11/24/20: President
Trump shows his sour mug for a 173-word “press conference.” It’s over and done,
like bad sex, in 64 seconds.
Mike Pence is by his side, perhaps to grab
him and bum-rush him from the podium if he goes off on some weird rant.
 |
For once, Trump hands pardon to a non-felon. |
____________________
“The last gasp of a pathetic presidency
in its dying days.”
Conservative
writer, Max Boot
____________________
The president speaks in tone-deaf
fashion:
Well, thank you very much, and I just want to
congratulate everybody. The stock market – Dow Jones Industrial Average just hit
30,000, which is the highest in history. We’ve never broken 30,000, and that’s
just – despite everything that’s taken place with the pandemic.
I’m very, uh, thrilled with what’s happened on
the vaccine front. That’s been absolutely incredible. It’s – nothing like that
has ever happened medically, and I think people are acknowledging that, and it’s
having a big effect.
But the stock market's just broken 30,000 – never
been broken, that number. That’s a sacred number, 30,000. Nobody thought they’d
ever see it. That’s the ninth time since the beginning of 2020, and it’s the forty-eighth
time that we’ve broken records in – during the Trump administration.
And I just want to congratulate all the people
within the administration that worked so hard, and most importantly, I want to
congratulate the people of our country, because there are no people like you.
Thank you very much everybody. Thank you.
Exit, stage right.
Good news on the vaccine, for sure, with hope
healthcare workers and frontline personnel can be vaccinated as early as the
second week of December. No comment from the president on all those for whom a
vaccine has come too late. On Monday, the U.S. was hit with another 157,531
cases.
Another 1,058 Americans died. But the stock
market was up again – 30,000 – “a sacred number.”
So f**k those dead people, right?
*
NO DOUBT, the president felt worse and worse
as the day progressed. True, he managed to pardon the Thanksgiving turkeys, “Corn”
and “Cob,” which I think should have been named “Donald J. Loser” and “Lame
Duck Don,” instead.
(That’s
just me.)
Then a double whammy. The Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania certified its election results and Governor Tom Wolf signed off on
its 20 electoral votes – going not to Trump, but to Joe Biden.
Not long after, the Nevada Supreme Court
certified Biden’s win and awarded the former Vice President six more electoral
votes.
The handwriting had been on the wall since
Saturday, when Michigan certified its votes for the challenger.
That certification came after a federal judge
batted aside a Trump challenge to the Pennsylvania vote. (That challenge had
revolved around the claim that in some counties voters were allowed to fix
errors on their mail-in ballots. In other counties that offer was not extended.)
Not long after the judge ruled, Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) urged the
president to accept reality, and move forward with the transition process,
which Trump had so far blocked. “President Trump has exhausted all plausible
legal options to challenge the result of the presidential race in Pennsylvania,”
Toomey said in a statement. It was time to face the
truth.
*
LATE TUESDAY, we learned that the U.S. had
set another record, not just a stock market high. Hospitalizations for the
coronavirus reached a new level, with 88,080 Americans too sick to go
home.
Many of them are going to die and tens of
thousands will miss Thanksgiving with their loved ones.
*
FOX NEWS takes a sock
to the “Fake News” chin when it is forced to settle a
suit brought against the company by
the family of Seth Rich. If you don’t remember, Rich was the young staffer,
murdered on the streets of Washington D.C. in July 2016. According to several
of the talking heads on Fox – or in this case the spewing heads – Rich had
leaked thousands of emails damaging to Hillary Clinton and Clinton and her
people had somehow had him knocked off.
Sean Hannity and Lou
Dobbs both pumped up the conspiracy theory. Once the case went to court, and they
realized they might have to testify in court, the parent company realized the
better part of valor was to tell the Fox lawyers to settle. Also involved in
fueling the story were Fox reporter Malia Zimmerman, Edward Butowsky, a wealthy
GOP donor, and at the time an unpaid Fox News consultant.
There was even a cameo
for Sean Spicer, who met with Butowsky at the White House in April 2017.
*
TRUMP’S LAWYER in
Wisconsin, Jim Troupis, is fighting to have tens of thousands of ballots throw out, including absentee ballots which were voted in person. His legal
case is not helped when he admits he and his wife voted by absentee ballot.
In person.
*
LONGTIME CONSERVATIVE
WRITER, Max Boot, warns in an
opinion piece that the president’s desperate
attempts to overturn the results of the election represent “the last
gasp of a pathetic presidency in its dying days.” If Trump decides to run again
in 2024, Boot says, the Republican Party “will do nothing to check his
authoritarian impulses.”
“Much of the GOP has already decided that
achieving its policy preferences is more important than preserving America’s
democracy,” he adds.
BLOGGER’S NOTE: In January 2021, with only six
days remaining in the star-crossed Trump presidency, Aaron Rich, the brother of
Seth, also wins a settlement against Butowsky and Matt Couch, a right-wing
activist.
Having both worked hard to spread the Hillary-had-Seth-murdered myth,
both apologized, apparently, as part of the court agreement.
“A single source, who we
now believe provided us with false information.”
“I never had physical proof to back up any such
statements or suggestions, which I now acknowledge I should not have made,”
Butowsky wrote in a Twitter post, which he deleted as soon as he had met his
legal responsibilities. Briefly, however, he admitted, “I take full
responsibility for my comments and I apologize for any pain I have caused. I
sincerely hope the Rich family is able to find out who murdered their son and
bring this tragic chapter in their lives to a close.”
Couch ate his own slice of “Fake News” pie,
admitting that his reports on the Rich murder “were largely driven by
information [given to] us by a single source, who we now believe provided us
with false information and who, as of this date, has retracted his statements.
Today, we retract and disavow our statements, and [we offer] our apology to Mr.
[Aaron] Rich and his family.”
And that is how you tell what’s “Fake News.” See
also: Lou Dobbs, et. al., at Fox, getting sued by voting machine companies
after claiming that their machines used during the 2020 election were rigged.
Dobbs even loses his job in the debacle.
