Another One Bites the Dust

   

The Year of the Groundhog: Another weekend behind us and little has changed.  Trump is still making promises he can’t keep,  relying on optics to assert that he’s is doing things that he’s not really doing and firing Inspectors General, willy-nilly.  As to those promises, on Friday he once again said that we’ll have a vaccination by year end, rolling out his new vaccination team, while at the same time saying that if we don’t have a vaccination it won’t matter because this “flu-like” disease, the one that’s killed more than 90,000 people so far and that CDC head Dr Redfield just said will kill 100,000 by June, will go away on it’s own.  The “new” team which includes the former head of vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline, the firm working on one of the vaccine candidates, not that that’s a conflict or anything, and a general in charge of Army readiness, a good thing because the military is skilled at ramping up resources, was likely announced in a hurry to counter the accusations made by dismissed vaccine expert Rick Bright, who enraged Trump by appearing on Sunday’s 60 Minutes.  Not surprisingly Trump is now tweet slapping interviewer Norah O’Donnell, calling her a third place anchor and telling CBS’s Chairwoman Redstone to “make things right,” as in get rid of her.  As to COVID 19 going away on its own, son Eric, proved his Trump chops by telling Fox that the disease is just another Democratic hoax that will “magically vanish” after the November election season which would be awfully nice, but is beyond unlikely given that the real experts believe that we’ll be smack in the middle of double whammy flu and COVID season come November. Ironically, Eric said that to the Fox people who were broadcasting from their safe at home locations.   On the vaccine front, there’s no question that every immunologist worth a dime is pushing full steam ahead.  The effort is unprecedented but even assuming one or more of their efforts results in a safe and effective vaccination a best case scenario wouldn’t result in all of us getting shots until next year, and that’s being optimistic though I’d love to be proven wrong about that.  The bottom line is that you don’t move forward with mass vaccination until you’re sure that that what you have works and that it doesn’t hurt a lot of people so if Trump tries to rush something out, we should make him and the extended Trump family take it first, in front of national TV, the way Governor Cuomo took a deep swab COVID test yesterday.  

Dog Walking:  On the Inspector General front, late Friday, Trump gave notice that he’s firing Steve Linick, the IG for the State Department.  He’s doing so at the request of Secretary of State Pompeo who the IG was investigating for, among other things, having State Department professional staff do personal errands like dog walking on behalf of him and his wife.  Though the law permits Trump to fire IGs when he’s lost confidence in them, firing as an act of retaliation is a bigly no-no, not that anything Trump does ever has consequences.  Linick, an Obama holdover, is known for actually taking his responsibilities seriously, he wasn’t easy on Obama people either but as we all know by now, investigating Democrats is a good thing, going after Trump’s Republican cronies, not so much.  With the exception of Republican outsider Mitt Romney, who called the firing of Inspectors General a “threat to accountable democracy” no other Republicans seemed troubled by the dismissal.  Senate Homeland Committee Chair Ron Johnson, who used to care about IGs when they were investigating Democrats, says it’s okay by him and the usual pearl clutch squad of Senators Susan Collins and Chuck Grassley, a major advocate for IGs, said they are “concerned.”  By the way LInick is the fourth Inspector General fired by Trump, he removed Michael Atkinson as the intelligence community's IG on a Friday in the first week of April; fired acting Pentagon IG Glenn Fine that same weekend; and removed Health and Human Services IG Christi Grimm in early May.  Remember when Senator Collins said that being impeached had taught Trump a lesson, she was right, he learned that he is all powerful.  As to Pompeo, even though he’s knee deep in muck, Senate Majority Leader McConnell is still trying to recruit him to run for the open Kansas Senate seat being vacated by retiring Senator Pat Roberts because he believes his candidacy would give the Republicans their best chance of retaining that seat. That says a lot about the state of the Republican party.

#ObamasGreat: Not the hashtag that Trump wanted to see go viral on twitter but the one that went viral after all of the major channels, including Fox, carried a virtual graduation ceremony celebrating the High School Class of 2020.  Former President Obama was the keynote speaker which is only fitting because these kids deserved a great speech by a skilled speaker and they got one.  Obama told the graduates to “Do what you think is right.  Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy, that’s how little kids think.  Unfortunately a lot of so-called grown-ups, including some with fancy titles (hint, hint Trump) and important jobs (more hints) still think that way, which is why things are so screwed up.” (SHADE!) Trump who earlier in the day had retweeted a pirated clip from the movie Independence Day of him poorly photo shopped onto actor Bill Pullman’s head responded to Obama’s speech by calling him grossly incompetent.  That from the man who ignored the oncoming COVID 19 onslaught because he didn’t want to upset his Chinese trade deal and who is now telling us we should be happy that only 90,000 people and counting are gone because it could have been millions?   

Et Cetera:  Justin Amash, the Republican turned Independent, is no longer running for president.  Both Poltiico and PBS New Hour have done stories about Biden accuser Tara Reade.  Based on a large number of interviews, they detail her erratic past, her habit of lying to friends and stiffing landlords, her difficulty in holding jobs and her history of saying only nice things about her experience working for Biden.  PBS even traced the Senate chamber route she said she’d been walking when she was “assaulted,” concluding that there was no way that such an event could have happened unwitnessed in that heavily trafficked area.  Reade responded by once again changing her story.  She also claimed that she’d been contacted by Trump’s campaign, something that her pro-bono Republican donor lawyer, who may be experiencing some remorse or just may be concerned about his reputation, then denied. Paging Megyn Kelly and all those folks at MSNBC and elsewhere who gave life to this story.  Maybe do your homework next time!  On the virus front, numbers are ticking up in opened-up Texas, numbers are also up in Georgia which keeps “accidentally” issuing graphs that “inadvertently” mix up the sequence of dates to show otherwise.  Here in NYC, police cars were streaming down Second Avenue last night blaring out reminders to social distance and wear masks, a warning to the many devil may carers hanging outside the upper east side bar and restaurant strip.  Yikes.     

Stay safe!