Soup and Crackpots

Duck Soup:  Yesterday Trump asserted, again, that there’s no systemic racism anywhere, that radicals are tossing both bags and cans of soup at heavily armed federal agents and that he most definitely has not had a series of mini strokes. He also doubled down on his assertion that ninja-like antifa radicals have been amassing on planes and heading to cities throughout the country. Even though all of that is crazy talk it’s the mini stroke denial that caught everyone by surprise.  Though NY Times journalist Michael Schmidt recently reported that VP Pence had been put on alert the time that Trump was rushed to Walter Reed for that impromptu first half of a physical that Trump now says was the second half of his physical, Schmidt didn’t say that the visit was due to a stroke so the mini stroke comment came out of the blue. Trump who routinely questioned Hillary fitness to govern and who is now demanding that Joe Biden take a drug test to prove that his recent speechmaking prowess isn’t the result of drug enhancement tweeted yesterday “It never ends! Now they are trying to say that your favorite President, me, went to Walter Reed Medical Center, having suffered a series of mini-strokes. Never happened to THIS candidate - FAKE NEWS."  When asked if he had been put on alert at the time of the Walter Reed “visit,” VP Pence mumbled something about Trump being the healthiest man alive and said that as VP he was always prepared to step in on an as needed basis but didn’t directly deny the alert story.  Anyway, given Trump’s lack of impulse control, his word slurring, difficulty climbing up and down ramps, trouble lifting glasses of water, and unusual gait, it’s not unreasonable to assume that his heart and brain are on the fritz and that he just admitted as much.  By the end of the day, in a feeble attempt to explain away Trump’s tweet the White House communications team pointed a finger at former Clinton Press Secretary Joe Lockhart for tweeting “did @realdonaldtrump have a stroke that he is hiding from the American public?”  As to those flying ninjas, apparently that assertion comes from a conspiracy theory that’s been floating around social media for a couple of months which is probably where the soup can nonsense comes from as well.  As to those cans/bags yesterday while he was in Kenosha, Wisconsin meeting with law enforcement officials Trump went full Andy Warhol but without paint brushes, drifting into a diatribe about anarchists tossing “bags of soup,” which he described as easier to throw than bricks with the added benefit that any anarchist caught with a few cans of Tomato Soup could easily claim them as essential nutrition rather than weapons.  While hanging with the police Trump also asserted that there was no systemic racism but that every now and then police have been known to choke like golfers do only when they choke they inadvertently squash necks or shoot Black men in the back whereas golfers just overshoot the cup.  That was a repeat of a golf analogy he made on Monday night during his interview with Fox’s Laura Ingraham, one that even she recognized as totally tone deaf and tried to get him to halt midstream. He of course missed her message.  Advancing brain fog maybe?

Viral Musings:  Trump is also pushing another conspiracy theory, that coronavirus isn’t all that deadly because “only” 6% of the 185,000 plus Americans who’ve died of COVID died only from the virus.  That claim is an ill-informed and twisted interpretation of a CDC report that says that 9,000 of the departed had no other health issues. As virus guru Fauci put it yesterday "Let there not be any confusion, it's not 9,000 deaths from COVID-19. It's 180,000-plus deaths…..The point that the CDC was trying to make was that a certain percentage of deaths had nothing else but COVID. That does not mean that someone who has hypertension, or diabetes who dies of COVID didn't die of COVID-19. They did." Sadly, Trump isn’t the only politician going with this lie, Republican Senator Joni Ernst who is running for reelection in Iowa is all in on it too.  In fact she’s also accusing health care professionals of goosing their COVID death numbers to up their compensation saying “These health-care providers and others are reimbursed at a higher rate if COVID is tied to it, so what do you think they’re doing?”  This one is simple, compare this year’s mortality rate to last year’s, and then try to explain all those extra deaths. To paraphrase longtime Democratic strategist James Carville, it’s the coronavirus, stupid, as well as Trump’s failure to adequately deal with it.  On that stupidity front, Trump’s at it again.  Yesterday it was revealed that the Trump administration won’t be joining the global coronavirus effort because it is being led by the World Health Organization.  That is an incredibly foolish and shortsighted decision: first, because it assumes that one of our vaccines will be the first and best of the bunch; second, because it fails to recognize that eradicating the coronavirus has to be a worldwide effort because as we’ve learned the hard way deadly viruses don’t respect borders; and third, because it cedes third world savior status to the Russians and the Chinese who will be happy to step into that role, especially at our expense. 

Et Cetera: Representative Joe Kennedy III will be out of a job in January, he lost to incumbent Senator Ed Markey in yesterday’s ridiculously costly Massachusetts primary, however his fellow Congressman moderate Richard Neal will be back as he survived a challenge from the left. Trump’s lawyers have managed to put off the release of his financial information a while longer, again.  Yesterday a three judge Appeals court panel issued an order granting Trump lawyers' request to block Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance from accessing Trump’s financials until the Circuit Court of Appeals resolves the issue. A hearing is set for the end of the month. Last night, Melania’s one time friend and event organizer Stephanie Winston Wolkoff who is really angry with Melania for throwing her under the bus by making it seem like she’d benefited wildly from the inauguration events she’d organized and who has a new book out that details what a charmer Melania really is, revealed that she taped some of their conversations and that FLOTUS has a habit of using personal email for official events and also uses Signal, an encrypted messaging application to make her communications unreadable by prying eyes.  That’s the same Melania/birther who according to Wolkoff refused to move to the White House until all the toilets used by the Obamas had been removed and replaced. And because it’s a new month, another Trump finance co-chairman is in hot water.  The Washington Post reports that Elliot Broidy, who once had Trump fixer/lawyer Michael Cohen pay off a woman that he impregnated or that someone impregnated, is about to be charged by the Justice Department for wrongful foreign lobbying stemming from his efforts to convince senior Trump administration officials to abandon a corruption probe into the Malaysian government and to press for an exiled Chinese dissident, Guo Wengui, to be extradited. Would it surprise you to know that Guo is also a good friend of former Trump strategist/indicted charity fraudster Steve Bannon who was recently picked up by postal inspectors off of Guo’s yacht.  What a twisted plotline.