Boots and Booting

King of Crazy:  While President-elect Biden was busy doing presidential things like thanking first responders, delivering  “fireside” speeches, announcing appointments, adopting a kitten and playing with and apparently tripping over his German shepherd Major, Trump pardoned an unregistered Turkey, continued screaming election fraud, bemoaned the judicial process, attacked “his” FBI and Justice Department, and appears to have greenlighted what was probably an Israeli assassination of Iran’s leading nuclear scientist because why not make world repair more challenging for Biden?  While most of us were preparing for downsized, muted Turkey festivities a bloviated Trump held a bizarre news conference squished into a teeny tiny kindergartener’s desk, screamed at the main stream media for not treating him respectfully after one of them asked him if he’d ever leave or have to be booted,  played multiple rounds of golf, and flew with his adult children to Camp David. According to the Washington Post, he has also spent a good part of the time since the election doing a way too convincing crazy King George imitation, raging at unseen enemies and expressing disbelief that he lost to basement denizen, sleepy Joe Biden.  Loser Trump who hates that sobriquet more than anything, is astonished that his attempts to disrupt the postal service, dissuade and then discount mail-in voting and suppress and then throw out minority vote combined with his efforts to stack the Supreme Court failed to result in him winning or at the very losing by a margin small enough to overturn in the courts.  Despite the “best” efforts of Rudy’s crack legal strike team, state and federal judges aren’t buying it, they continue to dismiss his cases, an insult magnified by the fact that some of those dissing Federal judges are Trump appointees, because as one of those judges said of his attempt to throw out Pennsylvania votes “free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious.  But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof.  We have neither here.” Trump is only now coming to the realization that it’s hard to get crackpot cases to SCOTUS. Also, the recount of the votes in Wisconsin’s two largely Black cities, the results are in and not only is Biden still the winner, he actually picked up 87 votes at a cost of $3 million for Trump’s donors.  Though Trump’s lawyers are still suing, Wisconsin’s election results are due to be formally certified later today. Adding insult to injury, not long after Trump screamed election fraud again during an interview with one time Money Honey now crazy Fox pundit Maria Bartiromo, 60 Minutes aired its interview with his former head of cyber security, the widely respected and totally sane and convincing Chris Krebs.  Krebs detailed the steps that he and his team successfully undertook to insure that this year’s election was fraud free and totally legitimate.  Continuing with his King George lunacy, Trump rage tweeted that the 60 Minutes segment was a “ridiculous, one sided story on election security…..an international joke. Our 2020 Election, from poorly rated Dominion to a Country FLOODED with unaccounted for Mail-In ballots, was probably our least secure EVER!"  Is now a good time to point out that the Crazy King still has custody of the nuclear football and that a lot of bad things can happen during the 51 Days between now and January 20?       

Pardons, Pardons, Pardons:  Trump’s been signaling his intention to pardon “lock her up” screecher Michael Flynn ever since the national security advisor for a minute got caught lying in the early days of the Trump nightmare to the FBI about his conversation with former Russian Ambassador Kislyak so his holiday weekend pardon wasn’t all that surprising, nor was it precedent setting.  Presidents grant inappropriate pardons all the time.  Ford did it for Nixon, Clinton did it for financier/donor Marc Rich and George HW Bush did a slew of them for people involved in Reagan’s Iran-Contra affair.  What makes Trump’s pardon of Flynn standout isn’t that Flynn, who was also acting as an unregistered agent for Turkey, lied, it’s that he lied to cover up something that he believed that Trump had done, something that could explain Trump’s affinity for all things Putin.  Just about everyone expects that Trump will grant a lot more pardons before he exits on January 20 and that though some of those pardons will go to people selected by Kim Kardashian a lot of them will go to people like Paul Manafort, another one who kept his mouth shut, and Steve Bannon because bilking donors is something that Trump finds very relatable.  Far more relatable and excusable Biden appears to have forgiven Major, for the puppy play that resulted in two hairline fractures of one of his feet.  Hopefully, Biden, who really should be bubble wrapped until January 20, will lose his new boot in time for the inauguration.  

Electioneering: Few if any expect Trump to attend Biden’s inauguration. He has other plans like announcing the 2024 run that will allow him to raise lots of money for his legal bills and possibly even a competing January 20 “rally.”  He is also promising to hold one of his viral rallies in Georgia next week, to help Republican candidates/insider traders Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in their runoff races against Democrats Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock.  Under ordinary circumstances, Loeffler and Perdue would be shoe-ins to win their races, despite Biden’s Georgia win, the state still tilts red and historically more Republicans show up for run-off elections,  however a number of those ruby red voters are so convinced that the November election was fraudulent that they are talking about staying home, or even worse, submitting write-ins for Trump so who knows what’s going to happen. By the way, Loeffler’s strategy involves portraying her opponent Warnock as an anti-Semite while Perdue’s involves pointing out to voters that his opponent Ossoff is one of those “untrustworthy” Semites. For their part Ossoff and Warnock are engaging in mutual hug fests, in order to disabuse concerned voters that either accusation holds water.

And More:  The virus situation is beyond sad and virus guru Fauci warns of surges on surges.  Who, but everyone, would have guessed that leaders playing down risk, combined with mayors and governors heading out of town for vacation sojourns while telling their constituent to stay home mixed in with millions of virus deniers could result in such an unrelenting disaster?  Those vaccines can’t come soon enough, and it looks like both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s are likely to start going into the arms of health care professionals and other first responder’s by the end of December  but something is up with the Astra Zeneca one, apparently they screwed up their dosing and though their vaccine is probably effective, they will have to “fix” their studies before getting US approval.  And a correction, last week I confused Mike Shirkey, one of the Michigan Republicans who went to the White House to discuss “virus resources” with Trump with Norman Shinkle the Michigan Republican who ultimately abstained from voting for the certification of the state’s election results. Though that meeting ultimately bore no fruit for Trump, he tried again last week, hosting some local Pennsylvania officials. No luck there either, at least so far, but Trump did manage to advance the virus as one of those officials, State Senator Doug Mastriano tested COVID positive; and because the virus team in the White House is totally inept, the results of his test came in while the mask free Mastriano was meeting with Trump and company.  Mastriano was quickly yanked out of the West Wing but his aerosol particles remained.