Moral Decay

Seize the Day? The January 6^th Committee spent the weekend sifting through the 700 pages of documents that the Former Guy tried to keep hidden.  Though we don’t yet know everything included in those pages, via Politico’s Betsy Woodruff Swan we now know that one of those documents is a draft executive order that directed the Defense Secretary to “seize, collect, retain and analyze” all the voting  machines and related election apparatus and to appoint a special counsel to investigate the 2020 presidential election. The memo cited disproven conspiracy theories about election fraud in Georgia and Michigan, including those off the wall assertions that such foreign players as China, Venezuela and Italy were involved in the so-called election steal as justification for what would have been extreme very undemocratic actions to state the obvious.  The plan included in the draft order sounds a lot like what kraken lawyer Sidney Powell was pushing in mid-December and it’s thought that she would have been the person chosen to assume the special counsel position. The memo cites two classified documents, one of which was so classified that its existence outside of government was not known, indicating that someone within the government was among its scribes. Notably just a day after the memo was written one time national security adviser Michael Flynn who was pushing for the FG to declare martial law, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne who in addition to being Team FG was a supporter and paramour of Russian sparrow Maria Butina and kraken lawyer Powell met with the FG in the Oval Office presumably to discuss the implementation of the plan.  Additionally, it was around that time that Attorney General Barr who until then had been willing to do almost anything he was asked to do submitted his letter of resignation and the leadership team remaining at the Department of Justice threatened to resign en masse.  Moreover, since by then the FG had replaced the leadership of the Defense Department with loyalists, had the executive order been signed, the confiscation of the voting machines as well as the whole martial law thing could have really happened and had it happened at the very least the FG would have remained in office well past January 20. Concerns that the FG was going to follow through with these plans likely explains why all 10 living former US defense secretaries took the unprecedented step of signing on to a public letter that was published in the Washington Post in early January, 2021 declaring that the US presidential election was over and that Joe Biden had won. 

The Melber Effect: While the election machines were never confiscated, what appears to have been the Rudy Giuliani led effort to upend the Electoral College vote certification process did go forward.  On Friday, Boris Epshteyn, one of the members of the Giuliani team, actually admitted that he was involved in that effort. Following in the footsteps of former trade advisor Peter Navarro, he did that during an appearance on Ari Melber’s nightly MSNBC show. Of course Epshteyn’s position is that he hadn’t done anything wrong, he was just lining up those alternative electoral college certificates in case former VP Mike Pence “needed” them. And why shouldn’t Epshteyn think that confessing on air isn’t exonerating, the FG has employed the tactic repeatedly and its not like he’s suffered any consequences.  As to consequences, it’s not clear that daughter Ivanka will ever really face any, well other than not being allowed to head up a charitable organization in NYS or being invited to the Met Gala, but she is running up legal bills, assuming that she rather than the Republican National Committee is paying them.  In addition to being subpoenaed by NYS Attorney General Tish James, last week she was invited to meet with the January 6^th committee.  They’ve heard from others that she tried repeatedly to convince her father to get the Capitol Hill tourists/insurrectionists to stand down before someone was killed. No one really expects her to show up, especially since right now the request is just that a request, not a subpoena, but how ironic is it that she is afraid to testify that she was actually doing the right thing.  It turns out that former Attorney General Barr, who like Paul Manafort has a book coming out soon, isn’t so shy.  Over the weekend we learned that he, like former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, has met with members of the Committee several times.

Viral Musings:  Yesterday a boisterous group of anti-vaccine mandate protestors held a rally in Washington DC.  Apparently, anti-vaxers now refer to themselves as just being anti-mandate, a position also popular with conservative judges including the Texas one who blocked another one of Biden’s mandates last week, as they’ve decided that being anti-mandate is more politically acceptable.  Don’t be fooled, the anti-mandate crowd is most definitely against vaccines. One of the louder demonstrators in DC was RFK Jr who attacked the mandates by saying that “even in Hitler’s Germany you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did.”  Apparently he never got to the end of the diary, and missed that Anne died at the Bergen-Belsen death camp. The Auschwitz Museum, the most important group to follow on Twitter, responded best saying “Exploiting the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured, and murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany — including children like Anne Frank — in a debate about vaccines and limitations during global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decay.” Sadly, the Auschwitz Museum twitter response staff are kept far too busy these days.  On the virus front, while there’s no question that the Omicron wave is on a steep decline in places like New York State where the positivity rate is now below 10%, even lower in NYC, and hospitalizations are declining it’s too early to say that the country is out of the woods as the 7 day average of daily COVID deaths is still hovering around 2000 and hospitalization rates are still rising in many areas including even upstate NY.  Also, the results are in and it’s clear that COVID vaccines do not affect fertility though getting COVID can negatively impact men’s ability to procreate for around 60 days.

Ukraine: The situation in Ukraine continues to deteriorate.  Last week President Biden was slammed for saying that an incursion of some kind by Russia into Ukraine was likely and that all of our allies weren’t in the same place with regard to pushing back at Putin’s plans. It turns out that though Biden may have been too frank for many, he was talking truth.  The Germans who rely on Russia for too much of their energy, are fearful that opposing Putin will result in consequences that they’d rather not face. To that end over the weekend the head of Germany’s Navy was pushed to resign after he suggested that Putin “probably” deserved respect, more than implying that it was okay to let him take another chunk of Ukraine because “Russia is an old country. Russia is an important country. Even we, India, Germany, we need Russia, because we need Russia against China."  He got canned for saying out loud what a lot of others in Germany are thinking and what Tucker Carlson and the NY Times’ Ross Douthat are saying.  Meantime, the Brits, who are knee deep in their own “Boris Johnson partying during COVID” controversy accused Putin of seeking to replace Ukraine's government with a pro-Moscow administration. For our part, though we appear to be close to imposing extreme sanctions intended to cripple Russia’s banking institutions and to limit its ability to produce technology dependent products, we’ve also started calling home families and non-essentials workers from Ukraine a recognition that things are likely to get uglier soon.  Oy.