because the only way we’re going to lose this election is if
the election is rigged. Remember that. It’s the only way we’re going to lose
this election, so we have to be very careful.”
You could almost image his supporters fingering the triggers
on their guns. And they have a lot of guns. The polls are rigged. He can’t
lose. Unless. Unless the vote is rigged. “The only way they’re going to win,”
he says of Biden and the Democrats, “is that way. And we can’t let that happen.”
The man is nuts.
BLOGGER’S NOTE (1/19/21): I always thought Trump
was nuts. I still didn’t realize how nuts he was till he got thumped in
November.
He lost the popular vote by more than 7,000,000
but spent the next 77 days, not counting days since he left office, claiming he
won by 10,000,000.
“What we saw week in and week out…was
terrifying.”
In an
op-ed in the Washington Post, Taylor offers withering assessment of the
man he was at first glad to serve. The “frequent follies” of Trumpian behavior,
Taylor warns, put “the safety of Americans at risk.”
“I can attest that the country is less secure as a direct
result of the president’s actions,” he adds.
If the broad strokes Taylor paints are depressing, the details reveal
Trump in all his petty ugliness. In a separate video, Taylor tells the story of
a meeting DHS officials had with the president after California suffered
through a devastating summer of forest fires. “He told
us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down [emphasis
added] from a wildfire because he was so rageful that people in the state of
California didn’t support him and that politically it wasn’t a base for him.”
Even when
Trump wasn’t plotting revenge against segments of the American people, all of whom
he was elected to serve, it was hard to keep him focused on important issues.
Taylor explains:
Top DHS officials were regularly diverted from dealing with
genuine security threats by the chore of responding to…inappropriate and
often absurd executive requests, at all hours of the day and night. One
morning it might be a demand to shut off congressionally appropriated funds to
a foreign ally that had angered him, and that evening it might be a request to
sharpen the spikes atop the border wall so they’d be more damaging to human
flesh. (“How much would that cost us?”).
Meanwhile, Trump showed vanishingly little interest in subjects
of vital national security interest, including cybersecurity, domestic
terrorism and malicious foreign interference in U.S. affairs.
Finally, he notes:
The president’s bungled response to the coronavirus pandemic is
the ultimate example. In his cavalier disregard for the seriousness of the
threat, Trump failed to make effective use of the federal crisis response
system painstakingly built after 9/11. Years of DHS planning for a pandemic
threat have been largely wasted.
“What we saw week in and week out, for me, after two and a half years in that
administration, was terrifying,” Taylor recalls in the video out this week.
That video is the work of a group of Republicans who support Joe Biden in the
coming election. For Miles Taylor, the choice is clear:
Given what I have experienced in
the administration, I have to support Joe Biden for president and even though I
am not a Democrat, even though I disagree on key issues, I’m confident that Joe
Biden will protect the country and I’m confident that he won’t make the same
mistakes as this President.
*
IN RELATED NEWS, we learn that in July 2019 both the
Republican and Democratic heads of the Senate Intelligence Committee notified
the Department of Justice that it was believed several witnesses may have
provided misleading testimony during the Russian
investigation.
Those
witnesses:
Donald Trump Jr.
Jared Kushner
Hope Hicks
Steve Bannon (see also: 8/20/20)
We do know, beyond all doubt that Jr. and Jared met with Russians
in June 2016. They did not disclose that meeting until July 2017, and only
after it became clear the free press was going to blow their cover.
We also know what Hope Hicks said on November 10, 2016, two days after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. “We are not aware of any campaign
representatives that were in touch with any foreign entitiesbefore
yesterday, when Mr. Trump spoke with many world leaders,” she claimed.
She was lying.
Blatantly.
*
WITH
CAMPAIGN SEASON in full swing, the president tells an adoring crowd in Mankato,
Minnesota, on Monday that he’s been talking to God. Naturally, God has
been answering.
“We built the greatest economy in the history of the world,
and now I have to do it again,” he tells worshippers.
COVID-19 has set him back, he admits. He eHe will
need a second term (maybe a third!) to work his magic once more..
“You know what that is?” Trump asked, referring to a disease
that has killed tens of thousands of the people he was elected to serve. “That’s
God testing me. He said, ‘You know, you did it once.’ And I said, ‘Did I do a
great job, God? I’m the only one that could do it.’”
Well, that didn’t sit well with the Lord. Trump continued, “[God]
said, ‘That, you shouldn’t say. Now we’re going to have you do it again.’” The
crowd broke out in laughter and worshipped the Golden Calf.
*
“That’s
for the evangelicals.”
SPEAKING OF: Every so often, Trump tells the truthby mistake. Today, he told
another crowd, at another campaign rally, “We moved the capital of Israel to
Jerusalem. That’s for the evangelicals.”
You would think that in foreign policy, Trump would be taking
actions to benefit U.S. security and interests. What Trump really had in mind
with this move was shoring up his religious base. “You know it’s amazing with that, the evangelicals are more excited
about that than Jewish people. It’s really – right? It’s incredible,” Mr.
Trump continued. This has something to do, of course, with the fact many
evangelicals believe that when the Jews regain the Holy Land it will fulfill biblical
prophecy and indicate that the Second Coming of Jesus is at hand.
*
WHEN NOT TALKING TO GOD, the president has a new advisor
telling him everything is going great, as far as COVID-19 is concerned. Dr.
Scott Atlas has been added to the White House team.
His main qualification for the post? He will tell Trump what Trump wants to hear, including the idea that
Americans should resume normal life, get the economy going full blast again,
and not worry about dying. For example, Dr. Atlas, has insisted we can get all
the kids back in school, and they don’t even need masks, because children
rarely get sick from the coronavirus.
Teachers? Bus drivers? Cafeteria workers? School
administrators? Dr. Atlas wants them to take their chances. Take a few germs for
the team! We know Trump won’t care how many educators – or even children – die,
so long as he gets a second term in the White House.
POSTSCRIPT:
Speaking at the Democratic National Convention, Kristin
Urquiza talks about losing her father to the coronavirus.
“His only preexisting
condition was trusting Donald Trump.”
"After
five agonizing days,” she explained, “he died alone in the ICU with a nurse
holding his hand. My dad was a healthy 65-year-old. His only preexisting
condition was trusting Donald Trump and for that, he paid with his life.”
When
the president told America this disease was going away soon – that it was no
worse than the flu – her father believed her, caught COVID-19, and paid with
his life for trusting a con artist.
___
8/18/20: If you’re not watching the Democratic
Convention, Joe Biden is now the official candidate of the party and will try
to defeat Donald J. Trump.
“I never thought I would have a president who
is a danger to national security.”
Lt. Gen. Jack Weinstein
____________________
You’ve also missed seeing former Republican
governor of Ohio, John Kasich, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin
Powell, come out in favor of Mr. Biden. Powell, a lifelong Republican, was joined
by former GOP senator Chuck Hagel, who accused the president of “dereliction of
duty.” Trump, warned Hagel, “has degraded and debased the presidency and our
country in the eyes of the world.” Retired Lt. Gen. Jack Weinstein added his
voice to the chorus. Citing his 36 years in uniform, he said, “I never thought
I would have a president who is a danger to national security.”
We have, Powell said, a nation divided, and “a
president doing everything in his power to keep it that way.”
*
Connections with Russian
intelligence assets.
IN
OTHER NEWS, the final volume of the Senate report on Russian interference in the 2016
election is released.
Most
Americans are too busy trying not to get sneezed on to consider the findings. We
will briefly note:
The
bipartisan committee uncovered the same kind of evidence found by Robert
Mueller and his investigators. There were multiple contacts between Russians
and members of the Trump campaign. Some were more problematic than previously
known. For instance, Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer, who met with top
campaign officials in a secret meeting in June 2016 (a meeting which included
Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort), had connections with
Russian intelligence assets that were “far more extensive and
concerning than what had been publicly known.”
(As we at this blog have previously noted, Ms. Veselnitskaya
fled this country, one step ahead of arrest.)
As The Hill notes, the Senate panel also found that, hostile foreign powers looked upon the Trump transition team as
an easy mark:
“Russia and other
countries took advantage of the Transition Team’s inexperience, transparent
opposition to Obama Administration policies, and Trump’s desire to deepen ties
with Russia, to pursue unofficial channels through which Russia could conduct
diplomacy,” the report reads, noting that this made the “transition open to
influence and manipulation.”
Senate
investigators also went further than the Mueller Report had, tagging Konstantin
Kilimnik, the business partner of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, as “a
Russian intelligence officer [emphasis added].” The committee labeled
Manafort “a grave counterintelligence risk” in its report.
Kilimnik
also fled to Russia before the feds could slap on the cuffs. And Manafort went
to prison.
Evidence
indicated that at least two members of Team Trump, Don Jr., and Felix Sater,
may have lied to Congress about Candidate Trump’s efforts to get a hotel deal
closed in Moscow, during the campaign. (Again, as we have previously noted,
Sater was a convicted felon with he went to work for Trump.)
Further,
the committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin was personally behind the hack and leak operation that published stolen
Democratic Party emails, which did serious damage to Hillary Clinton’s
campaign.
Trump
fans might find some comfort in knowing that the committee faulted the F.B.I.
for giving too much credence to the Steele dossier.
Also,
six of the eight Republicans on the committee happily announced that after
three years of investigations, “we can now say with no
doubt, there was no collusion.”
This is an interesting assessment, since we know
Veselnitskaya and Kilimnik are safe in Russia and will never testify.
And because Trump has always said he won’t take a pardon for Manafort “off the table” – so Manafort has
no reason to cooperate with any investigations.
And because Don Jr. refused to return to Congress and clear
up his earlier testimony until he got a sweetheart deal, including limited hours he’d have to stay on the stand, limits to
topics he’d have to address, and a promise he would never be called again to
testify about any contacts with Russians.
Top Trump allies in both the House and Senate argued absurdly
that Don Jr. shouldn’t have to come again, in the first place, because so far
no one had been able to prove he had been lying.
BLOGGER’S NOTE (12/24/20): Paul
Manafort gets an early Christmas present when the president indeed pardons him.
You could say for “services rendered.”
That is: Not ratting on Donald Sr.
___
8/19/20: President Trump might not understand the
science of climate change, or even grade school level science. He does,
however, have a bold plan to defeat the coronavirus once and for all. Mike
Lindell, the MyPillow guy, says he and Donald have talked about a new cure for
COVID-19.
Mr.
Pillow has pointed the president to oleandrin, an extract from the flowering
oleander plant, which has been shown in one non-peer reviewed study to
have antiviral properties when tested in vitro.
That
is: in a test tube.
True.
Lindell is not a scientist, per se. But if there’s a miracle cure out there,
Trump is going to hunt it down.
Real
medical experts are of the opinion that Lindell should stick to peddling fluffy
cushions. “This is really just nonsense and a distraction,” Dr. Jonathan
Reiner, a professor of medicine at George Washington University, says. “I can tell you,”
he assures Anderson Cooper on CNN, “there are millions of compounds that, when
tested in vitro, in a test tube, appear to have some antiviral activity but
that are worthless in vivo, in humans.”
Trump's new science advisor.
*
IN OTHER NEWS, the president
claimed again that the U.S. was doing great handling the coronavirus crisis.
As always, he garbled or
ignored the facts.
Trump decided to compare the situation in our country with the situation
in New Zealand. He said that country was having real problems. Cases were
exploding! Speaking at a rally in Mankato, Minnesota, he told adoring fans, “The places they were using to hold up, now they’re having a big
surge…they were holding up names of countries and now they’re saying ‘whoops!’”
“Do you see
what’s happening in New Zealand? They beat it, they beat it [the virus],
it was like front-page news because they [his media enemies] wanted to show me
something.” Well, you couldn’t show Trump anything! Not even math. He was
handling the problem with fantastic skill. The prime minister of New Zealand
was watching her people drop dead in uncounted numbers.
Maybe Trump
could send flowers.
Oleander?
A quick fact
check showed that on the day Trump compared his skills favorably with
New Zealand leadership the island nation had nine new COVID-19 cases.
Here in the
United States, we were averaging something like 50,000 cases
per day for the week.
New Zealand
has only 4.9 million people. So, if we adjust for population, we’d have to
multiply 9 x 66…
Okay. New
Zealand is doing much, much better, regardless of what Donald J. Trump might claim.
FUN FACT: Goodyear tells employees at a Kansas
manufacturing facility that they may not wear “Make America Great Again” hats
or other political gear at work.
Dictator Don attacks the company on Twitter, and calls for his fans to boycott the
company. “Don’t buy GOODYEAR TIRES - They announced a BAN ON MAGA
HATS. Get better tires for far less!” This is definitely not the preferred way
to help American business during a pandemic.
Founded in 1898, the
Akron, Ohio company is one of the few companies in this country still making
tires.
BLOGGER’S NOTE (4/3/22) A check of Worldometers, can give us some
perspective on which nations have done well, combating the spread of the
coronavirus. As of today, nearly half-a-billion known cases of the disease have
been registered. Number 1, in the world, for most infections?
Adjusted for population, we fall (thankfully) to thirteenth place, with
3,015 deaths per million population.
So far, New Zealand has suffered 70 deaths per million.
___
8/20/20: You
probably missed the story, but scientists announced
that the Greenland ice sheet lost 532 billion metric tons of ice in 2019. That
was more than twice as much as has been lost in an average year, since 2003,
when NASA satellites began taking precise. measurements.
Alex Gardner, a NASA ice scientist, called the
loss “huge” and “astounding.”
____________________
Tin
Pot Don and QAnon save the anchovies.
____________________
Greenland is melting.
This is a warning to the world; but Donald Trump
isn’t listening. Or, he is, and doesn’t care.
His solution is to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for more drilling,
because in Trumpistan, the more coal, oil and gas we burn, the better Tin Pot
Don likes it. All respect to coal miners, worried about jobs. All respect to
drillers in Texas and fracking crews in Ohio. We all want a good wage or to profit
from a good business, be it opening up new oil fields, or building windmill
farms in Iowa.
But we all live on the same globe; and the globe
we live on must remain livable for future generations.
Another problem with dirty energy is oil spills
– which could ruin the environment in the ANWR.
Look no further than Mauritania, where a
Japanese ship has run aground, spilling oil into pristine waters.
*
IF IT SEEMS to you that paranoia
has a foothold in the Oval Office, you are not in error. With Trump’s poll
numbers looking dismal, and with sensible conservatives and longtime members of
the GOP coming out against him, Trump is focused on holding his base. That
includes a depressing swath of racist and nuts.
Wednesday, reporters asked the
president about his growing support for people who believe in QAnon. If you’ve
never heard of this movement because you’re not a crackpot, adherents believe
the world is controlled by a “Deep State” cabal of satanic pedophiles. And go
figure: They’re liberals! Members of this cabal are said to sexually
torture children and harvest their adrenochrome. According to QAnon, this
substance can have hallucinogenic effects at high doses. It’s also “a
life-extending elixir.” Cannibalism
is practiced and various forms of “mind control” are involved. Hollywood elites
are behind the mind control portion of the scheme.
Jews, of course, play an outsize
role, an idea your garden variety anti-Semite is happy to get behind. George
Soros is supposedly the money man backing the child-molesting crew. Barack
Obama was a leader of the nefarious ring, and Hillary Clinton too. In 2016 rumors circulated about a child sex
slave ring, operating out of the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza joint. This
lead one well-armed fool to barge in on people tossing dough and spreading
sauce. He shot the lock off a freezer, and freed … zero children. Because there
were none. All he rescued were a few anchovies – and
for his troubles he got his dumb ass sent to prison.
The FBI has labeled QAnon a domestic terrorist threat.
Still, a growing number of people
calling themselves Republicans and running for office believe in the mysterious
“Q.” He or she, or they, is/are the anonymous,
online voice/s out to reveal the truth. Thus “Q anonymous.”
Trump has congratulated several
of these candidates on Election Day wins. When Marjorie Taylor Greene triumphed
in a congressional primary in Georgia, Trump tweeted congratulations to a “future
Republican Star.” He called her “strong on everything,” which is kind of vague – but no doubt includes her stand
against Hollywood mind control in all its permutations. He said Greene, an avid
QAnon fan, was the type who “never gives up – a real WINNER!”
All this talk led reporters to inquire
Wednesday, whether or not the president believed this bunkum. Was he helping
save children – and the world – from
Satanists, cannibals, and pedophiles?
Trump played coy. “I don’t know
much about the movement other than I understand that they like me very much,
which I appreciate,” he said. (Neo-Nazis and Klan members like him, too; but
that’s a story for another day.)
“I’ve heard these are people that love our
country.”
Then it was off to the races, with Tin Pot Don whipping the same
nag he loves to ride. “I have heard that it [QAnon] is gaining in popularity,
and from what I hear, these are people that when they watch the streets of
Portland, when they watch what happened in New York City,” Trump explained,
“these are people that don’t like seeing what’s going on.”
“I’ve heard these are people that love our country and they
just don’t like seeing it.” The protests, he meant. “So I don’t know really
anything about it other than they do supposedly like me and they also would
like to see problems in these areas, like especially the areas that we’re
talking about, go away.”
A reporter spelled out some of
the group’s beliefs and waited for the President of the United States to comment.
“I haven’t heard that,” he shrugged. “But is that supposed to
be a bad thing or good thing? If I can help save the world from problems, I’m
willing to do it. I’m willing to put myself out there.”
*
The crooks were already here.
ONE FORMER TRUMP AIDE may not
have a chance to help him with the saving or the winning of a second term.
It was announced this morning that
Steve Bannon, once a valued campaign advisor, White House aide, and proud member
of Trump’s National Security Council, has been indicted for fraud.
The irony, of course, is thick.
Bannon was a leading voice in the “law and order” movement, a key to the Trump
2016 run for the White House. People who donated to the fund thought their dollars
would go to help build Trump’s big, beautiful border wall, to keep out all the rapists
and murderers and MS-13 gang members, crossing from Mexico. Now, it seems, the
crooks were already here, using people’s contributions to pay for their own lavish
lifestyles.
Asked about Bannon’s arrest, the
president called it “a sad day.”
*
Can Vlad come out and play?
IT WAS A SAD DAY, too, for
Alexei Navalny. U.S. News & World Reportreports:
“Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, a leading critic of
Russian President Vladimir Putin, was rushed to a hospital and was in a coma…due
to what his spokeswoman said was a deliberate poisoning.”
Fingers immediately pointed at Putin, who has long history of
bumping off any persistent critic.
Still pals!
Unfortunately, Trump cares as much about poisoned critics as
he does the Greenland ice sheet. (See: 8/27/20.) He’s hoping to invite Putin to the next G-7 meeting, scheduled to be
held in this country, but currently postponed due to the pandemic. The G-7 used
to be the G-8 until the Russians invaded Crimea and started shooting up Ukraine.
Trump doesn’t care about Ukraine, or corruption in Ukraine either, no matter what he says.
At least four of the other six members of the G-7, all close
allies of the United States, oppose an invite to the murderous autocrat. Those
four: France, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Donald still ♥’s Vlad.
*
LAST BUT NOT LEAST, White
House Press Secretary “Birther” McEnany is asked
if her boss is prepared to accept the results of the coming election.
“The president has always said he’ll see what
happens,” she explains, “and make a determination in the aftermath. It’s the
same thing he said last November [last election, she means]. He wants a free
election, a fair election, and he wants confidence in the results of the
election.”
In other words, he will be
confident in the results if he wins. And you know, if he could pull a Putin, he
would.
POSTSCRIPT: The president might believe that QAnon types love
America, if not quite all the people who inhabit America, such as Jews, Muslims,
immigrants, and people of dark skin. Several Republican voices, however, are raised
in protest.
“Real leaders
call conspiracy theories conspiracy theories.”
Rep.
Liz Cheney describes the QAnon
movement as a “dangerous lunacy that should have no place in American politics.”
Rep. Adam Kinzinger sums up the secretive musings of “Q” this
way, tweeting: “Could be Russian propaganda or a
basement dweller. Regardless, no place in Congress for these conspiracies.”
Sen. Ben Sasse slams Trump, without
naming the fool. “QAnon is nuts,” he tweets, “and
real leaders call conspiracy theories conspiracy theories.”
Gov. Jeb Bush tweets, derisively,
“Why in the world would the President not kick Q’anon supporters’ butts? Nut
jobs, rascists [sic], haters have no place in either Party.”
Pence does his very best to change
the subject before finally admitting, “I dismiss it out of
hand.”
Even Sen.
Lindsey Graham weighs in. “Well,” he tells an interviewer, “QAnon is batshit
crazy. Crazy
stuff. Inspiring people to violence. I think it is a platform that plays off
people’s fears, that compels them to do things they normally wouldn’t do. And
it’s very much a threat.”
BLOGGER’S
NOTE: Navalny survives the poisoning attempt, barely. He does,
however, keep a sense of humor.
He pokes fun at
Putin again, noting that in Russian history: “There was Alexander the Liberator
and Yaroslav the Wise. Now we have Vladimir the Poisoner of Underpants.”
Sadly, this is still
Putin we’re talking about. In February 2021 Navalny is sent to a Russian penal camp in Siberia.
8/21/20: No matter how hard you try you cannot keep up with all the craziness that
click clacks from the Twitter thumbs and blah blahs from the lips of Tin Pot
Don. Nor is it possible to delineate the multifaceted ways in which the current
President of the United States threatens fundamental American values, while simultaneously
undermining our standing in the world.
____________________
Trump is bad at math, bad at geography and really bad at his
job. More and more Republicans know it and are starting to say so, too.
____________________
He’s not even good at the basics of his job. This week we had
another 1.1 million Americans file for unemployment. That kept alive a disastrous
streak of 22 weeks with at least a million new claims. COVID-19 cases did fall on
Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, a hopeful trend for all Americans. Then they spiked
again: 46,500 new cases on August 19, 44,864 on August
20, and 46,754 today.
Meanwhile, the president has been trying to make it sound
like other countries are doing just as badly – if not worse –
than we are. This week he cited New Zealand as
an example. On August 19, the island nation had six new cases. Six!!!! On August 20, they
had five. Today, they reported 11. Adjusted for population that would be the
equivalent of the U.S. having a combined 1,452 cases those three days.
Trump sucks at math.
*
IF MATH IS A PROBLEM for Tin Pot Don, geography is definitely
not his strongest subject. According to a former Trump appointee at the
Department of Homeland Security, after Hurricane Maria smashed the island of
Puerto Rico, the President of the United States floated the idea of selling the island,
and justified his plan, saying Puerto Ricans were “dirty” and “poor.” Later he
suggested a possible trade for Greenland, which would be hard to believe.
Except this is Tin Pot Don, a most ill-informed man.
We should remind Trump fans – and their
fearless, clueless, lawless leader – that
the people of Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens.
You can’t just sell them or trade them like slaves.
*
FIRES ARE BLAZING across California, as climate change
continues to heat up and dry out the Golden State. Tens of thousands of Californians
have been displaced from homes, and 771,000 acres have burned. Trump displays his usual level of empathy –
which is none. “I see again the
forest fires are starting,” he said on Thursday. “They’re starting again in
California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests – there are many, many years of leaves and broken
trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”
“Maybe we’re just going to have
to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us,” he added.
Someone should probably explain to
Trump. Eight of California’s ten worst fires have ignited this decade. Colorado
is currently fighting its second biggest fire ever. The worst came in 2002. Arizona
has a dozen active fires going, tied with Oregon. Scientists have long warned
that a hotter, drier planet would suffer more and more destructive forest
fires. See, for example: Siberia in July; “zombie fires” in Alaska in May; massive fires in Australia in January.
Climate changes is not a “hoax,”
and neither are these results. (See: NASA comments on Greenland, 8/20/20.)
*
IF YOU SKIPPED the Democratic
National Convention, you missed several touching moments. Brayden Harrington, a
13-year-old stutterer talked about how Vice President Biden took him aside when
they met, and told him to have confidence, and said he could overcome his
problem, as Biden did as a young man.
“Fundamentally good people.”
Not so touching, but still of
note: Ed Good, 95, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, a lifelong
Republican and Trump voter in 2016, said he would not make the same mistake again.
Trump, he said, was the “worst
president we have ever had.”
S.E. Cupp, a conservative commentator,
watched the DNC show and came away impressed. Having viewed a video that
focused on Jill Biden and the tragedies that have shaped her husband, Cupp had
a sudden realization. These were “fundamentally good people.” It was clear, she
said, that Joe loved this country. He loved its people. She compared him to
Trump, who she found wanting.
Our current president loves only
himself, she said. Cupp decided that was reason enough to vote Democratic for a change.
She was not alone. Cindy McCain,
wife of the late Sen. John McCain, announced that she, too, would cast a vote
for Biden. “Joe Biden,” she said, “is a wonderful man and a friend of the
McCain family.”
Daughter Megan, a conservative
like her late father, said she would also vote for Joe, one of an increasing
number of GOP regulars to have had enough of Trump. Republican mega-donor Meg
Whitman made it clear she was votingBiden. Governor Phil Scott of Vermont said he would not vote for Trump. He “would consider” supporting the Democratic
ticket, but not his own party’s leader. Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich is a “no”
and will vote the Democratic ticket.
Kasich’s announcement prompted Mr.
Maturity in the White House to erupt. “He was a loser
as a Republican, and he’ll be a loser as a Democrat,” the president fumed, even
though Kasich has no plans to turn Democrat. “Major loser as a Republican,”
Trump added. “I guess you can quote me on that,” he told reporters. “John was a
loser as a Republican. … And as a Democrat he’ll be an even greater loser.”
Trump repeats himself a lot.
A group of top Republican
intelligence officials, 73 in number, have announced that they will vote for the challenger, not for the
incumbent. This group (which is likely to grow), includes
…retired
General Michael Hayden, who served as national security director and head of
the CIA; William Webster, the only man to serve as both head of the CIA and
FBI; John Negroponte, the first director of National Intelligence; Michael
Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center; and Mike
Donley, former Air Force secretary.
Trump has demonstrated that he
lacks the character and competence to lead this nation and has engaged in
corrupt behavior that renders him unfit to serve as president [emphasis
added, unless otherwise noted]. … We have concluded that Donald Trump has
failed our country and that Vice President Joe Biden should be elected the next
President of the United States.
Former Republican congressman Charlie Dent is voting Biden/Harris in
November. He set forth his reasons, in an interview on CNN.
For me, it’s about right
or wrong. Stability vs. instability, security vs. insecurity, normal vs.
abnormal. That’s why I’m doing this because I feel that we need
to return some sense of normalcy to the function of
government. We simply don’t have that now. And that’s why I’m going
to be voting for Joe Biden for president.
There are greater
principles involved like the rule of law. We have to defend
democratic values. And I say democratic with a small “d.” A
free press, an independent judiciary. These are things that are
very important.
And the president has
been trying to undermine those things. And I think that, again,
we have to talk about broader principles here rather than just
an immediate policy victory.
Dent said there were “many
Republicans” who agreed with him. Those who have already made it clear they plan to vote for Biden,
write in a vote for someone else, or remain on the fence continue to multiply.
They include retired Gen. Colin Powell (for Biden), former GOP presidential
candidate Carly Fiorina (Biden), George W. Bush (unlikely to support Trump),
former Florida governor Jeb Bush (unsure) and Sen. Mitt Romney (plans to write
in some other name). John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor is a
hard “no” on his former boss. Sen. Lisa Murkowski is “struggling” with the idea of a second term
for Tin Pot Don. Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the Department of
Homeland Security and once a member of Team Trump, will not vote for the man
who gave him a job. Rep. Francis Rooney of Florida is also leaning toward
Biden, explaining that our current president is “driving us all crazy.” Ret.
Admiral William McRaven will vote against his party leader.
“A conspiracy of cowardice.”
Stuart Stevens, who spent four
decades helping GOP candidates craft campaigns and win, has soured on Trump
and his party, generally. He describes what he sees from leadership in todays’ GOP
as a “conspiracy of cowardice.”
Even Dan Coats, Trump’s former
Director of National Intelligence is wavering in
support for his old boss. Like those six dozen other Republican intelligence
experts who have made their opposition clear, Coats is said to believe the
current administration has damaged our national security apparatus.
Ultimately, Coats, a loyal Republican, may not jump ship.
Still, there has probably
never been an election like this in all of U.S. history, where so many members
of a president’s party think their erstwhile leader is a threat to the country
they love.
Ms. Fiorina is typical of the
best of what remains of the Grand Old Party. She calls Biden “a person of
humility and empathy and character.”
None of which, Trump is.
*
LAST BUT NOT LEAST, an
unexpected note of warning regarding the man in the Oval Office. Sources at Fox News have
reportedly revealed to CNN chief media correspondent Brian Stelter what Sean
Hannity says about the president behind closed doors.
Stelter
writes that some in the White House refer to Hannity as Trump’s “shadow chief
of staff.” It’s a position of power, but comes at cost. Trump calls Hannity at all hours, day and night. One of
Hannity’s confidants described it to Stelter as the president treating, “Hannity
like Melania, a wife in a sexless marriage.”
A
sexless marriage might explain why Trump is always so on edge, so short on
temper, so prone to lash out.
He’s
horny.
One of Hannity’s associates
says that “off-off-off the record,” the Fox News host would tell people the
president is “batshit crazy.” A second source confirmed, “Hannity has said
to me more than once, ‘He’s crazy.’”
FUN FACT: Speaking of Fox News, according to Miles Taylor, former DHS chief of staff,
Trump told top officials at Homeland Security to watch Lou Dobbs’
show on Fox “every night.”
“The president would call us and ... he would say, ‘Why the
hell didn’t you watch Lou Dobbs last night? You need to listen to Lou. What Lou
says is what I want to do,’” Taylor said.
And that is the history of the lame-ass Trump administration
in a nutshell – filled with nuts. Trump was too lazy even to come up with
policy positions of his own.
___
8/22/20: Some presidents have a moral compass. Some don’t. Harry
Truman memorized the following prayer when he was a boy, and would repeat it often
the rest of his life, and do his best to live by these precepts:
Oh! Almighty and Everlasting God, Creator of Heaven,
Earth and the Universe:
Help me to be, to think, to act what is right,
because it is right; make me truthful, honest and honorable in all things; make
me intellectually honest for the sake of right and honor and without thought of
reward to me. Give me the ability to be charitable, forgiving and patient with
my fellowmen—help me to understand their motives and their short-comings—even
as Thou understandest mine!
Amen, Amen, Amen.
We
know Tin Pot Don wouldn’t.
____________________
Pay the porn
lady, Tin Pot Don.
____________________
Case
in point, a judge has now ordered the President
of the United States to pay the court costs for Stormy Daniels, the porn
queen he paid off not to tell her story during his first run for office.
Daniels
sued in 2018 to be able to tell her tale; Trump and his lawyers sued to stop
her, and ultimately lost.
A
California Superior Court judge, where the case was heard, has ruled that Trump
must pay $44,100.
___
8/23/20: A new critic of the president
emerges. This time it’s his sister and federal judge, Maryanne Trump Barry, 82.
In secret tapes of conversations with her niece, Mary,
who wrote a book about her uncle, we hear what a family insider thinks. “He has
no principles,” his sister tells the author. “You can’t trust him
[emphasis added].” she adds, her comments based on intimate knowledge gained
over decades observing her brother. She tells Mary that Donald had someone take
his SAT test for him. “He doesn’t read,” she notes. As for his performance in
office, the president’s sister has this to say. “The change of stories. The
lack of preparation. The lying. Holy sh*t.”
HOLY
SHIT, indeed. Even the president’s relatives think he’s a conniving, lying, ill-informed
bum.
*
ALSO
TODAY, Trump gets loose on Twitter and calls the Food and Drug Administration part of “the deep state.”
He says scientists are holding up the vaccine process until after the November
election. (See: 10/6/20.)
Taylor and Neumann
hope to get 20 to 40 others to join.
____________________
“The
chair behind the Resolute Desk has always been bigger than any political party.”
Michael Steele,
former chair of the RNC
____________________
A
group of 27 former GOP members of
Congress,
of similar mind, has announced plans to fight reelection of the president. They
cite Trump’s “corruption, destruction of democracy, blatant disregard for moral
decency, and [an] urgent need to get the country back on course.”
Members
of the Lincoln Project, another renegade Republican group, have a similar goal.
Former RNC chair Michael Steele joined today. Steele explained his decision in
words that echo Taylor and others. “The chair behind the Resolute Desk has
always been bigger than any political party,” he said. “Sadly, we have
witnessed its occupant devolve into preying upon fears and resentments with
narcissism that nurtures only chaos and confusion.”
Trump, of course, will play these protesters off as supporters
of some “Deep State.” If we use our judgment, we might see them more accurately
as men and women of integrity, still guided by love of country, rooted in
principled conservatism and respect for the rule of law and the U.S.
Constitution.
*
IN ANOTHER SAD DEVELOPMENT, for the president, another staunch supporter went down in flames this week.
Jerry Falwell Jr., head of Liberty University, a most excellent Christian school,
was caught in a salacious sex scandal. It was revealed that Falwell’s wife,
Becki, had been having an affair with a much younger pool boy, and that while
they engaged in coitus, Jerry liked to watch.
Not a good look for the leader of a university based on
faith.
Mr. and Mrs. Falwell in happier times.
*
IN OTHER NEWS, the Republican National Convention is off to a
rousing start. Speaking on the first night –
and planning to speak four nights in a row – President Trump kicked off the
celebration exactly the way you might have expected. “If you really
want to drive them crazy, you say ‘12 more years,’” Trump began, as the
audience chanted “12 more years!” in response. “Because we caught them doing
some really bad things in 2016. Let’s see what happens.”
He also made it clear to his rabid supporters that they had
nothing to fear but the icy touch of reality. The Democrats couldn’t possibly
beat him. “The only way they can take this election away from us is
if this is a rigged election. We’re gonna win this election,” Trump claimed. He
added that he had never seen such record levels of enthusiasm for his
presidency.
On August 23, according to RealClearPolitics, the
president had an average approval
rating in all polls of 43.9%.
*
LAWYERS
for Eric Trump are fighting a subpoena from the New York State
attorney general, involving questions about the valuation of four Trump-owned
properties. Like any Trump, facing investigation, Eric has called this demand
for testimony a witch hunt. “This,” he whined, “is the highest level of
prosecutorial misconduct – purposely dropped on the eve of the Republican
convention for political points.”
The
attorney general’s office begs to differ. What investigators want to know, is
did Businessman Trump, now President Trump, cheat the state on taxes, or did he
cheat the banks? Maybe, both! In 1995 he bought a property called Seven
Springs, north of New York City. Trump paid $7.5 million. By 2014, when seeking
a bank loan with which he hoped to buy the Buffalo Bills, his company placed a
value on Seven Springs of $291 million. Four years later, on an ethics form required of the president under federal law, the property
was valued at $50 million.
Lower
value, lower taxes.
___
8/25/20: It didn’t take a genius to see this coming, and it won’t
take a genius to tell you President Trump won’t take the blame. Tuesday night,
a 17-year-old from Illinois, armed with an AR-15, shot and killed two Black
Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and wounded a third.
According
to sources, Kyle
Rittenhouse, the alleged shooter, was “obsessed” with the Blue Lives Matter
movement. What better way to show support for “law and order” than to join
like-minded vigilantes, travel to another state, and gun down protesters?
According to one report, Rittenhouse
was one of a group of heavily-armed men who described themselves as “armed citizens
[come] to protect our lives and property.”
Look,
we of the liberal persuasion get it. People burning down stores are a species
of idiot; but unleashing people like Rittenhouse, is not the solution.
(There’s
also no evidence the people he shot were burning down anything.)
The
young man has been charged with fleeing across state lines as well as murder. Look
for President Trump to take one of two courses. First, he ignores the story. More
likely, he offers “calming words” and attacks “Democratic mayors” for letting
criminals run amok in city streets.
*
AT
LEAST Donald J. Trump’s businesses are doing better. Federal Election
Commission filings show $2.3 million in donations to the president’s reelection
campaign have been transferred to companies he owns, to pay for rent, food, and
lodging. Since taking office, for example, Orange Leader has accepted $1.5
million in rent from his own campaign on just one property in New York City,
his skyscraper on Fifth Avenue. The Republican National Committee has paid
$225,000. The Trump campaign has also paid the Trump Organization $281,000.
*
IN
OTHER NEWS, the Republican National Convention has had a few snags. For
example, there are only so many Trump family members available to speak. And we
know his older sister is out (see: 8/23/20). So, the lineup of guests
can seem thin. You can’t get former GOP nominees for president, successful or
otherwise, to talk, because with one exception (Bob Dole) those still living
(Bush 43 and Romney), and at least two deceased (Bush 41 and John McCain), considered
Trump a cancer.
That
meant you had Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend filling a speaker’s slot, shouting into
an empty arena, as if she were talking to an audience of the deaf, and believed
volume would cure their impairment. Kimberly Guilfoyle – who probably
caused deafness in a few listeners with good ears in the process – whose parents
were born in Puerto Rico, yelled about how her parents immigrated to this
country, and how if Joe Biden won in November, America would no longer be
the haven of freedom it has always been for people like her mother and father.
Critics
were quick to point out that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory. That means Guilfoyle’s
mom and dad were citizens the moment they were born, which somehow, she
didn’t realize.
Another
speaker was Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion activist. That’s fine. People of
good conscience can disagree about that topic.
More
of a surprise are her views on voting. It turns out,
back in May, she tweeted support for “head of household voting.” She explained
that “in a Godly household, the husband would get
the final say.”
That would mean, if she and
her husband disagreed, her husband would vote for the candidate he liked. Mrs.
Johnson could stay home and make him a bologna sandwich upon his return.
This must be the Republican
Party’s idea of making it up to women for running a Pussy Grabber for
president.
____________________
The same sympathy is due to any family who loses a son or
daughter in the line of duty, as an officer of the law or otherwise.
____________________
You can and should sympathize with anyone who loses a loved
one, or who sees a loved one badly injured. For example, the family of Jacob
Blake, who was shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Or the
families of two men allegedly killed by Kyle Rittenhouse. The same sympathy is
due to any family who loses a son or daughter in the line of duty, as an
officer of the law, or otherwise.
When the RNC invited Mary Ann Mendoza, an “Angel Mom,” to
speak about her son’s death in 2014, you could understand she might have
something important to say. Her son, a Mesa, Arizona police officer, was killed
in a head-on collision in 2014, involving a drunk driver. That driver was in
this country illegally.
No one story proves a point involving millions of human
beings, but you can surely feel the mother’s overarching, unending pain. The
same for the other 30 families, on average, who lose loved ones to drunk
drivers every day, and the 10,500 stories that could be told in the United States
every year.
Then again if you are Team Trump, and you are trying to
stir hatred and fear against illegal immigrants, yeah. Pick this one
example.
Mendoza would still get a pass in my liberal book because
pain is pain. But her speaking slot was revoked when it was revealed she had
posted a link on her Twitter feed, and suggested her 40,000 followers read a story rife with anti-Semitic tropes
and horrible comments. Included in the story were selections from TheProtocols
of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic “classic” and a favorite of Adolf
Hitler.
Fans of QAnon jumped in on the thread, with comments like
these, suggesting that “malevolent Jewish forces in the banking industry are out to enslave
non-Jews and promote world wars.” It was said the Titanic had been sunk
to protect the Federal Reserve, and that every president between John F.
Kennedy and Donald Trump “was a ‘slave president’ in the thrall of a global
cabal.”
My
sympathy for Mrs. Mendoza, in regards to her loss, remains. I would think,
however, that a mother who knew great pain might not be trafficking in the same
kind of hate that led to the death of 6,000,000 Jews.
Not
that it matters much, but Mendoza also lost points in my book when I learned she
was listed as a consultant on the “We Build the Wall” project.
That
is the project, we now know, which allegedly involved a significant degree of
self-dealing and fraud.
(Not
by her.)
A
check of Wikipedia reveals her son, Brandon, was 32 at the time of his death.
He was driving home from a shift in his own car, when the drunk driver, a man
with a lengthy criminal history, and without a driver’s license, crossed the
center line. Both men were killed. The drunk had a blood alcohol level of
0.24%, three times the legal limit. R.I.P. Officer Mendoza.
Blue
Lives Matter.
And
so do Jewish lives, Mrs. Mendoza.
POSTSCRIPT: This blogger has a number of excellent
Republican and conservative friends. None, as far as he knows, are racists or
bigots. They would not be his friends if he knew they were.
“All
of the conservative, none of the embarrassment.”
Nevertheless,
racists and bigots are clearly fond of Mr. Trump. Case in point: Marjorie
Taylor Greene, running for a seat in Congress in November, and a big fan of
crazy conspiracy theories.
From the outset, Ms. Greene has had
detractors even within the Republican Party. The slogan adopted by Dr. John
Cowan, the Republican who lost to her in a primary contest, was, “All of the
conservative, none of the embarrassment.”
A
check of web archives done by NBC News revealed that Greene, running in a safely
Republican district, should win a seat, despite having promoted all manner of dangerous
absurdities. She believed the “Pizzagate” tale, which led some other dope to
shoot up a Washington D.C. pizza parlor. She posted about a “Clinton Kill
List,” which theorized that Mrs. Clinton had ordered a string of
assassinations, but the “Deep State” covered for her. In another post she questioned whether or not
a plane really crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.
When
violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, Ms. Greene did President
Trump one better, when he said there were “good people on both sides.” Greene
claimed that the white supremacists weren’t involved in the killing of Heather
Heyer and the injury to 19 other anti-hate protesters. The attack was an
“inside job,” carried out to “further the agenda of the elites.”
James
Fields, who drove the car that killed Heyer and injured the others, was
involved in an “accident,” she maintained.
Greene
also suggested recently that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was guilty of treason, noting that
the punishment is execution. Previously, she had suggested that a good way to
remove Pelosi from power would be – no, not voting her out – but “a bullet to the head.”
So,
one must wonder. Do Greene and poor deluded individuals like Rittenhouse and
Fields all drink from the same toxic fountain of neo-fascist hate?
This
blogger would argue that they do.
Greene fills her
card for Racist Bingo.
Candidate
Greene came in for fresh criticism after Politico uncovered inflammatory
videos she posted online. Not entirely a fan of religious freedom, she
suggested in one rant that Muslims should not be
allowed
to serve in the U.S. government, and that there was an “Islamic invasion” going
on. She noted that a Muslim woman elected to Congress wanted to put her hand on
the Quran to be sworn in. “No,” Greene said (clearly never having read the
Constitution.) Her description of sexual practices in the Muslim world was
textbook bigotry. I found myself surprised, as I listened, to a tape she made, that
she hadn’t claimed Muslim men had sex with camels. Wait…I am typing and
listening to her screed…She just mentioned “goats and sheep.” Greene has
suggested in the past that George Soros, a Democratic megadonor, was a Nazi in
his youth, even though Soros is a Jew. And if this was Racist Bingo, she filled
her card by saying that blacks should be proud to walk past statues of
Confederate generals, because those statues show how far we’ve come in
overcoming racism.
A story in The New
York Times added depth to what should be Greene’s shame – save for the fact the
Trump base clearly loves her.
A clear indication that Greene was more
than a dabbler in QAnon was her 2018 endorsement of
“Frazzledrip,” one of the most grotesque tendrils of the movement’s mythology.
You “have to go down a number of rabbit holes to get that far,” said Mike
Rothschild, whose book about QAnon, The Storm Is Upon Us, comes out
later this year.
The lurid fantasy of Frazzledrip refers
to an imaginary video said to show Hillary Clinton and her former aide, Huma
Abedin, assaulting and disfiguring a young girl, and drinking her blood. It
holds that several cops saw the video, and Clinton had them killed.
When Greene posted a picture of Donald
Trump with the mother of the slain N.Y.P.D. officer Miosotis Familia on
Facebook, one of her commenters described Frazzledrip and wrote, “This was
another Hillary hit.” Greene replied, “Yes Familia,” then continued, “I post
things sometimes to see who knows things. Most the time people don’t. I’m glad
to see your comment.”
Michelle Goldberg, whose last name alone
should send QAnon believers into a tizzy, describes the whole “Q” movement as “a repurposed version of
the old anti-Semitic blood libel, which accused Jews of using the blood of
Christian children in their rituals, and a cult lusting for mass public
executions. According to the F.B.I., it’s a domestic terror threat.”
Of course, Greene is not
the first nutjob on the right to demonize Mrs. Clinton, but more in a “proud”
line of nutjob thinkers.
Goldberg notes:
An attendee at the 1996
Republican National Convention told the feminist writer Susan Faludi, “It’s well-established
that Hillary Clinton belonged to a satanic cult, still does.” Running for
Congress in 2014, Ryan Zinke, who would later become Trump’s secretary of the
interior, described her as “the Antichrist.” (He later said he was joking.)
Trump himself called Clinton “the Devil.”
In
any case, when this blogger tunes in again to listen to Greene’s old tape, he
hears her say “the most mistreated group of people in these United States
today, are white males…they are blamed for everything…they’re the scapegoats…”
At
that point he can’t take any more.
Greene
insists that her old posts no longer represent her views. You can watch her story here if you
have the stomach.
BLOGGER’S NOTE: Greene goes
on to win a seat in Congress. By February 2021, she has become such an
embarrassment, that the U.S. House of Representatives votes, 230-199, to strip
her of all committee assignments. That includes one on the Education and Labor
Committee. In her own defense, Greene claims she no longer believes in QAnon.
She blames her earlier positions – that leading Democrats deserve to
die for their role in a diabolic pedophile ring – on her inability to trust the
mainstream media.
“I was allowed to
believe things that weren’t true,” she says.
Only 11 Republicans join
in the vote against her, which would seem to be an indictment of the GOP, more
generally.
___
8/26/20: While Trump supporters were worrying about Joe Biden’s
plans to “abolish the suburbs,” scientists were worrying about multiplying signs
of climate change. In a newly
released study, experts warn that 60 percent of Antarctic ice shelves
may be subject to “hydrofracturing.” Cracking in the ice will be accelerated by
melt water from the surface flowing into
crevasses and enlarging them. These ice shelves currently serve like dams to “buttress”
inland ice. If shelves collapse, inland ice flows to the sea, crumbles and
melts, and oceans rise.
____________________
The goddam Antarctic is melting. It’s more
evidence of climate change. Don’t be stupid. Do something!
____________________
These
“hoaxsters,” as President Trump might call them, published their
report
in the latest issue of the journal Nature. You can catch their drift if
you read nothing more than the first paragraph. “Atmospheric warming,” is the
cause.
If
you dive deeper, you will…okay…you won’t get most of what they’re saying
(unless you’re smarter than this blogger).
A
typical sentence:
We therefore used a
deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), the U-Net29, to identify the
fracture-like features in the relatively low-resolution, but continent-wide,
MOA imagery. We trained the DCNN with a subset of MOA imagery in which fracture
features were manually labelled (Extended Data Fig.1c).
So, let’s put it in English we can all
understand. They used sophisticated satellite images to measure melting.
The goddam Antarctic is melting. It’s more
evidence of climate change. Don’t be stupid! Do something!**
The End.
** Scientists don’t really call readers stupid. What
they really said: “If warming allows meltwater to enter the vulnerable
buttressing regions we have identified, hydrofracture-driven ice-shelf collapse
is possible, which could have major consequences for Antarctic mass [ice] loss
and global sea-level rise.”
*
SCIENTISTS
aren’t the only ones worrying about climate change and its results. A hotter,
drier California is going up in flames. Trump doesn’t care if a blue state
burns. Florida is a different matter.
Floridians
might vote for him.
Miami
Mayor Francis Suarez, a 42-year-old Republican,
doesn’t need sophisticated satellite imagery to see what’s happening to his city. (Miami is six-and-a-half
feet above sea level – or less.) He warns that it is time for his party “to stop
ceding ground on issues that are important issues to my generation [emphasis
added, unless otherwise noted].” One is immigration. The other is “the
environment.” Suarez can see with the naked eye, what is happening. “Sea level
rise,” he warns, “which is something we are seeing in our city and the
environmental impacts we are seeing … have a huge economic impact.” He says the
Republican Party “shouldn’t abandon an issue” like that.
A
little more digging, and we find a storyfrom 2017, in the Miami Herald. Trump
fans will ignore a story like this and argue that scientists – for example at NASA – are liars, and we should listen to Tin Pot Don. The story
focuses on the threat from more powerful hurricanes, fueled, as scientists have
long predicted, by higher water temperatures which turbocharge storms.
“Given what we know now about how the ocean
expands as it warms and how ice sheets and glaciers are adding water to the
seas, it’s pretty certain we are locked into at least 3 feet of sea level
rise, and probably more,” said Steve Nerem of the University of Colorado,
Boulder, and lead of the Sea Level Change Team, a NASA collaboration. “But we
don’t know whether it will happen within a century or somewhat longer.”
Trump
won’t be around to find out the answer. Future generations will. I suspect they
will rue his name.
Meanwhile,
the National Weather Service is warning residents along the Louisiana and Texas coasts to
evacuate in the face of Hurricane Laura. Expected to make landfall today, the
Category 4 storm may bring an “unsurvivable” storm surge with it, with waves 20
feet high, and waters flowing 30 miles inland. Experts warn that “large and destructive waves will cause catastrophic damage
from Sea Rim State Park, Texas, to Intracoastal City, Louisiana.”
*
PRESIDENT TRUMP is already laying the groundwork
to contest the outcome of the coming election, telling supporters that foreign
nations plan to manipulate the mail-in vote. He hints darkly that it will be
“the scandal of our times.”
“RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE
PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS,” Trump tweetedin June.
“IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”
The Office of the Director on National Intelligence responds
with this statement: “We have no information or intelligence that any
nation-state threat actor is engaging in any activity to undermine the mail-in
vote or ballots.”
The F.B.I. is also dubious: “We have not seen to date a
coordinated national voter fraud effort during a major election,” an official
said. “It’s extraordinarily difficult to change a federal election outcome
through this type of fraud alone.”
*
IN
OTHER NEWS, the Trump administration stops and starts and stops and starts new
rules on COVID-19 testing. When it comes to important policy, President Trump
has a turnstile mind.
First,
CDC issues guidelines for opening schools safely. Then those guidelines are
scrapped in the face of White House pressure. Then CDC says we need more
testing to get a grip on the virus spread. Someone in the administration puts
pressure on the scientists and, lo, CDC announces Monday that people who are asymptomatic need not bother
with tests.
You
know, as Trump says, if we didn’t have so many tests, we wouldn’t know how many
cases of COVID-19 we have.
The
same logic applies to tests for breast cancer, tuberculosis, and smallpox, one
would suppose.
When medical experts began protesting, and reporters began
asking questions, no one seemed to want to own the new policy. The people at
CDC said, hey, it wasn’t us. Contact HHS. The people at HHS said CDC did it,
not them. Adm. Brett Giroir claimed that everyone had discussed the change, and
they loved it, including Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Fauci immediately cast doubt on that statement, saying that at
the time the decision was made, he “was under general
anesthesia in the operating room [for removal of vocal nodules] and was not
part of any discussion or deliberation regarding the new testing
recommendations.”
Experts of all kinds were
baffled by the change in position. Most responded with scientific warnings. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University, was more pointed in a tweet.
“Now what the hell kind of CDC
recommendation is this? We need to be doing MORE testing, not less,” she wrote.
The Hillnoted that, “According to multiple reports, top political officials
forced the CDC to make the change.”
Krys Johnson, an assistant professor of instruction in the
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Temple University in
Pennsylvania, was blunt in response. “It is unconscionable
that recommendations, which should follow only the science, are being modified
to enable [maybe even ensure] underreporting of COVID-19 cases at this critical
juncture.”
Nor was Ms. Johnson some liberal college professor hating on
Team Trump. The American Medical Association, representing hundreds of
thousands of professionals was quick to say, in politer fashion: “HOLY SHIT!
WHOSE BONEHEAD IDEA IS THIS?”
Or to be more exact, Susan Bailey, president of the AMA, put
her group on record against the change:
Months into this pandemic, we know COVID-19 is
spread by asymptomatic people. Suggesting that people without symptoms, who
have known exposure to COVID-positive individuals, do not need testing is a
recipe for community spread and more spikes in coronavirus.
The AMA
was quickly supported by The Infectious Diseases Society, whose members called
for an “immediate reversal” of CDC’s changed position.
At
least one insider, described as “a person who works with the White House
Coronavirus Task Force,” told ABC News, “The people in the trenches are
horrified by this. It gives the impression that asymptomatic people cannot
transmit the disease, which is not true. Community spread is driven by
asymptomatic people”
___
8/27/20: The big story for today will be disaster along the Gulf
Coast, knocking COVID-19, a new round of protests over a police shooting in
Kenosha, Wisconsin, and even Donald J. Trump’s acceptance speech at the
Republican National Convention out of the headlines.
____________________
“There’s many more steps to go
down into the pit.”
Professor Ian Howat, Ohio State
____________________
Meanwhile,
a second hurricane is brewing, as more and more Republican voices are raised in
alarm, against their own party’s standard bearer, a man with no standards, save
for, “Me, Myself, and I.”
First,
Laura. Thursday night the Category 4 monster, made landfall, slamming into Texas
and Louisiana. Experts say it was the strongest storm to hit the coast in over
a century, with winds in excess of 150 mph.
(At
157, you have a Category 5 storm.)
Fortunately, a predicted storm
surge of twenty feet did not materialize; but wind damage was
“catastrophic.”
Live
coverage from the area
is compelling. It’s clear people along the coast and far inland need help. CNN describes buildings as
“obliterated,” and “chunks of the beach missing” in Creole, La. Roads along the
coast are destroyed or blocked by debris. I-10 is closed, after a ship was
ripped from its moorings and wedged under a bridge. Volunteers were trying to protect what they
could
at First United Methodist Church in Lake Charles, but with almost no roof left,
and rain coming down, it was a thankless task. Damage along the Texas coast was
extensive, but not as bad as expected, which would still mean “terrible.”
Residents along the coast are being warned that if they return to their homes,
they may face weeks without power. In Louisiana, hundreds of thousands are without power and tens of
thousands have no water, after city and local water plants were badly damaged.
Thankfully,
only a handful of deaths have been reported.
Hurricane
Laura, of course, is a harbinger of worse disasters to come. Yet, we can expect
the president in days ahead to avoid the slightest hint that scientists have
been right for years. Climate change, they have warned repeatedly, will lead to
more hurricanes, and more powerful ones.
As
always, we are aware at this blog that one data point proves nothing. The fact
this was the strongest storm to hit the region ever, tied with a storm in 1856, proves
nothing. A single data point proves nothing.
Yesterday,
of course, we covered a plethora of data points, all pointing to the same scary
conclusion (see: 8/26/20).
Today,
the Insurance Information Institute, supplies us with fresh and compelling evidence.
Analysis from 1851 to 2015, shows that during that period no hurricane ever struck the
U.S. before June. This year is the sixth in a row during which hurricanes have
formed outside of the normal season.
Simply
put, Atlantic waters are warming
significantly, and warming faster than scientists feared. (You have to be
almost willfully ignorant to miss this, as, for example, the president himself.)
Waters in the Gulf of Mexico are also warmer, “freakishly”
so, allowing storms to pick up
force as they approach landfall.
Six
years in succession – that’s significant evidence. Yet, the best we can say for
the current, clueless occupant of the White House is that he has stopped
calling climate change a “hoax,” at least on Twitter.
*
Ice that took thousands of years to form is
melting.
THE EVIDENCE continues to
build, even if the “See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil” crowd in the
White House refuses to admit it. Scientists reported this week that the Greenland ice sheet is endangered and ice that took thousands of
years to form is melting.
“We’ve passed the point of no
return but there’s obviously more to come,” Ian Howat, a professor at Ohio
State, explained. “Rather than being a single tipping point in which we’ve gone
from a happy ice sheet to a rapidly collapsing ice sheet, it’s more of a staircase
where we’ve fallen off the first step but there’s many more steps to go down
into the pit.”
Sea levels are
sure to rise, the only question being, how fast and how far in the next hundred
years? Only our grandchildren and their grandchildren will be around to find
out the result.
Some people believe in climate change. For example: NASA
scientists. Some don’t. Such
as: Tin Pot Don and the poor sods who follow his pronouncements like he’s preaching
some anti-science gospel. Still, the data points continue to accumulate.
Phoenix just set a record for most days in a year, eight so far in 2020,
with temperatures hitting 115°, and plenty of summer left. The average daily high of 107.9 degrees,
so far this summer, is another record. So is the average low of 84.2 degrees.
July went into the record books as the hottest month in Phoenix history. Death
Valley, California hit a high of 130° Sunday. Scientists believe that may be
the hottest temperature ever recorded on earth. (Two higher readings in the
1930s are suspect.)
You can find all the evidence you need to explain why the
Greenland ice sheet is melting, assuming you’re not too lazy to look. January
2020 was the hottest January, globally, ever. June 2020 was the third hottest June. You can ask the scientists at
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration if you don’t believe what a
small potatoes blogger says. The first three months of this year were the second hottest ever, trailing only January-March 2016.
The data accumulates.
*
ALSO: Don’t be a knucklehead. The science is crystal clear: Wear a
mask for your own safety and out of respect for the safety of those around you.
(See also: 7/30/20; 8/26/20.)
More than a thousand Americans have died on sixteen of the
first twenty-seven days of the month.
*
“Hurricane
Bone Spurs” is a threat to democracy.
IN
OTHER NEWS of great import, growing numbers of Republicans and conservatives
continue to warn about the dangers of Hurricane Donald, a destructive force
unlike any in our nation’s history.
His
hate-filled, hate-fueled first term in office is a harbinger of what to expect
if he secures a second.
For
the first time in U.S. history, Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, has been forced to come out and say, that the military will take
no role in settling a disputed election. “I foresee no role for
the U.S. armed forces in this process,” he told members of Congress. “We will
not turn our backs on the Constitution of the United States.”
As
in – we all have to worry about a certain orange fool refusing to vacate the
White House if he doesn’t win.
Hurricane
Laura may have pulverized the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Donald, sometimes called
“Hurricane Bone Spurs” is a threat to drown out democracy. We have covered this
story extensively if you’d care to look. We have compiled a lengthy list of retired U.S.
generals and admirals, as well as other voices from the military, outlining the
dangers Trump poses to democratic norms. We have put together the many warnings of members of
Trump’s own party. But now the chorus of alarm is growing louder, more
insistent. Today, 34 Republicans who worked on Mitt
Romney’s 2012 campaign issued a letter, in support of
Joe Biden.
They write:
What unites us now is a deep conviction that four
more years of a Trump presidency will morally bankrupt this country,
irreparably damage our democracy, and permanently transform the Republican
Party into a toxic personality cult [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted].
We can’t sit by and allow that to happen.
Jennifer Horn, former chairwoman of the Republican Party for New
Hampshire, also weighed in today. A founding member of the
Lincoln Project, another organized GOP effort to defeat Trump, she explained
her group’s support for Biden.
I mean, I’m not
trying to tell people that Joe Biden is going to be a conservative president,
but what I think is…generally true about Joe Biden, I think he’s a decent
person. And I think that he cares about the country more than he cares about
himself. And I think that those two things alone put him light years ahead
of Donald Trump for being qualified to be president, the United States.
Even several
billionaires and their wives have signed on with the Lincoln
Project because no tax cut, no amount of money you can ever make, can make up
for desecration of the U.S. Constitution.
The warnings keep
coming. “Country first,” John McCain used to say, putting partisan politics aside
to work for the common good. Now more than a hundred former McCain staffers
have signed a letter saying, they too will put, “Country first.” They will work
to elect Biden.
This effort is led by Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s former chief
aide and speechwriter. “We have different views of Joe Biden and the Democratic
Party platform – most of us will disagree
with a fair amount of it – but we all agree that
getting Donald Trump out of office is clearly in the national interest,” says Salter.
“Character matters
in our leaders.”
Finally, a group
called 43 Alumni for
Biden issues a letter, signed by 21 staffers, so
far, who worked for George W. Bush. They, too, focus on personal
characteristics more than policy, writing:
We are a group who served in George W. Bush’s
administration. We have seen the importance of leadership up close and we know
Joe Biden is the choice we need to make in November.
Character matters in our leaders. Joe Biden has proven
himself over years of public service. We have seen him respectfully reach
across the aisle, consider a different point of view and make a thoughtful
decision to benefit the nation. Joe Biden is courageous and will tell the
American people what we are facing, but will also have a plan to guide us
through this difficult time. He is someone who has endured tragedy and can
empathize with the pain of losing a loved one too soon. Joe has also
experienced parental job loss and has lived with its consequences. Joe has
faced adversity and come through it with his dignity intact. He will help us do
the same during these trying times.
Over the past four years we, as a nation, have struggled
with truth. Conspiracy theories have been legitimized and facts have been
dismissed [emphasis added]. The expertise of world-renowned scientists and
physicians have been sidelined while the opinions of pundits have been
embraced. Meanwhile, more than 170,000 Americans are dead due to this
mismanaged crisis. As a nation, we have lost our moral compass. Children should
never be separated from their parents and caged for seeking asylum in the US.
It is cruel and inhumane. We need to get back to basics: facts matter, there is
right and wrong. We can do that with Joe Biden in the Oval Office. He will
listen to and work with experts to craft and execute plans to solve problems
and ease suffering. Joe will act with integrity, he knows no other way to lead.
We can trust him.
The onslaught of insults and vulgarity we have witnessed in
recent years must stop. Our children are watching us. If we explain away
misogyny and racism as political tactics we are complicit in normalizing
completely inappropriate behavior. This is not who we are as a nation.
Americans want a successful country, but how is that possible if what we see
modeled from the White House is disrespect and outright hate?
Joe’s kindness is sorely needed right now.
*
DID
SOMEONE MENTION GOOD CHARACTER? Jerry Falwell Jr. has been having a really bad
month. And his wife Becki’s month hasn’t been any better. The purportedly
Christian couple, big fans of President Trump, continue to see their
reputations battered.
First,
there were stories about Mrs. Falwell’s affair with a pool boy, and salacious
stories about Mr. Falwell watching them from the corner.
Next, a
young Liberty University student alleged that Mrs. Falwell assaulted him one night, when he slept over at
the Falwell home. He was a friend of their son; and she treated him to a bit of
oral sex.
“She was
the aggressor,” he says.
*
IN
OTHER GRIM NEWS, another week of jobless claims and we top one million again.
Throw in people filing for relief under a special pandemic program and the
total rises to 1.6 million.
President
Trump is still predicting a “V-shaped” recovery. In a recent survey, however, economists
warn that we will not regain all our lost ground until 2022. The Economic
Conference predicts a decline in GDP of 4.9 percent for 2020. This will be followed
by anemic 2.0 percent growth in 2021.
In a second
poll conducted by the National Association for Business Economics, more than
60% of respondents agree that the U.S. economy will not recover, and reach the same level as Quarter 4 in 2019, until at
least 2022.
STOP HURRICANE DONALD BEFORE IT BECOMES
A CATEGORY 5.
___
8/28/20: The pandemic continues to rattle the economy. Fears grow that a second
wave of layoffs may be coming. MGM Resorts plans to lay off 18,000 furloughed workers, a quarter of its U.S.
workforce. American Airlines is letting 17,500 workers go. Another 4,000 workers at Booking.com will be cut in September. State
and local governments have slashed payroll, eliminating 1.2 million jobs. Moody’s Analytics warns that falling tax
receipts and rising costs for unemployment relief may force an even larger,
additional round of cuts, as many as 2.8 million.
*
____________________
“If our collective future were a movie, this week would be
the trailer.”
Camilo Mora, climate scientist
____________________
AS
AUGUST winds down, we find two storms brewing in the Atlantic, as another year of hotter waters make for
ripe conditions for hurricanes.
As for
Trump, he continues to ignore climate change – when we’re lucky – and to
denigrate the experts when we’re not. With California going up in smoke, Iowa
recovering from freakish 100 mph straight-line winds, and the Gulf Coast
smashed, evidence of trouble piles up. As NPR reports:
Climate scientist Camilo Mora of
the University of Hawaii says if our collective future were a movie, this week
would be the trailer.
“There is not a single ending
that is good,” he says. “There’s not going to be a happy ending to this movie.”
Welcome to a hotter world, humanity. It’s not going to be any
fun.
*
ALSO
TAKING A HIT: Ivanka Trump. And that hit is delivered by her aunt, on her father’s side. The
president’s sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, had already been quoted saying
her brother – Ivanka’s dad – has absolutely no principles. Now tapes surface in
which she says, like father, like daughter. “She’s all about her,” the aunt
says of Ivanka. “She’s a mini-Donald, but yet he’s besotted with her.”
In a
previous tape, she said of the president, “He has no principles. None. None. And his
base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people.
Not do this.”
*
MORE
FAMILY FUN: The president hits back at his niece,
Mary Trump, whose taped conversations with Judge Barry, have ended up in her book,
and now in public view. “Unstable,” he calls the author. He takes glee in
saying she was “rightfully shunned, scorned and mocked her entire life” by the
rest of the family. Because who doesn’t believe a person deserves to be mocked
all their life!
While
he’s at it, the President of the United States decides to trash his former
National Security Advisor, John Bolton – a man he put in that position, and who held the post for
seventeen months.
Now,
Trump says, he’s a “dumb warmonger.” And only a complete idiot would hire him
for advice.
___
8/29/20: In Portland, Oregon gunfire erupts Saturday night.
One person is killed, this time an individual wearing a “Patriot Prayer” hat,
marking him as a member of a far-right group that has clashed repeatedly with
protesters.
A
truck caravan, stretching for miles, carrying hundreds of Trump supporters, had
entered the city earlier, and clashes spread.
Almost
as if the president wanted it that way…
*
ELIZABETH
NEUMANN, who stepped down in April as assistant secretary at the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS), recently faulted the
president
for attacks on “Democratic-led cities” and his talk of lawlessness, supposedly
tolerated and even encouraged by his political foes. Neumann, a Republican,
says Trump’s words are helping fuel a potential race war. “It is completely a
sideshow to distract from the real threat and it’s extremely dangerous.”
Neumann
notes that the F.B.I. has made multiple arrests at peaceful protests in recent
months, with right-wing extremists coming in to try to stir trouble. More
Americans have been killed in the last five years, by white supremacists, she
says, than by all other terrorist groups combined.
The
greatest domestic threat we face today, she insists is “right-wing extremism,”
not Antifa.
___
8/30/20: Sunday morning, the president is up early and tweeting, his
first post coming at 4:49
a.m. In the five a.m. hour, he fires off fifty tweets and retweets. In one he
quotes a like-minded user who says a
patriot was assassinated in Portland on Saturday, that Antifa was responsible,
and that the mayor and police commissioner have “blood” on their hands. Trump
decides to “calm” the situation by calling the mayor, Ted Wheeler,
“incompetent,” like “Sleepy Joe Biden.”
The
president loses his focus at one point,
and posts a football clip, with a tweet, “Play Football Big Ten!”
____________________
“Contemplate the
meaning of freedom in their own lives.”
____________________
Then,
it’s back to bashing Democrats and protesters of all kinds, unless they’re
pro-Trump folks. A video of the truck caravan prompts him to respond, “GREAT
PATRIOTS!” in a typical all-caps Twitter
shout.
As
always, in Tin Pot Don’s eyes, only those who support him in unthinking fashion
are patriots.
His
thumbs start throbbing and he loses steam in the six a.m. hour, with only 36
more posts. Then, at 7:04 we get: “LAW & ORDER!!!” the simplistic tweet of
a simple-minded man.
As for
protesters – white guys in trucks, are considered patriots in Trumpistan. Black
guys in sports, or their white teammates and friends are no good. Team Trump
has made it clear that NBA players boycotting games should be ashamed of
themselves. “Silly,” one White House aide called their protests, just because a
black man in Wisconsin was shot seven times in the back by police. “Absurd,”
the aide added. Jared Kushner said the players should feel lucky, that they had
so much money, that they could afford to sit out games. Tin Pot Don says the
players are ruining the league.
(Jared,
the rich white guy, stirring up the Trump base against rich, African American
guys. Amazing hypocrisy.)
The protests
continue to spread. Players in a number of sports join the N.B.A. guys in
support. The W.N.B.A. players refuse to play. Major League baseball teams
postpone seven games. The National Hockey League cancels two days of playoffs,
and promises to fight racism within the sport. Tennis player Naomi Osaka sits
out a semifinal match at the
Western & Southern Open. Out of respect, all other matches are paused and
rescheduled.Nine NFL teams cancel practice. The New York Giants discuss sitting
out a game once the season commences. The Cincinnati Bengals, as a team, visit
the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a short walk from their stadium. The Center is billed as a
place where visitors can gain “insight into the struggle for freedom in the past,
in the present, and for the future” and “contemplate the meaning of freedom in
their own lives.” One recent exhibit, “Legacy of Justice Deferred,” told
the story of Ida Wells, the black journalist who battled for decades to expose the
horrors of lynching, and end a savage practice that stained the nation’s flag.
You
know President Trump has never heard of Ida Wells, and doesn’t know anything
about the history of lynching, or even why Colin Kaepernick and other players
chose to kneel in protest, during the 2016 NFL season.
You
absolutely know he’s not going to be “contemplating the meaning of freedom” in
his own life, nor in the lives of 330 million Americans. All of them – all of them
– he was elected to serve. His focus should rightly be on ensuring the freedom of
all of us, not just stirring the anger of his “patriot” pals in pickup
trucks.
Yes.
They had every right to wave the flag from the back of their vehicles and parade
through Portland.
Kaepernick
had the same right to kneel under the flag four years ago. That’s how the Bill
of Rights works.
POSTSCRIPT: Lara Kollab, an Ohio doctor, could
stand to visit the Freedom Center and do a little contemplating. She recently lost
her license to practice osteopathic medicine and surgery after a number of anti-Semitic
social media posts came to light. In one, Kollab promised to give Jewish patients
the wrong medicine, to make them die. In another, she wrote, “People who
support Israel should have their immune cells killed so they can see how it
feels to not be able to defend yourself from foreign invaders.” Kollab is
apparently a left-wing hater and nut.
On
the right-wing side, we have Sheriff Todd Wright, who gets axed from his job
after a racist rant surfaces. The Arkansas County, Arkansas officer can be heard
shouting about African Americans, and calling them “n-----s,” nine times.
Which
is precisely ten times too many.
___
8/31/20: With the coronavirus spreading
unabated the
President of the United States decides to focus on finding…what…a cure?
Nope.
He has to find a scapegoat, because saying the virus would “magically go away”
didn’t work. Claiming injecting bleach would help was stupid. Taking advice
from the MyPillow guy regarding flowers, and the Demon Sperm Lady on
hydroxychloroquine didn’t alleviate the problem.
Trump
needs a scapegoat, and Dr. Anthony Fauci is it. Once the face of the
president’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, Trump has soured on his help.
In an interview with Laura Ingraham, the president makes it clear who he thinks
deserves the blame. Would he put Dr. Fauci “front and center” in his
administration’s response to the pandemic, she asks, if he had a chance to do
it all again?
“I
disagree with a lot of what he said,” the president says. “I get along with
him, but every once in a while, he’ll come up with one [idea] that I say, ‘Where
did that come from?’” Trump wants it to be clear. He didn’t pick Dr. Fauci for
the job. “I inherited him. He was here. He was part of this huge piece of
machine.”
So, was Trump hinting that Dr. Fauci, who has served every U.S.
president since Ronald Reagan, who helped end the scourge of H.I.V., and successfully
battled to control the Ebola outbreak … was he part of the “Deep State?”
Ingraham didn’t ask, because her job at Fox News was to set
Trump up to look as good as possible.
On the final day of
August, with Donald J. Trump in charge of the whole “huge machine” of the
federal government, with Fauci merely offering advice, the U.S. hits a grim new
milestone:
6,000,000cases of
COVID-19.
*
IN A
NEW BOOK, Donald Trump v. The United States, by Michael Schmidt, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for TheNew York Times, we learn that the president once asked Gen. John Kelly to be Director
of the F.B.I. There was an opening, by chance, after the previous director,
James Comey, refused to pledge his loyalty. Comey insisted on continuing an investigation
into the actions of Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s first pick for National
Security Advisor.
Trump
fired Comey when he refused to give the pledge. Then he called Comey a liar and
swore he never asked him for a pledge.
Schmidt
now writes that Kelly turned down the offer and the pledge. “Kelly said that
he would be loyal to the Constitution and the rule of law, but he refused to
pledge his loyalty to Trump.”
(If
you can find any evidence that Gen. Kelly has denied this story let me know, by
emailing me at vilejjv@yahoo.com.)
*
IN A POLL taken by Military
Times magazine, even before this story exploded, it was clear Trump was losing support among active duty
troops. Asked in late July and early August, 49.9 percent of respondents said
they disapproved of his job performance, including 42 percent of all those
polled who “strongly disapproved.” Only 38 percent approved. If the election
had been held then, 41 percent said they would vote for Joe Biden, 37 percent
for Trump. (Another 13 percent planned to vote third party; and nine percent
said they’d sit out the election.)
___
September 1, 2020: Let’s not delude ourselves. Donald J. Trump is the worst “LAW
& ORDER” president ever.
Today,
he traveled to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where
he basically talked about how much he loved cops.
Cops,
in Trumpistan, according to this president, are essentially incapable of
breaking any laws.
____________________
The worst “LAW &
ORDER” president we’ve ever had.
____________________
Not
only is Trump the worst “law and order” president we’ve ever had, he puts Warren
G. Harding to shame. Why should we be surprised? This is the guy who bragged
about grabbing women’s pussies – because he could. That would be considered sexual
assault in a court of law.
Trump
isn’t interested in law or order. Not even common decency. He’s the man who has
two pending suits against him, filed by women, one by Summer Zervos, for defamation and sexual assault.
The other was filed by E. Jean Carroll, alleging rape. This is the guy who was accused of rape by one
of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, a 13-year-old virgin at the time of the alleged
attack, and listed as “Jane Doe” in court documents. Her claim was supported by “Tiffany Doe,” who said she witnessed four incidents of
assault by our now president, with Tiffany also admitting she helped recruit underage
girls for Epstein’s sex-abuse ring. That case was dropped in April 2017, when Jane’s lawyer
said her client “was fearful for her life.”
So, for
Donald, innocent until proven guilty, at least.
Still, you
get some sense of why the president went out of his way recently to say that
he wished Ghislaine Maxwell well. She is, of course, Epstein’s
alleged accomplice and main procurer of teen girls.
Trump
can talk “LAW & ORDER” all he wants. To use his favorite word, it’s a “scam.”
This is the gentleman who defrauded students at his university and had to pay $25
million in restitution. This is the man who stiffed undocumented immigrant
workers in the 1980s, and lost a $1.4 millionjudgment to pay them, too.
Trump and his talented
“Team of Felons.”
President
Lincoln is famous for assembling what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin calls a
talented “Team of Rivals” to serve in his cabinet. Trump will be remembered for
assembling a talented “Team of Felons.” As Citizen Trump, he had already revealed
his preferences by hiring Felix Sater, a convicted felon when Trump put
him on the payroll. It was Sater who later suggested that if they hoped to
close the Trump Tower Moscow deal in 2016, that they gift Vladimir Putin
a suite in the proposed building. It was a perk worth $50 million. There’s your “law and order.”
Putin is
a man guilty of a wide array of crimes, including bilking the Russian people
out of tens of billions of dollars. If anyone dares complain, he has them
arrested, if they’re lucky, poisoned if they persist.
On an
international front, since taking office, and even before, Trump has cozied up
to some of the bloodiest killers on the planet, people for whom “law and order”
means the authoritarian state dominates the lives of citizens, starting in the
cradle, continuing to the grave. At a campaign rally in Raleigh, N.C., in July 2016, Donald revealed
his colors. He admitted that Saddam Hussein was a “bad guy.”
“But you know what he did
well?” Trump asked the crowd. “He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They
didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. It was
over.”
It was.
It was over for more than
5,000 Kurds, mostly women and children, when the Iraqi dictator ordered his air
force to gas their town. It was over for all the brave Iraqis who protested against every kind
of human rights abuse. They were beaten, raped, and tortured, and finally murdered
in their cells.
“LAW & ORDER,” Saddam
style.
Since
rising to the highest office in the land, Trump has continued to buddy up to
the world’s worst dictators. When Bill O’Reilly warned a newly-elected
president that Putin was a “killer,” Trump showed disdain for simple justice and the rule of law. “What?”
he replied. “You think we’re so innocent?”
And it
was telling, too, that the president had agreed to sit down for an interview
with a journalist he knew as an ally, working for a network run by Roger Ailes,
Trump’s good friend.
A bizarre affinity for
monsters.
Both
men would eventually be ousted, after women who worked at Fox came
forward and made it clear O’Reilly and Ailes had long abused their power and
been guilty of all manner of sexual harassment.
Trump is
the guy who said later that O’Reilly, who had already paid several
multi-million-dollar settlements, shouldn’t have settled.
And, while
still a candidate, Trump said that he had always found Ailes to be “a very, very good person.”
Whereas
many of the women who worked at Fox News soon made clear: Ailes was a predator.
Since
taking office, Trump has shown a bizarre affinity for monsters. He has called
the murderous Kim Jong-un a “friend,” and talked
about the “very beautiful letters” Kim has sent him. Meanwhile, the North
Korean dictator has continued to slaughter his critics and starve his people. Trump
commended Rodrigo Duterte, the President of the Philippines, for the
“unbelievable job” he was doing on the “drug problem” in his country. Duterte’s
secret, according to multiple human rights watchdogs? He had his police summarily execute alleged dealers, their clients, innocent
bystanders, and political opponents who complain about his tactics. Later, Trump
defended Mohammed bin Salman, after the Saudi leader ordered a journalist
assassinated and sliced into pieces. President Trump called him a friend, too;
and he called Xi Jinping, China’s president, as
corrupt a communist kleptocrat as ever walked the planet, both a “friend” and
“an incredible guy.” Xi recently brought “LAW & ORDER” to Hong Kong.
That
is: If you are a really big fan of stifling the free press, and sending in the
military to crush dissent.
This
president doesn’t care about law and order, except when he thinks he can scare
his base, and guarantee he wins reelection. He’s the guy who has one son
fighting a subpoena, demanding he appear in court and testify in a fraud investigation.
Three of his children (Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric, again) were banned from doing
charitable work, after a pattern of questionable spending was revealed at the Trump Foundation. My favorite example would be the decision to
spend $10,000 in charitable donations on a massive painting of … Donald J.
Trump.
Crookery introduced like
a virus.
Having
made crookery a staple of his business career, Trump brought crookery to his
campaign, and introduced it like a virus to the White House. This particular
germ tended to kill honest public servants. Felons, including those who were
already felons when they were hired, those convicted since, and alleged felons,
include Roger Stone, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Gen. Michael T. Flynn,
George Papadopoulos, and George Nader. Nader was already a felon when he went
to work for the campaign, having been convicted of child sex-trafficking in
1991. He has since been indicted on additional child-pornography-related offenses.
He pled guilty and was sentenced to ten years in prison. Steve Bannon, a mastermind
of the 2016 campaign, was indicted in August, as part of an alleged fraud scheme. To add insult
to legal injury, that scheme is said to have involved stealing money from the poor
MAGA-hatted crowd who elected Trump, and thought Mexico would pay for the wall.
Innocent
until proven guilty, again, in Bannon’s case, but good Lord, do we see a
pattern yet?
Felons
stick together, like the proverbial birds, and do what felons do. Trump and
Nader helped win a massive contract for Elliott Broidy, to perform security
work for the United Arab Emirates. That contract was worth as much as $200 million. And who wouldn’t be tempted to break a few laws for that
kind of money? Breaking the law was kind of a habit for Broidy. He had already committed
a few felonies, a decade earlier. To be fair, Broidy copped to one, that felony
involving bribing four New York State officials, at a cost of $1
million. In return they granted him investment control over a huge slice of the
state employees’ pension funds.
The
crimes Trump’s campaign crew committed were many and varied. There is no record
that anyone, behind the scenes, ever talked seriously about “law and order.” Manafort
earned most of his felonies for work he performed for shady Russian and
Ukrainian oligarchs, including Oleg Deripaska, this work having been done before
he joined Team Trump. Fittingly, Deripaska, a Russian businessman, had been
banned from travel to the United States over his role in an international
money-laundering scheme. Manafort would then earn a “bonus” felony, one of
ten he piled up in court, for witness tampering during the Russia investigation.
In
fact, he was so inclined to continue waltzing down a rewarding criminal path that
the judge in his case refused to grant bail.
Roger Stone
also piled up the felonies, seven in all, including one for lying to Congress during
the Russian investigation. Then he added a cherry felony to his six scoop-sundae
by trying to intimidate a witness.
Trump’s
personal lawyer for more than a decade, Michael Cohen, racked up eight felonies.
Most were earned in service to Donald, himself. Those counts included tax
evasion and campaign finance violations, including payoffs to a porn queen, one
Playboy bunny, a Trump Tower doorman – and good god – a second Playboy bunny.
The first three were meant to protect Trump’s reputation, such as it was,
during the run-up to the 2016 election. The last payoff, a $1.6 million whopper,
went to silence a Playmate who alleged she had been impregnated by Mr. Broidy, and
keep her from talking about their affair and a subsequent abortion.
And lest
we forget: the indictment filed in Cohen’s case mentioned a co-conspirator, labeled
“Individual 1.”
Trump.
Before
moving on, we should mention two more indicted individuals: Konstantin Kilimnik
and Natalia Veselnitskaya. Kilimnik worked closely with Manafort during the time
the latter ran Trump’s 2016 campaign. In a recently-released, bi-partisan report from the U.S. Senate Intelligence
Committee, Kilimnik is referred to as a Russian secret agent, and
Manafort as “a grave counterintelligence threat.”
Veselnitskaya
famously met with Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower
in June that year. The meeting was arranged after she claimed she could offer
dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Sadly,
both Kilimnik and Veselnitskaya are currently beyond the reach of U.S. law,
having absconded to Russia.
I’m sorry this post
can’t be read in Braille.
If
there has ever been a more criminally-inclined, anti-law-and-order bunch to
lead this nation, I am not aware. And I taught American history for decades. Trump
is the first president, to my knowledge, to step in repeatedly and overturn punishments justly ordered by U.S.
military courts. He’s the only president ever to call the military justice
system a “disgrace.” Trump has repeatedly put a thumb on the scales and tried
to tip it one way or the other, something normal presidents try not to do. He
suggested two different U.S. soldiers, Chelsea Manning, and Bowe Bergdahl, were
guilty of treason, the fit punishment being execution.
He has
called for swift and harsh punishment for criminals facing
trial in civilian courts, too, and called a jury verdict he considered too
lenient a “travesty of justice.” Even before he ran for office, his “law and
order” instincts were warped and dangerous. He liked to refer to people accused
of crimes as “animals,” even though the “animals” often prove innocent. Proving
they aren’t animals.
He once
demanded death for the Central Park Five. Those young African
American men were, indeed, convicted for their part in a brutal rape and the
near-fatal beating of a white female jogger. It took years to clear their
names; but cleared they were. If Trump had had his way, five innocent men would
have been dead.
Donald
J. Trump is to “law and order” as Al Capone is to “paying taxes.” Trump has
been battling doggedly to keep his own tax records hidden from prying eyes. He
and his legal team battled all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to fight a
request for documents. That request is part of – yes – another fraud
investigation, filed by the State of New York. The Supreme Court swatted away his arguments in one case and gave only
temporary relief in the other.
Who is
this guy? Trump is the guy who pardoned one felon (Stone), because that felon never
ratted him out.
Trump
is the guy who tried to stop another felon who served him (Cohen) from writing
a book about his experiences. When that felon was released from prison, as part
of an effort to clear inmates out of cells in the face of spreading COVID-19
infection, the Trump administration ordered him back to prison, unless he agreed
to take a deal. That deal? Stop talking about the book and stop working
on it and you can remain free. Cohen refused. He filed suit. A federal judge
ruled in his favor, saying his First Amendment rights had been violated.
Look.
If you still don’t see the trend, I’m sorry my post can’t be read in Braille. Trump
showed his stripes again, when two congressman, Duncan Hunter (and his wife)
and Chris Collins, early supporters of Trump’s run for office, were indicted in
separate cases. Hunter and his wife were nailed for stealing campaign funds.
Collins got arrested and charged with insider trading.
This
prompted the president to fire off an angry tweet:
Two long running, Obama era,
investigations of two very popular Republican Congressmen were brought to a
well publicized charge, just ahead of the Mid-Terms, by the Jeff Sessions
Justice Department. Two easy wins now in doubt because there is not enough
time. Good job Jeff......
And if you’re
keeping track, those cases would represent five wins for true law and order, and
zero for Trump.
Law
& Order: 5
Trump:
0
The
list of examples to prove the central point could be continued for as long as a
diligent reader could stand, that central point being that this president cares
no more about “law and order,” or even the rule of law, than guys like Kim
Jong-un and Putin and the bone-sawing types. We just happen to be fortunate
that we live in a country where the rule of law applies, and where even a president’s
worst instincts (so far) have been checked. And those instincts are starkly manifest.
Trump
has called the U.S. system of justice itself “a disgrace.” When the lower
courts go against him, he attacks judges. He called one judge who ruled against him “a hater.” He said the
judge was biased because he was “Mexican.” That judge was born in Indiana
and went to law school in Indiana too.
The
president has insisted that an array of political foes and even critics should
be jailed, despite the fact none have ever been:
1. Charged with actual crimes.
2. Been granted trial, with a real judge, jury, lawyers for
and against, witnesses – you know, the works.
3. Convicted by a jury or plead guilty.
These
individuals would include, but not be limited to, Hillary Clinton, Huma
Abedin, a Clinton aide, financier George Soros, former F.B.I. Director James
Comey, Comey’s deputy, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok (an F.B.I. agent guilty of
“treason,” according to Trump), Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, flag
burners, Steve Rattner, a critic, and the rapper Snoop Dogg.
Trump
has even suggested that The New York Times could be guilty of treason
for printing articles he doesn’t like.
“LAW
& ORDER,” Hitler style.
In
fact, a perfect measure of Trump’s lawless instincts would be the fact that he
wanted flag burners thrown into prison. This, despite the fact the U.S. Supreme
Court ruled, in Texas v. Johnson, a 1989 case, that flag burning, just
like flag waving (which President Trump loves almost as much as he loves
banging porn stars) is just one different form of First Amendment free speech.
A closeted
authoritarian, ready to come out.
This is who and what
Trump is. He’s a closeted authoritarian, ready if re-elected to “come out,” in
all his flaming glory.
This is a president who
dispatched Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine to drum up any dirt he could find related
to Hunter and Joe Biden. Rudy is the toady who quickly lined up two men, Lev
Parnas and Igor Fruman, to help. Last October, both were chargedwith violating straw and
foreign donor bans in U.S. political campaigns. And again, we should see
patterns. We know Sam Patten, a well-connected Republican fund raiser, pled guilty to arranging for a
Ukrainian oligarch and another foreigner to
buy $50,000 worth of tickets to one of the Trump inaugural events. To do it
they used an American straw purchaser. We know Imaad Zuberi, who donated $900,000 to the inauguration fund, was
later indicted and admitted to his own series of
felonies. Among other questionable actions, which led to a charge of
obstruction of justice, Mr. Zuberi covered up the fact that at least $50,000
“he” donated came from a foreign individual.
According to CNN, Zuberi also deleted
emails related to a number of illegal transactions. Those included “a $5.8 million
transfer from a foreign national that came in around the time of his [$900,000]
political donation.”
So it goes, in the fun-house mirrors world of
Donald J. Trump. You have a president who praises a member of Congress for
body-slamming a British reporter. That lawmaker, Greg Gianforte, first claimed
he didn’t slam anyone. Then witnesses said he did. Gianforte pled guilty eventually, got slapped
with a misdemeanor, and had to pay several thousand dollars in restitution. This
was reminiscent of Candidate Trump offering to pay the legal fees for a supporter who sucker-punched
a demonstrator at one of his rallies. That man was also charged with assault – which
is perilously close to the exact opposite of being for “law and order.”
Look, this isn’t “Fake News,” just because, if you like Trump, you
don’t like what you’re reading.
This blogger simply keeps track.
So, here’s a little more of
what I know, and the average Trump voter should, but doesn’t. After Matthew
Heimbach, an avowed white supremacist, assaultedan African American woman at yet another Trump rally, his lawyer
claimed Heimbach should not be held to account. His client had “acted pursuant
to the directives and requests of Donald J. Trump,” who had been working hard
to stoke hate. When Cesar Altieri Sayoc Jr.
sent bombs to Joe Biden, Barack Obama and CNN, his lawyer asked the judge for
leniency. His client, he said, saw President Trump as a “father figure.” When
three Kansas men were convicted of plotting to blow up the
homes of Somali immigrants, who happened to be Muslim, and attack a mosque, their
lawyers also blamed the President of the United States. As one defendant’s attorney
explained,
As long as the Executive Branch
condemns Islam and commends and encourages violence against would-be enemies,
then a sentence imposed by the Judicial Branch does little to deter people
generally from engaging in such conduct if they believe they are protecting their countries from enemies identified by their own
Commander-in-Chief.
I don’t make this up. I keep track. Who was the federal prosecutor,
for example, who let Jeffrey Epstein off on a single count of soliciting prostitution
in 2008? That sweetheart plea deal, when dozens of young women had already come
forward to complain, allowed Epstein to abuse girls for another decade. That prosecutor
would be Alex Acosta, chosen by Trump to serve as his first Secretary of Labor.
This is no “law and order” crew. Can you remember which Trump
cabinet official had to resign after racking up more than $1 million in unauthorized
travel expenses and sticking taxpayers for the tab? What other cabinet member resigned
in the face of at least a dozen investigations into abuse of power, including for
financial gain? Which cabinet official still has hundreds of millions of
dollars stashed in banks on the island of Cyprus, where money-laundering is a
sport? Finally, what former cabinet member called Donald J. Trump a threat to the U.S. Constitution, and accused him of ignoring the fundamental concept of “Equal
Justice Under the Law?”
Those cabinet members would be, in order, Tom Price, Scott Pruitt,
Wilbur Ross and Gen. James Mattis, the latter the only one honest enough to
quit in disgust.
This is exactly who Donald J. Trump is. He’s not about “LAW & ORDER”
and never will be. He might scare his base into believing that he’s the only
person who can stop the rioting in places like Portland and Kenosha – and crush
legal protesting too. He won’t even admit the difference, and doesn’t
care that there is.
Just this week the president defended the actions of a young 17-year-old
man, Kyle Rittenhouse, who has been charged with murder. Rittenhouse is alleged
to have killed two Black Lives Matter protesters, and wounded a third. None, as
far as we know, were armed. But Trump has already made up his mind, which means
he pressed his thumb down hard on the scales of justice. Trump said on TV that Rittenhouse
was “violently attacked,” basing his opinion solely on a bit of tape he had
watched. Had the young man not fired, Trump suggested, “he probably would have
been killed.” So, now we know. If a teen with an AR-15, a weapon he’s not
legally allowed to own, opens fire on people without weapons, then, sure. Call
it self-defense.
And watch out for imaginary thugs on imaginary planes.
In the end, the most dangerous thug in the United States today is
the President of the United States.
BLOGGER’S NOTE: Given Trump’s warped sense of what “law and order”
really means, we should hot have been surprised when his fans rioted on January
6, and tried to stop the certification of the final electoral vote count.
BLOGGER’S NOTE #2: In fairness, we should note that Kyle
Rittenhouse was found not guilty by a jury in November 2021.
In fact, it turned out one of the three men he shot did have a
pistol.
Yet he never fired it.___
9/2/20: The stock market is on a
roll – which Mr. Trump will be happy to report. We’re racking up COVID-19
cases, too, which he’d prefer not to mention.
According to the CDC, we’re still averaging 42,000 plus new cases per
day, in the last week.
There are countries that are doing much better. Germany had 1,218
cases on September 1. Adjusted for population, that would be about a tenth of
what the U.S. is trying to cope with daily.
Italy had 975, equivalent to one seventh of the caseload we see.
South Korea had 267, a terrible day by Korean standards. Our
caseload is roughly 28 times worse.
*
APPARENTLY, the American people still aren’t too happy with the President
of the United States.
With 63 days left until the election, the polls – for Don and the
Republicans, more generally – look grim.
*
IF POLL NUMBERS look bleak, Tin Pot Don has a planto sweep to victory in November. At a campaign stop
in North Carolina, he explains that the Democrats are plotting to steal the
election. To make sure they don’t get away with their plot, he tells his MAGA
crew to be sure to get their mail-in ballots, fill them out, and send them in in
a timely fashion. Then, if “they” don’t tabulate those votes – Trump doesn’t say
exactly who the “they” are – the MAGA crew should protect their “precious right
to vote” by going to the polls in person and voting twice.
What could possibly go wrong with this brilliant plan?
For instance, suppose you mailed in your ballot with little time
to spare. On Election Day it’s still sitting in a pile to be counted. Clerks
will catch up in a few days. But you haul your dumb MAGA ass down to the polls.
It appears your mail-in vote has not been counted. Duh. You vote again.
And when “they” do tabulate the mail-in ballots later? Well,
voting twice happens to be a felony in North Carolina.
x’s2.
MAKE AMERICA FELONIOUS AGAIN.
FUN FACT – RUSSIANS: We know Trump may get a boost again, in
2020, with a little help from Russians. U.S. intelligence agencies warned
against interference designed to harm the Biden campaign in a report ready in July.
FUN FACT – MORE RUSSIANS: Trump’s political pals, in charge of
overseeing U.S. intelligence, blocked release of that report until the
free press pried the truth out of their mouths two months later.
___
9/3/20: Trump had so much fun on
Wednesday, telling North Carolina supporters to go vote twice, he thought he’d
suggest it again Thursday, in Pennsylvania. At a stopover for a rally – rallies
being the only part of the job he’s good at – the president delivered the same
message. Get a mail-in ballot. Fill it out. Send it in. On Election Day, go to
the polls. Check to see if your vote has been registered.
Then vote again, just to be safe. (See: 9/2/20.)
*
____________________
It
was the kind of fawning praise any sycophant serving any dictator in history
might have used.
____________________
IN A MINOR, yet telling story, Trump economic advisor Peter
Navarro defended himself in an interview with CNN. Allegations
of verbal abuse of staffers, particularly young females, had surfaced. That would
be bad enough. It was his own defense that added a level of extra creepiness to
the tale.
“My mission in
this administration,” Navarro said, “ is to serve as a soldier for the greatest
commander in chief ever.” It was the
kind of fawning praise any sycophant serving any dictator in history might have
used. It was the verbal equivalent of North Koreans clapping wildly, in
unison, when Kim Jong-un spoke.
And need I point
out, Trump isn’t a “commander” in any sense of the word, nor is Navarro a “soldier.”
Trump dodged service entirely, when he had a chance to lead and fight, getting
a doctor to say he had bone spurs.
In checking on Navarro,
I noticed he’s the same age as me, born in July 1949. He never served in the
U.S. military, at a time when finding soldiers to send to Vietnam got harder
every year.
“Patriots of the
tongue,” you could say.
*
MEANWHILE, the coronavirus rages. Hospitals continue to overflow.
Business operations are badly hampered. School openings are complicated, even where openings get
off to a good start. Temple University, facing an outbreak of COVID-19, decided
to send all students home. The University of Alabama is hoping to squeeze in a football
season, but 1,200 students are infected. Amtrak has announced plans to furlough
2,000 workers, as ridership evaporates. Lego sales, at least, are up 14%, with
families stuck at home. The federal government continues to spill red ink. According to the
Congressional Budget Office, the accumulated deficit will, by the end of FY
2020, equal 98% of GDP. By the end of FY 2021, we will have a pile of debt
greater than our entire annual economic output as a nation. By 2023, the CBO
warns, our debt-to-GDP ratio will be higher than it was in 1946, when we had
just gone through the Great Depression and fought one of the greatest wars in
history.
More bad news: The CBO predicts the Medicare hospital trust fund
will go dry in 2024.
The Social Security Trust Fund will be depleted by 2031.
*
LAST, BUT NOT LEAST, former Republican
governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder pens an editorial in USA Today.
President Trump, he warns, “lacks a moral compass” and “ignores the truth.”
Trump, he adds, is a “bully,” and Snyder calls it “a tragedy watching our world
suffer from one.”
9/4/20: Great news for President Donald
J. Trump! He finally has a new Coronavirus Task Force member who will tell him exactly what he wants to hear.
According to Dr. Scott W. Atlas, we’re almost out of the woods and
into the sunshine of a beautiful meadow, filled with flowers and singing birds.
And a win for his boss is coming in the next election. Dr. Atlas is telling the
president that the science of wearing masks is unclear. Children, he says,
don’t pass on the virus.
And watch out for demon sex.
No, wait, that was the other doctor Trump touted for a time. (See:
7/28/20.)
____________________
Dr. Atlas can tell you how
to fix a broken skull.
____________________
Dr. Atlas is a radiologist, who believes the government should let
the virus take its course, only focusing on protecting the most vulnerable parts
of our population. If only he will come out in favor of injecting bleach, Trump
will have found the perfect advisor to serve his needs.
Unfortunately, Dr. Atlas is not an epidemiologist. Nor is he an
expert on infectious diseases. His skill is reading X-rays and telling you how to
fix a broken skull.
All indications are that Trump’s old experts are on the outs with
their mercurial boss. Dr. Carlos del Rio
is an actual expert in infectious diseases and close to Dr. Deborah Birx, the
White House coronavirus response coordinator. He told The New York Times
that the president didn’t like the advice he was getting from Birx, or Dr. Anthony Fauci. So he dug up someone – who he watched on Fox News– who would tell him what he wanted to hear.
“And he thinks
what we’ve done is really good.”
That is: the coronavirus is going away! And
you, Mr. Trump, are doing a fantastic job in every way.
(For the perfect suck up model, please refer to
Peter Navarro, in the post for September 3, 2020.)
Sure, you might think Dr. Fauci is way more
believable than Donald J. Trump. Sure, he’s considered the nation’s
leading expert in infectious
diseases. Sure, Fauci has served six presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan,
without incident. But can he tell you if you broke your wrist?
Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams also appears
to have gone into hiding, perhaps appalled by what he has seen.
And if you wonder why Trump likes Dr. Atlas so
much, the president made that clear at a White House press briefing. “He has
many great ideas,” the president said. “And he thinks what we’ve done is really
good, and now we’ll take it to a new level.”
Earlier this week, the president sat down for a talk with that other infectious disease expert, Laura Ingraham, on Fox
News. “Once you get to a certain number [of cases] – we use the word
‘herd’ – once you get to a
certain number,” he told her, “it’s going to go away.” Trump said he thought
we’d have a vaccine soon. Ingraham noted that many people said they wouldn’t
take it. Trump said, well, he’d never had the flu vaccine, until he became
president. But the stock market was at a new all-time high, he pointed out,
with stunning irrelevance.
On Tuesday, Dr. Atlas wanted to make it clear.
He had never suggested that the U.S. work toward herd immunity. “There’s never
been any advocacy of a herd immunity strategy coming from me to the president,
to anyone in the administration, to the task force, to anyone I’ve spoken to.”
So, where did our fearless president get that idea? Maybe, Mr.
Trump is getting advice from an imaginary friend.
(Even his imaginary
friend is stupid.)
*
WHAT WE KNOW, factually, is this: the August jobs report is out,
with some good news, and some bad. Another 1.4 million Americans went back to work, as we
rebound from the pandemic plunge. That’s the good. Unemployment, however,
remains at 8.4%, and nearly 30 million workers are receiving some kind of
assistance, roughly one in five. That’s the bad.
As for the coronavirus, it’s still kicking red, white, and blue butt.
The Centers for Disease Control reports that there have been
185,092 deaths from COVID-19 in this country.
We’re a sad #1, worldwide, when it comes to loss of life.
There have been faint glimmers of hope, although Trump was wrong
again when he told Laura Ingraham the virus was going away. CDC reports that we
are still averaging nearly 41,000 new cases per day, although that rate is in
decline. Americans still find themselves in a deep hole, and unable to stop
some of their more stubborn, mask-averse neighbors from continuing to shovel.
*
FACEBOOK decides to remove a post
by congressional candidate and Georgia Peach nutjob Marjorie Taylor Greene. On
Thursday, she posted a picture of herself holding a rifle next to images of three Democratic members of Congress,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, collectively known as
“The Squad.”
Green labeled the photo,
“SQUAD’S WORST NIGHTMARE.” In her post, she went on to attack “leftists” who
“want to take this country down,” adding, American needs “strong conservative
Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip
our country apart.”
Yeah. Save America. With
guns! Facebook declared her post an incitement to violence and took it down.
On this same day, Politico
reports on three draft reports from the Department of Homeland Security. All
three, reporters explain, “describe the threat from white supremacists as the deadliest
domestic terror threat facing the U.S., listed above the immediate danger from
foreign terrorist groups.”
Oh, yeah, all three of
the congresswomen mentioned are people of color. So you might say Candidate
Green knows her base.
___
THIS POST IS PART OF A SERIES, 9/5/20, 9/6/20 AND 9/7/20,
BEST READ IN SEQUENCE.
9/5/20: Friday dawns. The nation
readies for a long, relaxing weekend, except for all the germs. It’s a new day,
which means we have fresh indications that the President of the United States is
a dick.
Jeffrey Goldberg, a reporter for The Atlantic, citing
multiple sources, has exploded a land mine under Trump’s feet. Behind the scenes,
sources told him, the president has often disparaged American soldiers, including
those who died for this country. No one knows for sure how Goldberg’s tale will
hold up; but the president is forced to play defense. Part of his problem is
that allegations in the article sound exactly like the Trump we know and
don’t love.
____________________
“Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
President Trump
____________________
Goldberg focused first in his article on a presidential visit to
France in November 2018. Trump was there to recognize the hundredth anniversary
of the end of World War I. The outlines of a similar story were discussed
around that time. Trump reportedly decided not to go through with a visit to a
cemetery outside of Paris, to honor America’s dead. It was raining, and it was
said that he didn’t want to get his hair wet.
Now the article in TheAtlantic added damning detail.
According to four sources, Goldberg wrote,
In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled
visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than
1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting
killed.
The grinding Battle of Belleau Wood (June 1-26, 1918) is still a
part of Marine Corps lore. Fresh American troops, having just entered the war, battered
weary, dug-in German defenders. The Marines had to attack six times before they
could shatter the enemy line. Fighting was hand-to-hand, with bayonets and
rifle butts. It was there in that forest that Marines earned the nickname
“Devil Dogs” from their impressed foes.
Belleau Wood.
According to Goldberg, Trump not only had no idea what had
happened at Belleau Wood, he had no idea why he was in France. Sources told the
author that at one point, the president inquired, “Who
were the good guys in this war?”
That
would be the United States, for one.
In
another blow to the president, Goldberg added depth to the story of Trump’s
well-known feud with Sen. John McCain, a war hero if ever there was one. Again,
new details were damning:
When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff,
according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not
going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to
witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing
that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides.
McCain wasn’t the only combat veteran Trump attacked when he
thought the public would never know. This story was entirely new:
On at least two occasions since becoming president, according to
three sources with direct knowledge of his views, Trump referred to former
President George H.W. Bush as a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese as
a Navy pilot in World War II. (Bush escaped capture, but eight other men shot
down during the same mission were caught, tortured, and executed by Japanese soldiers.)
Doing my duty as a blogger, to both inform and entertain, I should
add that the future 41st President of the United States had to bail out over the Pacific, where he
was rescued a few hours later by an American submarine.
An experience like that, floating for hours, hoping no sharks
found you, and hoping rescuers did? That could change a man.
“There’s no money in
serving the nation.”
Another new story involved a trip Trump took to Arlington National
Cemetery in 2017, accompanied by White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly.
Kelly’s son, Robert, 29, had been killed in combat in Afghanistan seven years
before. The intent of the visit, on Memorial Day, was for the president to pay
respects to the fallen dead of America’s most recent wars.
At best, Trump fumbled the opportunity:
But according to sources with
knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned
directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close
to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness
of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump
simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.
When the best interpretation is that you were responding in a
“ham-handed” way, at a cemetery, you have problems.
While Goldberg does not cite Gen. Kelly as a source, several people
told him President Trump is incapable of understanding why anyone would die
for this country, since there’s no financial gain.
He writes:
“He can’t fathom the idea of
doing something for someone other than himself,” one of Kelly’s friends, a
retired four-star general, told me. “He just thinks that anyone who does
anything when there’s no direct personal gain to be had is a sucker. There’s no
money in serving the nation.” Kelly’s friend went on to say, “Trump can’t
imagine anyone else’s pain. That’s why he would say this to the father of a
fallen marine on Memorial Day in the cemetery where he’s buried.”
Goldberg goes to some trouble to bolster his claim that the
president has little respect for the military, for its traditions and norms,
and for the sacrifices our servicemen and women and their families make. He closes
with discussion of Trump’s own fear of death or disfigurement. At one point, the
president tells aides to make sure veterans who have lost arms and legs or been
disfigured in war do not take part in a July 4, 2019, parade he wants to hold in
Washington D.C.
“Nobody wants to see that,” a squeamish Trump says.
World War I casualty.
*
TO SAY the revelations in The Atlantic article were a shock
would be an understatement. And the free press began digging.
Trump and all his usual enablers were forced to rush out, stand
bravely before cameras, and deny anything like what had been reported had ever
been said by Donald Trump. Why, who would think it!
Before I became a “famous” blogger, I taught American history for three
decades. I know you have to get all sides of a story. Even then, you won’t be
able to uncover the whole truth. But support for Goldberg’s claims began
building. Trump, himself, added credence when he stepped in front of cameras
Friday and proceeded to trash Gen. Kelly, who served as his White House chief
of staff for a year-and-a-half.
At a hastily-arranged press conference, Trump insistedthat Kelly – who wasn’t even cited as a source in The Atlantic
– couldn’t handle his job:
I know John Kelly, he was with me, didn’t do a good job, had no
temperament and ultimately he was petered out.
He got – was exhausted. This man was totally exhausted, he wasn’t even
able to function in the last number of months. He was not able to function. He
was sort of a tough-guy. By the time he got eaten up in this world – it’s a different world
than he was used to, he was unable to function.
Trump? In his mind, in his world, he’s a “tough guy.” Bone spurs
don’t hurt in his world, of course.
*
SUPPORTING EVIDENCE continued to accumulate. James LaPorta, a reporter
for the Associated Press, and a former Marine himself, said sources confirmed several of Goldberg’s
claims. During a visit to Arlington Cemetery, the president did ask why the
dead had served. “A senior
Defense Department official with firsthand knowledge of events and a senior
U.S. Marine Corps officer who was told about Trump’s comments confirmed some of
the remarks to The Associated Press,” LaPorta said, “including the 2018
cemetery comments.”
LaPorta.
They
performed poorly and deserved what they got.
On the other hand, the Washington Postnoted that Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, an adviser to Vice
President Pence, tweeted that The Atlantic report was completely false. “I’ve
been by the president’s side. He has always shown the highest respect to our
active duty troops and veterans with utmost respect paid to those who have
given the ultimate sacrifice and those wounded in battle.”
That helped a little, but the Post had other sources:
A former senior administration
official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak
candidly, confirmed to The Washington Post that the president frequently made
disparaging comments about veterans and soldiers missing in action, referring
to them at times as “losers.”
In one account, the president
told senior advisers that he didn’t understand why the U.S. government placed
such value on finding soldiers missing in action because they had performed
poorly and gotten caught and deserved what they got, according to a person
familiar with the discussion.
CNN was next to confirmportions of the original article
in The Atlantic. After Trump denied the entire story, including all the
punctuation marks, a former senior administration official confirmedthat Trump “referred to fallen U.S. service members at the
Aisne-Marne cemetery [in France] in crude and derogatory terms” during the
November 2018 trip to France.
Jennifer Griffin, the longtime Fox News Pentagon reporter,
was also able to confirm key claims in Goldberg’s article. “Two senior
officials” who were on the trip to France, she said, supported his assessment. Then
she exploded another land mine under the president. Trump, she was told, had called
the Vietnam War “stupid,” a statement with which this liberal blogger (and
former Marine) might agree. But Trump went too far by 7,600 miles, the distance
from San Francisco to Ho Chi Minh City. “Anyone who went,” Trump told others, “was
a sucker.” He wondered why anyone served. They couldn’t make any money. “It was
a character flaw of the president: he could not understand why anyone would
die for their country, not worth it,” one former Trump administration
official told Griffin.
It looked bad for President Trump – and that meant President Trump had to respond as
President Trump always responds. Ms. Griffin, he said, “should be fired for
this kind of reporting,” adding, “Fox News is gone.”
*
TRUMP THEN SPENT a good part of his day, playing another
round of golf, #295 since taking office, at his private club in
Potomac Falls, Virginia.
___
9/6/20: The blogger was up early
on Saturday, still disgusted – but frankly amazed – to have heard that the President
of the United States made a habit of insulting veterans and the sacrifices they
make.
Could Trump be innocent? I don’t like the man in the least. Still.
This was hard to believe. I started looking for information.
____________________
“Teach us to distrust
and despise those clamorous patriots whose courage dwells but in the tongue.”
Washington Irving
____________________
Let’s be honest, though, even if we like Trump. If he called those
who served in Vietnam “suckers,” as my older brother served, and as I
volunteered to do as a Marine, it would be perfectly in character with who he
was then and remains today . In my case, in the summer of 1969, I asked twice to
be sent, but didn’t get sent.
White privilege, I guess. My racist platoon sergeant sent a black
guy the first time, instead.
The second time, I changed my mind, after joining our battalion
football team. So, off another African American went. I’m no hero; but I was
willing to do my part. I’d even argue (as liberal as I am), that I’m ten times the
patriot President Trump has ever been or ever will be.
I even pay taxes.
At any rate, I quickly located an article about the president’s comments in Newsweek.
There was a one-question poll at the end: Do you believe the president called
U.S. soldiers “losers?” When I clicked, “Yes,” the percentages popped up.
Yes: 66%.
No: 29%.
Don’t know: 5%.
*
Trump is the limbo king
when it comes to going low.
AS I NOTED in Friday’s post, I’m a former history teacher. I would
argue that history shows Trump is perfectly capable of stooping low enough to
insult the World War I dead. He’s the limbo king of presidents. I also admit I don’t
know for sure what was said. I wasn’t in the room to hear him speak. But we’ve
all heard him talk, almost daily, for four years. We know he never hesitates to
demean and dehumanize others, whether speaking of individuals or groups.
I know his family history, which doesn’t help.
It should not surprise anyone to know that no one in Donald’s direct
line has ever served in uniform, not since Grandfather Friedrich came here from
Germany in 1885. Grandpa never enlisted. The president’s father scorned service
during World War II and never lent a hand in the fight. Young Donald proved,
during the Vietnam War, that you can’t draft a Trump, no matter how hard you
try.
Trump, of course, had already marched out for a press conference
Friday afternoon. That’s the only kind of marching he’s ever done. As I puzzled
over details Saturday, I realized he had done himself no favors when he spoke. In
an effort to prove that he would never trash the troops, he had trashed Gen.
John Kelly, a man who had served the nation for 43 years, and who reluctantly agreed
to serve as Trump’s White House chief of staff in the summer of 2017.
Kelly didn’t want that job. Who would? He agreed because he thought he could bring order to chaos in the White House. According to friends, he agreed
to serve out of a sense of soldierly duty.
I kept checking for information. I learned that no one had to
draft Kelly to convince him to put on a uniform. In 1970, when he was 20, he enlisted
in the Marines. He got lucky, as I did, and was released from active duty early,
under a special program for Marines who wanted to go to college.
Kelly was never shot at in Vietnam.
He went back to school, graduated, and in 1975 rejoined the
Marines, as a young second lieutenant. He rose steadily in the ranks, and was
promoted to brigadier general while in Iraq. In April 2003 he led Task Force
Tripoli north for an attack on Baghdad, and got shot at for real.
*
“They were not anonymous to
her.”
I STILL didn’t know, with military precision, what Trump had said about
veterans behind closed doors. I do know he didn’t help his position Saturday, when
he started howling about Jennifer Griffin, Fox News national security
correspondent. Griffin defended her original reporting, which backed up the
Goldberg story. Now she insisted she had “impeccable” sources. She noted that
while her sources were “anonymous” for publication, they were not anonymous to
her. She knew these men or women. They were credible witnesses who said they had
heard what Trump said. Trump screamed even louder. He demanded, again, that she
be fired.
Later, he went lower still, calling reporters who were pursuing the
story, and backing up Goldberg, “animals.”
(Trump is no fan of the free press, repeatedly insisting that his
critics should be fired. See, for example, Jemele Hill.)
I kept checking. At least seven Fox News journalists defended Griffin, citing her careful
reporting in the past. “Jennifer Griffin
is the kind of reporter we all strive to be like,” said one colleague. “She’s
courageous, smart, ethical, fair and a class act. She’s earned the trust of
viewers throughout a distinguished career and is credible.”
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois
Republican who served with the Air Force in Afghanistan and Iraq, made it clear
where he stood. “She’s one of my favorite reporters. Fair and unafraid,” he
said of Griffin.
I still didn’t “know” what Trump said in a room where I wasn’t present.
And to be honest, I discounted most of what his defenders said. I’d argue that they
are, generally speaking, as sorry a crew of bootlickers as ever graced the
White House. Mick Mulvaney? Sarah Sanders? “Birther” McEnany?
Please.
By far, the best defense of the president I saw on Saturday
came from a veteran named Joe Kent. He’s a former U.S. Army officer, and a Gold
Star husband. His wife Shannon was killed by a suicide bomber in Syria last
year, while helping in the fight against ISIS. His pain, if you read his story,
is palpable. The sacrifices his wife made – that he made – that their children
made – are immense.
For a nearly mirror-opposite response, the story of Kelly Martin, a former
Marine, and her partner Gunnery Sgt. Diego Ponga – also killed in combat – is equally
good.
I can’t image ever calling a man like Kent, or his deceased wife,
a “sucker” for serving. But my problem is that I can imagine Trump.
That’s exactly who the f**k
Donald Trump is.
I know, recently, what Trump did to a decorated combat veteran,
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. He blocked a promotion the U.S. Army said Vindman had
earned, because he could not forgive a hero, whose testimony under oath,
called his behavior as president into question. Vindman had told a
congressional panel he came forth to testify, out of a sense of duty. He warned
that Trump had put U.S. security at risk by refusing timely military assistance
to Ukraine.
Vindman was never accused of perjury. But he was soon out,
resigning from the army after 21 years.
Roger Stone, who perjured himself to protect Trump, and
earned seven felony convictions in the process, never put on the uniform. He still
got a pardon from his pal.
That’s who Trump is. That’s exactly who the f**k Donald Trump is.
In any situation, if it’s to his benefit, he will go low.
What else led me to believe Trump could go as low as Goldberg and
Griffin and others had reported? I also knew that in the fight against ISIS, in
which Shannon Kent was killed, almost all the dead on our side were Kurds. We
armed and trained them and backed them with air and artillery support. The
Kurds did virtually all of the fighting on the ground, and lost an estimated 11,000 dead. Each
lost warrior was no doubt as loved by their families as Shannon Kent by hers. When
ISIS was crushed, President Trump bragged about what he had accomplished.
Then he pulled U.S. forces out of Syria, almost on a whim.
He allowed the Turks – historic and bitter enemies of the Kurds – to
storm into Syria. He betrayed, by far, our most loyal allies in the region.
Then he showed who he was and what he truly valued. He left 800 American
soldiers behind, because, as he made repeatedly clear, he wanted some Syrian oil.
“We’re keeping the oil,” Trump told an audience of police chiefs last October. “I’ve always said
that – keep the oil. We
want to keep the oil, $45 million a month. Keep the oil. We’ve secured the oil.”
If he had the oil, a lake of spilled Kurdish blood wouldn’t bother
him a bit.
Of course, he’d have no idea why Marines died in 1918. He’d never
understand why pilots flew into danger in 1944 or 1967. He’d have no earthly
idea why Gen. Kelly’s son was willing to fight and die in Afghanistan in 2010. All
he will ever really understand is piling up cash.
*
A fourth generation of no service
to country.
CAN I SAY, without a scintilla of doubt, that Trump did call
Marines, buried in France, “losers?” I cannot, until anonymous sources come
forth. I do know he screwed the Kurds and never looked back. I know what he has
said about our closest allies, who have fought by our side. When he thought other
NATO countries weren’t paying their fair share for defense, he denigrated their
contributions. Never once did he salute the thousands of British, French,
German, Italian, Canadian, and others, who were killed or wounded in
Afghanistan after we were attacked on 9/11. Allied dead, alone, numbered
1,147. A total of 130,000 soldiers from fifty partner nations
served there, so no Trump ever had to get bloody.
Not Don Jr.
Not Eric.
Not Ivanka.
And not Tiffany, the nicest Trump.
A fourth generation of no service to country, at all.
Do I believe in my soul that Trump called dead U.S. troops
“losers,” and referred to those who served in Vietnam as “suckers?” I do. I
know he once suggested that avoiding STD’s was
his “personal Vietnam.” Vaginas, he told radio Howard Stern, were “potential
landmines” he might step on with bone spur feet.
Having bragged about the many women he bedded, he added, “I feel like a great and
very brave soldier.”
Sadly, he probably did.
I think I know exactly who Trump is – a terrible human being – not
just a really terrible president. In the past, I listened to him torch Special
Counsel Robert Mueller again and again, and question his love of country. Mueller,
too, was a decorated combat veteran, who fought in Vietnam. He shed blood
while Trump was limping around the ski slopes at Aspen, with sore feet.
Like most Americans, I was shocked when Trump trashed John McCain,
and said a man who had been held prisoner for five years and tortured was no
hero. At one point, he called McCain a “loser” because enemy gunners shot his
jet out of the sky and said he liked people who “didn’t get shot down.”
Then, this weekend, he denied he ever called McCain a “loser,”
although the tapes showed he did.
I was shocked again when he attacked the Gold Star mother of Captain
Humayun Khan, who died in combat. Trump implied that her Muslim faith made her
suspect, although her son’s faith didn’t keep him from fighting under our flag.
And again, I was horrified when Trump picked a fight with Myeshia Johnson, a
Gold Star widow, after her husband was killed during a fight against
ISIS-backed forces in Niger, in 2017.
I thought any of those attacks were proof enough that a man like
Trump would go low at every chance, and go lower and lower again.
“It’s just the way he speaks, he can sound like an asshole.”
Nor am I alone in thinking as I do. Business Insider quoted
two sources, supportive of the story
in The Atlantic. One former senior White House official said comments
attributed to Trump, in that article, clearly resembled his speech patterns,
and were “consistent with who he is.” A second source agreed. “I’ve known
Donald Trump. It sounds like him. They’re consistent with things that he’s
said.”
The Daily Beast also did some digging, and found eleven
individuals willing to defend the president – in a weird sort of way. Had they
ever heard him make callous comments about our troops?
Well, yes.
But that, they said, was because he hated the wars they had to
fight, not the warriors. “The president means no disrespect to our troops; it’s just that the way
he speaks, he can sound like an asshole sometimes,” one current senior
administration official explained. “That’s how he is [when the cameras are
off]… It’s his style.”
I can agree with that. When I hear Trump speak, I almost always
think: His style is to sound like an asshole.
Three of Trump’s defenders admitted that the story about
Trump, at the graveside of Gen. Kelly’s dead son, rang true. Trump could be tactless,
even when talking about those who had died since 9/11. “This,” The Daily
Beast said sources told them, “included the president mentioning that their
service in these war zones [Afghanistan and Iraq] was a ‘waste,’ or that U.S.
military personnel in these conflicts had ‘died for nothing,’ or that the
fallen ‘should have been doing something else.’”
Yeah, “something else,”
would have been good.
Not dying comes to mind.
POSTSCRIPT: Writing in the British
newspaper, The Guardian, Robert McCrum admits his fiery love affair with America – with the promise of
what America could be – has been banked, possibly forever.
“An
orange monster, half-clown, half-tyrant.”
It saddens him, he explains, to have to “watch the
disintegration of a great society under the leadership of an orange monster,
half-clown, half-tyrant.”
McCrum adds:
I have always loved America for
its language, the snap of Twain or Lincoln and the sonorities of Douglass and
Melville. First and last, it’s a society built of words and ideas, those uplifting
expressions of reason and the pursuit of happiness, that quest for “a more
perfect union”, the new world’s dream.
Now the language is reduced to angry, semi-literate tweets,
the vocabulary suitable for a sixth grader, the only happiness to be pursued being
whatever makes the Narcissist-in-Chief smile.
___
9/7/20: Having gone golfing on
Saturday, and having golfed avidly on Sunday, and having worked his Twitter thumbs
to exhaustion (70 Twitter posts on Sunday, alone), Trump hunkered down at the
White House on Labor Day. With nothing better to do, it struck him as a phenomenal
idea to hold another press conference. All such conferences now are really lengthy
diatribes against political opponents, and anyone else Donald feels like
insulting that day.
____________________
“John McCain liked wars. I will be a better warrior
than anybody, but when we fight a war, we’re going to win them.”
President Trump
____________________
The president’s overarching problem is that when he opens his
mouth and words drip out in random order, an overwhelming majority of America’s
assume he’s lying. In a Gallup poll earlier this summer, only 36% of respondents said they believed the president
was “honest and trustworthy.”
That number was elevated by the 72% of Republicans who
believed, against all evidence, that the Easter Bunny was real.
News that the president had called dead Marines, killed
during World War I, as “losers,” and referred to men and women who served in Vietnam
“losers,” continued to dominate the news. I kept searching for insight. I found
several brutal responses aimed at the president, and one defense. The latter
was a lettersigned by “about 674” veterans – an odd phrase, I thought – and shared with Breitbart on September 4. Signatories
included at least three Medal of Honor recipients – and all respect to those
brave men.
That letter, however, seemed to indicate that minds had
snapped shut like steel traps, without catching any facts.
“Recent baseless media attacks against President Trump from
anonymous sources,” the letter reads, “are just another example of the depths
to which the President’s opponents are willing to descend to divide the nation
and meddle in this election.”
So, was I wrong to believe Trump was capable of stooping so
low? I could not help but notice that almost all the “denials” were focused on
the visit to France in 2018. A great deal was being made of the president’s
decision to skip the visit to the cemetery to pay respects to our fallen
soldiers from World War I. The president’s defenders seemed to want to prove that
safety concerns related to bad weather were why the president aborted the trip,
not narcissism and worry about his hair. Aides insisted they had not heard him
call the dead Marines “losers.”
The problem with the “I didn’t hear it” defense is that it doesn’t
prove Trump didn’t say what sources said he said. If four people say they heard
it – and at least four anonymous sources say they did – then, if those sources
would come forward, you could be nearly certain the president said what they
said he said.
I kept checking.
I found one tweet from a veteran, which I think adds great
credence to my position, that Trump would be capable of going so low. It came from
Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman’s brother, who had also run afoul of President Trump.
I would argue that the treatment of the two brothers proves
almost beyond doubt that President Trump doesn’t have respect for our
servicemen and women, and only cares about himself.
We know Eugene Vindman’s brother was driven from the service by
toadies in the Trump administration (the same enablers who defend him now). Lt.
Col. Eugene Vindman has said quite publicly that after he filed his own whistleblower
complaint, he was retaliated against by Trump officials. He, too, decided to
take off the uniform he had worn with pride for many years.
I also found a story in The Hill, from September 4, summarizing comments from retired Lt. General Mark
Hertling, in a talk with Don Lemon on CNN. Hertling told his host that he had spoken with active duty military
as well as veterans. These men and women were “furious” when they heard reports
of the president’s comments. “It’s tough to speak out right now if you’re an
active-duty serving general officer,” Hertling said in an interview. “By not
saying anything, they’re saying a lot.”
(And if you do cross
this president, your career is ruined, and you end up like the Vindman
brothers.)
I kept trying to
sort out all the stories I could find. Multiple news outlets had confirmed most
of the claims Jeffrey Goldberg made in The Atlantic. At least a dozen
people inside the Trump orbit had apparently heard Trump disparage the troops.
And on multiple occasions. (I even wondered: If The Atlantic says it had
a source, and The New York Times said it had a source, and Jenifer
Griffin of Fox News said she had a source, could they all be using the same anonymous
source, so that where it looked like three witnesses to conversations had
surfaced, there was really one?)
Like a man possessed,
I kept digging, deeper and deeper in the same hole, looking for gold nuggets of
proof.
Let’s just say,
I kept finding flakes. I checked Trump’s Twitter feed. If you carry out a word
search, you’ll discover he has used the word “loser” to describe critics and
enemies dozens of times. Crass, no-class insults are the
president’s stock in trade. You know, if any president could ever refer to U.S.
war dead as “losers,” and those who served in Vietnam as “suckers,” Trump is the
one.
On Twitter, the
president’s habit of going low is always on view. Anthony Scaramucci, who Trump
hired briefly to be his press secretary, is
suddenly “a loser who begged to come back” after the president canned him. John Kasich, former Republican governor of
Ohio, is “another loser.” CNN’s Chris Cuomo, “Fredo,” as Trump likes to call
him, is a loser. So are the “lowlifes and
losers” protestingin New York City right now. The people who work at CNN, are even worse, “sick losers” as the president
calls them, in just one of countless attacks on the free press. Mitt Romney
gets the ALL-CAPS treatment from the man with no class:
“LOSER!” Chuck Schumer is a “totally overrated loser.” There are “RINO losers”
too. Some “losers,” get nicknames: Elizabeth Warren is “Pocahontas,” Michael
Bloomberg is “Mini Mike.” John Harwood, a reporter, is a “total loser,” which I
assume is the worst kind of all.
Then again,
there are “stone cold losers” working for the Washington Post.
In fact, as soon
as the Goldberg story broke in The Atlantic, Trump went on offense. To
prove he would never call dead Marines from 1918 “losers,” he retweeted a post
by Matt Schlapp, a soulless enabler if ever there was one. Schlapp had posted
simplistically: “The Losers and Suckers work for the Atlantic. They are
colluding with the socialists to stop Trump.”
(Let’s just say
one does not go wisely to Trump’s Twitter feed in search of facts, or even
cogent analysis of current events. One goes for the lies, the polemics, and the
inadvertent comedy.)
You could even
find Trump tweet-denying that he called John McCaina “loser.” Then you could check around a little, as noted
yesterday, and easily find the tape and watch when he did.
*
A press
conference proves the president will always go low.
IT’S TUESDAY by
the time I complete this post. And I still can’t say with lead pipe certitude,
that Trump said what Jeffrey Goldberg says sources said he said. I am not the
only person, however, to notice that Gen. Kelly has remained silent,
despite Trump’s cheap shot attacks.
But I read
through the transcripts of the president’s Monday “press conference,” looking
for new insight. And I would argue they provide all the evidence we need to
decide what kind of man Donald Trump is. Is he capable of going to lows even
those of us who don’t like him could never imagine?
Absolutely.
This
was vintage Trump on display, wine
soured to vinegar, with a spritz of arsenic. Here, on public display, the
president went just as low as any of the anonymous sources in The Atlantic
had said. At one point, Trump explained his dislike for Sen. McCain. The man is
dead. You’d think he could let it go; but that’s not who Donald J. Trump is. “John McCain liked wars,” he claimed. “I will be a
better warrior than anybody, but when we fight a war, we’re going to win them.”
McCain, imprisoned and tortured for five years, “liked wars?”
And Cadet Bone Spurs was a “better warrior than anybody?”
Even I was a better warrior than Trump – and I was a supply
clerk in the Marines, about as unheroic a job as there can possibly be.
George H.W. Bush served in combat.
This is a fake hero.
The blogger defends the nation (1969).
General Kelly.
Names on the Vietnam Memorial Wall.
___
9/8/20: They say a leopard can’t change its spots. But if a leopard is
like Donald J. Trump, he can always deny he has spots.
With the election fast approaching, the leopard in the Oval Office
decides to pretend he’s a great environmentalist.
____________________
“Trump is the worst
president for the environment in history.”
The
Sierra Club
____________________
Apparently, most people who care about the environment, including
scientists who know that climate change is a threat to the planet’s future,
would disagree. The League of Conservation Voters, for example, graded Trump on his first year in office, as is their
practice. “If there was anything worse than an ‘F,’” they wrote, “Trump would
get it.”
The Sierra Club recently offered pungent assessment:
“Trump is the worst president for the environment in history.”
It was only
two months ago, when a coalition of 20 environmental groups sued Trump for wrecking bedrock environmental laws.
So, let’s
get real. You have a Science-Moron-in-Chief, who wants you to believe he’s
Albert Einstein. He can’t even differentiate between weather and climate. (See:
5/17/18.)
Meanwhile,
an increasingly hotter, drier climate means fire season in the West is longer than
ever. When fires do break out, they burn ever larger chunks of real estate,
including whole towns. This past weekend, Los Angeles County recorded its highest temperature ever,
121°, creating “kiln-like” conditions for fires. The National Interagency Fire
Center (NIFC) reports:
Firefighters across the
western states are seeing extreme fire behavior on many large fires. Seventeen new
large fires were reported, bringing the national total to 96 large fires [which]
have burned more than 3.4 million acres. Fires in California, Oregon and
Washington burned tens of thousands of acres yesterday, causing evacuation
orders for many nearby residents.
Trump likes
to blame state officials in California for their growing problems. Someone
should spray him with fire retardant. Currently, there are fires burning in:
Alaska: 4
Arizona: 7
California:
24
Colorado: 6
Idaho: 10
Montana: 9
Nevada: 1
New Mexico:
1
Oregon: 14
Utah: 4
Washington:
12
Wyoming: 3
According
to my calculations, based on NIFC figures, in the last ten years just under
90,000 square miles have burned in this country.
For sake of
comparison, that would be the same as burning up every inch of Minnesota and
then burning down Delaware for good measure.
Trump’s
grade from environmentalists (and people who actually followed the news):
F.
FUN WITH STRAWS: Trump did focus on the
“main issue,” environmentally, during a recent campaign rally. Climate change?
No. Oil spills? Nah. Plastic straws!
He told his fans he had to save them. Democrats wanted to ban
those beauties. “They want to ban straws,” he warned.
“Has anybody ever tried those paper straws? They’re not working too good. I’ve
had a couple of meals at McDonalds, et cetera, over the years. Wendy’s, a
friend of mine owns Wendy’s, I’ll give it a plug,” he added.
The guy’s a moron. (See: 7/27/18 for the dangers of plastic
waste in the world’s oceans. Trump doesn’t know about it, because he’s an
incurious oaf.)
Devastation in Oregon.
___
9/9/20: Team Trump, to use a sports
metaphor, finds itself trailing after an errant pass from quarterback D. J. “Bone
Spurs” Trump is intercepted by journalist Bob Woodward, and run back 105 yards for
a pick-six.
____________________
“We’re in crazytown.”
White House Chief of
Staff Gen. John Kelly
____________________
Or to put
in political terms, for some inexplicable reason, President Trump decided to
begin talking to Woodward, the man who helped bring Nixon down, sitting with or
talking by phone – on the record – a total of eighteen times. Considering
Woodward’s first book on the Trump years was titled Fear, and the next,
out Tuesday will bear the title Rage, you wonder what Trump was
thinking.
Ego and
narcissism likely blinded the fool.
So, far,
what we’re hearing is even worse than what we read in Fear, if we were
the reading type.
For today,
let’s stick to revisiting some of the quotes Woodward provided in Fear:
On page 47,
Steve Bannon described Trump, after his surprise election victory: “This is a
guy totally unprepared….Trump hasn’t spent a second [emphasis added,
unless otherwise noted] getting ready for this moment.”
Gary Cohn, Trump’s
chief White House economic advisor, told Woodward what he was most proud about
having done before he resigned: “It’s not what we did for this country,” he explained.
“It’s what we saved [Trump] from doing.” (xix)
Cohn
eventually came to see Trump in a stark light. “He’s a professional liar,”
he told people. (209; 338)
Former White
House aide Rob Porter seconded Cohn in his thinking: “A third of my job was
trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and
try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.” (xix)
Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson famously described the president this way: “He’s a fucking
moron.” (On page 225, Woodward explained why.)
Trump’s
first White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, offered a clear-eyed view of
his former boss. “The president,” he said, “has zero psychological ability
to recognize empathy or pity in any way.” (235)
Nor was Priebus
impressed with Trump’s management style. When “you put a snake and a rat and a
falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls,” he said, “things
start getting nasty and bloody.” (237)
Gen. John Kelly,
who replaced Priebus, was no more a fan. “The president’s unhinged,” he warned at one point. “He’s an idiot,” he
told other top aides after one more disastrous meeting. “It’s pointless to try
to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown.” (263;
286)
John Dowd, the
lawyer charged with building a defense during the Mueller investigation,
despaired at times. During a prep session, in case Trump had to testify under
oath, he realized that if Trump didn’t know an answer, “He just made something
up. That’s his nature.” Eventually, Dowd reached a startling conclusion. “Don’t
testify,” he told the president. “It’s either that or an orange jump suit.” (353;
354)
In fact, I
think we can assume the president was too lazy to read the book, before
deciding to give Woodward access this time.
Fear ends on page 357, with this:
But in the man and his
presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the
evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the
indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring
himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.”
___
9/10/20: The president and his band
of enablers spend a hectic day trying to explain away the damaging revelations included
in Bob Woodward’s latest book. Several news agencies have advanced copies and begin
quoting select passages from a work titled simply, Rage.
(This blogger is definitely buying one Tuesday,
when the book goes on sale.)
If the
quoted passages and stories are indicative of the full portrait Woodward paints,
it may stand as the most damning work ever written about a U.S. president. It certainly
should be enough to give even ardent Trump supporters pause on November 3.
(Okay, we know it won’t.)
____________________
Mattis would pray for the
country every Sunday.
____________________
First,
remember, President Trump agreed to go on record in talking to Woodward.
So, we often get Trump unfiltered. That is: Trump at his manic, lying,
bragging, ill-informed best. Or: his worst.
Woodward sums up the man in full, writing that
Trump has “enshrined personal impulse as a governing
principle of his presidency.”
At one point, Trump makes clear to the journalist (he called Woodward a
“whack job” on Thursday, after hearing some of what he wrote) that one of his
main goals as president has been to undo Obama’s accomplishments: “Ninety
percent of the things he’s done, I’ve taken apart,” Trump boasts. Policy
differences from one administration to another are to be expected. For Trump this
is more than policy or the give-and-take of partisan politics. It’s personal. It’s
an obsession. He hates his predecessor. He can’t help himself. And if that
means he must stand on a pile of wreckage that will represent his
presidential monument in the end, he gladly will. Smash Obamacare.
Bulldoze DACA. Withdraw from the Iran deal, all of these with nothing to show
for the effort. Quit the Paris Climate Accord.
Watch the world burn, like Nero writ large. Like Nero, take pride in
your fiddle-playing expertise.
Woodward also has many who worked in Trump’s administration on record,
including several who have not spoken out before. Secretary of Defense James
Mattis would go to church every Sunday and pray for the country, Woodward
writes, not just in the normal way, but knowing the danger his boss
represented.
True to an
unspoken code in this country, Mattis said when he resigned his cabinet post in
2018, that he owed his commander-in-chief a period of silence. It is tradition,
in this country, that generals and admirals do not undermine civilian
leadership, as in your typical banana republic.
Mattis had
warned that his silence would not be permanent. Woodward puts him on record, describing Trump as both “dangerous”
and “unfit.”
*
THESE
AREN’T ANONYMOUS SOURCES, as Trump’s lackies said just days ago, in trying to
blunt the damage done by stark revelations in The Atlantic (see: 9/5/20 and
9/6/20). These are men who worked for Trump, who were chosen by
Trump.
These
voices tell us what should be obvious to all by now. Trump is a liar. Even worse,
he’s the kind of liar who falls for his own lies.
Woodward includes
a telling anecdote involving Dan Coats’s wife. At a dinner one evening, Marsha
Coats sits next to Vice President Mike Pence. Appalled by what she has seen of the
president, and what she has heard about him behind the scenes, “I just looked
at him, like, how are you stomaching this?” she tells Woodward. “I just looked
at him like, this is horrible. I mean, we made eye contact. I think he
understood. And he just whispered in my ear, ‘Stay the course.’”
Vice
President Pence might have the capacity to hold his nose and back the president
in the name of policy or personal gain.
It’s hard
for others to ignore the stench wafting from the Offal Office.
“Truth is no longer governing
the White House.”
A reporter
for Business Insiderpicked outsome of Mattis’s other comments from the Woodward book.It
has long been known that Mattis and the president disagreed about policy.
Normal in any administration. But Mattis came to see Trump as a danger to the nation.
Like many of us, watching from the sidelines, watching up close, he found it
impossible to understand why Trump kept picking fights with allies, while
sucking up to some of the world’s worst dictators.
“What we’re doing is we’re actually showing
[emphasis added, unless otherwise noted] how to destroy America,” he says of
his old boss. “That’s what we’re showing [our enemies]. How to isolate us from
all of our allies. How to take us down.”
Mattis is not the first survivor of this administration to describe the
president as ill-informed. He is one of the most potent. Trump “doesn’t
understand,” Mattis tells Woodward. The president “has no mental framework for
these things. He hasn’t read.” In one brutal passage, Mattis
vents to Dan Coats, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. “The president,” he says, “has no moral compass.” Coats
doesn’t disagree. He doesn’t try to calm his colleague.
“True,” he
replies. “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t
know the difference between the truth and a lie.”
Coats is as true a
conservative as ever lived, a Republican, heart and soul. Yet during his entire
tenure as Director of National Intelligence, he finds it impossible to shake
the feeling that Vladimir Putin “had something” on Trump. There seemed no other
way to explain the president’s reluctance to confront one of America’s most
dangerous rivals. “He suspected the worst but found nothing that would show
Trump was indeed in Putin’s pocket,” Woodward writes. “There was no proof,
period. But Coats’s doubts continued, never fully dissipating.”
Trump’s own words, in
this regard, are deeply troubling. He may not be able to get along with Merkel
of Germany, or Macron of France, two of our top allies. Yet he fits in well with
the authoritarian crowd. “It’s funny, the relationships I
have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,”
the president tells Woodward. “You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”
I would
argue that Gen. Mattis already has. Trump is a man with no moral compass. He
has no overarching goals or principles, except to do and say whatever he has to
do and say to make himself look good.
In eighteen
separate interviews – all on tape – the president reveals who he is. The picture
is ugly. After the Saudis murder the Washington Post writer, Jamal
Khashoggi, and cut his corpse up with a bone saw, Trump does not stand up for
the free press in a contest with killers. He does not seem to know that
Khashoggi’s children are U.S. citizens and deserve support. When U.S.
intelligence agencies make clear there could be no murder without the approval
of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Trump refuses to face the
fact. He brags to Woodward, saying of the Prince, “I saved his ass.”
“I was able
to get Congress to leave him alone,” Trump said. “I was able to get them to
stop.”
Trump stopped lawmakers
from slapping Saudi Arabia with stiff sanctions, arguing in part that
the Saudis bought billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. weapons. So what if they
cut up a reporter?
No moral compass.
None.
Quoting a mass murder to denigrate a
former U.S. president?
Even weirder, if possible, is Trump’s love
affair with Kim Jong-un of North Korea. While Trump may rage about our
relationship with South Korea, and insist we’re “suckers” for defending our
allies, he tells Woodward that he and Kim, a bloody killer, have some kind of chemistry.“You
meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it’s going to happen.”
(Just
be glad Trump didn’t try to grab Kim’s pussy.)
“I don’t think Obama’s smart,” Trump tells Woodward at one
point. “I think he’s highly overrated. And I don’t think he’s a great speaker.”
Trump adds, as if in validation, that Kim Jong-un thought Obama was “an
asshole.”
Quoting a mass murder to denigrate a former U.S. president? Something
is fundamentally wrong, at his core, with Donald J. Trump.
Trump tells Woodward that he was awestruck meeting the North
Korean dictator for the first time in 2018, thinking to himself, “Holy shit,”
and finding Kim to be “far beyond smart.” Trump bragged that Kim “tells me
everything.” That included a graphic account of Kim having his uncle killed.
A week later, on December 13,
2019, when Woodward returned to interview the President again, Trump was still
fixated on the photos [he had of his meeting with Kim] and insisted on giving
Woodward a poster-sized print of Trump and Kim.
“Do you have a round thing for
this so he can take it? Or even a rubber band or something. Because you can’t
fold it, you’ll ruin it. I don’t even know why I’m giving it to you. That’s my
only one,” Trump said.
Some people – teenage boys
– want posters of super models and sports
icons to grace their walls.
Trump?
How would you like a poster of him and the guy who has
starved millions of his people, and slaughtered critics with anti-aircraft
guns?
“Like a
minus number.”
Woodward
manages to get the normally discreet Dr. Anthony Fauci on record, though until
I see the book, I suspect he has been quoted second hand. In one meeting with
top health officials, including people like Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the
CDC, Dr. Fauci says that in dealing with the coronavirus, the president’s
attention span “is like a minus number.” He warns the others that Trump “is on a separate channel.” The
president, he says, is “rudderless.” According to Woodward, Dr. Fauci came to
believe that Trump’s “sole purpose was to get reelected.”
Perhaps most telling, and most damaging, are Trump’s own words
on his handling (or mishandling) of the coronavirus crisis. Ina recorded conversation on
February 7, Trump makes it clear he knows the virus is deadly. “You just breathe the air and that’s
how it’s passed,” he says. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very
delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”
“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeats for
emphasis.
Trump’s defenders will try to blame Dr. Fauci and others
for giving the president bad advice in those early days of crisis. Here we have
Trump explaining that the disease is easily spread through the air. It’s far
more dangerous than flu. Yet when Trump speaks in public, he will discount
wearing masks for months. He will tell the nation that COVID-19 is in fact no
worse than flu. His supporters will hear his words – will repeat them and
spread them like a second kind of virus. Rush Limbaugh and the fools who pose
as pundits at Fox News will pick up the story and spread it as surely as a sick
patient spreads disease by coughing on a nurse. Hundreds of healthcare workers
will be infected and die. Millions of Americans will be infected. Nearly
200,000 will die. Other nations will face the threat with clear eyes and honest
leadership and handle it with greater success.
In fact, Trump
admits in a March 19 call to Woodward that he has deliberately minimized the danger. “I
wanted to always play it down,” he tells the reporter. “I still like playing it
down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
The danger Americans face is acute. In April, at the same time he is calling on states to reopen, he
warns Woodward about the virus.
“It’s so easily transmissible, you wouldn’t even believe it.”
Thursday, with all these damaging revelations dominating
the news, Trump picks that one word, “panic” from his conversations with the
author. He claims that even though he knew how the disease spread, how easily, how
dangerous it was, he was discounting the danger because he wanted the American
people to remain calm.
By the way, let’s show up for big rallies and celebrations,
and wear our red MAGA hats, but not masks.
As Mattis and Coats and many others who have seen Trump up
close, could tell us, the president was going to lie.
And, once again, he had.
It didn’t matter to Trump if tens of thousands of Americans
died. His only purpose was to win a second term.
*
FINALLY, a minor matter to discuss, but a
telling one, nevertheless. Woodward himself learned how ill-informed Trump
could be, or perhaps how happy he was to lie. “I’m number one on Twitter,” he boasted
during one conversation. “When you’re number one and when you have hundreds of
millions of people, whether they’re against you or not they still read what you
say,” Trump continued. On Twitter, actually, he has 88.5 million “followers”
and that includes people like me, who only go to his threads to find out how insane
he sounds.
It would no doubt pain the president to know
that his nemesis, Barack Obama, has 122.4 million followers on Twitter.
(Trump also trails a number of celebrities,
including Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Rihanna, and Taylor Swift.)
Often, in their conversations,
Trump is suspicious about what Woodward will do with what he says. “You’re
probably going to screw me,” the president predicts. “You know, because that’s
the way it goes.”
On the contrary, from what we
know of the book so far, the president screws himself. He reveals
himself.
“When
his performance as president is taken in its entirety,” Woodward finally writes,
“I can only reach one conclusion: Trump is the wrong man for the job.”
POSTSCRIPT: Even the Taliban have the brains to wear masks in a time of
COVID-19, and their only profession is murder.
Trump crowd from September 10.
Above, a
Trump crowd, from a September 10 tweet by the bombastic liar, President Donald
J. Trump.
A reporter
for The New York Times tweets another picture of this rally, noting that
not one in ten in the audience is wearing a mask. Security tracks her down,
using her picture, and has her thrown out.
Putin and
Kim and their ilk would understand the president’s impulse to stifle the free
press.
Give Trump
a second term. Maybe we’ll have anti-aircraft guns and bone saws in the next four
years.
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