Mass Murder and Illegals: Another Week Just Like Every Other Week

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The only remarkable thing about two of the USA’s most long-running and unresolvable “crises” colliding in the same moment is that it is no surprise at all. Incidents of yet another psycho buying an assault rifle one day and killing a dozen people the next and the chaos of migrants piling up at the southern border are as routine features of American life as traffic jams and beer commercials.

In large part this explains why I at least no longer have any outrage to give. I hope you’re different, but I can’t work up the energy any longer to fume and rant to … who? … demanding “they” do something. Based on how the system works today, I know and I suspect you know, nothing of any lasting significance will be done with either crisis.

This isn’t to say the Biden Administration will not make a good faith effort and try. But both guns and migration require resolutions to issues beyond what elected American officials are capable of dealing with.

On the matter of guns, we all know the basic statistics. There are more guns in circulation than there are people in the United States. Citizens of the U.S. own 47% of the world’s privately-owned firearms. Our death-by-gun-violence is double the next worst country, which lately is … Yemen. The highest percentage of household gun ownership is in rural areas and small towns, and in the Midwest and South. The lowest is in large metropolitan areas of the East and West coasts. Whites own more than twice as many guns as non-whites. Older white men, Republicans and self-described conservatives are most likely to own a gun. And the majority say they own a gun, not for “sport” and hunting as we so often hear, but for “protection.”

To help you with the math on that one, based on the 2010 census, 6.7 million Americans owned something in the range of 140 million guns. And that was 10 years ago. Before the pandemic set off another wild buying spree among the same crowd … for reasons of … protection … against?

And — always my favorite statistic — 3% of these self-protecting gun aficionados own, wait for it … half … of the guns in circulation.

Killing the filibuster might … might … allow a bill on universal background checks to pass. That might at least stop flat-out lunatic time bombs like the guys in Atlanta and Boulder from walking out of a gun shop any morning they wanted and start shooting up massage parlors and grocery stores that afternoon. Even Joe Manchin of hard-protectin’ West Virginny is on record saying he supports gun control to that minimum extent. But at the first whisper that background checks are coming, gun sales will spike again. All the aging white guys in rural America convinced that (usually dark-skinned) killers are lining up to bust through their bedroom windows, will add another half dozen “ARs” to their arsenal.

My personal solution to gun “enthusiasts” has long been … ridicule. I’m not a licensed psychologist, nor do I play one on TV, but in my humble experience over lo these many years kicking around rural ‘Murica and wrangling with gun “lovers” on social media, 99% of self-describing “gun rights” advocates come with the distinctive odor of sexual insecurity and inadequacy.

Self defense and the need to “protect my family” doesn’t quite explain why gun ownership, much less multiple gun ownership, is for many if not most of older, white, male, rural, conservative Americans the #1 issue in any political discussion. And why their reaction to any … any … attempt to regulate gun and ammo sales is like they’ve learned Hillary Clinton is coming with a chain saw for their junk.

Me, I’d launch a PSA campaign. (I defer to Mr. Loveland on how best to coordinate this.) Thousands of TV ads, with actual psychologists, celebrities and indisputable statistics laying out the roots of the tortured fantasies of dominance and heroism these “enthusiasts” are forcing us all to labor under. Create an entertaining zeitgeist that turns buffoonish Oath Keeper/Proud Boy machismo into a cultural punch line. It’s often said such people are arming up for a culture war. Well, give it to them, in a way that bullets don’t matter.

In other words, treat fools as the fools they are.

Immigration, often the #2 “crisis” for the same crowd and a regular excuse for adding to their arsenals, requires a response both to climate change and the epic corruption of Banana Republics. The current wave has roots in not one but two hurricanes in a month destroying homes and crops last fall, a crisis that compounded the usual drug-driven gang violence of places like Honduras and Guatemala.

Since I doubt Libertarians like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are ever going to re-think America’s “war on drugs”, the only viable solution to convincing all these people to stay at home is to pour ungodly amounts of U.S. money into rebuilding homes, infrastructure and farmlands … without losing most of it into the pockets of tin pot dictators and the drug gangs — most armed with cheap American guns — that often keep them in office.

Keeping assault rifles out of the hands of psychos exdecising their precious Second Amendment rights may be the easier of the two.

For Vaccine Holdouts, A Different Kind of Messaging Is Needed By Late Summer

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Currently, COVID-19 vaccine demand exceeds supply, so the challenges public health officials face are mainly logistical in nature.  They’re doing an admirable job with those tasks, with the rate of vaccination doubling since Biden’s inauguration.

But the nature of their challenge is about to quickly change.  But before long, vaccine supply will start to exceed demand.  Then the public health leaders’ challenges will be more about persuasion than logistics. 

Here’s hoping public health officials are prepared for that very different kind of challenge.  Very soon, they must make a swift and dramatic pivot.

The people who are getting vaccinated now are obviously the “low-hanging fruit.”  They’re motivated. They’re much more likely to try to cut in line than avoid the line.  Little to no persuasion was necessary for them. 

But persuading the “high-hanging fruit,” those skeptical about the vaccines, will be necessary to get to the 70% to 90% vaccination rate that experts tell us will give society the holy grail, “herd immunity.”  That won’t be easy.

Up until now, public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci have only needed to communicate public health facts.  For most of us, that worked.

But by now, the fence-sitters have repeatedly heard the Fauci facts and they have stayed on the fence.  At this stage, it’s illogical to think that a new surge of epidemiological fact-sharing is going to suddenly convince holdouts to buck up and get their Fauci Ouchy.

Public health officials should look to what has been successful in other public health campaigns.  I’m talking about bite-sized, unvarnished, and visually-driven ads. These are TV, radio, online, social media, and outdoor ads that make appeals to emotions, including fear.  In terms of messaging, vaccination holdouts need shaking, not hugging.  They need a scare, not a seminar.

After all, smoking rates didn’t decrease dramatically because of inspirational Surgeon General fact sheets. They finally decreased as smokers and their loved ones saw raw emotional ads that portrayed the living hell associated with tobacco-related illnesses.  

Similarly, our parents didn’t all start wearing seat belts after pouring over safety studies or having a spontaneous fit of conscience.  Instead, many finally started to buckle up because they couldn’t stop daydreaming about difficult-to-watch ads like this.

Finally, the incidence of drunk driving didn’t decrease because we all were moved by well-crafted CDC spreadsheets.  Many of us changed our ways because of searing images of victims’ and perpetrators’ lives being destroyed in the blink of an eye.

These campaigns offered brutal testimonials and images that cut through the information clutter of modern life and stuck in our memories in a way the epidemiological sermons couldn’t. 

And they worked.  They changed individual behaviors, and, just as importantly, they fueled passage of laws and policies that further changed behaviors.

In my career, I’ve sat through many focus groups reviewing these kinds of ads. I can assure you, almost everyone hates seeing these ads, because they make us feel horrible. Focus group participants will inevitably tell you that such ads are completely ineffective for them.

Yet whenever and wherever these kinds of ads run, behaviors change.   

Facing the worst pandemic in a century, we can’t treat this final crucial stage of pandemic management like a popularity contest.  We have to do what works, not what is popular.

By late summer and early fall, we will need public health messaging campaigns that show vaccine fence-sitters what it feels like to slowly suffocate to death from COVID.  They need to feel what it would be like to live with chronic COVID long-hauler conditions.  They need to feel what it would be like to inadvertently infect and kill someone. 

We need to see ads that make us feel these things in our guts, because adding another data point in our brains isn’t going to be sufficient.

These are the kinds of jarring emotional images that will push at least some vaccination fence-sitters out of the comfort zone that is preventing them acting.  These are the kinds of portrayals that will show them that the downsides of vaccinations – scheduling hassles, needles, sore arms, short-term aches and fevers – pale in comparison to the downsides of failing to vaccinate.

Surprisingly, the use of jarring imagery is still a matter of debate in public health circles. To their credit, public health decision makers tend to be nurturers and fact-driven.  Therefore, many still make the mistake of assuming that everyone is like them, and therefore can be persuaded by messages that inspire, reassure, and educate.  They’re right about many people, but not all people. 

The impressive achievements from the tobacco control, seatbelt, and drunk driving campaigns, among many others, tell the tale.  For the group of Americans who still aren’t sure about whether they want a miraculous life-saving vaccine, facts and inspirational messages alone just aren’t going to cut it.  For people who are still holding out in late summer, it’s time to get real.

And What if Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene Ran NASA?

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I’m having a hard time recalling the last time the two biggest news stories of a single day offered a starker contrast than last Thursday. February 18 being the day NASA landed its latest rover on Mars … and the day Ted Cruz, senator from freezing, powerless and waterless Texas decided to pack up the wife and kiddies and hit the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun.

Prior to Thursday I had geeked out and watched a dozen or more YouTube videos about the Mars 2020 mission. These included backstories of some of the scientists who had devoted a dozen years and more of their lives to pulling off the highwire endeavour of dropping the Perseverance rover with all its exotic tech on exactly the chosen spot after a six-and-a-half-month 130-million mile crossing through space. So yeah, I had tears in my eyes as the signal came in that the machine had landed safely and the team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory leapt out of their chairs in exultation.

It was an astonishing accomplishment, even if we’ve come to expect it of NASA.

But then came Cruz. With nearly all of his 29 million constituents suffering and some dying from a predictable, man-aggravated cold weather catastrophe, Cruz seeing no role for himself in either serving or protecting Texans, packed up and left for Mexico. While we may not have expected exactly that stupid a move from Harvard-educated Cruz, somehow it came as less of a surprise than it might.

The two events offer a vivid example of a key and, if you ask me, perilous division widening across the United States.

How so?

Well, on the one hand you have a deeply-coordinated long-term effort by an team of scientists; (ethnically and racially diverse it’s pertinent to note), people of discipline with a near religious devotion to empirical fact. The career they’ve chosen and the work they do fail utterly if they miss, omit or ignore facts.

Meanwhile, you have a burgeoning species of professional politicians, embodied by Cruz, but including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Texas’ Republican-controlled legislature, (an almost all-white male crew) and fellow travelers like Josh Hawley of Missouri, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Jim Jordan of Ohio and of course Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — to name only a few — whose success, such as it is, is heavily if not entirely dependent on ignoring facts, rejecting basic laws of science and only pretending to function as “public servants.”

I couldn’t help but imagine how the two events — the Mars landing and the Texas grid failure — would have played out had the cast of characters reversed roles. If Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene ran NASA and NASA’s science nerds were in charge of Texas’ deregulated power grid … with all it’s voluntary guidelines for maintaining function in cold weather?

On the former, forget blowing up on the launch pad. The Cruz, Hawley, Greene, etc. act — a standard now of Republican political theory — is so solely reactive to juvenile tribal pressures, Mars 2020 would have been red-lined the minute someone tipped them that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is in California … a “blue state run by a socialist Democrat governor!”

Bye bye red planet.

But in Texas, who among us thinks for a minute that Team NASA, looking at the 2011 breakdown of the grid and the years of demands to weatherize the damn system, would have said, “Sheeeeit, all those mittens and scarfs for all those pipes and valves would really cut into shareholder value. Let’s not and say we did. Or blame AOC. Whatever.”

Several people have noted that modern Republicans have perfected a species of electable politician out of DNA based on simply being against everything “the libs” are for. Look no closer than South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem for a Midwest example of blowing off — i.e. doing nothing in the face of the factual science of the COVID pandemic, resulting in one of the highest death rates in the world — and being widely touted as having demonstrated the cut of a presidential jib because of it.

As the folks at NASA control rooms might say, “WTF?”

Cruz and Hawley are no different. They just don’t look as good in skirts, and to date anyway aren’t under attack for running up fat Sarah Palin-style tabs at taxpayer/chump expense flying around on state planes to MAGA rallies.

But (my gal) Marjorie! An unapolgetic carpetbagger from an upscale Atlanta suburb migrates over to rural GooberLand for the easier voter pickins and wins in a slam dunk because she made no real policy promises other than bringing QAnon math, delusion and grievance to DC. Oh, and more guns.

(The death of Rush Limbaugh — the stem root of all hat-no cattle conservative patriotism and theatrical fact rejection — simultaneous with Cruz’ antics was almost too rich for words.)

Watching the split-screen of the Mars rover and Ted Cruz, my alleged mind drifted back to a theme Israeli historian/author Yuval Noah Harari keeps making in his books, essays and lectures. Namely that “cognitive evolution” is increasing right now. Not necessarily among all, but clearly among a small but significant sub-section of the human population.

Not a hundred or a thousand years from now, but likely within the next decade Harari believes we will see the first of what will in effect be a “super species” of humans. People with access to the best information, plus the means to collate and apply it to practices and technology, will dramatically increase both their life-spans and their years of vigorous good health.

That dramatic leap in human evolution will not be based in performative ignorance, laissez-faire math and “owning some libs.”

A lot of facts will be involved.

I can imagine a scenario where when such a day comes, even after all he’s said and done to distort logic and reason, Ted Cruz will once again gather up the wife and kiddies, call in a police escort and push ahead to the front of the line.

Until then though he’ll have to be content — along with Josh Hawley and Marjorie Greene — with having a veto vote over NASA’s budget.

Excuse Me, What Exactly Do You Find “Offensive and Absurd”?

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Classic quotes of the Trump era never stop coming. There was Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts”. Donny’s, “My administration has done more for the Black community than any President since Abraham Lincoln” and (my gal) Marjorie Taylor Greene complaining how, “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true … .” Truly immortal verbiage, each of them. But to those we now add Lindsey Graham reacting to the (Second) impeachment managers’ meticulous tick tock of the January 6 Trump mob riot by saying, “most Republicans found the presentation … offensive and absurd.”

The issue is not the chaos and violence of the attack mind you … but the presentation of the evidence of it. That’s what a Republican, 26-year veteran of Congress finds “offensive and absurd.”

Really, where do you go with something like that?

Prior to the start of this latest trial my attitude was, “Fine. Knock yourselves out. But we all know how this ends.” Impeachment deux was going to be another noble exercise in futility. There was — and is — no way 17 Republicans will ever vote to convict a life long con man turned reality TV star who is the most potent force in their party.

But after four days I’m here to say that the Democrats have significantly exceeded my expectations. While another acquittal is not in doubt, they have presented for the historical record a vivid, indelible, moment-by-moment, easily-accessible and indisputable chronicle of the highest crimes imaginable short of pulling out a gun and shooting an opposition candidate dead on live TV.

And the Republicans are no in a corner where they will go on record and vote to excuse it.

As W. might say, “Mission Accomplished.”

America’s beard-stroking class is full of punditry of … where do we go now? … when one of the only two viable political parties the country has has become so mired in fears of Trump, of Trump’s fevered and semi-literate base and the consequences of riling either of them to an intramural insurrection that they’ve acquiesced to a fantasy world. A world where for all intents and purposes Trump really did win “in a sacred landslide”, where “patriots” beat and kill cops, where stark visual/audio evidence is “offensive and absurd”, (or “crap” as Graham described it to Sean Hannity a few nights ago.)

Because I’ve come to believe the only plausible route out of this dungeon of grievance-stoked insanity is through a refortification of the so-called center-right, aka traditional country club Republicans, I’ve spent a lot of time lately listening to right-of-center podcasts like Charlie Sykes’ “The Bulwark.” (A former right-wing Wisconsin talk radio host turned mortified/horrified never-Trumper, Sykes has a polished, reassuring manner. He’s been good company as I’ve devoted a mid-winter cold spell to renovating the basement library/bedroom.)

Like other old school conservatives, Sykes and his guests are struggling to see a future for a party where a shameless nincompoop like Marjorie Taylor Greene exerts more influence on likely voters than Liz Cheney, the daughter of the goddam Voldemort of American Republicanism, Dick Cheney, for chrissakes. Facts are tough to ignore. And the fact is that Greene and the roughly 150 other GOP congesspeople like her are far … far… more reprentative of the zeistgeist of modern conservatism (or whatever you want to call it) than either Liz or Dick Cheney, or any Bush or any side show act like Mitt Romney.

Sykes and other former Republican bloviators and strategists correctly see a party overrun with post-policy grifters. People like Greene who clearly don’t have the faintest idea or interest in any form of legislation — save maybe gun rights and another round of tax cuts for their donors — but who have hit on an infallible grift. Namely, raging about any and every kind of hysterical nonsense that trends on social media … and encouraging people to write them a check to “fight for it.” (Greene is reported to have raised more than $1.5 million in the past couple months.)

A few old school Republicans gathered (on Zoom) a couple dsys ago to discuss the idea of creating … wait for it … a new party, and abandoning the “Republican” brand to the Greenes and Matt Gaetz’ and Louie Gohmerts and Oath Keepers of the world. But their central issue would also be money.

While fat corporate/tycoon dough would possibly follow a new party led by Ben Sasse, to pick a name, the Marjorie Greenes (like the Michelle Bachmanns before her) float on a sea of a handful of whack-a-doodle millionaires (Bachmann had Tim and Bevery LaHaye of the “Left Behind” novels fortune), but mainly they tap a fathomless sea of $25 and $100 checks from, well, from the likes of Hillary Clinton’s ‘”deplorables.” That sea will not be writing checks to Ben Sasse.

Historian Jon Meacham, one the more valuable of regular cable pundits, made an interesting point the other day when he said that while it’s true contemporary Republican senators fear Trump and his raging Borg-like base, what they fear is much is the full schism they’d create if they vote to convict Trump. Such a vote would very likely be the impetus for … Trump to create a new party. A Trump party based on nothing but Trump is a fear that is a stark, plain-to-be-seen possibility given the man’s cult-like appeal to seething mobs.

Almost any percentage of Republican voters who followed Trump away from the established party — and poll after poll shows an inviolable 32% who express a near religious attachment to him — translates to certain doom for any Republican caught in a three-way race with a Democrat and a Trumper.

Moreover, it then becomes a good question whether once reliably Republican corporate/tycoon cash continues to follow any Republican — old school or Trumper — into a campaign neither has a chance of winning. Far better, if you’re running the Home Depot political action account, to re-aim that money at “gettable” Democrats who’ll do big money bidding for the right price.

It’s a perilous predicament Reoublicans find themselves in. And if it weren’t for the fact they’ve built their careers on race-baiting, science-denying, economically-divisive “crap” that is truly “offensive and aburd” I might feel sorry for them.

Five Reasons To Never, Ever Vote For the MyPillow Guy

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Mike Lindell, the “MyPillow Guy,” seems to be the front-runner to become Minnesota Republicans’ nominee for Governor in the 2022 election.  This seems like a big joke to many, but we need to take it very seriously.

Lindell has many advantages that other GOP gubernatorial candidates lack — minor celebrity, statewide name recognition, tons of personal money, a compelling personal story of redemption, the wink and a nod endorsement of Minnesota GOP Chair Jennifer Carnahan, and most importantly, a likely Trump endorsement.

In a GOP primary, where the most slavishly Trumpy Trumpists rise to the top, Lindell can point out that he not only supports Trump, he practically deifies him.  Take his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC):

“As I stand before you today, I see the greatest president in history. Of course he is. He was chosen by God. God answered our prayers, our millions of prayers, and gave us grace, and a miracle happened on Nov. 8, 2016. We were given a second chance and time granted to get our country back on track with our conservative values and getting people saved in Jesus’s name.”

Top that, Paul Gazelka, Pete Stauber, Scott Jensen, Chad Greenway, and Matt Birk.
To any swing voters paying close attention, it’s obvious that electing Lindell governor would be a disaster. But are they paying attention? I don’t want to take it for granted that Minnesotans won’t elect a narcissistic minor celebrity.  See Jesse Ventura in 1998 and Donald Trump in 2016.

So here are five important reasons to work like hell to keep Lindell out of power.

Crooked Businessman.  The MyPillow company Lindell founded has earned a humiliating “F” grade from the Better Business Bureau due to the number of consumer complaints it has received.

He also was forced to pay a $1 million lawsuit settle for making false medical claims about his pillows.  It turns out that pillows cannot cure insomnia, sleep apnea and fibromyalgia.

Over his career, Lindell has shown himself to be a rich, fast-talking, serial-lying, TV-empowered con man running a shady business. Sound familiar?

Admitted Stalker.  Mike Lindell has been divorced twice, and violated a restraining order obtained by a girlfriend who accused him of physically abusing her. This is how Jim Heath TV describes those events:

Lindell was divorced for the first time by 2008, and was arrested in January of that year on suspicion of domestic assault.

The woman he was dating claimed he had punched and kicked her — even hitting her with “a four-foot wooden dowel,” according to documents.

Lindell denied the allegations, but an order of protection was still issued in the case.

He was arrested two months later for violating the order by allegedly taking the woman’s car.

He ultimately pleaded guilty to the order of protection violation.

Keep in mind the old adage: “Character is who you are when no one is looking.”

Dangerous Quack. You know those guys who crawl out from under rocks to con desperate people whose families are in crisis? Yeah, he’s that guy.

At a time when Americans were desperate for good science-based advice about how to survive the deadly Covid-19 pandemic, Lindell publicly promoted the plant extract oleandrin as “the miracle of all time.”

Meanwhile, scientists stress that there is no scientific evidence supporting these claims, and that oleandrin is poisonous even at very low doses.

Oh and by the way, Lindell just happens to have a financial and governing stake in a company that makes oleandrin, Phoenix Biotechnology.

This chapter tells us a lot about how Lindell would be as a governor. His instincts are to ignore science and put profits over people.

Murderer Protector.  Lindell shamelessly donated bail money to spring accused murderer Kyle Rittenhouse from jail.  Kenosha, Wisconsin law enforcement officials have charged the young white male of the murder of two Wisconsinites who were peacefully calling for an end to police brutality.

Lindell later claimed he didn’t intend his donation to help Rittenhouse with bail, but he refused to seek the return of his donation. As with Trump, pay attention to what Lindell does, not what he says.

Keep in mind, Lindell didn’t come to the defense of George Floyd, or the police officers who were bloodied and killed at the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump insurrectionists. But he rushed to the defense of someone murdering peaceful Americans who were speaking out for justice for black people. That speaks volumes.

Inciter of Insurrection.  After more than 70-days of bipartisan local, state and federal officials confirming 2020 presidential election results through legally sanctioned counts, audits, recounts, re-recounts, certifications, and court reviews, Lindell continues to publicly pedal the baseless, dangerous lie that Biden’s 7 million vote, 74 elector margin is somehow invalid. For good measure, he also claimed Senator Tina Smith’s 5-point victory over Jason Lewis was actually a loss. 

With no supporting evidence, and several court decisions tossing out the allegations, Lidell continues to falsely allege that voting machine companies Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems had conspired with foreign powers to rig voting machines to steal the election from Trump. As a result, Twitter has permanently banned Lindell and his company MyPillow, because they have seen that he is unable or unwilling to tell the truth, and is inciting violent attacks against democracy. 

Speaking of inciting violence, Lindell attended Trump’s infamous insurrection-inciting rally, which led to Trump’s second impeachment.  After supporting the incitement, Lindell aggressively pushed false claims that the murder and mayhem at the Capitol was done by Antifa members, instead of by Trump-supporting white supremacists and militia members. 

Weeks later, none of the arrested insurrectionists have been found to be associated with Antifa, or any other left-wing group.  

As Lindell’s infomercials say, “but wait, there’s more!”

Lindell was photographed entering a White House meeting  with a list of talking points that included encouraging President Trump to impose martial law to help Trump overturn the will of the people in the 2020 presidential election. Martial law!

So while we’re yucking it up at the cute SNL skit, remember that this guy isn’t just a harmless kitschy-cute infomercial huckster.  He’s a consumer-victimizing, protection order-violating, science-denying, serial-lying, insurrection-inciting, and martial law-advocating crackpot.

A Potential Silver Lining In the Dark Cloud That Is Trump’s Vaccine Rollout

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It’s painfully obvious that former President Trump badly screwed up the parts of the Covid-19 vaccine initiative that he actually controlled.  While he obviously wasn’t equipped to be in the lab developing vaccines quickly, he was in a position to order the right number of doses, develop a plan for getting the vaccine to at least 70 percent of us, and marshal resources to implement the plan.

He botched that assignment, and that has put a very dark cloud over President Biden, who needs a relatively swift end to the pandemic in order to have any hope of having a successful presidency.

But maybe there is a bit of a silver lining in that dark cloud–highly visible consumer demand created by the shortage.

As all good Adam Smith fanboys know, the law of supply and demand tells us that low supply will create high demand for a product.  In a nation with a sizable slice of vaccine doubters, creating more demand for the Covid-19 vaccine will be critically important. 

It’s no secret that shortages, or perceptions of shortages, are powerful tools for marketers.  For instance, the makers of Teddy Ruxpin and Nintendo Wii produced too few products, perhaps intentionally, and that generated tremendous consumer demand.  As a result of the shortage, those companies benefited from months of millions of dollars worth of free new media coverage of consumers waiting in line.  Sales ultimately surged, as consumers apparently thought to themselves, “I mean, if all of them want it so badly, I must want it too!”

This happens all the time in capitalistic economies. Shortages increases consumer demand.  That’s also why so many internet marketers go to great lengths to tell us how few of their products remain available.  It’s why the Starbuck’s Unicorn Cappuccino and McDonalds’ McRib sandwich are only available for “a limited time only.” 

Based on those examples and many others, all of this news and social media coverage about Americans fretting about vaccine shortages and bragging about getting their vaccine before the rest of us may help convince some number of Americans that they want this product as well. 

“I mean, if all of them want it so badly, I must want it too?”

And indeed, newer surveys are showing that more early skeptics are getting interested in getting vaccinated.  In September 2020, when Trump was still in charge, and wildly exaggerating everything about his Covid response, the number of Americans saying they would definitely get vaccinated was only about 51%.  This posed a huge challenge, because  epidemiologists tell us we need about 70% to get the Fauchi Ouchy in order to achieve the necessary herd immunity. 

By December, with Biden starting to take the reins and positive test results rolling in, the number had grown to 61%. That’s important progress.

But how do we get from 61% to 70%? The news media and social media obsession with the vaccine shortage, and Americans doing victory dances on their social media feeds after getting vaccinated, may do for Fauci what the Wii shortage did for Nintendo.

To be clear, there will be lethal implications of Trump’s bumbling of the vaccination distribution plan.  A delay of a month or two will mean many Americans will needlessly get sick and die. That’s tragic and inexcusable.

But as we continue to mop up Trump-generated calamities, we have to take the good news wherever we can find it.  And maybe this current vaccine shortage will help convince enough of the remaining vaccine fence-sitters to join the herd.

Is the Star Tribune and Other Traditional Reporters Prepared to Join the “Coalition of Reality?”

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It doesn’t necessarily follow. Just because Republicans and what pass for conservatives today are determined to learn nothing from the Trump era that the rest have to blunder on without changing the way we go about our business. And be “we” I’m referring to anyone who is now, has been or in any way engages in some form of journalism.

But mostly I’m concerned with the traditional, primary sources of news reporting.

Despite admirable-to-superb work from a few national outlets — The Washington Post, The New York Times, ProPublica, The Atlantic, even Vice to some extent — regional and local news organizations, like the Star Tribune here in Minnesota — continue to play the traditional game of “neutrality”, where no act, no behavior is so egregious or outrageous that you ever say so in a “news story.” Instead, as journalism schools have taught since the days of Herbert Hoover, reporters and editors compile facts … and let … you guessed it … the reader decide.

Very few large news organizations employ an ombudsman or a “reader’s editor” any longer, (if they ever did). Someone to answer questions about how and why stories are covered. As the few who have had such jobs now tell, on podcasts and such, it was a perilous undertaking. Not so much for the flack and anger of partisan readers, but for the venom of internal politics, where large egos with serious reputations on the line did not much like someone publishing criticism of their work anywhere, much less the very paper they worked for.

Margaret Sullivan, who was such an editor, at the New York Times and now at The Post, has written about the vital need for journalism to grasp the realities of the 21st century and adapt. She echoes the thinking of the more firebrand NYU professor, Jay Rosen, who long before Trump commandeered a major political party, won election and ran amuck, said that America’s traditional press was incapable of evolution.

Rosen more than Sullivan has no problem describing the mainstream press today as a hidebound creature with a near religious devotion to out-moded conventions. Among those conventions being the deep aversion to betraying any sense of judgment when reporting on political behavior.

Rosen likes the phrase, “the view from nowhere”, to describe the perspective of the typical traditional news story. A story that leaves the impression of a reporter/organization with no stake in the consequences of what they’ve seen and heard. And no larger responsibility to insist on truthfulness as a criteria for publication.

This was the comfortable perspective that continues — after four years of Donald Trump — to struggle with the use of the word “lie.”

Sullivan had a column recently recommending three changes in basic journalistic conventions necessary to keep up with the head-spinning bad faith and shamelessness of Trump and Trump-era Republicans. (Being a traditional animal herself, she of course was careful not to go full-inflammatory and actually call out Republicans by name.)

But she did argue for an evolution in convention to include judgmental-sounding language in garden variety news stories. For example, pointing out — right then and there in the printed story — that what Politician “A” was just quoted saying has been debunked — here and here — and why they’re essentially spouting nonsense. Given that many if not most readers consume The Post (and the Star Tribune) on-line, dead-tree space is not an issue with that sort of evolutionary adjustment.

She wrote this in the context of The Big Lie. Namely that this last election was rigged, and that Joe Biden stole it from Trump. In other sectors of American culture, the response to The Big Lie has been fascinating and encouraging. An impressive number of large corporations are withholding campaign donations to — Republicans — who supported The Big Lie, acknowledging the toxic effect that the lie and whole cavalcade of lies that made Trump possible is, well, bad for business.

I suspect these companies will in short order come creeping back to the influence-buying game. But when they do they should be smart enough to expect some reporter somewhere — perhaps The Post’s David Farenthold — will check their paperwork and tell the world that in the view of AT&T, JPMorgan and Coca-Cola or whoever — the likes of Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Matt Gaetz have been punished enough and have learned their lesson.

Rosen and others have also suggested a new acid test for Lie enabling. Any reporter interviewing any politician simply asks, “Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election fair and square?” If the answer is anything other than, “Yes,” the interview is over and said politician gets no space to spew in that reporter’s publication.

The rise of Donald Trump required a lot of ennabling in a lot of ways from a lot of different sources. It wasn’t all talk radio blowhards, FoxNews and foaming mouth bloggers. There was the misguided deference to traditional “neutrality” by papers like the Star Tribune. Large rimary news organizations who were reluctant to regularly, routinely, consistently fact check candidate Trump and Trump-like politicians in real time — then and there in their reported stories. (And I give you the long, conventional, “neutral” free-ride Michelle Bachmann got from Minnesota media as Example #1 of such implicit enabling.) That deference to convention played a significant role in sustaining the unwarranted credibility of preposterous, toxic lie-building.

The phrase I like today is the “Coalition of Reality.” Are you in, or out?

Given what four years of Trump has wrought, given The Big Lie, given January 6, given the five dead, including a cop, and given the astonishing number of Americans who continue to believe the tortured fantasy of election fraud, traditional conventions have to evolve. Allowing anyone with a campaign bus or an election certificate to say whatever they want unchallenged and uncorrected is not fair, “neutral” reporting. As we have seen, it is sustaining a toxic fiction, a poisonous unreality.

I don’t know that I’d really ever want to “get back to the days” of Herbert Hoover or Dwight Eisenhower. But the reality of 2021 is a lot more aggressively shameless than those lost eras.

The boys and girls or professional news reporting are going to have learn a lesson or two from what has and is going down.

You Know, Don’t You, That Trump is Never “Going Away”?

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Sure. Go ahead. Hang a second impeachment on him. Hell, if we wanted to be real he should have been impeached a dozen times by now. But like the last time, this next one is not going to “remove” Donald Trump.

We’ve seen this movie and we know how it ends. Mitch McConnell will delay it into Joe Biden’s term and then lead the new Republican chorus, (already tuning up), admonishing Trump Deranged liberals to, “Stop dividing the country and let the healing begin.” At that point Biden and Chuck Schumer will have to decide if they want all-hands-on-deck for COVID vaccinations and a gigantic infrastructure stimulus bill … or deal with still more Trump.

Their problem, which is also our problem, is that Trump is not going to go away no matter what anyone does to him. Never mind Congress and never mind all those New York prosecutors filing their fangs. The guy has a mind meld over a breathtaking percentage of the public and — I’m betting — every new episode of his flabby and incontinent Joan of Arc martyrdom is going to be fresh accelerant on the bonfires of their rage.

With the internet already ablaze with calls for the MAGA faithful to return to D.C. on the 17th for Biden’s inauguration, it was … um … unsettling to listen to reporter/author Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer-winner, tell Rachel Maddow the other night that intelligence community sources he’s spoken to since Wednesday’s riot estimate that 20% of Trump’s base are so inflamed they’re prepared to escalate violence beyond what has already happened.

If math isn’t your thing, Suskind, (his book on Dick Cheney, “The One Percent Doctrine” is a favorite of mine), calculates 20% of 75 million as … 15 million. Fifteen million.

Is he being a Chicken Little alarmist? Is that hyperbole? Maybe. But I’d put 15 million at about the number of adult Americans who came out for the first time ever to vote for Trump in 2016 and then did it again — and plus some — in 2020. Fifteen million would also collate nicely with the percentage of the public who are multiple gun-owners.

Beyond even the pandemic and economic mess, Joe Biden and incoming Attorney General Merrick Garland’s foremost battle over the next four years will be neutralizing wildly irrational, well-enough organized and heavily-armed white supremacists. And by that I mean exactly the 99% white mob who ransacked the Capitol.

Like this guy, for example.

So, no, I don’t find 15 million an implausible number for the number of “patriots”, many if not all with an apocalyptic view of the Trump martyrdom crisis and the liberal assault on their “freedoms” and “values”. Fifteen million who have the means, motive and in this moment, the opportunity to “fight” to “take back their country.”

Who just happens to also be this guy …

It’s a crowd that is itching for a new Ruby Ridge-like fight, and unlike Arab terrorists and Black Lives Matters “radicals”, it’s a crowd that has the sympathy of a truly disquieting percentage of American law enforcement. (Gotta love U.S. police departments searching to see how many of their cops were in D.C. last Wednesday.)

How exactly you castrate this crowd without giving them the heroic, pitched battle for “freedom” they want, I have no idea. But they can’t be allowed to commit crimes and terrorize the sane and sensible with the impunity they’ve been granted up until now. Some kind of fight is going to have to be had.

As for Trump himself. I’m sure being banned from Twitter is worse than castration. But it’s not enough. He’s already made $250 million off MAGA Nation and will need a lot more.

There have been plenty of books about Napoleon’s exile to St. Helena. The one I read, “The Black Room at Longwood”, could serve as a template for what to do with Trump. Completely cut off from the rest of the world. Walking alone in the cold mist. Slowly decaying, with no hope of ever again being celebrated, before finally succumbing to a slow death in solitude.

Once all the indictments have been handed down and his crack legal team has added up the likely fines and prison-time, go ahead, offer him a deal. Serve the time and sign over Mar-a-Lago and all his soon-to-be-bankrupt golf courses or … accept permanent residency in a 1000 sq. ft. hut on a cold, distant island …

… with no WiFi.

BLM and Capitol Rioting Not Equivalent

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I strongly oppose looting, rioting, and vandalizing at protests. I often share the frustration that drives a small minority of protesters to destroy during emotional protests. But I unequivocally oppose it, because it’s illegal, it usually victimizes innocent people, and it hurts the cause. 

Because an overwhelming majority of Americans share that sentiment, conservatives work overtime to falsely paint the left as being somehow pro-rioting.  The latest example of this can be found throughout social media and political discourse. It goes something like this: “At least the Capitol protesters didn’t burn and loot, like the Black Lives Matters (BLM) and Antifa. Why are you outraged about the Capitol protesters but weren’t outraged about BLM looters?” 

Let’s dissect that piece of false equivalency, a logical fallacy where two very unequal things are falsely implied to be the same, or of equal magnitude. What happened at the U.S. Capitol building is qualitatively different than what happened at a relatively small number of the BLM protests.

Trump’s Inciting v. Biden’s Condemning.  First, President Trump incited the Capitol assault.  That conclusion is shared by both Democrats and Republicans, including members of his Administration. Then, after the violent insurrection happened, and the nation and world were watching in horror, Trump hit the airwaves to say of the Trump-supporting violent rioters: 

“We love you. You’re very special… I know how you feel.” 

Trump embraced and celebrated his followers’ violent insurrection.

In sharp contrast, President-elect Biden never called for looting. When it happened, he immediately and repeatedly condemned it, and called for protesters committing crimes to be prosecuted.

“Protesting such brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response. But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not. Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community is not.”

Supporters of Trump have no basis for criticizing supporters of Biden on this issue. None. Biden has clearly denounced violence and destruction at protests, while Trump has cheered it.

Just Cause v. False Cause.  It’s also important to recognize that Black Lives Matter looters had true and justifiable reasons to be filled with raged when they took to destruction in the heat of the moment.  They had just witnessed a clear video of a black man needlessly and casually murdered slowly by an arrogant white police officer. They had lived their whole lives in a country where people of color are disproportionately victimized by police officers, and where police officers are almost never held accountable for their brutal crimes.  

Martin Luther King, Jr. opposed rioting, but he explained it to white people who can’t know what it’s like to be black in America:

“…it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”

In stark contrast, the Capitol insurrectionists had no evidence of election fraud.  During dozens of counts, audits, recounts, re-recounts, certification reviews, and lawsuits, often overseen by Republicans or Republican-appointed officials, no evidence of fraud was produced by Trump’s team or found by election officials.  Those reviews, conducted over a long 64-day period, corroborated the finding of the Trump-appointed head of election security, who found that the 2020 election was the most secure in history.

Those reviews found that Joe Biden won by 7 million votes and 74 electors, the largest margin for a challenger since 1932, when Franklin Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover.

In other words, the BLM riots were sparked by serial murder and denial of justice, while the Capitol insurrection was driven by a well-proven lie. 

Destroying Property v. Destroying Democracy.  Finally, looters at BLM marches destroyed property, while Capitol looters were trying to destroy the most meaningful and valuable thing in America — democracy.   Ignoring Republican-overseen counts, audits, recounts, re-recounts, certifications, and lawsuits finding the 2020 presidential election to be free and fair, the Capitol insurrectionists were trying to silence the voices of 81 million Americans, and effectively end American democracy.  They were attempting a traitorous coup against America.

Again, I strongly denounce looting, rioting and vandalizing at protests.  But this must be fully understood: Torching property in the name of a proven injustice is infinitely less harmful to the common good than torching democracy in the name of a proven lie.

And What If a Black Cop Had Shot a QAnon Goon Yesterday?

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For me, one of the most indelible images of yesterday’s Trumpist riot at the Capitol was the video of the (black) Capitol cop retreating back up flights of stairs as a pack of vandals — every reason to believe they were armed — pushed deeper and deeper into a supposedly high security government building. Clearly, that cop had every good reason to believe his safety, if not his life was in danger.

But he didn’t shoot. Not even a warning shot.

The contrast with the previous day’s decision in Kenosha, Wisconsin not to prosecute a (white) cop who pumped seven slugs into the back of black man … who was walking away from him, but later was discovered to have … a knife … and therefore acted in self-defense … is pretty damned stark. And it now fits much too perfectly with the attention DC cops are getting for doing, dare I say … fuck all … to impede TrumpNation from careening like feral pigs through Capitol chambers and offices.

Watching that feckless response, who among us didn’t recall Bob Kroll and dozens of Minneapolis cops rallying for Trump at the Target Center in October ’19? I’ve read in several places estimates that at least 60% of military personnel support(ed) Trump and that the percentage among American cops is even higher. (I apologize for not having links to that data. But I’m still looking.)

Despite the FBI telling Congress that white supremacists/nationalists are the primary terrorist threat to the “homeland” when push comes to sign-carrying protests only blacks get the full, tactile SWAT and “call-out-the-guard” treatment. (Remembering scenes from last June’s George Floyd/BLM protests in front of the White House, I kept wondering yesterday, “And where is the menacing helicopter blasting MAGA World with rotor wash to disperse them from the Capitol steps?”)

Everything about yesterday was disgusting. As obscene poetry it was, I guess, a fitting final scene for the Trump era. Rampaging mayhem. That is if, god help us, it really is the last atrocity he unleashes on us.

But I can’t say I was “shocked” by what happened. I wasn’t shocked by the flaccid response of the cops to a white mob. That’s the nature of the people who want to be cops and get hired to be cops. And I sure as hell wasn’t shocked that Trump and Rudy and Donny Jr. and Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and the likes of Alabama’s new imbecile ex-football coach/senator Tommy Tuberville egged it all on, “inciting” being the legal term for the crime they committed.

It’s what’s been building and coming for years. It began well before Trump, as many have said. Trump merely exploited the ignorance and rage Republicans and their infotainment complex have been cultivating with reckless avidity since the early Clinton years.

In his famous book, “Explaining Hitler,” author Ron Rosenbaum (no connection to the deceased local lawyer), explored all the ways the “little people” with their liw information stew of fears and superstitions and greivances were cultivated for harvesting by a bizarre little man whose power lay in his willingness to tell the mob everything they wanted to hear. Mainly, that it was all someone else’s fault.

I often think of that when I reflect on the food chain of ordinary citizens “just doing a job” working, say, for a radio station spewing the noxious, self-serving bullshit of your Rush Limbaughs, Jason Lewises or Tom Emmers (before he rode radio power to a seat in the Trump caucus.) Unless you say those “little people” were too hapless and clueless to understand the effect of what they pushing out on the public, there’s responsibility and blame there for Trump and what happened yesterday.

I have no hope — zero — that yesterday’s riot will mark a sea change in American politics. Even if there is a mass prosecution of the selfie-taking, Facebook-posting vandals, it’s inconceivable that Trumpism will diminish enough that grifting sociopaths like Cruz and Hawley will shift course to some kind of neo-George H. W. Bush style of conservative politics. If not votes there’s simply too much easy money to be made off the mob raised up out of soil fertilized by FoxNews, NewsMax, talk radio and now, all the sewage of the internet.

Had that lone black cop in the famous video pulled out a gun and plugged some goon in a QAnon hoodie, or a maybe the guy carrying the “Trump/Jesus” flag, the “victim” would a hero on Limbaugh’s show ten minutes later and Hawley would be on the Senate floor railing against the “cancel culture” that shoots patriots for exercising their First Amendment rights … and encouraging everyone listening to send him a check.

The Race of Snakes for 2024 Has Already Begun

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Very much true to form, 2020 is slithering back under its rock pretty much the same way it lived its 366 days in the sun. Which is to say covered in the ash and sewage of incompetence, grift and noxious self-interest. As we prepare to sing Auld Lang Syne by Zoom, the Trump administration is (again) blaming the state and local officials for the inept roll-out of vaccines … to fight a global pandemic. Meanwhile, never a crowd to let a crisis go unexploited for personal gain, big name Republicans are busting their first moves for 2024.

First among equals in naked self-service is of course The Donald himself. As of New Year’s Eve, the Lord of Low Information has scammed another $250 million from MAGA zealots, many of whom I’m guessing had to shave $20 off their welfare disability checks.

Looking at (known) debts in the $600 million range and facing the near certainty of criminal prosecution for bank and insurance fraud, His Grand Orange Incontinence is, I read, toying with the idea of charging the Red Hat Brigade to attend “Trump 2024” rallies, along with launching some kind of All-Donald-All-the-Time streaming TV service, which at say $5 month for even 10% of his 70 million Twitter followers adds up to $35 million a month, or a little over $400 million for the first year, little to none of which will be reflected on his federal income tax returns, of course.

There’s just too much easy fool’s gold to be picked up off the ground for Trump to ever say he’s not running again in 2024. Plus, even his putative opponents are falling over themselves to sustain his standing as the Anointed Redeemer of Aging White Deplorables. Pundit John Heilemann, (one of the few who emerges from 2020 with credibility intact), recently asked listeners to imagine a “hands up” question in the first Republican primary debates in 2023.

The question? “Do you believe the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from Donald Trump?”

Being Republicans trying to win votes out of a Republican base, all 30 of them on the stage, from Louie Gohmert and Don Jr. to Ted Cruz will of course raise their hand and attest that The Donald was robbed, thereby implying his rightful claim to the crown. (It will be an echo of that infamous moment in Iowa years ago when John McCain and every other Republican raised their hand when asked who took issue with the Theory of Evolution?)

Speaking of Cruz and the Republican affinity for grift, you have to love The Most Hated Man in the Senate taking a clue from Trump and making a Facebook appeal to MAGA Nation for money to help near billionaire Kelly Loeffler and China-trader/multi-millionaire David Perdue win their run-offs in Georgia. Except Ted did Donny one better. Where Trump had to peel off a percentage to the Republican Party, Ted … can keep it all. To himself. Without giving a nickel to his already richer-than-Croesus colleagues.

As the Brits so often say, “Brilliant!”

Post-Donald, the existential issue is early identification and a tactical plan to stop “competent Trump”, the not so mythical “conservative” who is not just smarter than Trump, (which is easy, hell even Louie Gohmert could jump that bar), but more disciplined. Cruz is one such animal. So is Tom Cotton from Arkansas.

But the horse breaking hardest from the gate here, 20 days before Joe Biden gets sworn in, is 40 year-old Josh Hawley of Missouri. As you may have read, he intends to carry the MAGA Warriors banner into the Senate chamber next week and refuse to certify the electoral college of Biden. This really won’t do anything but piss off every Republican who really doesn’t want his/her name on a forever vote to undermine an election that wasn’t even close. But as naked grifts go, it will create a mega-ton of publicity for Hawley and raise at least Cruz-size cash from perpetually raging Trumperoos.

As a candidate, Hawley is already on different track — or in a different lane — than Cruz and Cotton. His strategy is to aim everything at pissed-off rural/blue collar whites, promising them more free money. (He says he supports those $2000 checks, knowing Mitch McConnell will make sure he never has to actually vote on it.) All while reigniting their self-pitying grudges against mongrelizing immigrants, high-tech slicksters and sneering, anti-cop big city elites.

But unlike Trump, who can’t be bothered to read a cue card, much less a legal brief, Hawley, the former John Roberts law clerk, former half-term attorney general of Missouri, “educated” at Yale and Stanford, is all about utterly shameless, serpentine calculation. (Who can forget as a Senate candidate two years ago the fresh-faced Hawley appearing in TV ads underlining his support for the key elements of Obamacare while — at that very moment — leading the Republican court challenge to kill it?)

Hawley has chutzpah and strategy chops neither Cruz or Cotton have shown to date. Moreover, no major Republican donor is going to be confused or dissuaded by Hawley’s talk of moving significant cash downward toward “real Americans” in a “worker-focused approach”, as Hawley likes to say. GOP money men and women know a slick con job when they see one, and Hawley is the slickest on the scene at this moment.

You gotta hand it to Republicans, they have a deep, nearly fathomless well of these snakes.

The Biden years went by so fast … .

Trump Behind Closed Doors is So Far Beyond Anything “Veep” Could Imagine.

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While we all hold our breath and wait for the 126 Republican congress-critters and 17 state attorneys general — valiant defenders of the Constitution — to suffer any consequences for trying to overthrow a presidential election (*), I came across this item.

“Barack and Michelle are reportedly producing a comedy series for Netflix ‘based on the chaotic transition of power when Donald Trump became president in 2016’. The show, titled The G Word With Adam Conover, is a collaboration between the comedian and the former first couple’s Higher Ground Productions, based on Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk, which was born out of a September 2017 Vanity Fair article. The book covers the historic chaos and mismanagement that occurred in the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Energy during the handoff between the administrations.”

I spotted that story the same day Julias-Louis Dreyfus showed up on Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast’s podcast, “The New Abnormal”, and where she was asked for million and first time if the Trump presidency had out-lunaticked, out-venaled and out-bungled anything they ever imagined when and her writers was shooting “Veep?” Short answer — yes. Team Trump, meaning Jared and Rudy and Ivanka, etc., has performed so far beyond (I mean, below) what “Veep’s” writers could dream up there’s talk of reviving the show based on a new lower bar for what audiences are prepared to believe about … the President of the United States.

Then there is Noel Casler, a professional “talent wrangler” who worked on “The Celebrity Apprentice” and is now flagrantly violated his Trump-mandated Non-Disclosure Agreement with tales of Trump’s chronic incontinence, his plastic girdle, Adderall addiction, halitosis, sexual predation, personal grooming, functional illiteracy and vain-glorious laziness. Stories that rival anything “Dumb and Dumber” imagined, much less ‘Veep”.

Being an admitted (former) coke-snorting rock ‘n roller, Casler’s stories don’t carry quite the credibility of say, Maggie Haberman at The New York Times. But as he points out in this interview, Trump is still president. For another month Trump can still sic The Justice Department on anyone who dares say he wears Depends. Casler also reminds us that the edges of all these stories have circulated for years and that at this point only the most delusional Trump cultist finds it hard to paint in the numbers and accept that as bad, as ludicrous and buffoonish as everything is that we can see right now, what is waiting to be told is even more clownish.

Or, as Lori Levine, one of Casler’s interviers says, “Wait a minute. Can we get back to the shitting his pants story?”

Understanding that journalism is a delicate balance of reporting-while-maintaining-access, I have no trouble — zero — believing that people like Haberman or any of the Washington Post’s White House team or CNN’s have terabytes of files of stories of Trump’s more personal dysfunctions. Stories they’ve chosen to withold until after he’s safely gone. I mean, from the Times’ perspective, is presidential incontinence a legitimate story? Heaven’s no! You can imagine the editor’s meeting on that one. The Times does not run “shitting your pants:” stories.

The accepted tradition of journalism is to ignore “private” behavior. LBJ took heat once for pulling his dog’s ears. But no one in real time — while he was in office — told the story about Johnson forcing staffers to watch him relieve his bowels or whipping out “Jumbo” to make a point about who was the biggest dog in the kennel. Likewise, JFK had to be long dead and buried before we were told he was obsessively nailing everything in skirts while supposedly guiding us to The New Frontier.

Times of course have changed, post Bill and Monica and The Blue Dress. But unlike Clinton, Trump has been so derelict in his duty, so sociopathic in his disregard for pandemic suffering and death and so complicit in protecting Vladimir Putin, his only reservoir of good will is with ‘Murica’s sad Lost Minority, the torch-and-pitchfork MAGA crowd. You knw, the bellowing mob forever pissed at the way big city elitists have played them for chumps all their lives.

Point being, even if the Biden administration decides to pass on a prosecution, or even a Truth Commission on the Trump years, popular culture is well positioned to take all the drugged-out, scatological, grifting gold that Donny and the gang have given them and make a fresh fortune out of it.

Among the 81 million in this bubble it requires no suspension of disbelief.

(*Will never happen. In fact they will proudly remind voters about it next election.)

Hard As It Is To Believe, Better Days Are Coming.

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The usual Christmas cheer thing is tough pull this year. But I’ve been doing my sunny, delusional best to convince friends and family that genuine, valid indicators point to a much improved world beginning in mid-to-late March.

“How so, Kemosabe”, you ask?

1: After eleven months of buffoonery, serious, experienced, organized people are taking over the pandemic response. The confederacy of semi-literate grifters in executive offices has been neutered. A full bore, all hands on deck, coordination of private/public vaccination infrastructure is already evident. There is no doubt whatsoever that instead of playing golf, The First 100 Days will be committed to applying science and sophisticated logistics to stifling the spread of COVID-19.

2: The vaccines work. It’s ironic that as virulent as the virus has been in terms of spread and impact on the most vulnerable, it is remarkably weak in the face of the vaccines that have been created.

3: While the economic impact on lower-income essential/face-to-face workers has been criminal, the millions who have not lost income (or their lives) represent an unprecedented reservoir of pent-up consumer demand. After a year of not traveling, or dining out, or meeting up for happy hour much less foregoing “recreational” retail shopping, a large and fortunate percentage of the public has amassed a remarkable pool of unspent discretionary income. Whether for pleasure or business, the travel and hospitality industries, and all those they employ, foresee a fast-rising restoration of demand as vaccinations increase daily by the hundreds of thousands.

4: Damage to far too many restaurants and bars has been fatal. (By one estimate we could have kept them all afloat, paying wages, for $25 billion a month.) But the demand that kept them in business prior to the pandemic is still there and likely will emerge even more vigorous as consumers accept the effectiveness of the vaccines and rush back to resume what many regard as a basic luxury/pleasure of daily life.

5: In terms of rebound, factor in the pent-up desiure and enthusiasm for any activity you might think of as “social”. Entertainments like movies, concerts, museums, sporting events and on and on. Then add in the people they employ.

Point being, that while, yes, there continues to be a fathomless pool of Trump Stupid out there, reality has at long, long last developed an unstoppable momentum.

Sure, Donny’s flatulent attorney Rudy and his “elite strike force” of tin foil hat gargoyles are still around looking more farcical and deranged by the day. And it’s true that 80% of the Republican congressional caucus remains so terrified of an incompetent reality TV act they don’t dare say out loud that he is now not just a loser, but an embarrassingly bad and whiney loser. And yeah, we still have the indicted attorney general of Texas suing other states to overturn their elections. Not to mention of course the cynically vain ex-beauty queen governor of South Dakota who equates her presidential prospects with how little she does to keep her citizens alive, (as many of them are choppered out of South Dakota to other overwhelmed states).

All this lunacy remains. But with Trump defeated, the relevance of their idiocy and cowardice has been dramatically reduced. Yes, TrumpNation will continue to be a national embarrassment, and yes, their (and uber-left anti-vaxxers’) resistance to vaccination will be an impediment to full-scale COVID relief.

But their historic, fatal incompetence is being shoved through the exit.

There’s No Choice Here. Trump Has to be Prosecuted.

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Not that I’m surprised. But after four years I still can’t find a good reason not to unleash a torrent of legal ruin on Donald Trump and his minions. The corruption, incompetence and grotesque offenses against common decency are all you need. But perhaps even more important than court judgments is the matter of historical reckoning. We are all worse off if Trumpism isn’t defeated in the public record.

Now, full disclosure, I was one of those foaming at the mouth for a trial or at least a Truth Commission on the hows and whys of the Iraq war fiasco. Silly me, I thought several trillion in tax money and 4500 dead Americans would be enough to kick start a cathartic investigation. But instead we got the usual, collegial “healing” and “moving on” and all that happy horse plop.

In contrast to Republicans who openly trade in rage-inducing fantasies and accusation, the average Democrat lives in fear of poking a bear they don’t know for absolute certain they can wrestle to its death. The thing is though it isn’t just Democrats who live in terror of an insane, irrational uprising by TrumpNation. Republican FBI director Jim Comey’s worst errors of his term — his Hillary comments in July and October of ’16 — were largely rooted in his fear of virulent anti-Clinton agents in his New York field office. Likewise, we know now from Andrew Weissmann’s book from inside the Mueller investigation that Mueller himself feared inciting and getting dragged into a right-wing maelstrom were he to push a too broad, too deep and too aggressive investigation of Trump’s personal financial entanglements.

Point being, after the ugly lunacy of these past four years someone has to man up to the fear of the pitchfork crowd and produce a complete and honest record of what we’ve been living through. Prosecution of Trump’s finances are very likely to provide answers to what the pandering and kowtowing Putin was all about.

There has to be some kind of inoculation from Trumpism, or it will come back stronger than ever.

So yes, there are inherent risks in any conflict, even a premeditated one. But Joe Biden’s administration has a couple things going for it that mitigate some of the likely blowback. One is the pandemic and the other is Trump himself.

Biden will be well-advised that he should say very little if anything about prosecutions of Trump … and his kids … and all their ludicrous, sketchy business associates. All he ever has to say is, “My maiun job right now is dealing with this pandemic. We have an independent judiciary and these are matters for the Justice Department.”

Behind the scenes, Biden’s AG can tacitly encourage and assist all the various offices in New York to do their thing. (There are good tactical reasons to skip the federal prosecution parts.) Publicly though, Biden should and no doubt will focus all his attention and energy on distributing the COVID vaccines and re-setting the economy.

Trump’s farcical campaign to challenge the election in court, (where I believe he is now 1-37, a worse winning perecentage than the ’62 Mets), is all about creating a positive cash-flow martyr myth, a new level of exploitation of his deplorable cult. And it’s reasonable to expect that nascent Trumpist media organizations will energetically prostitute themselves in hopes of capturing the millions for whom FoxNews isn’t reckless enough.

But Trump is not a Bush or a Dick Cheney. He has no base of institutional loyalty in the Republican party. Much the opposite, in fact.

By that I mean establishment Republicans will be only too happy to see him both removed from the scene and as diminished by prosecutions as possible. If you’re Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton or Nicky Haley or even South Dakota’s homicidally sociopathic Governor, Kristi Noem, the less Trump in the air the better it is for them. Trump out of the White House is one thing. Far better for their noxious ambitions though is having his terrifying “grandeur” sullied and his influence corroded by steady revelations of … oh, let’s see here, what have we got? … bank fraud, insurance fraud, campaign finance fraud, money laundering, sexual assault and on and on including a complete look at his implausible “billionaire” status.

Let me ask you this. Can you think of even one reason why Mitch McConnell would not want to be rid of Trump? How much happier would he be working with a party leader who has an attention span longer than that of a mayfly? Point being, while the whole craven Republican crowd will huff and puff and fume to Rush Limbaugh about those dastardly Democrats and their heinous persecution of a beloved statesman, to the last self-serving treacherous one of them they’ll be delighted if Trump is reduced to the infamy and ridicule he richly deserves and they no longer have to bend their knee to a moron.

I know what you’re thinking. “Damn, they’re a swell crowd. Real friends. I’m glad COVID prevents me from having them over for Thanksgiving dinner.”

If there’s a bottom line to why Trump has to be prosecuted it’s because avoiding it out of fear of a culture war brawl only ensures that the anti-factual, anti-intellectual, anti-science grievance syndromes of modern “conservatives” continue to strengthen and flourish. Without prosecution there is no hope of abatement.

Trump is a lazy idiot. A fool. But Republicans have a deep bench of “competent Trumps” — Hawley or Cotton or Tucker Carlson, or worse — calculating how they can exploit that crowd and do authoritarian Trumpism right.

Not to get all lofty and grand and everything, but for the health of democracy in the US of A Democrats have to do everything in their power to saw the legs out from under the preposterous mythologies of Trumpism and the right-wing carnival of bullshit that it embodies.

“Moving on” from Trump only means moving into something worse.

Can We Please Have a “Tough Conversation” About the 72 Million?

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Excuse me, but I’ve grown more than a little restless with the theory that the country’s stark, polarized divide would heal if only us snotty, overbearing liberals would stop and see things from the point of view of the 72 million Trump voters.

This notion, that conservatives, mainly white rural conservatives are largely reacting to the constant disrespect they feel from, you know, big city, New York Times-reading, Stephen Colbert-watching, Volvo-driving elites is getting a fresh work out after this recent election.

TrumpNation came out in unexpected droves. Therefore, say musty Libertarian op-ed pieces and countless commenters, liberals (and apparently only liberals) need to have a “tough conversation” with each other and finally atone for their misbehavior.

We heard this after 2016. There was, you’ll remember, no end of journalistic self-flagellation at how poorly “the mainstream media” understood the travails of the white working class, and how little effort newsrooms devoted to seeking out such people and “understanding” them. (As though your average newsroom has the budget for buying rounds of drinks at some rural bar and taking stenography as the locals bellyache.)

All that is back again. And it again it lacks one critical factor, if “healing” is actually the prize we’re focusing on.

Namely, where is any kind of “call” to, or “admonition” for TrumpNationalists to engage in a similar quality of self-criticism and behavior modification? Go ahead. Look around and get back to me when you find comparable demands aimed at that rather large and formidable crowd.

To put it bluntly, the over-weighted demands for “respect” and “understanding” from “liberals” toward “conservatives” screams “patronizing”.

Is it too much to ask if pundits and our sage culture counselors see only one group as adult enough to actually engage in therapeutic self-examination, and see the other side as so functionally immature that there’s no point in even posing the question to them?

There are a million theories for how 72 million people came to believe a reality TV performer and flagrant serial con man was a genuine self-made tycoon, and how they ignored a fantastic torrent of daily lies, blunders and scandals culminating in a demonstration of executive incompetence — his response to the COVID pandemic — that rivals when it doesn’t exceed the worst failure of government management in the history of the United States. But you can boil all of them down to two.

The 72 million either don’t know what is true, or they don’t care. So take your pick. Which suggests a higher level of adult function?

Their ignorance and/or indifference has been hardened — like epoxy glue — by 30 years of talk radio, 25 years of FoxNews and a solid 10 now of reckless disinformation via social media. The underlying message via all platforms is that … they are not responsible. Not only are they the victims of snotty, scheming, disrespectful liberal elites, there’s nothing they need to do to cool things down. In fact, the only thing required of them is to stay angry and resentful … and tune in again tomorrow for a booster shot.

I laugh every time I hear or read some Trumper yabber about “owning the libs.” The obsession of that crowd with, well, people like me I guess, (but really AOC and Ilhan and Hillary and all those other harridan socialist babes), is just not reciprocated. It may be fundamental to their “disrespect” grievance, but I don’t think I’ve ever considered “owning a Trumper”. It’s never crossed my mind long enough to register as a thought. Put another way, I (like other journalists) didn’t give them a lot of thought … until four years ago. Yes, they were out there and I heard the noise. But it was all so factually challenged and steeped in common, age-old grievances there was nothing to “engage” with, or really even “understand.” Certainly there was nothing to “agree” about.

One of the primary obstacles to “healing”, if that truly is the point of criticisms of liberal behavior, is the critical factor of judgment in social relations.

We may engage people as friends because we share interests, because they make us laugh or because they mix a damned good Mojito. But where the rubber meets the road in true, deeply-bonded friendships is a trust based in judgment. Because they know what is factually right, good friends will do the right thing when the right thing needs to be done.

Point being: supporting and voting for someone (and his craven enablers) who has proven himself beyond all doubt to be an unquivocal fraud, a racist and sociopathically indifferent to the suffering of millions of fellow citizens is a stunning demonstration of appalling judgment. In other words, it is not the response of a trustworthy individual to an extraordinarily serious moment.

I’m all for “healing”. Only fools aren’t. But at some point social critics are going to have to invent “messaging” that requires modern conservatives/Trumpists to be as adult in their self-examinations as all the allegedly snotty, sneering liberals supposedly demeaning the 72 million via The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, MSNBC, NPR, TED talks … and on and on … at every point of the dial where, you know, facts get verified before they’re sold.

Anything less than an equal admonition to TrumpNation is definitional enabling. It’s treating Trumpists like children. The effect is equal to sanctioning the belief of 72 million that the only things that are truly real are the things they want to be real, and that everything wrong is someone else’s fault.

When I was 10 I used to think that way.

Good Lord! Why Would Any of Us Ever Believe a Pollster Again?

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There is your basic “wrong”. Like last week, when all the sports guys predicted the Packers would beat the Vikings by two touchdowns. Ha! What a botch! But then there’s World Class, Never to be Forgiven-or-Forgotten-Etched-in-Granite-for-All-the-School-Children-to-See-Wrong … like, for example, America’s professional pollsters’ and pundits’ whiplash-inducing botch of last night’s election.

Holy Jesus, most of these boys and girls are going to need new identities and applications for the lunch shift at Chick-fil-A.

As someone who consumed waay too much pollster/pundit blather over the past year, I have no problem telling you that no one I heard — not your Nate Silvers, your David Plouffes, your David Axelrods, your Nate Cohns, your John Heilemans, your Rick Wilsons, your Steve Schmidts, your Amy Walters or your Dave Wassermans laid out a scenario remotely resembling what we’re looking at today. (All of them will be spinning the meaning of the word, “remotely” in the weeks, months and years to come.)

All along, the key ingredient for 2020 was what was described as your “shy Trump voter”, basically another, previously untapped layer of under-educated white males (and some females) that Trump could both find and fire up enough for them to show up and vote, maybe for the first time ever. And — what I kept hearing from “the experts” — was that that voter was a myth. They didn’t exist. Word was that the new, modern, far more sophisticated post-2016 polling, weighted to properly account for hard-to-get ahold of under-educated white males had their non-existence covered.

Well, obviously not, as those voters poured out of wherever they were hiding and voted in record numbers to reelect Donald Trump, the man who has ended the pandemic and got everybody back to work and drinking at their favorite bar.

My old “Same Rowdy Crowd” compadre, Jon Austin, (i.e. “The Great and Powerful”), has done lots of homework on the last pre-election polling data. Here I cut and paste from him unapologetically.

” … much of my thinking [says Austin] is driven by the assessments of the three election-prediction sites that use polling and other factors to assign a percentage probability of which way each state will vote. Again, those sites are:

• DecisionDesk (https://forecast.decisiondeskhq.com/president). As of October 30th, it gives Biden an 87 percent chance of winning the election.

• The Economist (https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president). As of October 30th, it gives Biden a 96 percent chance of winning.

• FiveThirtyEight (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/). As of October 29th, it gives Biden an 89 percent chance of winning.”

Now obviously, as of Wednesday afternoon Biden may still win, in which all of these particular sites will no doubt claim they “got it right”. But the picture they painted in their live cable TV interviews and in quotes to reporters was of something far different. And beyond them, in state polls, the product emits an even worse smell.

I eagerly await hearing from the professional pollster who had Lindsey Graham beating Jaime Harrison by 12%. Or Susan Collins over Sara Gideon by 9%. Or Joni Ernst over Theresa Greenfield in Iowa by 7% Or even Trump in Ohio by a fat 8%.

Conventional wisdom and pervasive chatter in veteran-operative liberal circles, after inhaling double secret probation “internal polling” and the junk above was that Biden had it comfortably in the bag, with a Democratic Senate “leaning” to “likely.” Hell, remember all that fantasizing about Texas? 5.5% may be better than the 9% Hillary lost by, but it’s nobody’s idea of “in the hunt.”

What we’re left with, while the pro pollsters scurry off to get emergency collagen injections for their reputations, is one very stark reality.

Far … far … from Donald Trump and the election of 2020 marking the death knell of the Republican party, supposedly destroyed by Trump’s malignant incompetence and vulgarity, the oppooisite is true. The astonishing, previously undetected number of votes Trump pulled out of the hills, hollers and exurbs of America, means that with or without him, Trumpism — grievance-driven, anti-science and fully isolated from reality by “alternative facts” — is now more powerful than ever. More powerful than any expert data geek or veteran pundit ever imagined.

To put a blunt point on it, that means no Republican candidate at any level, much less anyone running for national office, will dare step a rat’s whisker away from authoritarian/racist Trumpist messaging. Or in other words, things are looking good for Donny Jr. and Tucker Carlson in 2024.

Or hell, even my gal the QAnon Queen, freshly-elected Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Greene.

Post-election playlist

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Guest post by Noel Holston

The Washington Post’s Sunday magazine yesterday featured a powerful article about our bitterly divided country’s prospects for healing after Tuesday’s election. The author, Gene Weingarten, though he’s a humor columnist by trade, has a hard time keeping his optimism up.

I understand how he feels. So do millions of us.

A dear old friend, a naturalized American citizen who fled South Africa because of apartheid, told me the other day that despite accusations from the Right, she doesn’t hate Trump supporters, she simply can’t fathom their allegiance to such a creepy guy. Another old friend, a former Peace Corps volunteer no less, has been arguing with me on Facebook, determined to convince me that Joe Biden is thoroughly corrupt, senile and certain to drag the country down to socialistic hell.

They’re very civil representatives of the respective sides. I’ve actually had a gun-loving Facebook acquaintance use the phrase “Lock and load” during a testy exchange.

I’d say that the prospects of our healing and reclaiming some common ground are better if Biden wins, if only because he will at least try. That’s not only his promise, it’s also his history. Don’t forget he was harangued by his opponents in the Democratic primary for having been too friendly with Senate Republicans and “blue dog” Southern pols of yore.

President Trump, on the other hand, has demonstrated little if any interest in mitigating his policies or his behavior to win over Americans who disagree with him.  The notion that he would suddenly turn magnanimous and conciliatory in a second term seems pretty farfetched.

Whatever happens Tuesday – or the Tuesday after that or the Tuesday after that, depending on how the vote count and the likely challenges go – we’re going to have to make the best of another four years together.

 And because I would much rather us be singing and dancing in the streets than shooting, here, respectfully and not at all facetiously submitted, is a little playlist for the days ahead, a diverse, non-partisan Top 10 of songs that speak to wellness, optimism and unity:

“Peace in the Valley” – Elvis Presley

And the lion shall lay down by the lamb.

“Medicated Goo” – Traffic

My own home recipe’ll see you through

“Get Together” – The Youngbloods

Come on, people now, smile on your brother

“Coconut” – Harry Nilsson

Add lime, then drink ’em both together

“We Can Work It Out” – The Beatles

 Life is very short and there’s no time.

“A Spoonful of Sugar” – Julie Andrews

Helps the medicine go down

“Why Can’t We Be Friends” – War

The color of your skin don’t matter to me/As long as we can live in harmony

“Jeremiah Peabody’s Polyunsaturated Quick-Dissolving Fast-Acting Pleasant-Tasting Green and Purple Pills” – Ray Stevens

Guaranteed to be just what you need for quick, fast, speedy relief.

“(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” – Nick Lowe

Seriously.

“Sexual Healing” – Marvin Gaye

Helps to relieve my mind.

Bonus track for the hopelessly devastated:

“Whiskey River (Take My Mind)” – Willie Nelson.    


Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He’s a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.

Attention Bed-Wetters! Prepare for Chekov’s Gun to Fire After the Election.

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Two phrases trending simultaneously today are “bed-wetting” and “Chekov’s gun.” They are of course related. It’s how we do elections in 2020 USA.

“Bed-wetting” refers to the state of extreme high anxiety afflicting every Democrat/functioning adult who remembers 2016. Such people are in the thrall of pathological superstition, certain that ignoring all Biden-favorable data/metrics is the only way to guarantee a Donald Trump defeat on Nov. 3 (or in the days thereafter.)

There’s always a case to be made for taking the “worst case scenario” in critical life events. But I’m here to tell you, this ain’t 2016 and Trump and a very large number of Republicans are in serious trouble. If I were forced to make a guess, I’d say Biden is going to run up north of 340 electoral votes next week, that Democrats will narrowly take back the Senate and even add a handful of House seats along the way.

As Lindsey Graham likes to say, “Hold the tape.”

There are all sorts of wonky deep-data indicators that this might even be a conservative scenario. I note this morning a report that Texas, heretofore the big, dopey, ludicrously proud red gorilla of US politics has already banked 50% of all votes cast in 2016, with an enormous turn-out in the Houston area. Maybe these are all MAGA warriors rushing to save their god-ordained leader, but nobody who runs numbers for a living thinks so.

Veteran politicos like Rahm Emanuel, and many others, are certain that voter turn-out this year will exceed 2016 by over 20 million. While the Team Trump strategy (such as it is) has been to rile up even more low-information, non-college educated white male voters than it did in ’16, polling, which has enhanced it’s sophistication regarding hard-to-reach adults over the past for years, simply can not detect enough of that kind of voter to overcome Biden’s current lead.

Moreover, as many surveys have shown, polite, genial uncle Joe has never had unfavorable numbers like Hillary did in ’16, and even more startling, his “favorable” nmbers have increased as the campaign has gone on. Trump meanwhile is not just disliked but loathed by a stunning number of women and has lost his advantage with so-called “independents” (i.e. people who end up voting Republican 70-80 percent of the time).

“Chekov’s gun” is a hot topic because of court rulings in certain states upholding Americans’ “originalist” right to brandish guns at polling places, along with a fueled-and-ready legal machine to scream foul at the slightest hint of a missing signature on an absentee ballot. All this has been ominous in its foreshadowing.

For what it’s worth, (i.e. less than the coffee you’re drinking), I’m in the camp that says a bona fide, indisputable “blue wave”, not just a Biden win, but an election that returns Mitch McConnell to minority status, will suck most of the plausibility and energy out of Republican legal challenges. He may be as devious a bastard as they come, but McConnell plays the long game, and he knows the faster he gets past Trump and on to something new the better it’ll be for him in 2022.

What that leaves on the table for bed-wetting is Trump’s reaction to clear defeat. There is no imaginable way he calls Biden and says, “Joe, Donny here. Good game. You won, here’s the keys.” (Can you imagine him even attending the next inauguration?)

More likely is that Trump commences a 68-day version of Sherman’s March to the Sea, torching every disloyal apparatchik who failed to jail Barack Obama, while simultaneously rewarding his international creditors in every conceivable way in order to slither out from under his staggering debt load. There will also be the critical business convincing his new Supreme Court that he’s well within Thomas Jefferson’s doctrine that it’s okay to whip out the Sharpie and pardon himself and his kids.

In other words, calm down about the vote but don’t put away the rubber sheets just yet.

That NY Post Hunter Biden Story: Has Vladimir Lost His Mojo?

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I’m a little worried. Judging by this Rudy Giuliani/New York Post/Hunter Biden fiasco I’m thinking our old pal Vladimir is losing his touch.

I mean, by now I was expecting something a lot more sinister and sophisticated than, you know, another e-mail scandal. People, it’s 2020! Where are the deep fake videos? You know, a slick 4k mash-up with Joe Biden sitting down in his favorite pizza joint in front of an 18″ wood-fired pie of chopped up baby parts and a side dish of Satanic hot sauce?

Instead Vlad wheels out … Rudy Giuliani? The fearsome Russian FSB doesn’t understand that Giuliani is Functioning Adult America’s idea of a sad, over played punchline? As in: truly everyone’s babbling, drunk uncle? As “October surprises” goes, this is just sad. Pathetic even.

It gets really bad when (Murdoch-owned) FoxNews won’t touch a story — presented for your inflammation — by the (Murdoch-owned) Post. Why? Was it the combination of Giuliani’s and Steve Bannon’s and Alex Jones’ fingerprints all over the thing? Or did they have enough inside-the-family intel to know that the guy who wrote the thing demanded his name be taken off it … and that the by-line that finally ran belonged a poor woman who had never before had anything printed in the Post … and only learned her name was attached after it was published? I mean, good lord people. We need better practices nefariousness. This is amateurish.

Now, I’m guessing Vlad is saving his best moves for election day. Namely, as I’ve said before, a series of “ballot irregularities” in key states that aligns with Bill Barr’s judicial philosophy like the gears of a fine luxury sedan. (I’m pleased to see that Team Biden is stashing away cash for the court fight(s) over that inevitability.)

Bad as the Post-Hunter Biden story is, it was predictably inhaled by the right-wing bubble culture. I don’t know why I was surprised. I guess it’s because at this point I was assuming that even they would require something a bit more elegant in their flagrant con jobs. But no. If there was ever any doubt how ill-informed and sealed-off from wider culture the Trump base is, the last semblance evaporated with their whole-hearted, childishly credulous embrace of a story with so many gaping lapses of plausibility. (Here’s the best item-by-item take down I’ve read.)

Pundits and mainstream media oracles are slapping themselves on the back for recognizing … all the red flares shooting off a pile of absurdist bullshit … when they saw it lying right there on the sidewalk in front of them. Good for them, I guess. It is an improvement from 2016’s “even-handed” pursuit of Hillary’s e-mail “scandal.”

Two weeks is always an eternity in a presidential election cycle, and with the combination of Valdimir/Trump/Barr still in the game we remain very much in a kind of super duper, double secret form of eternity.

But I can’t help but wonder what Putin is thinking over there in his sealed up dacha. His investment in Trump paid off with four years of chaos and corruption, and all the international disgrace Trump has brought down on the United States. So it goes without saying he’d like a longer run. More of the same. The complete ruination of NATO for example … and on and on. But did Vlad factor in the full incompetence of Trump? The transparent buffoonery of Rudy Giuliani and the ineptitude of Republican politicians like Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, charged with … making something out of all the drunk uncle theories? I’m thinking, “no.” Being diabolical, Putin would have a hard time imagining such an broad cross-section of idiots.

So, eager as modern Republicans are to play his game, Vlad is going to have to come up with something more clever — by far — than the stale re-run he got out of Rudy and the Post.

The Hour of Repudiation Is at Hand.

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Because of all the consternation and anxiety in the air, I think, from a mental health perspective alone, it may be useful to look at present events and see light breaking over the horizon.

The standard disclaimer for everyone still reeling from 2016 is that polls and fund-raising are not votes and nothing is certain until all the votes have been counted. But even with every imaginable nefarious scenario — voter suppression, fake ballot drop boxes, $200 checks to every senior, “miracle cure” vaccine announcements, armed “poll watchers”, and on and on — Donald Trump is poised to suffer one of the most decisive repudiations of any elected leader anywhere, certainly in our lifetimes and arguably over the entire past century.

The remarkable thing about polling for this race is that given the epic events of the past year — impeachment, pandemic, economic collapse (among lower income groups), racial protests both peaceful and violent — Trump’s “favorabilitty” numbers have barely budged. He’s still at roughly 42% with absolutely no indication that he has attracted any new support to him, or peeled anything away from Joe Biden.

In fact, since the one-two-three punch of court-packing with Amy Barrett, his boorish debate performance and his hospitalization for the virus he dismissed as a “hoax”, Biden’s numbers have pushed up virtually everywhere that matters. The “undecideds” (and who, good god are those people, and can we require them to have identifying license plates?) have goosed his numbers by three to six points across the country.

Moreover, Trump is out of money. Big donors smell a losing, bad investment. His campaign has been forced to pull TV advertising from a half dozen “must win” Midwestern states and devote what they have left to playing defense in the normally reliable Sun Belt and on social media, which means they’re preaching to the same toxic choir — and almost no one else — even more than usual.

Making things worse for himself is that every hour of every day, with his FoxNews/Rush Limbaugh call-ins, Trump looks and sounds evermore like an absurd, delusional, mentally unstable loser. (“A spray-tanned, doped-up, TV pitchman,” to quote Obama strategist David Plouffe.) Utterly ridiculous, in other words. A look underlined, highlighted and garlanded with flashing red neon by the revelation of his squalid personal finances and jaw-dropping indebtedness.

To this we must add Vladimir the Puppetmaster’s recent comment hedging his bets on the election and making understated conciliatory noises to Joe Biden … just in case his troll farms fail to excite America’s patriotic militias like they did before. I’m sure Donald in his steroid fever loved hearing that. (Did you call Vlad to complain, Donald?)

Most of all in my view is … women. Since the trifecta of the Barrett/debate/hospitalization fiascos Biden has opened a … wait for it … 23-point lead among women, a lead even greater among college-educated women. Frankly I don’t know or spend time with any women who don’t see Trump as the emodiment of everything they’ve endured and despised in, excuse my language, asshole bosses, co-workers, ex-husbands and bad boyfriends. Meanwhile, by contrast, Joe Biden seems like everyone’s genial, polite uncle.

So yes, while we should be prepared for election chaos, with Bill Barr-led court challenges to “voting irregularities”, cos-playing storm troopers (i.e. armed ex-husbands and bad boyfriends) haunting polling stations, and FoxNews pushing an early “call”, right now Donald Trump is set up to lose in a deafening defeat. A well-earned, humiliating repudiation.

All I’m saying is this: while we all keep our foot on the gas, sharpen our wooden stakes and load up the silver bullets, I think we’re entitled to allow ourselves a moment for the psychic equivalent of a reinvigorating lungful of fresh air.

If only to buoy our spirits for the bullshit coming from election to inauguration day.