The Fat Lady Sings

 

Tr*mp the Opera approaches the finale faster than I anticipated, with a climax somewhat more surprising than it should have been.  I wonder what they were saying from the pulpits of the megachurches this morning.

While impeachment at this point seems like a long shot, it would be worth the effort if it can deprive Tr*mp of his post-presidential retirement benefits, including a million bucks a year in travel expenses (and half-a-million more for Melania), lifetime Secret Service protection, and a pension equal to the salary of a Cabinet official.  Fittingly, he won't get lifetime health insurance, which only kicks in after five years of Federal employment.  I can't object if he's signed up for Medicare.

Meanwhile, it looks like the Republican Party is fracturing, which is not necessarily good news for progressives.  If there is "bipartisan cooperation" between Republican and Democratic "moderates," the Senate may as well elect Joe Manchin the new Majority Leader.  Granted, even that would be better than having McConnell in charge.

As for Tr*mp's "base," it will survive, albeit somewhat diminished.  Just how diminished remains to be seen: those who get their "news" from One America Network, Parler, and 4chan, or who live in communities where Romney is seen as a liberal, can cling to their alternative realities for a long time.  (FOX will follow the eyeballs and the ad revenue.)

Needless to say, Biden's FBI will have to pay a lot more attention to domestic terrorism.

Waiting for Brunhilde

 

The opera has grown increasingly Wagnerian, and I never had much tolerance for Wagner — too long and just too noisy to sleep through.  Although all the major news outlets have accepted the idea that Biden won the election, a distressingly large number of Americans still firmly believe that Tr*mp was “robbed” of  victory.  The cognitive dissonance suffered by Our President is shared by his loyal base; and their news sources are working hard to preserve their illusions.

Trump still seems to be counting on “his” Supreme Court to back up his play to remain in power, and the first test of loyalty will be his attempt to discount illegal immigrants when allocating representation in the House.  Frankly, I can’t see how self-proclaimed “Originalists” and “Literalists” can twist the plain language of the Constitution to exclude them, but logical consistency, of late, hasn’t been held in especially high regard.

For all the optimism around the Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca vaccines, it’s hard to imagine a two-dose protocol having enough impact to make much of a difference. It’s hard enough to get people inoculated even once, much less have them return for a second dose a month later.  In the Third World especially, dispensing on-time second doses will be next to impossible.

Wagner’s painfully long Ring Cycle “ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings” — and it looks like the fat lady, this time around, isn’t even waiting in the wings.

About that election...

 

 You may feel like it's okay to take a breath now, but the stink of authoritarian populism still hangs heavy in the air.  Biden may aspire to lead a united country, but it won't be happening any time soon — if ever.  Some of the oversized American flags may come off the pickup trucks, but the American reservoir of racism and misogyny remains full to the brim, continues to spill over into the streets, and will allow Republicans to continue exploiting the divisions that make minority rule possible.

Tr*mp's supporters. whether they know it or not, are okay with fascism — and there are a hell of a lot of them.  Add in the 20% who didn't trouble themselves to vote – which probably means they figure they can live with anything – and that's a significant majority of America.  That ratio is probably neither better nor worse than what you'd find in other developed countries, human nature being what it is, but the past four years offered ample evidence that the threat of fascism in the USofA is real. 

The Real Story

With all the chatter going on about Tr*mp's "mini-strokes," I figure I ought to tell you what really was happening that day at Walter Reade.  I have absolutely no evidence, but hey, it's 2020 — and it sounds good!  What more could you want?

 Frankly, I was sure about what was going on the day the news broke about Tr*mp's surprise hospital visit.  News that Pence was put on-call "in case" Our President needed anesthesia has only confirmed what I thought then.  Anesthesia was planned: Tr*mp was scheduled for a colonoscopy.  Unless he chickened out, Pence actually got to be president for fifteen or twenty minutes.

Of course, a colonoscopy is pretty standard for a man in his seventies – so one might wonder why it was such a big secret.  The answer, of course, is Tr*mp's fragile ego and macho pretensions.  He just couldn't stand that anybody might envision him bare-ass with some guy probing between those enormous buttocks.  (I don't much like envisioning it myself.)

If you really need confirmation, you might want to check how much tweeting he did the night before.  He'd have spent quite a bit of time on the toilet.

 

Brief Briefs

Indecent Exposure
It is true that laws requiring us to wear face masks impinge on our personal liberty,  The same is true of laws requiring us to wear pants, and demonstrations against that restriction might be more entertaining than the anti-mask protests.

The Twitter Hack
Smart enough to hack the accounts of  lot of famous people, including some leading Democrats, the hackers were not smart enough to run a profitable con, pulling in less that $120,000 from some very gullible people.  They may have done better had they hacked leading Republicans; Our President's account could have brought in millions.

Positive Thinking
The Tr*mp family attended Marble Collegiate Church when it was led by Norman Vincent Peale, author of The Power of Positive Thinking and a forerunner of today's Christian conservatives.  I suspect his influence on young Donald may have been profound, but, sadly, positive thinking hasn't worked on the coronavirus.

Talking about senility...

Just in case you missed yesterday's presidential "press conference," here's a sample of what Our President had to say:

“We have great agreements where when Biden and Obama used to bring killers out, they would say don’t bring them back to our country, we don’t want them. Well, we have to, we don’t want them. They wouldn’t take them. Now with us, they take them. Someday, I’ll tell you why. Someday, I’ll tell you why. But they take them and they take them very gladly. They used to bring them out and they wouldn’t even let the airplanes land if they brought them back by airplanes. They wouldn’t let the buses into their country. They said we don’t want them. Said no, but they entered our country illegally and they’re murderers, they’re killers in some cases.”

Bounties

Nobody is surprised that Our President doesn't read his intelligence briefings, placing more confidence in Fox News than in the CIA.  (Personally, I suspect his aversion to reading may be because he's dyslexic.)  Republicans say nobody told him because the evidence for Russia paying bounties on the deaths of US service members wasn't strong enough.  Democrats say nobody wanted to tell him because he doesn't like to hear bad things about his buddy, Putin.

Another possibility is that he was told, and got on the phone to Putin to "find out if it was true."  Putin, of course, denied it — and Tr*mp, of course, believed him, just as he believed Putin's denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election: "President Putin says it's not Russia," Tr*mp proclaimed in Helsinki.  "I don't see any reason why it would be!"

Tr*mp has spoken to Putin by phone five or six times since he "didn't find out."  What were they talking about?  Oh, yeah — we're not allowed to know.

Sarcasm

I flipped on the TV while folding some laundry, just in time to receive Our President's latest medical advice.  His thought process could not have been so clear had it been displayed in a crawl at the bottom of the screen.

"Antiseptics kill germs, right?  And I heard somewhere some kind of light kills them too.  I wonder if they thought of that?

Simultaneously, his lips started moving – and a moment later, he was bouncing his great idea off Birx and the scientists.  It is not easy to be Fauci (not invited this time) or Birx, but I guess they hang in there for fear of whom their replacements might be.  Tr*mp, meanwhile, was imagining how neat it would be when he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

While I don't anticipate any Lysol shortages, I won't be surprised if there's a rush on UV lighting fixtures, possibly advertised on Fox News.  Soon, I predict, there will be plant lights shining down on the MyPillow® accoutred beds of many who comprise Our President's base.  Somehow, it seems appropriate.

What comes next?

Maybe there's a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, but nobody has any solid ideas about what else we'll find down there.  Pretty clearly, though, things will be different.  Both socially and economically, our current situation is a lot more novel than the novel coronavirus; and major societal disruptions provoke culture change.

Nobody is surprised by leaders like Orban, Duterte, and Modi becoming more authoritarian.  Tr*mp might dream of emulating them, but Tr*mp's general ineptitude and lackluster popular approval should make that impossible.  Meanwhile, economic collapse has prompted Congress to adopt a series of "socialist" initiatives that may be the forerunners of broader socioeconomic reform.

Granted, the plutocratic class will do its best to stymie any significant change; but workers who lose their health insurance along with their jobs are a lot more likely to abandon their "preference" for employer provided plans; Americans with little or no savings, including a sizable slice of the Red Hat Brigade, will come to recognize the need to expand safety net programs; and America's massive wealth disparities will become increasingly intolerable as the pandemic and its aftermath make them increasingly impossible to ignore.

Even if Tr*mp's "miracle" happens, and the virus subsides substantially in coming months, economists agree that recovery from its economic damage is likely to take years.  With weak consumer demand, many of the "safe" jobs currently being performed at home also will disappear.  Nobody is truly immune, and all of America will come to understand that.

Those who follow this blog know that optimism is not one of its defining characteristics, but this time there is some reason to hope that we eventually will emerge from this crisis with a more just society.  To be sure, November's elections will make a big difference.  One only can hope that the Democratic establishment can move beyond Clinton-era ideas of what is "practical" and start listening to the party's more progressive wing.

Time to Panic?

 

Maybe.  Fresh from arresting an uncle and a cousin on charges of plotting a coup, MBS roiled oil markets by launching a price war against Russia, exacerbating instability in a world economy already teetering from the impact of COVID-19.  Investment houses think recession is likely.

The manufacturing sector already is in recession from Tr*mp's trade war, global supply chains are a mess, and a virus is not especially susceptible to economic interventions.  However much money is pumped into the economy, it doesn't do much good if people won't go out and spend it: so whatever fiscal stimulus Congress comes up with probably won't make much difference.  The Fed will cut rates again, but interest rates already are so low that a further cut can't have significant impact.  The truth is that firms already have plenty of cash-on-hand were they interested in expansion — but who's interested in expansion while there's a pandemic going on?

I suspect the coronavirus may have done some good for "Grandpa Joe" in yesterday's primary contests: weird "Uncle Bernie" seems far too angry to offer much comfort and reassurance.  If the viral threat persists, of course, "Mean Boy Donald" fares even worse.

Catch-up

Our President's "deal of the century," the proposed "peace agreement" that would formalize Israel's currently de facto apartheid state, failed to deliver Israel's Parliament to his buddy Bibi; and may have helped the Arab-led Joint List win two additional seats.  Since the main disagreement between Bibi's Likud and Benny Gantz's Blue and White Party is over whether or not Bibi goes to jail, parliamentary paralysis may have been the best possible outcome at this point.

Meanwhile, in the USofA, the Democratic establishment has solidified around Joe Biden.  The push was especially evident on MSNBC, where invited guests heavily favored Biden over Sanders.  Chris Matthews may  have gone a bit overboard, though: he's losing his prime-time slot, possibly in response to complaints from MSNBC's more progressive viewers.

I still have serious doubts about Biden's "electability."  While the media tout his "improved" debate performances, he still has problems remembering his talking points, much less thinking on his feet.  I can't help thinking that his staffers are praying that ARVID-19 will damage Tr*mp enough to compensate for their candidate's many weaknesses.  Some think tank, somewhere, has to be calculating how many Americans have to die to ensure a Biden victory.

Also, although we haven't heard much about Burisma lately, it's coming.  By hook or by crook (mostly the latter), Tr*mp can count on Dan Barr to deliver in time for the presidential campaign

Rare as it may be, I feel some sympathy for Erdogan's efforts to keep another million Syrian refugees out of Turkey, which already is overburdened – and equivalent sympathy for the government of Greece, left to muddle through the refugee crisis with no real EU support.  At the same time, I understand that admitting more refugees can only further empower AfD, National Front, and other far-right parties.

Putin is having a very good week.

Bernie's "electability"

At this point in 2016, the consensus among the talking heads was that Donald Tr*mp could never win the Republican candidacy, much less the presidency.  Surely, they opined, Tr*mp was too extreme, too unorthodox: the nominee would be a far safer candidate.  (Remember Jeb Bush?)

What the punditry missed was that it was Tr*mp's unorthodoxy – his disregard the "rules" – that powered his candidacy.  Tr*mp was a disruptor – a norm-breaking agent of change – and change was just what many voters desperately wanted.  It was the same impulse that helped Obama win in 2008.  (The black guy just had to be different – right?)

For decades, American optimism has been in decline.  Only a third believe their children will be better off than they are, and the data indicate that the majority two-thirds are probably correct.  Over the past three years, nothing has happened to change those attitudes.  A low unemployment rate makes it easier to find a second job when your first job won't pay the bills, but that's not a recipe for life satisfaction.  In the critical Rust Belt states, Tr*mp's trade wars have reduced the number of well-paid manufacturing jobs; and insecure "gig" jobs with no benefits offer little comfort.

The face of change this time around is Bernie Sanders, and his plan for disrupting the status quo centers around redistributing wealth from the obscenely rich to the rest of us.  Granted, the USofA already may be too corrupt for that goal to be attainable, but that doesn't make the goal any less attractive to the many who feel left behind, or any less valid if we hope to salvage some of what we call "democracy" in America.

Tr*mp's own weaknesses could make him vulnerable to any potential Democratic opponent (with the possible exception of Joe Biden), but cautious incrementalism doesn't inspire voters to flock to the polls.  The real "swing voters" aren't cautious moderates; they're angry malcontents.  Like it or not, Bernie is the Democratic Party's best chance to win over those voters and take the presidency.

About that impeachment...

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Afghanistan update

Last week, Our President pardoned two turkeys and three war criminals.  Then he flew off to Afghanistan, where he announced resumption of peace talks with the Taliban.  The Taliban's response: "Huh?"

Presumably, this means negotiators will take up where they left off, with the Taliban agreeing not to attack NATO forces as they fully withdraw; and to hold separate peace negotiations with the Afghani government – in China.  While this is not good news for more westernized, urban Afghanis – particularly women – the frequently innocent victims of US bombing raids won't mind at all.  Anyway, nobody seems to have a better idea.

Clearly, the Taliban must recognize that a treaty with the United States may not be worth much, given US withdrawal from the Iran pact; and it's unlikely that Taliban leaders will feel any great obligation to follow through on their own commitments once foreign troop are gone from their country.  It's also unlikely that they will see a bitterly divided Afghani government as a credible negotiating partner, given the ongoing dispute between Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah regarding who actually won the past couple of elections.

Of course, most Americans really don't care what happens in Afghanistan once our troops come home: so America's longest war finally may be coming to an end.

Quick take

Many were amused when Lindsey Graham suggested that the Tr*mp administration is just too incompetent to hatch a plan which would force Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.  Well, Tr*mp & Co. certainly were too incompetent to get it right.  Sondland's amateurism and Giuliani's dementia made sure of that: they got caught.

I think it's just as amusing tha their incompetence – and Tr*mp's – are now the basis of the Republican defense against impeachment.  "Ukraine got the money," they say.  "There weren't any investigations."  Right.  The plan didn't work.  They got caught.

Clearly, Jim Jordan was added to the intelligence committee to provide sound bites for Fox.  I can't help thinking his greatest qualification is that he, like Tr*mp, actually believes the conspiracy theories about Ukraine, rather than Russia, being responsible for the 2016 election interference; and that it was done to benefit Democrats.  The Red Hats, needless to say, happily will believe it as well.

Quick Takes

Obliged to juggle alternative realities on a daily basis, is it surprising that Mick Mulvaney was, shall we say, a bit confused?

Let's start a pool!  How long will it be before Rudy Giuliani goes under the bus?

Vladimir Putin is the only world leader likely to bring a semblance of peace to Syria.  If that happens, should he be considered for the Nobel Peace Prize?

We all know we're not supposed to judge people by their appearances, but sometimes you just can't help it!

Saving the Republican Party

As I'm sure you've noticed, Our President is batshit crazy — and he's been getting worse.  As impeachment pressures grow, his general demeanor is deteriorating and his rants and rage-tweets are increasingly bizarre.  Up to this point, Republican efforts to rationalize Tr*mp's irrationality have been strained, but effective enough to mollify his base.  The Zelensky phone call opened some cracks in GOP unity– even at Fox News – but none large enough to do real damage.

The Erdogan phone call, however, is different.  Tr*mp's base may not understand much, but they understand treachery and betrayal; they recognize a stab in the back when they see it.  After years being told of the bravery and loyalty of the Syrian Kurds – consistent "good guys" in all the media – Tr*mp's abandonment of America's allies against ISIS has to feel like a gut-punch to his admirers.  Real damage has been done, and none of the President's arguments for American self-interest or realpolitik is likely to reverse it.

In other words, Tr*mp's chance at a second term took a serious hit over the past few days; and since a narrow win in the Electoral College looked like his best  path to victory, the situation is dire.  A serious drubbing by Democrats in 2020 will endanger Republican control of the Senate as well.  What's a Bible-thumping stooge of the plutocracy to do?

Here's an idea: sidestep that embarrassing impeachment inquiry and invoke the 25th Amendment. With all due sympathy for his "illness," dump Tr*mp and give the presidency to Pence.  Our Vice-President has kept a low enough profile over the past three years to maintain his undeserved reputation for moral probity.  He could win.

It won't happen, of course.  Pence doesn't have the chutzpah to start the ball rolling, and the sycophants, enablers, and co-conspirators in the Cabinet would be too terrified to follow through.  Still, should you happen to run into Charles Koch any time soon, pass the idea along: he just might like it.

Продовжуйте поширювати шмальц

You don't have to read Ukrainian to figure out Volodymyr Zelensky's basic approach to dealing with Our President.  The "reconstructed transcript" of their telephone conversation omits any mention of the incomparable sexiness of America's First Daughter, but nobody will be too surprised if it shows up in a later edition.  The joint press appearance at the UN offered more of the same: Did Zelensky feel "pressured" by Tr*mp?  Of course not!

In the meanwhile, it's hard to argue that Biden won't be hurt by his son's lucrative employment by an Ukrainian oligarch.  Hunter's sinecure may have had no impact on America's foreign policy whatsoever, but the optics are terrible.  The "electability" argument for Biden's nomination has suffered a severe hit.

It will be a mistake if Democrats ignore Tr*mp's numerous other abuses of power to zero in on the Ukraine affair.  Those other abuses, including the numerous instances presented in the Mueller Report, demand greater scrutiny over the course of the impeachment inquiry: ignoring them is tantamount to endorsing them.

On the lighter side, congressional testimony on Ukraine by Rudy Giuliani promises to rank among the funniest absurdist comedies in TV history, and may require creating a new category for the Emmy Awards.  Granted, one shouldn't be laughing a senile dementia – but as a (Medicare) card-carrying geezer, I'll claim special dispensation to LMAO.

Briefs

The Phone Call
Maybe I'm overoptimistic, but this time it feels different.  Unlike the convoluted complications of the Mueller Report, the Tr*mp-Zelensky phone call is easy to understand — easy for people with only casual interest in the news to think about.  It might be enough to convince Pelosi and the Red State Democrats that impeachment isn't so bad an idea.

Iran
No matter where the drone attack on the Saudi oil installations was launched, everybody knows Iran was responsible.  That, of course, is what the Iranians intended: their layer of deniability was paper thin.  They showed the Saudis how vulnerable they are, and upped the ante on Tr*mp, who now is forced to choose between tanking his re-election chances with a war nobody wants, or looking like a wimp to his base.  Yes, Our President has been having a bad week.

Israel
If Avigdor Liberman manages to keep the ultra-Orthodox parties out of the ruling coalition, he'll have done one good thing in his life.  Benny Gantz is moderate only by comparison to Bibi (and, maybe, Liberman), so if he successfully forms a ruling coalition, it won't make much difference to anybody outside of Israel – nor to the Palestinians.  Still, it does provide the prospect of Bibi going to jail.

Shorts

Mueller speaks
It's hard to believe that those who didn't read the Mueller Report watched him on TV for five hours.  The impact of the report on specific individuals will depend entirely on the video clips chosen by their news outlets of choice.  California Republican Tom McClintock's analogy comparing Mueller's report to a flaming sack of sh*t must have had the Congressman's aides rolling on the floor when they wrote it, and I'm sure it will get a lot of play on conservative media.  Less likely to get much play in those quarters will be Mueller's uncharacteristically biting reply.

Wrestling with hate
Watching some video of last week's North Carolina Tr*mp rally took me back to 1967, when I took a date to Pittsburgh's Civic Arena for a heavyweight wrestling show.  The villains back then still included a "Nazi" and a "Jap," along with a more contemporary "Commie."  My date and I left early, not because of the wrestling, but because of the fans — who were dead serious about what they saw in the ring.  Their howls and chants of pure hatred against the "bad guys" — the others — were genuinely horrifying.

The UK's new PM
There's an excellent chance that Boris Johnson will cheerfully lead his country into economic catastrophe with a no-deal Brexit.  Since Conservative MPs are every bit as spineless as Republicans in our Congress, a no-confidence vote seems impossible.  Johnson is far more intelligent and literate than Our President, to whom he frequently is compared; but they share a similar instinct for appealing to the basest populist instincts of their electorates.