The Trump Files

As noted, president chubby bear interrupted his hibernation on Friday and waddled from his cave long enough to sing the praises of operation Warp Speed and take full credit for the development of an anti-Covid vaccine "in record time," even though said vaccine has yet to be fully tested and approved, let alone distributed to the millions of Americans (outside of New York state, that is) who will soon need it, especially as the number of cases and deaths continues to rise at an alarming rate. The president spoke from prepared remarks, which somehow failed to acknowledge that. He also failed to address the fact that former vice-president Joe Biden has 306 electoral votes to his 232, meaning Biden and running mate Kamala Harris will be replacing president squatter-by-right in the cave at noon next January 20.

One of the problems the president has in denying that, aside from the torrent of ludicrous lawsuits that are being tossed out of court almost as fast as they are presented, is the fact that the election wasn't even close; in fact, it was far more one-sided and decisive than the one in 2016, which Trump touted as a "landslide" even though the electoral count was the same, 306-232, The difference is that Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by more than three million, whereas Biden won that vote by about five million---thus presenting, in president willie sutton's twisted mind, a clear and indisputable case of voter fraud and election theft. That is the only way, to him, that Biden could have won more votes against "the greatest presidency in the history of presidencies"—better in only four years than any others in eight—a list that includes Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry S Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama.

For all his fabled rhetorical excellence, Trump wasn't able to convince enough Americans of his greatness—no, his godliness and divine right to re-election. So now he has to convince them that he actually "won" an election in which he was soundly beaten, that it was "stolen" from him by Democrats who somehow managed to alter or otherwise usurp thousands upon thousands of votes in such key states as Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Pennsylvania. It's an argument that flies about as well as Trump would were he to jump from the White House balcony he is so fond of pointing to as his "home." You lost, Donald; get over it and start acting like a man, not an overgrown baby in suit and tie.

November 17, 2020

Surfing past president bombast's tsunami of outdoor rallies in the days leading up to the presidential election on November 3, I kept hearing him say things like "Covid; that's all we hear these days—Covid, Covid, Covid... Believe me (oh, how he loves that phrase), after the election you'll be hearing nothing more about Covid. It will suddenly disappear..."

As his disciples cheered and shouted their approval, I thought to myself, "Are they listening to what he is saying?" The answer to which is yes... and no. What I mean is, there is often a wide chasm between listening and understanding. There's no doubt his sycophants are listening... but understanding? As the Wizard of Oz noted, that's a horse of a different color. After all, as president "believe me" has logged more than 25,000 verifiable lies (and counting) since moving into the White House four years ago, and not one of them seems to have caused his deluded followers to blink, let alone wonder if he might be slightly bending the truth, one has to wonder whether anything he says or does can breach the ramparts of blind obedience and wend its way to the inner sanctum of thought.

Take, for example, last Saturday, when president well-wisher signaled his approval of demonstrations in downtown DC by directing his motorcade to drive past them...on its way to the golf course! His serfs and puppets cheered, instead of asking themselves, "Why isn't he at the White House combating the alarming surge in Covid-19 cases, which he assured us would disappear the day after the election?" Most rational observers see one thing —a clear dereliction of duty—while the president's lackeys see quite another —"he cares enough to let us have a glimpse of his royal personage as he takes time off from his demanding schedule for some well-earned rest and recreation." Same circumstance, two diametrically opposite views.

In pondering how to bridge this seemingly insuperable chasm of fact vs fiction, reality vs fantasy, I've concluded that president fibber mcgee's underlings do need a "hearing aid," but one unlike any that has ever been worn before: a hearing aid that can separate truth from falsehood, authenticity from mythology, bravado from cowardice. Not only would such a device enable Trump's apologists to actually "hear" what he is saying, it would have the added benefit of limiting his rallies to around five minutes or so, with most of that time devoted to Trump either clearing his throat or pausing for breath. If we can send a man to the moon, surely we could design a "hearing aid" that would implant some common sense into the ears, minds and hearts of those who insist on "hearing" only those "facts" that validate and reinforce their fear and intolerance, no matter how far-fetched and ludicrous the argument. Scientists, you have your assignment; surely that's not too much to ask.

In other news...

Note to Lindsey Graham (R-SC), chairman of the Senate judiciary committee: of all the presidents to go to war for, you chose this one? High marks to GA secretary of state (and fellow Republican) Brad Raffensperger for calling Graham out for the senator's suggestion that he invalidate some legal ballots in a state where Joe Biden's lead is roughly 14,000 and a hand recount is under way. "I did no such thing," Graham said. "Yes, you did," said Raffensperger who would probably like to see that count reversed too, but legally, not under the table, as he says Graham intimated in a phone call to his office. "It was an implication," said Raffensperger, "of 'look hard and see how many ballots you could throw out.'" Hey, "I only wanted to understand the process," Graham protested. The question remains: why was a ranking US senator phoning the GA secretary of state (and those in AZ and NV) when what happens in those states is none of his business. As Yul Brynner, the Siamese monarch in The King and I, speculated, 'tis a puzzlement. Graham has since tried to explain his reason, saying, "because the fate of the US hangs in the balance." With that I would agree—but only if he should succeed in overturning the election results and handing president woebegone another four-year term. That would not only tip the balance, it would seal the fate of democracy in general and the US in particular. In other words, welcome to the Fourth Reich.

To your profiles in courage, add the names of Fox News anchors Eric Shawn and Leland Vittert. Courage? Fox News anchors? True, those are concepts not ordinarily embodied in the same sentence, but that's no misprint. Faced with an unceasing barrage of pro-Trump gibberish from talking heads Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and assorted guests, Shawn and Vittert had the balls to step forward and call their ranting what it is: bullshit. "Prosecutors say any voter or election fraud allegations will be thoroughly investigated and if a fix were in, if there was wrongdoing, we will all know about it," Shawn said on what appears to be an authentic Fox newscast. "But election officials across the country insist, as of today, that there is no evidence of any widespread fraud affecting the outcome of the presidential election, that our precious democracy was not tampered with and that such baseless and false claims are an insult to the thousands of election officials and workers across the country who we have seen dedicating themselves 24/7 to ensure a fair and free election for all of us."

Two words spring to mind: Bravo and Amen. And should Shawn and Vittert soon find themselves seeking other employment, some self-respecting news network should grab 'em fast.

And finally...

In the film Wag the Dog from 1998, the US president is about to be ensnared in a sex scandal (how timely is that?) two weeks before the election. To distract attention from it, his administration enlists a high-powered ad man to help concoct a phony "war" with Albania, "fought" entirely in the press and on (pre-Internet) social media (Fox News, anyone?). I was reminded of that film this week when president wrecking ball asked top military brass about his "options" were he to plan an offensive strike on Iran's primary nuclear site. Iran, it seems—surprise, surprise! —has been enriching its stockpiles of uranium, one step in the development of a nuclear weapon. By doing so, Iran would be violating a non-proliferation treaty with the US—that is, if president I-can-do-better hadn't pulled us out of that treaty two years ago. Now he wants to know if he can "step outside and settle this," bone spurs and all. Truth be told, Trump knows he's on his way out the door and would like to make as much mischief as possible before then. Another possibility may be the thought that "yes, I lost the election, but America wouldn't dare change presidents in the middle of a war." Note to Donald: yes, it would. A war with Iran wouldn't be pleasant, but at least the Orange Menace could watch it from the comfort of his digs in Mar-a-Lago, from where he could carp: "If Biden thinks he's so hot, let him figure a way out."

November 20, 2020

Where is the anger?

Where is the outrage?

Where are the large crowds of protesters loudly screaming—as Donald (technically, I'm still your president) Trump would be if the shoe were on the other foot ---"Throw the son of a bitch out!!!"

What we have is a rogue soon-to-be ex-president who refuses to concede an election in which he was soundly beaten by former vice-president Joe Biden, instead using the court system and every other felonious weapon at his disposal to try and overturn the result—in other words, to try and snatch democracy from under our noses while obliterating a system that has served the country well for more than two centuries, all in the name of his narcissism and self-interest. Aided and abetted, of course, by the right-wing media whose steady drum beat of pro-Trump propaganda has led many of our fellow citizens to believe his cause is righteous and must prevail over the "forces of evil"—otherwise known as law and order, justice and propriety—that have led us to this impasse.

Where is the outcry?

Where is the anguish?

Perhaps I'm not paying close enough attention, but what I'm mostly hearing are calm, generally muted "voices of reason" assuring us that there's "really no problem," that Trump's brazen power grab is doomed to collapse, and our "system of government and laws" will prevail. Okay. But would you mind saying that a bit louder, please? You're in danger of being drowned out by Fox News, One America Network, NewsMax and other right-wing loonies who wouldn't know or honor the truth if it attacked their perversion and bias like Covid-19.

Here's one example: OAN this week ran a story that claimed the actual Electoral College result was Trump 410, Biden 128. How did they arrive at those mind-blowing numbers? Well, it seems—and this is just between you and me—it seems that the US Army conducted a covert raid in Germany to seize computer servers with election-related information. Why was US election data stored on servers in Germany? While OAN chose not to address that question, the result of the Army's "stealth raid" was clear: "It shows a landslide victory for president Trump, with 410 Electoral College votes including liberal strongholds California and Minnesota." Minnesota, perhaps. But true-blue California? Even the swindler-in-chief might find that head-scratching result hard to believe.

In spite of OAN's insistence that its sources were unerring, there were a few tiny problems, one of which was that the Army not only asserted there was no such raid, but that the software company in question, Scytl, does not currently have servers in Germany. Chris Krebs—who until last week was Trump's director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—also debunked OAN's bizarre fairy tale (and was soon looking for another job), as did the AP, Reuters, PolitiFact and the (failing) NY Times. And as a final blow, Snopes rated OAN's story "false."

Problem is, by that time it had been seen online by hundreds of thousands of credulous viewers, many of whom no doubt decided it was true, not false. And so OAN's specious "noise" drowned out many of the "calm and reasoned voices" who insist there's no way Trump can subvert an election and steal another four-year term. And they are in all likelihood correct (knock wood). Still, I can't help thinking about the early 1930s, when the powers-that-were in Germany were no doubt saying, "Oh, don't worry about crazy Adolph; sure, he's ambitious and egomaniacal, but we have the law on our side. There's only so much damage he can do." Meanwhile, Hitler's loyal henchmen in the Republican (pardon, National Socialist) Party were working overtime behind the scenes and in the shadows to make sure the law no longer applied to their glorious leader. And almost before you could say "heil," they'd ushered in the Third Reich. The rest, as they say, is history.

But don't worry; that could never happen here... could it?

In other news...

Just when president donald the great's heinous onslaught on democracy seemed in danger of collapsing, the cavalry arrived in the imperious guise of—Rudy Giuliani! Yes, America's mayor entered the fray, using his incomparable legal mind to fluster and outwit those who would dare stand in the way of his master's rightful path to re-election. With all the ingenuity and cunning of a latter-day Jubilation T Cornpone, Guiliani marched defiantly into a courtroom in Pennsylvania to argue the president's case, cleverly catching the judge off balance by declaring that Trump's brief alleging widespread voter fraud was "not a fraud case." Judge Matthew Brann, however, had done his homework: "There is no claim in the complaint that any qualified Pennsylvania voter cast more than one ballot that was counted," he said to Giuliani. "There is no claim that any qualified voter who cast a mail-in ballot had their vote wrongly rejected. There is no claim that anyone not eligible to vote in fact voted."

"But your honor," Giuliani shrewdly replied, "they wouldn't let us watch them count the ballots!"

Defense attorneys were quick to disagree, noting that three formal counts and a request for action over the issue had been erased in a revised version of the president's lawsuit. "Mr Giuliani is talking about another case, not the case before your honor," one said, and was "focusing on allegations that had been deleted, deleted, deleted, deleted."

"That may be true," Giuliani argued, "but nobody told me!" At which point Judge Brann asked, "So on what basis are you arguing that 680,000 legal votes should be overturned?" Faced with the sort of question any well-grounded attorney would pounce on like a lion on red meat, Giuliani stood tall, rolled up his sleeves, looked the judge straight in the eye—and asked for a recess.

Giuliani was later overheard on his smart phone asking someone to "wire today's $20,000" to his account as rivulets of hair dye ran down the sides of his sweat-stained face.

And finally...

Note to TV's talking heads: Please stop saying "there is no evidence of WIDESPREAD voter fraud." The fact is, there is no evidence of voter fraud. PERIOD. The only "fraud" is hunkered down in the White House, trying every underhanded trick in the book—and some that aren't in the book—to steal a lawfully and legitimately won election from the clear and rightful winner, Joseph R Biden.

November 25, 2020

Thanksgiving is upon us, and this year we've been given a reason to be thankful by president petulant I, of all people, who has reluctantly conceded (though that's a word he would never use) that his four-year reign of incompetence, indifference, vindictiveness and venality has finally ended and that Joe Biden will be sworn in on January 20 as the forty-sixth president of the United States. Symbolically, the transfer of power began some seventeen days after the election when General Services administrator Emily Murphy handed Biden and his team the keys to the kingdom, assuring everyone that she had "reached this decision independently, based on the law and available facts, and was never pressured—ow! you're hurting my arm!—never pressured directly or indirectly by any member of the executive branch" to withhold funds or other resources needed to start the transition.

Meanwhile, with less than two months remaining before president-elect Biden's inevitable inauguration, president plaintiff's team of silver-tongued world-class lawyers continues to file frivolous and largely incomprehensible lawsuits in a number of states, seeking to overturn election results that have already been certified, and generally trying, in their best Keystone Kops manner, to cast doubt on an election that one of their own, Chris Krebs, the director (until last week) of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), has called "the most secure in American history." And while president chubby bear continues to hibernate in his large white cave, emerging only for a brief moment Tuesday afternoon to boast about (and take credit for) an uptick in the stock market, he has ordered his underlings to set fire to every haystack in sight, making sure the incoming president and his administration will have to spend the better part of their first year putting them out. Oh, and president daydreamer continues to insist that he "won" the election, arguing that Biden's advantage of roughly five million popular votes is a mirage, one that can easily be reversed once the truth becomes known. And to allay any doubts, he has left the disclosure of that truth in the capable hands of Rudy Giuliani.

In other news...

Heroes do walk among us, and we are thankful for one of them, Patrick Quinn, who died this week at age thirty-seven. In case the name doesn't ring a bell, Quinn, who suffered from Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS), was a co-founder of the Ice Bucket Challenge, a campaign that went viral and brought awareness (and needed funds) to enhance ALS research. Ice bucket "challengers" doused with freezing water included Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James, Will Smith, Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson, Vin Diesel, Lady Gaga, Ben Stiller, Amy Schumer, Chris Pratt, Conan O'Brien, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and many others who together helped raise more than $220 million for ALS medical research. (President well-coiffed demurred, saying ice water wasn't good for his comb-over. He did, however, draw some laughs when he said his charity would lend a hand.)

According to the CDC, about 12,000 to 15,000 Americans may have ALS, for which there is no cure. "The Ice Bucket Challenge dramatically accelerated the fight against ALS, leading to new research, expansion of care, and greater investment by the government in research," the ALS Association wrote on Twitter. "Pat continued to raise awareness and funds for the fight against ALS" even as his own condition worsened. A hero indeed. RIP, Pat.

And finally...

Note to the professional nay-sayers who are grumbling that president-elect Biden is trying to set up a "third Obama term": a third Obama term would look a helluva lot better than any first Trump term, no matter what measuring stick were used. There is simply no substitute for astuteness and professionalism over cronyism and incompetence. You don't need knowledge or experience to prove that; it is simply self-evident. A "third Obama term"? You can count me in without uncertainty or pause.

November 28, 2020

There are times when a news article may grab one's attention, others when it takes no more than a headline. Here is a recent example of the latter:

TRUMP SAYS HE'LL LEAVE WHITE HOUSE IF ELECTORAL COLLEGE SEATS BIDEN

Really? Where is the "news" there? The headline implies that Trump has a choice—that he may simply decide to stay in office for another four years and make the new president wait until he is ready to leave. Let us be perfectly clear about that: he has NO SUCH CHOICE! On January 20, the Bidens move in, and the Trumps move out—they can either go quietly or with an "escort." There is NO alternative!

As the Constitution states: "The terms of the president and the vice president shall end (not "perhaps" shall end) at noon on the 20th day of January... and the terms of their successors shall then begin." Nowhere does it say "unless the current president and vice president decide otherwise." So if Trump "says he'll leave the White House," that is not because he welcomes the change but because the decision is not his to make. It has been made for him and enshrined in the Constitution. No matter how that banner reads or what it implies, there is simply no news there!

The headline does, however, show how debased the electoral process has become on president conspiracy's watch. No president has ever screamed "fraud!" and "rigged!" and "we was robbed!" as loudly or as often. The actual evidence of said fraud, however, has proven as difficult to pin down as Trump's tax returns or his state-of-the-art health-care plan. I'm no big fan of John Bolton, but Trump's former national security adviser hit the nail squarely on the head when he said of the administration's relentless quest to prove election fraud, "Their argument seems to be that there was a conspiracy so vast and so successful that there is no evidence of it." Bingo! It's a premise that Rudy Giuliani has been peddling before every court that is willing to grant the president's laughable complainant-in-chief a hearing, always with humbling and predictable results. As a Pennsylvania appellate court ruled in dismissing his most recent derangement: "Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here." In response, Trump bellowed, "There's no way Joe Biden got eighty million votes! How could he, when we SUPPRESSED more votes than that!"

Nevertheless, on January 20 Trump will leave the White House and Joe Biden will replace him as president. As for president also-ran attending the Biden inauguration ceremony, my gut says no—he simply can't be present for what the nation sees as a peaceful transition of power and he considers an abject humiliation. It certainly wouldn't be the first tradition he'd upended during his four years of conning millions of misguided Americans into trusting that whatever he was doing on the golf course was akin to governing. Stay tuned...

In other news...

If there is one thing president oz the magnificent has in common with p.t. barnum, it is the unshakable belief that a sucker is born every minute. To both men, conning that sucker was and is second-nature. Trump's latest scam is harvesting money from those credulous bozos to help "root out fraud" in the recent presidential election. And he's not the only one. Houston, TX-based True the Vote Inc promised a multi-level plan to "investigate, litigate and expose suspected illegal balloting and fraud in the 2020 general election." So how has that been going? For starters, in the days after the election True the Vote filed four lawsuits but dropped them all last week, choosing instead to "follow a different (and unspecified) path."

One of True the Vote's pigeons (pardon, clients) had seen enough. Fred Eshelman, founder of North Carolina-based Eshelman Ventures LLC, filed suit Wednesday against the fraud-hunters to retrieve the money he had given them to help reverse the election results. How much money? A mere $2.5 million, that's all. True the Vote offered him $1 million to drop the suit, which he refused. Apparently, he isn't 100 percent cuckoo, only the part of him that supports Donald Trump's unhinged allegations that the election was STOLEN FROM HIM by a nefarious (and clandestine) Democrat-led conspiracy, and that he actually won by a landslide. While it seems a refund is certainly in order, we must keep in mind that Eshelman—a money manager who had the smarts to form his own company and is the former CEO/chairman of two others—was donating his millions to HELP RE-ELECT DONALD TRUMP! Talk about bi-polar! Scientists could spend years studying and analyzing that part of the human brain that stubbornly refuses to accept what is patently true and chooses instead to cling to a fantasy in which up is down, black is white, in is out, and Donald J Trump is a very stable genius and still reach the same inescapable conclusion—there's one born every minute.

December 7, 2020

When it comes to the Trump Syndicate's post-election lawsuits, those who have been keeping score are aware of the results to date: Courts 48, Trump 1 (the lone "victory" allowing Trump's poll watchers to move four feet closer to the vote-counters in Pennsylvania). In the latest setback, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled 4-3 against the Syndicate's attempt to nullify about 20,000 ballots in that state's election in November. A decree in the capo's favor could have paved the way for the Republican-controlled state legislature to choose its ten presidential electors, effectively setting aside Joe Biden's clear-cut victory and handing Wisconsin's electors to the mob.

Hooray! Another win for democracy!

But wait, hold on a minute! What was that vote again? It was 4-3, you say? In a state in which Biden won the popular vote by about that same contested margin of 20,000 votes? That means three of those seven jurists agreed with Trump's preposterous delusion about illegal ballots having decided the outcome in Wisconsin, exactly as they (presumably) did (at least in Trump's warped mind) in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada! What a coincidence! And based on the Syndicate's other inane and ill-conceived lawsuits, I can all but guarantee that the Court was given zero proof to support those outrageous claims. Even so, three of them—all members of the state's highest court!—chose to buy the snake oil that Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and others have been peddling and voted to overturn a perfectly legal election—based on what? Certainly not on the sort of "evidence" presented by Trump's slapstick legal team in other cases in which they've been all but laughed out of court.

In theory, those elected to serve on the High Court in Wisconsin are non-partisan; if, however, they were lined up for a photo, my guess is that at least three of them would lean so far to the right that the photographer would have to take the shot at a 45-degree angle. Fortunately for our democracy—at least in Wisconsin—the other four remain upright and relatively level-headed; at least they were in this case. But if even one of the four had swallowed Trump's tainted bait and been reeled in, the Syndicate might have added ten stolen electoral votes to its total of 232.

In other news...

On Saturday, president do-or-die was in Georgia, supposedly campaigning on behalf of the state's two Republican senatorial candidates in a January 5 run-off election but actually doing the same as he does everywhere else—airing his outlandish grievances—and this time also phoning Republican governor Brian Kemp to ask if he could lend a hand in helping to overturn an election whose ballots have now been counted and re-counted at least three times. This only days after Trump had called Kemp "hapless" and a "moron." Needless to say, the governor politely declined president double-dealer's request, saying he hadn't the power as governor to honor it.

And even as his days in the White House are numbered, president Avaricious the 1st continues to milk the "election fraud" cash cow for all it's worth, so far to the tune of more than $207.5 million, most in small donations from patsies who could use the money for more practical purposes such as feeding their family or paying the rent. The money, they are assured, is earmarked for the president's "Election Defense Fund," no doubt a worthy cause in their befuddled minds. The fine print, however, reveals that about 75 percent of the money is being diverted to a new political action committee, Save America. Three guesses as to who gets that no-strings-attached cash, and the first two don't count. And in case you were wondering, yes, Trump can spend that money almost any way he wishes. A quick round of golf, anyone? No charge; and the drinks are on the house! (well, on those whose misguided but nonetheless welcome donations built the house).

The coronavirus pandemic may have taken more than 280,000 American lives this year but it couldn't stop the New York Young Republicans from hosting their annual gala for 150 members at a New Jersey restaurant last week with special guest star congressman Matt Gaetz (R—of course—of Florida). The restaurant has since been closed on orders from governor Tim Murphy who tweeted Gaetz, "Matt, you are not welcome in New Jersey, and frankly I don't ever want you back in this state." NY governor Andrew Cuomo, no doubt biting his tongue, simply called Gaetz "irresponsible." To which Gaetz responded, "If Mike Pompeo can attend a party even larger than that at the State Department, so can I." Well, he does have a point there...

Last Wednesday, one day after president corleone's notably impartial Justice Department said it had found no evidence of widespread fraud in the November presidential election, the prevaricator-in-chief was at it again, posting a 46-minute video on Facebook in which he repeated (and embellished) every lie he had ever told about the "rigged" election that he actually "won"—by a lot. After prefacing his remarks by saying "this may be the most important speech I've ever made" (talk about setting the bar low!), he launched into a series of fantasies and outright lies about how the election was "stolen" from its rightful winner (guess who?), raging about voting irregularities in the four critical states that swung the election in Joe Biden's favor. Then, as icing on the already moldering cake, president lawful painted himself as the valiant defender of America's election system, saying he "had been told" (somehow he can never quite remember exactly who told him) that protecting the integrity of our voting system could be "the most important accomplishment" of his presidency—even more important than that three-under-par 69 he shot the week before at his golf course in New Jersey—a score, by the way, that was every bit as valid as his claims of election fraud.

And finally...

Remember Pearl Harbor! As president Franklin D Roosevelt (we had real presidents in those days) said to congress and the nation, "a day that shall live in infamy." And you thought I'd forgotten, didn't you? No, that's the sort of horrific catastrophe that tends to linger in a six-year-old's mind, even seventy-nine years after the fact.

December 13, 2020

The nation's long nightmare has finally ended—or has it?

On Friday, president dracula's last desperate attempt to use our court system to suck the lifeblood from American democracy died a swift and suitable death when the US Supreme Court drove a 9-0 stake straight through its heart, denying the litigator-in-chief a second (undeserved) term in the unseemly and iniquitous mausoleum once known as the White House. The Court's unanimous decision thus ended our country's closest brush (so far) with becoming a 21st century replica of Nazi Germany—or did it?

Here is what US Rep Frank Kratovil of Maryland, a lawyer by profession, had to say about that (we are paraphrasing, of course):

Trump isn't quite through yet. When Congress convenes in January to certify the electoral vote (232 for president "I WON—BY A LOT!," 306 for president-elect Joe Biden), Trump will convince at least one member each in the House and Senate to challenge the results. Once that has been done, both chambers are required to consider that complaint and determine its legitimacy. The House of Representatives, still controlled by Democrats, will no doubt dismiss the matter out of hand. The Senate, however, may or may not agree. If the chambers return a split verdict, the matter goes back to the states whose governors have the final say. Fortunately, those governors, regardless of party, have chosen so far to uphold the rule of law. While it looks as though they will continue to do so, the pressure from the Trump Syndicate will be enormous, and the governors may have to summon some of the "courage" president bone spurs has been demanding from others to quash once and for all his fruitless quest for unchecked power.

Should the governors fail to act on his behalf, president droopy dog will have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune once more —yet another setback in a seemingly endless series of travails that have beset the country's most maligned and hapless victim since the day he entered this world, when doctors had to perform emergency surgery to dislodge the silver spoon he had accidentally tried to swallow. Since then, it seems, both friend and foe alike have taken up arms against him, forcing president good-hearted the 1st to utter time and again the dreaded words "you're fired!" (well, actually to have some of his craven underlings utter them on his behalf).

What makes this latest reversal so hard to bear is that president woebegone really thought his hand-picked Supreme Court would overlook the deplorable shallowness and absurdity of the lawsuit filed on his behalf by the attorney general of Texas—an action he called "the big one"—and ride to his rescue. After all, president svengoolie reasoned, he had pulled the wool over the eyes of more than seventy million Americans, the aforementioned attorney general and attorneys general from seventeen other states, not to mention more than 120 members of the House of Representatives who had lent their names (and mortgaged their souls) to help further the suit, and even two "states" we didn't even know existed—New California and New Nevada. Given those powers of persuasion, conning the Supreme Court, he surmised, would be a piece of cake.

As it turns out, Trump greatly underestimated the Court's ability to separate law from burlesque and vote accordingly, whether or not some members "owed him a favor." Problem is, once they've become justices on the Court, the words "you're fired!" no longer apply. Even if you are president with all the pomp and circumstance that implies, those justices can give you the finger any time they please, for whatever reason they wish, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Face it, when you can't even hoodwink Clarence Thomas it's time to start waving the white flag. A sure sign, however, that president never-say-die is serious about giving it another try in four years was his Sunday tweet proclaiming "THE 2024 ELECTION IS RIGGED!" Nothing beats getting an early start...

In other news...

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