Dikdats

Opinions:  According to a Reuters/Ipsos national opinion survey 79% of US adults believe Joe Biden won the White House.  Another 13% said the election has not yet been decided, 3% said Trump won and 5% said they do not know.  That 3% includes Trump, all the members of his extended family, with the exception of niece Mary and possibly Aunt Maryanne Trump Barry, many Republican members of the House and Senate, Trump’s cabinet and most, but not all of the pundits who regularly appear on Fox A/K/A Trump news.  Most in Trump’s immediate orbit confirm what the rest of us have figured out, that Trump will never concede, and why would he, he still hasn’t admitted that he lost the 2016 popular vote.  Trump also doesn’t intend to fade away, he’s currently telling close associates that he’ll be running for president again in 2024, assuming his cholesterol addled brain hasn’t eaten away at what he passes off as sanity or he isn’t mired in legal troubles and/or incarcerated.  As to the Fox contributor set last night Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Karl Rove, one of the Republican Party’s most hard-nosed and manipulative political operatives.  In it Rove confirmed what the NY Times said with its banner headline yesterday, that the election wasn’t riddled with fraud.  He added that Biden has insurmountable leads in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada and Georgia, enough to give him more than the 270 electoral college votes he needs.  Rove went on to say that once Trump’s “days in court” and by that he doesn’t mean his days facing off against prosecutors in New York but rather his absurdly nonsensical election lawsuits alleging things like super tall guys were out intimidating voters and too many members of “his” military, those guys he called losers, voted for Biden to be believable, he “should do his part to unite the country by leading a peaceful transition and letting grievances go.” Republican Oklahoma Senator Lankford has also weighed in, he’s not conceding that Biden won, but he says that he intends to push Trump to start sharing those top secret presidential security briefings with him if he hasn’t done so by Friday.  Those are the briefings Trump stopped reading in October.  The bottom line is that Trump may eventually go, but that part about letting grievances go or uniting the country, forget about it.     

Charades: Last night President-to-be Joe Biden announced that he has selected Ron Klain to be his White House Chief of Staff.  No surprise there, Klain is a long term Democratic veteran and Biden advisor, he  was responsible for dealing with the Ebola crisis during the Obama presidency.  As to the transition, Biden, Klain and the rest of the their team remain without official government support as team Trump continues to impede the process, blocking communication, cooperation and Congressionally authorized funding.  Even the State Department phone operators are in on the charade, contrary to past practice they are sitting on messages for Biden from foreign leaders and dignitaries.  That’s particularly petty, given that it’s routine for the State Department to receive and forward messages to former VPs and Presidents and up until the election they had been doing so for Biden but now that he’s the presumptive President they’ve stopped, bowing to Trump’s autocratic aspirations.  About those aspirations, Trump placed another one of his toadies at the Defense Department yesterday, adding Douglas Macgregor, a retired army colonel who was nominated, but not confirmed, as ambassador to Germany because of his practice of referring to immigrants to Europe as “Muslim invaders,“ his call for the shooting of migrants on the US border, and his promotion of a range of white nationalists conspiracy theories. He has also advocated a fast, as in haphazard, withdrawal from Afghanistan and has said the US should not “rush hundreds of thousands of troops to the Polish border” in the event that the Poles need help dealing with Vlad’s crowd.  Former Four Star Army General Barry McCaffrey is very concerned.  He tweeted yesterday that “the crisis at the Pentagon is just beginning (DANGER) – we are watching a slow moving Trump coup to defy the election and refuse to leave office by dikdat. Believe your eyes this will be a test of our institutions.”  Others are less certain of Trump’s intentions or his ability to achieve them, whatever they are.  However, whether those intentions represent an attempt to overturn the election, carry out last minute foreign interventions, destroy documents, or release information that can be weaponized against Biden, they’re not good.  

Viral Musings: About those so-called Muslim “invaders,” two of them are scientists Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, the Turkish-German scientists who developed the Pfizer/BioNTech messenger RNA coronavirus vaccine.  In addition to giving us hope that there is a light at the end of our very long and dark tunnel and that we will eventually get out of the viral mess we’re in, the two, who founded BioNTech, are now among the richest people in Germany.  Not bad for children of Muslim “invaders.”  As to the state of the pandemic, the virus is winning, the situation in the US is so bad right now that it’s hard to write about.  A record 145,835 cases were diagnosed yesterday, the number of hospitalized is over 65,000, an additional 1431 died yesterday and total fatalities are over 241,000.  Nothing to worry about there, which explains why head of the virus task force/VP Pence cancelled his trip to drenched Sanibel Island, Florida, not to focus on the virus but to hold Trump’s hand and head to Georgia to help with the upcoming Senatorial campaign. And because the White House truly is a viral hotspot, three more White House aides including White House Political Director Brian Jack have tested COVID positive.  Jack is another one who attended Trump’s mask free election night “victory” celebration.  That victory most certainly doesn’t pertain to Trump but his presence on the ballot did help a few more Republican Senators hold their seats;  the various decision desks have now called the race in North Carolina for incumbent Republican Thom Tillis and the race in Alaska for incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan.  Ivanka weighed in by tweeting out her congratulations because apparently it’s okay for media outlets to project victories for Republicans, just not for Democrats running against her father.  To that end, responding to pressure, Georgia’s Secretary of State announced that he’s starting the process of recounting all of those Georgia ballots, by hand rather than by machine, a time consuming process.  But no worries, he thinks he can finish the count in time to certify the results for the electoral college.   

 69 Days