Every Hour of Every Day Irony Dies Again

Posted on by

With apologies to Graydon Carter, 9/11 was no Donald Trump.

Back in the week after the attacks that killed (only) 3000 Americans, Carter, then editor of Vanity Fair, memorably intoned that the event was so grave and sobering that, “I think it’s the end of the age of irony.” There is dispute over whether Carter — who co-founded the regularly brilliant satire magazine, Spy, back in the late ’80s and gets some credit for the description of Donald Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian” — was the first to suggest we’d never again laugh at the ironies of outrageous hypocrisy and shameless buffoonery. But fair or not, the line has stuck to him.

The smart kids at the Oxford dictionary define irony as, “A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.”

Now, given four years of Trump we can debate whether the line about “contrary to what one expects” has standing any more. Still, let’s take a quick roll through just a few of the shiv stabs of irony we’ve endured in recent weeks and see if there’s still a way to laugh.

Trump Campaign Manager Melts Down and Is Tackled By Cops in His Front Yard. To TrumpNation the MAGA reelection machine is a bigly world-class hypercar, the McLaren F1 of political campaigns, and therefore worthy of every dollar they can peel off their disability checks and send over to it. So it is ironic, to us if not them, that the campaign has somehow blown close to a billion dollars of MAGA money and is being heavily outspent in key places like Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Irony grows when campaign manager Brad Parscale, after citing “a million” requests for tickets to Trump’s Tulsa rally, (which ends up pulling in slightly fewer than a bad arena football game), is demoted/fired. Worse, having um, “migrated” $38.9 million of MAGA dollars to side hustles he personally benefits from, Parscale has rather flagrantly bought himself a Ferrari, a $400,000 boat and a $2.4 million waterfront home … only then to learn he’s under federal investigation. At this point he allegedly slugs his wife, gets drunk, threatens to kill himself with one of the 10 guns he keeps around the house for protection, perhaps from antifa, and wanders shirtless out into his front yard (while drinking a beer) where he gets tackled by cops and carted off to mandatory psychiatric care.

To this, purly as a bonus, we have ex-GOP hack and now Lincoln Project driving force Rick Wilson saying he “believes” Trump,’s campaign funding problem is compounded by the candidate himself, i.e. “The World’s Greatest Business Man”, taking “a 20% skim” off the top of all those $10 MAGA collections and stuffing it straight into his pocket. .

Not Only Isn’t Trump “Really, Really Rich” but He’s Essentially Lost $400 Million THREE Times. Those two $750 annual tax bills got most of the attention after the big New York Times story. But people long amazed at Trump’s shell game finances took special interest in the fact that he first blew $400 million in money he inherited from his father, (and likely swindled away from other relatives), then made and blew the $400 million he made off “The Apprentice” (including acting as a pitch man for Double-Stuf Oreos). But then — and this is based on what his records show — he is now in debt to god knows who for at least another $400 million. For those keeping score at home that’s $1.2 billion he’s basically thrown in a hole and set on fire. So here we have the irony of the “world’s greatest businessman” revealed to be demonstrably incapable of balancing a check book.

(At Vanity Fair William Cohan throws this in, ” … that is only a fraction of the more than $1.1 billion or so in debt and obligations that Trump [currently] owes across his empire, my calculations show. There’s Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, which Trump owns and which has $100 million of debt on it, due in 2022. On 40 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, which Trump also owns outright, he owes another $139 million, due in five years. He also owns 30% stakes, alongside Vornado Realty Trust, in two office towers: one in Manhattan at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, and one in San Francisco at 555 California Street. His 30% of the debt on these two buildings, according to the Vornado filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is $448 million—$163 million of which is due next September, with the balance of $285 million due in two years. (If you are still with me, we’re up to $687 million in debt. … thanks to Dan Alexander, the Forbes Trumpologist and the author of new book White House, Inc., we can account for another $100 million or so, bringing the total debt that Trump owes to around $1.1 billion—well beyond the $421 million of debt the Times shared in its piece.)

So, for another deeper level of irony, we have the “Art of the Deal” tycoon who screams “hoax” and “no collusion” every time someone says “Russia” deeply in arrears to a collection mysterious lender/investors, all of whom I gotta assume are feeling nervous about ever seeing a return on their money.

Can you call yourself a billionaire if the only billion in sight is what you owe your creditors?

Trump’s White House is Itself a Super Spreader Cluster. Leaving aside for a second the grand(est) irony that Trump the Denier, Trump of “Like a Miracle” and “We’ve Got it Totally Under Control” fame himself becoming infected, as of Wednesday, 27 people connected with the White House have also tested positive. In D.C. that one famous building is a goddam viral hot zone.

By contrast, last week the entire country of Taiwan, all 23 million people, reported … nine cases. Want more? Over a dozen countries reported fewer than 10. The Denier-in-Chief’s personal physical situation is so bad it’s the only plausible reason why the White House is refusing to allow contact tracing to determine who in the building is “Patient Zero”, the infector of the infected.

Does any of this mean that the scales have fallen from the eyes of Trump Nation? I doubt that, profoundly. Sean Hannity is telling MAGA warriors that Trump is a 21st century version of Winston Churchill, leading us through a crisis, presumably by exacerbating the crisis with incompetence and then infecting himself to demonstrate his sheer damn manliness.

TrumpNation is keeping the faith, or maybe they’re keeping the fraud, I’m not sure which. But then there are studies exploring why conservatives don’t use or seem to understand irony and satire, as liberals do. It’s a cognitive thing.

So as you and I can agree, the problem isn’t that irony has died. It’s more a problem that we are awash in so much irony it’s too damn hard to decide what’s laughable and what’s tragic.

MinneMirage?

Posted on by

Why is Trump obsessed with investing so much time and money in Minnesota?

Last night’s Trump rally in Duluth was old hat for us. The visits from Trump and surrogates are non-stop, and the incendiary attack ads are wall-to-wall.

Yes, I understand that in 2016 Hillary only won Minnesota by 44,593, or 1.5 percent. Yes, I realize that there are “soooo many Trump signs up in rural areas,” where “real Minnesotans” live. Yes, I realize the Iron Range is continuing to evolve into a reliably red East Dakota or North Kentucky, politically speaking.

But still, the data from 2020 just don’t look all that encouraging for Trump, or puppets such as U.S. Senate candidate Jason Lewis. Despite all of those massive Trump signs in rural areas, 55% of Minnesota’s population is in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, and Biden is doing well there. Here are the most recent polls, aggregated by fivethirtyeight.com:

(P.S. The Star Tribune/KARE-11/MPR poll published on September 26 had Biden ahead 48 percent to 42 percent, with eight percent undecided. It has Trump’s approval rating at 43 percent. Not sure why fivethirtyeight.com didn’t list that one, but that poll is consistent with the average of these other polls.)

As we all know, the 2016 polls didn’t match up with the 2016 results on Election Day, though for the most part the difference was within the polls’ statistical margins-of-error, or nearly so. It’s important to note that these most recent findings in 2020 are mostly outside the margin-of-error.

To be clear, I’m not saying Minnesota is a sure thing for Biden. The margins shown in these polls are not insurmountable, particularly if Trump continues to dump a disproportionate amount of time, money, lies, and voter suppression efforts here over the next 33 days.

But if these numbers qualify Minnesota as one of the most hopeful swing states in Trumpland, how bad must the other swing states look for Trump?

“Stand by … This isn’t going to end well.”

Posted on by

Well, among all the other things that have withered and died under Trump’s touch we can now add presidential debates. Team Biden will understand that they can’t refuse two more cage matches with Trump. They can’t “quit.” But the real question is who will want to watch? Last night settled any question still left hanging in the air that we’re dealing with something truly foul and reckless.

To quote Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, no one, especially women, wants to spend more time with, “a big fat asshole”.

Before the debate’s first “segment” was half through the verdict was pretty well in, “This is a disaster.” By dawn today some of the early quotes are already legendary.

Jake Tapper at CNN: “That was a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck. That was the worst debate I have ever seen, in fact it wasn’t even a debate. It was a disgrace.”

His colleague Dana Bash (a nice blonde lady): “”I’m going to say it like it is. That was a shit show. We’re on cable. We can say it. Apologies for being crude. But that is really the phrase I’m getting from people on both sides of the aisle on text and the only phrase I can think of to describe it.”

Frank Bruni in the New York Times: “I’m not exaggerating when I say that Trump was breathtaking, and I may even be paying him something of a compliment, because it takes a peerless combination of audacity and mendacity to pull off some of what he pulled off.”

And on and on. Trump’s behavior was so ugly and boorish, so untethered from any kind of reality and dignity I couldn’t help but imagine mothers and fathers with impressionable children who had gathered to view an important historical event shuttling the kids off to an early bedtime to protect them from the snarls and hissing of America’s Elected Role Model-in-Chief.

It was so ugly it was obscene.

The ball is now in the court of the Commission on Presidential Debates. Since both campaigns have to agree to rule changes I don’t see how they get Team Trump to agree to a “kill switch” for microphones. Trump interrupted Biden something like 78 times. The switch would only be coming for him.

The Commission is also savvy enough to understand that Trump’s feral desperation is only going to get worse. He’s losing in national polling. He’s losing in battleground state polling. He’s getting obliterated in fund-raising. He doesn’t have enough cash on hand to be a TV presence in places like Minnesota, where he’s blustered he’s going to tip us red. (So … he has to fly in today and give another super spreader rally in an airplane hanger.)

The consensus is overwhelming that his brawling, drunk uncle routine last night is only going to make all those key metrics worse. (Biden pulled in an unprecedented $4 million in the first hour after the debate.) It’s a scenario that bodes for more of the same and worse for mild-mannered Steve Scully, of C-SPAN, moderator of the next debate.

If Chris Wallace couldn’t exert any control over Trump, Scully should bomb-proof the underside of his desk.

The negotiated agreement that the moderator would not provide fact-checking won’t be revisited. And it would do no good if it were. It would simply become a one-on-two debate with Trump raging against both the moderator and Biden.

As for Joe, I have to say he benefited from Trump’s belligerence. Biden had a half dozen golden opportunities handed to him to deliver a “Reaganesque” one-liner. When Trump muttered, “To be honest … ,’ Biden’s play was to wait a beat and reply, “Well, this’ll be a first for you. We’re all ears.”

Likewise, if at any point in one of Trump’s rabid rants Biden had just straightened up, looked at him in the eye and said, “Good god man! Get a grip! If you keep ranting like this you’ll have a stroke!” 61% of the viewing audience would have nodded and said, “No shit.”

Old School polite and diplomatic Joe Biden is/was no match for the New School Fox-and-Twitter bred histrionics and fact-free torrents of Trump. But Trump so wildly and crudely overplayed that hand no sane adult faulted Biden for failing to be glib and theatrical.

The reaction line Biden needed most was at the end, when Trump — the President of the United States — was asked to directly and unambiguously tell his most radical white supremacist supporters to stay calm and respect the outcome of the election, and his response was to tell the armed-to-the-teeth neo-Nazi Proud Boys to, “stand back and stand by.”

I mean, I bolted upright in my chair and shrieked, ” ‘Stand by!!!!’? What the [bleep] are you talking about you, appalling thug?”

Maybe the key issue facing the Commission is whether another debate as ugly and potentially inciteful as last night serves to enable Trump to spray more gasoline on possible insurrection.

I mean, Trump, who is incapable of hiding his darkest impulses did say/promise, “This isn’t going to end well.”

The Commission may need to believe what he says.

The False Equivalence Trumpists

Posted on by

Trying to pick your least favorite type of Trump supporter is not easy. The competition is stiff, and there are strong arguments for all of them.

Trumpist Typology

Greed Trumpists. There’s the Greed Trumpists, who will put up with any Trump outrage – kids torn from mothers and put in cages, white supremacy encouragement, coordinating with foreign enemies interfering in our democracy — to get a tax cut, even a tax cut that represents relative crumbs compared to the mountains of loaves lavished on billionaires.

Personality Cult Trumpists. There are the Personality Cult Trumpists, many of whom watched far too many episodes of The Apprentice with an uncritical eye.  They find Trump entertaining and embrace the myth of Trump’s deal-making skills and “only I can fix it” hucksterism, despite his pandemic response debacle and tax returns that expose Trump as a bumbler of epic proportions.

Bible-Thumpin’ Trumpists. Then there’s the Bible-Thumpin’ Trumpists. They ignore of the dozens of Trump’s extreme anti-Christian actions—serial sexual abuse and infidelity and cutting food subsidies for the poor to name just a couple — that make a mockery of the Golden Rule and the Beatitudes  in order to hoard as many Fallwell-endorsed judges as possible.

Tribal Trumpists. Who can forget the Tribal Trumpists, who will let Trump take their loved one’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) health protections and Social Security benefits just to be able to say that their Red Tribe of “real Americans” stuck it to the Blue Tribe of “libtard snowflakes.” Go team!

Changeophobe Trumpists. Changeophobe Trumpists are fearful of our fast-changing world and ever-nostalgic about the glories of what they view as the good old days of their childhoods. They are particularly susceptible to Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” by keeping coal dirty, light bulbs inefficient, America white, global competition at bay, and bigotry unchallenged.

Racist Trumpists. The Racist Trumpists are obviously a very strong contender for least favorite.  They insist that Trump’s villifying of immigrants and people of color is a “refreshing rejection of political correctness,” instead of a wink and a nod to the full spectrum of racists, from those of us who are sometimes lousy at recognizing systemic racism to full-blown white supremacist activists like the Proud Boys, Aryan Nations, Volksfront, American Freedom Party, Ku Klux Klan, and White Aryan Resistance.

Thug Trumpists. And then there are Thug Trumpists, who can’t recognize the difference between bullying and actual strength, and gravitate towards authoritarian personalities to serve as a binky to make them feel more secure in the face of their overblown fears of our changing and more diverse nation.

False Equivalence Trumpists

But the last month of the election is when we unfortunately have to be hearing a lot from perhaps my least favorite type of Trump supporters — the False Equivalence Trumpists.  They continually declare that “both sides do it” to make their vote for the most bigoted, incompetent, and corrupt President in U.S. history seem somehow defensible.

Since last night’s presidential debate, the False Equivalence Trumpists were out in full force, complaining about “both candidates” being equally bad and lamenting that they “once again have to choose the lesser of two evils.” 

Though they carry an air of intellectual superiority in their assertions, False Equivalence Trumpists are among the most intellectually lazy of all of the Trumpists types. 

Obviously, both candidates have sold out to a special interest, lied, supported an unwise policy, or made a big mistake. Same as it ever was.  But from that truth, False Equivalence Trumpists quickly jump to the safety of “both sides do it equally,” instead of digging into the facts to determine which candidate does it more.  In a democracy, doing that kind of qualitative differentiation is a voter’s duty, and they consistently shrink from it.

Because False Equivalence Trumpists find it distasteful to be held accountable for supporting an imperfect candidate, they stubbornly cling to the truth of “both sides do it,” but not the whole truth.  The whole truth is that any fair-minded analysis comparing Trump and Biden will show that Trump is much more incompetent, much more bigoted, much more dishonest, and much more corrupt. 

But this group of Americans lacks either the judgement to see that truth, or the courage to speak it.

The False Equivalence Trumpists are top-of-mind right now because, we are entering the final month of the presidential campaign with about 6 percent of the voters somehow still undecided.  Tragically, these pathologically indecisive Americans could be decisive on November 3rd.  The fact that the fate of the nation, and maybe even the planet, falls to this group of Americans is crazy making and terrifying.

The Times Drops the Big One and a Modest Proposal for a Deal with Donny.

Posted on by

Consider the crowd I travel with, but I was startled by how many people read Bart Gellman’s piece in The Atlantic — the one about all the manners of hell that could play out if/when Trump refuses to concede defeat in November. But I suspect many more will be reading The New York Times deep and epic dive into the fraud and incompetence revealed within the past 20 years of The Donald’s tax records.

If it doesn’t tell us everything we’ve wanted to know about Trump’s finances — and there’s no “specificity” about money that may have come in from Russians — it’s as good as we’re likely to get until the day Cy Vance in New York lays it out in a public trial. It’s a long read, as was the Times’ 2018 Pulitzer-winner detailing the fraud old man Fred Trump and family ran for decades while building up the fortune … that Donald quickly blew on casinos, bad steaks and cheap vodka.

While this latest Times piece confirms virtually everything any clear-headed adult suspected of a carnival act like Trump for the past 30 years, it will likely mean nothing to MAGA nation, assuming they even hear a word about it in their thickly-insulated echo chamber. But the moderator of next Tuesday’s first debate, Chris Wallace of FoxNews, will commit journalistic malpractice if he doesn’t push Trump on what is in the Times story.

That said, my alleged mind has jumped to something else. Something both James Carville and ex-Obama chief of staff and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel have been saying over the past few days.

Namely, that all the noise Trump (and Bill Barr) have been making about the “rigged” election and “getting rid of the ballots” and the “continuation” is a tactical device to build leverage for a “deal” with Biden once Trump is defeated. (I’ve written about this before, because I think it is palpable likelihood. Like a layer of flop sweat forming under a bad con man’s comb over.)

As today’s Times story lays out, Trump is in (ridiculously) deep debt, with huge bills coming due in the next couple years, for which he is personally on the hook. And the tab gets bigger if he loses his much-referenced tax audit (over $100 million including penalties), and bigger still if New York and god knows how many stiffed contractors, harassed women, former employees go after him … hard … post the immunity of the White House.

Trump desperately … and I do mean desperately … needs a way out of this looming apocalypse. One way is if he wins the election. But barring that he needs something like blanket immunity from the state of New York. And that would mean striking … a deal.

As I’ve said before, only a hopeless idiot would enter into any deal with Trump that didn’t have airtight conditions and abusive-level penalties.

So this is my proposal:

Trump agrees to concede the election. In return, the Biden administration, in union with Andrew Cuomo and Vance in New York set the following conditions for Trump — and his family, (since Ivanka and the boys appear to have fat chunks of fraud splatter in their laps as well) — to avoid prosecution.

The deal requires Trump to submit to a public interrogation by tax and white collar fraud attorney/prosecutors into any and all of his business dealings, from the time he took over from his father through to today. This would include everything involving the Russians, the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks, and any other thug-ocracy he’s been trolling for loose change.

It also stipulates “the deal” is voided the second Trump lies, “misstates” or “mischaracterizes” any pertinent fact.

Why “public”?

Because the story of Trump and the foundational lies of Trumpism has to be told. It has to be admitted to and confessed by Trump himself. History has to be written by the winners … from the mouth of the loser.

Gellman’s post-election hellscape is based on the premise that “we will never know”. That the fog and stench of Trumpism and Federalist Society Bill Barr-ism is desaigned to prevent anything from ever being truly knowable. (Such is Putin’s game in Russia.)

I believe Adam Schiff for one will eloquently argue that accepting anything less than a full peeling of the Trump myth simply enables a smarter, less louche and preposterous Trump from picking up the pieces and starting all over again. Even the most oblivious and deficient Trumper has to be presented with stark evidence that they’ve been conned … again.

Thirty nine percent will ignore the Times’ tax blockbuster and/or dismiss it as “fake news”, and Biden still needs a solid victory in Florida election night and a landslide overall to neuter any plausible claim Trump and Barr might present.

But the basis is now visibly forming to squeeze Trump into a corner from which his only escape is a Walk of Shame, to reference the entirely apt “Game of Thrones.”

Repeat After Me, “It Will Never Be ‘Normal’ Again.”

Posted on by

Forget raining, it’s pouring Trump scandal books. The past few days I’ve been toggling between Jeffrey Toobin’s, “True Crimes and Misdemeanors” and Brian Stelter’s, “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.”

There are separate discussions to be had about both, as there are over Bob Woodward’s “Rage”, the New York Times’ Michael Schmidt’s, “Donald Trump v. The United States” and top Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissman’s “Where the Law Ends.”

But one stark takeaway from Toobin and Stelter is how completely unprepared “the establishment” was for Donald Trump. More to the point both are argue, is how unprepared traditional legal bureaucracies and journalism organizations still are even today, nearly four years and 20,000 lies after Trump was elected … the first time.

Toobin (and Weissman, based on interviews he’s already given), both lament the overly-cautious, tradition-bound behavior of Robert Mueller as he confronted Trump’s total obstruction of his investigation. A creature from an era when people in high offices showed basic respect for legal “norms”, Mueller (and at least one key deputy) refused to push a direct face-to-face confrontation with Trump or any of his family over the source of their wealth, despite clear indications that its roots were in Russia and therefore they were all highly likely to be compromised by Vladimir Putin.

The spectre of litigating against … the President of the United States … over large scale money laundering for Russian oligarch/gangsters was simply a place Mueller didn’t want to go. Better to deliver a narrowly-investigated, bridled report that suggested as much but left all the ugly charging business to Congress.

Stelter’s book is a dizzying trip into Fox’s alternate universe. The naked careerism and mendacity. The all but total dereliction of journalistic duty in favor of locking down and pandering to an audience with a nearly-religious allegiance to a “norm-busting” celebrity figure. It’s all there, plus some.

Bad as all that is, the problem both Toobin and Stelter suggest is that “normal”, “traditional” politicians, courts and media are still off-balance and indecisive about how to respond to Trump. And this comes barely a month before the next election and with Trump plainly setting up to deny the results of the election should he lose.

Fundamentally, the problem is that the people in control of response to Trump’s (and Bill Barr’s, and Mitch McConnell’s) flagrant norm and tradition-breaking are almost all figures groomed and elevated to their positions from what appears to be a lost era. An era when editors and judges and sensible, civic-minded politicians always gave presidents the benefit of the doubt, always sought to present a “balance” between “both sides” and always avoided the word, “lying.”

But if you watch the Trump spectacle day after day and if you read what you can, the only conclusion is that we don’t live in that era or world anymore, and given social media and every other platform of disinformation, we never will again. The evolution of “normal” has passed our institutions by and is rocketing into a new time zone.

The Eisenhower-era of journalism, courts and politics is long gone. And we’re at a point, right now today where tradition-groomed and bound judges, politicians and journalists are have to ask themselves if they’re really going to play this moment as Robert Mueller did? Are they going to continue to respect the “norms” of their professions, all of which have been mocked, abused and degraded by Donald Trump, in the anachronistic hope that eventually, at some point, if not now, November or a decade from now, normal respect for tradition will prevail again?

Or, are they going to accept a harsh reality and adapt to change?

Frankly, if Trump is able to create enough chaos to declare and sustain victory I don’t see how old time tradition will hold sway in the US of A ever again.

Wanted for the Winter Ahead: A Stronger Pair of Rose-Colored Glasses

Posted on by

Even as someone who was well old enough to remember 1968, I can’t shake the feeling that this … today … is worse. And that drift toward fatalism isn’t helped when Dr. Michael Osterholm predicts “another 12 to 14 months” before we’ll begin to feel true relief from the pandemic.

There’s a psychological fragility in the air that I’ve never felt before. 1968 was a terrible year. But even with 400 or more GIs being killed a week in Vietnam, (i.e. less than half of one day of this pandemic), even with the assassinations, the street protests and riots it was still possible to grasp The Silent Majority’s rationale for supporting the war, for supporting Lyndon Johnson (until they didn’t) and eventually Richard Nixon. The Commies were bad. We couldn’t let them win … no matter how much damage we did to ourselves.

It didn’t make a lot of sense. But it made some sense.

As much as we loathed Johnson, Nixon, Curtis LeMay and all the establishment warriors of that era, in retrospect at least we regarded them as fact-based characters. Rational but seriously misguided.

Today though, and without question, our fate, is in the hands of utter fools. Fools lacking even a waving relationship to scholarship, honesty and the basic efforts of their job decriptions. Fools being given stalwart legal support by deeply cynical (i.e. Nixon-like) characters, but fools none the less.

The combination of an eight-month old pandemic for which the government still has no plan, and against which our president long ago decided not to bother fighting, racial tension as bad as 1967 and a truly apocalyptic wildfire season out west, a scene long predicted by Osterholm-level climatologists and regularly mocked as a “hoax” by fools creates a cocktail of despair unlike anything in my lifetime.

I was a big fan of “Game of Thrones”, but the “Winter is coming” jokes have lost their gallows humor punch.

Write it off as the congenital mental weakness of elitist libtards, but I am struck by how often and unbidden friends and neighbors are saying, “God, I’m dreading this winter.” And how could a rational person not?

We have an election marked by utter stupidity and “viciousness”. An election we know with near total certainty will end in a culture war battle royale no matter who wins.

Plus, we have an unmitigated pandemic that is almost certain to regain deadly strength as we seal ourselves back indoors and cut off what limited physical contact we’ve been able to enjoy with others. And, as I say, all that plays against terrifying, conclusive proof that scientists have been right all along about both virus and climate … and yet the fools are still mocking both. So yes, the ingredients are there for a season of extraordinary psychological pain.

Facing this, every trite homily will encourage us to practice saintly quantities of patience toward each other. Some might even advise that each of us has to take heightened responsibility for our own sanity and stability … in order to be of any value to others. But the larger question is, “What percentage of us are prepared to reflect on our responsibilities to the culture at large?”

And will that percentage be enough?

Even if Donald Trump is dragged out of office, his army of self-pitying fools, catalyzed by their grievances, their sense of humiliation or their anachronistic genetics far more than any policy, will continue to resist and obstruct any science-based plan to restore “normal order.”

So yeah. If you have a new, stronger prescription for rose-colored glasses, you know where to find me.

And Who Would Be The Donald’s Real “Losers” and “Suckers”?

Posted on by

Even before we got to the “losers” and “suckers” phase of The Donald Trump Experience we already knew this election was set in cement. Nothing is going to stop 39% of the American voting age population from idolizing a narcissistic reality TV performer. That 39% can almost be described as “genetic”, certainly figuratively and quite possibly literally.

A few days before Donald of Bone Spur called Americans who volunteered to defeat facism — instead of making a few million bucks by taking over daddy’s real estate scams, tax frauds and all, and devoting his spare time to avoiding STDs on the Manhattan dating scene — a poll showed the same 39% crediting Trump with doing “a good job” on the COVID-19 pandemic.

If I had a dollar for every time I asked, “Who the [bleep] are these people?” well … I’d owe myself a couple million. Through the lenses of sociology, cultural anthropology and basic psychology the absolutely unmoveable, intractable, granitic allegiance of this percentage of people to Trump — not the Republican party, but Donald Trump — is nothing short of astonishing. A “good job” on the pandemic? Has this crowd been on Neptune since January?

I’ve been fascinated with this undistractable, almost reptilian response to Trump since he rode down the gilded escalator. This isn’t “normal” political appeal. This is way beyond Ronald Reagan. Trump clearly excites something in the 39% that no other personality in American leadership ever has. I said as much when I wrote about how he could “win it all” back in 2016.

Arguably, and well worth discussing, is the likelihood that there’s something even deeper than psychology at work in the tribal, animal-like response to Donald Trump among 39% of our population. Or at least I think it’s worth talking about. So bear with me here.

A little knowledge of evolutionary physiology can be a dangerous thing. But there is common agreement that at any given point in time individuals of any species, from locusts to salamanders to humans possess physical abilities different from other members of the same species. It’s Darwinian. It’s how species at large guarantee their survival. A certain percentage of every herd, or tribe, possess capabilities, genetic structure, talents and instincts that allow them to survive stress, whether by drought, famine or conflict with predators.

I’ve mentioned I’m a fan of Ezra Klein, of his website Vox, his podcast and his individual writing. And I’ve been struck by how many times in conversations with guests from one scientific discipline or another he’s walked up to the line where the logical next phase of the discussion about “Why We’re Polarized”, or tribalism or what gives with the 39% is to talk about a biological/physiological explanation.

To be specific, about the likelihood that the 39% is an evolutionary standard, possibly millions of years old. There have been studies of the psychological manifestations of an overactive, which is say, “differently wired” amygdala, the brain’s physical center for controlling emotions. A bit more active than “normal” and the fight-or flight mechanism is more hair-trigger and less reflective.

I’ve also read sensible explanations for the (very) long-term benefit to genetic survival in having a portion of every tribe wired in such a way. Having a large portion, i.e. 39%, hyper-perceptive to potential dangers — the snap of a twig in the dark forest, drums beating on the other side of the savannah — meant the tribe as a whole had a better chance of preparing for and defeating whatever might come.

This kind of talk is of course a cultural minefield, especially in the aftermath of “The Bell Curve” by Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray, in 1994. All hell broke loose over their suggestion that genetics explained intellectual weaknesses among races.

But what I’m talking about has nothing to do with racial or even ethnic distinctions. The possibility worth discussing is whether this is what it would more likely be, which is to say a standard percentage across every “tribe”. A very, very basic means of insuring genetic survival.

Eventually the conversation has to then turn to the value of so high a percentage in a modern, highly-interconnected and (despite what the headlines tell you) a far, far less violent world than what we evolved from at say The Dawn of Man.

Barely 200,000 years have passed since humans began some form of tribal living, a collectivizing frought with fear of the tribe on the otherside of the valley and every other … other. That’s far too little time to significantly reduce — i.e. Darwinize-out — the “inflamed amygdalas” among the human species.

So this high percentage of hair-trigger “fight or flight” tribe members today instead responds not to the snap of twigs, or smoke signals on the horizon, but rather to high intensity, high frequency signals from within the culture at large. Moreover, being at the dawn of the age of highly-individualized social media as we are, where everyone can plug into whatever excites their amygdala the most, these people can feel fortified by the presence of a vast tribe of common thinkers, or “like-minded fearer/fighters” if you will.

Donald Trump’s lamentable talent, one that I doubt he’s ever bothered to explain to himself since it works so well, but is copied from every authoritarian in history and all the autocrats of today, is to feed this percentage of the tribal population precisely what excites their brain structure most effectively. “Precisely” in terms of not just message, but of tone and context. (A “really, really rich” silverback known to associate with only attractive females.)

And yes, Trump’s triggering shtick is abetted, if not lifted whole from popular media like Fox News, Breitbart, talk radio and so on. All of which, as ratings and surveys regularly confirm, are consumed by the same percentage and composition of the population.

As scientists have said, ruefully in many cases, it’s an open question whether in evolutionary terms this 39% represents the portion of the species that survives what comes next and therefore passes on its DNA, or whether it fades away, an unadaptive anachronism, like wooly mammoths, dodo birds and our prehensile tails.

The immediate problem of course is what damage this highly instinctive, highly reactive, all but completely unreflective allegiance to the biggest ape’s constant false alarms does to the tribe in general.

And What Does Biden Do if Trump Threatens Him with “The Deal?”

Posted on by

Tim Walz got off one of the better lines of the summer when he was told Donald Trump was thinking about making a stop at 38th and Chicago, at the George Floyd memorial, while in Minnesota rousing the rabble a week or so back.

Said Walz, “That is a really bad idea.”

The Governor of Wisconsin and the Mayor of Kenosha are saying the same thing today as Trump prepares to inflict himself into a roiling cauldron of rage tomorrow. After spending Sunday re-tweeting sympathizers of the 17 year-old wanna-be cop/Trumper who killed two people with his (illegal) AR-15, it’s not likely Trump is going to Wisconsin to defuse the race war bomb he’s been packing for the last four years.

He wants more rage. He needs more rage.

At this point it’s realistic, and not at all cynical to believe Team Trump is eager for video of protests and riot-like violence around him in Kenosha, especially if the protestors are black. The starting gun for the final stage of what we’ve all known will be the ugliest, most shameful and embarrassing presidential campaign in American history has been fired. And Trump’s strategy, maybe his last best strategy and his latest assault on common decency, is selling suburban America on the idea that inner city blacks are coming for their property.

And it will work to some extent.

For all the revulsion and disgust of Trump by college-educated suburban women, there are enough of them — 10%-15%, who knows — with a fragile enough sense of security, they will gamble that despite all evidence to the contrary, Donald Trump is the better bet to restore “law and order.” The better bet to keep scary-looking black people off their lovingly manicured lawns. Their husbands, polls tell us, will take even less convincing.

I still believe that given robust voter turn-out and ineffective meddling by Russia and other bad actors, Joe Biden will win. Or, to re-purpose Trump, “The only way I win is if it’s rigged.”

But prone as I am to dystopian fantasies I’ve spent too much time churning over scenarios like this:

Following several weeks of protest and counter-protests, (think this past weekend in Portland, Oregon muliplied a couple hundred times), with muddied results from mail-in ballots challenged at every turn by Trump/Barr lawyers and judges, a consensus finally emerges that Trump has in fact lost. He has to vacate the premises.

But … facing a future of ceaseless and financially ruinous criminal and civil indictments, he pitches Biden … The Deal.

“Either”, he says to the President-elect, “you grant me total immunity from any prosecution now or in the future, or I keep up this fight, this all-out culture war.” Essentially, Trump, who is far more important to Trump voters than the stale old Republican party, would be threatening to set up a separate government. A viral, media-driven insurgency, with himself as the wounded, legitimate leader driven from ofice by the “deep state” but supported and served, passionately and reflexively, by literally hundreds of thousands of wanna-be cops. People with an endless supply of bigotry, anger and bullets.

What does Biden do?

Does he take the deal and direct his Justice Department, the attorney general of New York and the SDNY to drop all investigations and prosecutions of Trump and his cronies? Or does he risk what he knows with absolute certainty Trump is willing to do to destabilize Biden’s new government?

Only an idiot would make any kind of deal with Trump expecting him to honor it. But the dilemma remains.

Biden will have to be making every move imaginable to finally get the pandemic under control, which could mean another tougher, nation-wide, mid-winter lockdown. Simultaneously, he will have to prove that genuine police reform has begun across the country. And … and … with Congressional support, he will have to quickly and successfully stimulate an economy all the way down to the bottom 20% to stave off mid-winter evictions, homelessness, rage, suicides … and on and on.

I know what I’d do. It’d be the American version of The Nuremberg Trials.

But that’s why no one’s electing me to anything.

A GOP Convention Speech to Rival Donny Jr. and His Girlfriend

Posted on by

You may be thinking, “Damn, how are they going to top that first night of Trump’s convention?” And I can understand that thinking. Monday was …um … pretty … um … out there.

The (white) gun waggling St. Louis couple talking about the ruination of the suburbs! (The suburbs!) Donny Jr. looking more red-eyed and hyped up than a Foghat tribute band drummer exiting a men’s room stall! And Donny Jr.’s girlfriend in a spray-on red dress yelling — on an empty stage — about how radical liberals, “… want to destroy this country and everything that we have fought for and hold dear. They want to steal your liberty, your freedom. They want to control what you see and think and believe so that they can control how. You. Live! They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent, liberal victimology to the point you won’t recognize this country or your self.”

Yowza! It’s got to be tough topping that.

But if you’re thinking that, you’d be wrong. The Trump family has a very deep, dare I say fathomless bench of yellers, I mean speakers. Spray-on gold leaf-tongued orators you might say. And each of them has a vision of radical, anarchist Joe Biden’s America more terrifying than the one before them.

Check out this speech leaked to the fake news media prior to this evening’s gathering of the Grand Old Guignol.

Hostess: “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Samuel J. McGuirk, Vice-President of the QAnon National Trust and Treasurer of We Build the Wall (Greater and Bigger Again).”

Sam McGuirk: “American patriots. I wish I could speak to you in better times. But both you and I know I can’t. America is dying. Flopping on a cold rock like a diseased carp, gasping for one last pure breath. One last inhalation of air free of tyranny and socialism. A last glimpse of the pure blue sky before the sickening, poisoned red glow from the smoldering ruins of once great cities like Minneapolis and Kenosha, cities destroyed by Joe Biden-Kamala Harris-led antifa snipers and arsonists, moves over us and blots out the sun.

Radicals and heathens and, I’ve been told, pizza-eating cannibals like Biden and Harris are driving their people, dark, and I do mean dark, criminal, rapist and pedophile people out of the inner city into our suburbs. Suburbs where there are now jungle-like voodoo tent invasions full of drug dealers injecting babies and your pets, your Pomeranians, your Castle Defense dobermans with meth and crack. You’ve seen it on ‘Fox and Friends’.

“And all this while they disarm the police, the proud last line of defense between you and some “African” American openly driving through what was once your neighborhood with a broken tail light. A tail light which as we know from Q is really a code, a signal, to other America-hating antifa looters to follow in behind, kidnapping your women, your wives and daughters. Abducting them in order to subordinate them to the most perverse and sickening desires of their drug-crazed socialist anti-Second Amendment cults. This is happening right now, to pure, righteous women who proudly fall to their knees in the presence of godly men like the Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr. and pray for a man, a great man with a long red tie, a man promised by the Bible, to come and drive the mongrels from our treated lawns.

Ladies and gentlemen I know of what I speak. As a proud member of the Northwest Alabama Muzzleloaders and Reenactors I have experienced first-hand the disrepect and abuse of basic freedoms that comes with cannibal pedophile socialist invasion. When I confronted an anti-white, anti-christian invader filling up what was clearly a stolen vehicle over at Bobby Dan’s FastGas here in Haleyville, informing him in no uncertain terms with the business end of my Second Amendment-protected AR-15, that he had five seconds to stop abducting and plotting fornication with my women and get out of the county, I was mocked by the fake news media. You all saw it. Me, with only a fifty-bullet clip to protect my freedoms, against a wild-eyed “African” American intent on practicing socialist pedophilia at Bobby Dan’s … in broad daylight!

This is where America is today. So-called “urban” forces, illegally immigrating openly not just into suburbs but in … in … in places beyond the suburbs. Places where our great generals shed patriotic blood to keep us all free of the darkening of our country.

I could go on for quite some time. But you know most of the rest of the story. How China invented the kung flu in a lab and made a deal with Joe Biden to shoot it into our tap water, our Bud Light and even our Mountain Dew to steal the election. Fortunately for us, and this is where the story gets to its happy ending. There is light at the end of this dark tunnel because, praise the lord!, we have had Donald J. Trump here to stop the cannibal socialist gun-hating plot in its tracks.

Donald Trump has worked 24 hours a day to cut off invaders from China. He said this “plandemic” was just oneperson coming in from what we used to be able to call the Yellow Peril, before political correctness ran crazy and wecan’t say what we’re all thinking. And he was right. Like the miracle he said would come, and like the miracle he himself is for us, the Wu-hoo flu has stopped. He has said so.

The fake news media, libtard smart asses who wouldn’t know a Mountain Dew from a pocket Glock, people who don’t have a tenth the mental power of a Sean Hannity, say this flu has killed a couple thousand Americans. But you know that’s a hoax. Those people were going to die anyway. What are we getting so upset about?

I don’t believe in the “plandemic” and either do you. Why? Because Donald Trump, the man who holds the Bible high over the head of radical antifa pedophiles tells us so.

Donald Trump is all we need. Donald Trump knows all that needs to be known. Donald Trump was promised by God. It’s in the Bible. You can look it up. Leviticus, I’m pretty sure. And, ladies and gentlemen, my fellow true Americans, I attest here and now that Donald J. Trump is not and never has been a pedophile cannibal.

Thank you and good night. Keep your women close and your weapons closer.

God bless America!”

United States Headed for Splittsville?

Posted on by

Guest post by Noel Holston

“Like they say, it takes all types to make the world. But sometimes you wish it didn’t.” — Gloria Naylor, Bailey’s Café

Our country hasn’t been so divided since the run-up in the 1850s to the Civil War, but this time, though there are similar moral and social issues at the heart of the conflict, the geographic aspect is not so defined than you can draw a Mason-Dixon line between North and South.

Animosity is festering among citizens who live side by side, albeit dispersed in different proportions from state to state. If shooting were to break out — as some worry it will and a few appear to hope — it would be like a massive barroom free-for-all, an ugly, bloody mess that would wreck our economy and make us easy pickings for a hostile foreign power.

Hand-crafted GOP political sign, outskirts of Watkinsville, Georgia

If one side firmly believes four additional years of Dirty Donald Trump would turn the United States of America into a fascist state and the other side is dead certain that a Sleepy Joe Biden victory would make us communist, is there anything we can do preemptively?

Secession isn’t an option, for reasons alluded already. Our hostile factions live cheek to jowl.

If we are indeed dealing with many of the classic complaints — irreconcilable differences, mental cruelty, unreasonable behavior — what about separation instead, a monumental divorce?

What if we divided up the property, the land mass of the continental United States into two roughly equal acreages, East and West, not North and South, so both factions get some Sun Belt,some coastline and some places to ski and snowmobile? We can flip a coin to determine who gets which slice.

Obviously, this restructuring will require a monumental migration/resettlement, the most complicated game of musical chairs ever attempted. First, however, we have to figure out who belongs where.

To facilitate any necessary reassignments, we’ll all fill need to fill out the following 13-question — in honor of the 13 original colonies — questionnaire:

1. Do you believe that being asked to wear a COVID mask in public infringes on your Constitutional liberty?

2. Do you believe that every American citizen should have the right to own and carry an assault rifle or pistol?

3. Do you believe climate change is a plot hatched by Chinese communists and/or anarchist scientists?

4. Do you drive an extra-large pickup truck as a leisure vehicle?

5. Do you believe George Soros is a closet Nazi determined to spend his vast fortune to turn the world socialist?

6. Do you believe Hillary Clinton operated a child-sex ring out of a Washington pizza parlor?

7. Do you still believe Barack Obama is Kenyan by birth?

8. Do you believe Black Lives Matter is terrorist organization?

9. Do you believe we need a tall, spike-topped wall along our southern border to keep Mexican and other Latino asylum seekers out?

10. Do you believe Redskins is a fine name for a sports team?

11. Do you believe windmills cause cancer?

12. Do you support fracking and oil drilling in national parks?

13. Do you believe Donald Trump’s face should be added to Mt. Rushmore?

If you answer yes to more than two of these questions, you could soon be a citizen of the new right-wing nation of Murica.

If you answer no to all but one or two of these questions, citizenship will be granted to you in leftist Portlandia.

Flag designs to come.

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.

Yeah, I Voted for Ilhan Omar

Posted on by

Whatever problems the Post Office is having, they haven’t slowed the torrent of anti-Ilhan Omar/pro-Antone Melton-Meaux clogging our mail slot here in the beating heart of the Fifth District. In sheer total mass the accumulating pulp is approaching the heft and gloss of that Restoration Hardware catalogue. Post-primary, the printers handling all this stuff will be kicking back in Cabo for a month.

The cash for attacking Omar is believed to be coming from “bundlers” associated with pro-Israel lobbies, committees and such, as well as Republicans eager to paint Omar’s high-profile immigrant, female, Muslim “radicalism” as a political loser and swap her out for something more mainstream. At this moment I’m not certain if either or both is true. But the size and sophistication of the effort to take out a young, first-term Congresswoman is both extraordinary and more than a little repellent.

I’ve rolled my eyes more than a few times over the past two years at the way Omar has said things as well as moves she’s busted in the context of her squirrely personal melodramas.

IMHO there’s a prima donna factor involved there, as well as, ironically, a tone of entitlement. At the risk of stepping out into the minefield of sexism, what I’ve seen with Omar is not unlike what I’ve seen countless times with other young, female celebrities. Being successful and good-looking buys you a lot of space in modern America. It can go to your head.

That said, I had no second-thoughts about checking her name and mailing in my ballot for her. Having yet to meet the perfect politician, my attitude is that Omar deserves another term, at least to tidy up her personal life and refine her message discipline. You never want to set the bar for comparison as low as utter fools and frauds such as Louie Gohmert, Jim Jordan, Devin Nunes, Thomas Massie, Ted Yoho, Matt Gaetz and a dozen other trolls in the Republican caucus. But if they, (mostly sewage-spewing white guys), can hang around DC year after year, Ms. Omar — who may be self-involved but isn’t stupid — deserves at least one more term.

Frankly, I like Omar’s style of in-your-face “radicalism”, and I’m not all that bothered that she hasn’t stuck a sock in it and waited ten years to step up and say what’s on her mind. Despite what Breitbart and OANN and FoxNews are forever hyper-ventilating over, Omar and the rest of the all-female, “ethnic” Squad are hardly on the verge of enacting Sharia Law in ‘Murica, grabbing our guns and forcing us to live on a diet of kale and seaweed.

They remain distinctly minority voices … but with unusual potency in the age of social media.

Far from being detrimental, the noise Omar and the others are making, both impudent and imprudent to the ears of sclerotic institutions like the Star Tribune editorial page, is actually healthy for a functioning democracy. And absolutely vital to one like we have today, which is being rotted out from within by an enormous cast of shameless, homogeneous charlatans. (You want eye-rolling? Zoom me any time the Strib natters on about the anodyne values of “reaching across the aisle”, “consensus-building” and “pragmatism.”)

I don’t know if Nancy Pelosi has ever had a kind of Mother Hen chat with Omar. But certainly someone explained to her the hellfire she’d face if she dropped so much as a syllable of negativity about America’s carte blanche commitment to “Israel”, which is synonymous with “Benjamin Netanyahu” as far as too many Americans are concerned. Netanyahu is as flagrantly corrupt as Donald Trump, and as long as his kind holds power in Israel we need someone with a high Congressional profile asking, “Exactly what in hell are we doing here?”

Ms. Omar is hardly a bashful flower. She likes the stage and the lights. No one will confuse her with quiet, plodding Marty Sabo. And that’s good. This is a wildly different time.

The Squad is .92% of the current Congress. The GOP’s Orwellian-named Freedom Caucus is nine times as large, and none of them are enduring a flash flood of attack cash during their primary campaign.

Stylistically and tactically Omar has things to learn. And if she doesn’t, her 2022 race may be a different story. But right now she’s a valuable voice because she’s unique and because she won’t quietly relent to brute tradition.

The Fifth District can live with that just fine.

The Gob-Smacking Stupidity of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally

Posted on by

Having found a real cup of coffee, I was walking back to my lavish room at the Spa Hot Springs Motel and Clinic on Main Street, White Sulphur Springs, Montana when the half-dozen biker guys poured out of their adjoining rooms and began the process of saddling up for the day’s ride. They were a riot of Harley-Davidson-branded gear. Harley vests. Harley belts. Harley t-shirts. Harley bandanas. And of course big, chromy Harley motorcycles.

Watching the elaborate packing process while sipping my latte I finally asked, “So what’s up with Sturgis this year? Have they called it off?” Four of them ignored me. The guy I picked for the alpha of the bunch shot me a look and said, “Fuck no.” The sixth guy, a bit more sociable, looked up from carefully folding his rain gear into his (Harley-branded) saddle bag said, “No way. It’s happening.” All I could say was, “Really. Well, that’ll be wild.” “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a protest.”

I was tempted to say something effete and out-of-touch big city liberal like, “A protest against what, sanity?” But I didn’t. At this point in the worst pandemic in a hundred years and with as many Americans dying every three days as died in 9/11, futility is the only product of a “discussion” with Harley-encrusted “protestors.” So ride on, dudes.

It goes without saying that the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, a tribal extravaganza of face-to-face, jowl-to-jowl, belly-bumping machismo and consumer exhibitionism holds the high probability of being the single largest “super spreader” of COVID-19 held anywhere in the world since the outbreak began last November. A quarter of a million people, the vast majority middle-aged to older white men, will both ride into western South Dakota this week for the giant, mechanized bacchanal … and then turn around ride back to their homes, all across the country, spreading everything they picked up in Sturgis all along their routes, like a horde of toxic Johnny Appleseeds.

Bikerworld’s other big rally, in Daytona, Florida went on as scheduled this past March in the early days of the pandemic. But Daytona’s “Biketobefest” seems likely to be cancelled this fall, what with the virus surging worse than ever … in large part due to “protestors”, the roughly 36% of freedom-loving Americans who refuse submit to reality and continue to prolong and enhance the peril to the lives and livelihood of everyone else.

Letting Sturgis happen amid all this is of course not surprising given the culture of South Dakota. The current governor, Kristi Noem, once upon a time the South Dakota Snow Queen, is every Trumpist’s dream girl. She’s abolished the requirement to get a permit before carrying a concealed gun, opposed Obamacare and every form of abortion rigts she can find or be pointed at, is on record — during Obama’s term — as being very concerned about the national debt, so much so that as a Congresswoman she declared the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Medicaid, high-speed rail projects, cap-and-trade technical assistance, and subsidies for the Washington Metro rapid transit system examples of federal programs she thought needed a damn good whacking.

Then there’s the $400,000 fence she wanted built around the Governor’s Mansion … in Pierre (friggin’) South Dakota, the state government jobs (with salary increases) she gave her daughter and son-in-law, the $80,000 personal TV studio she had built and her order that the words “In God We Trust” — in 12″ high letters — be displayed prominently in every school in the state.

And all that of course was before she shrugged off any kind of science-based compliance with CDC virus guidelines.

Noem of course isn’t unique among South Dakota politicians. A few beauty queen touches here and there and she’s really just a FoxNews regular guest upgrade from the usual white male militarist-rancher anachronism. Put another way, Noem is precisely the kind of creature-from-a-different-era who blithely rationalizes away any responsibility to a world beyond that which sustains her.

I won’t bore you here with the long(est) version of my personal interaction with South Dakota’s authoritarian politics, namely it’s “Stop and Frisk” drug interdiction policy on its Interstate highway system. No more than to say getting pursued, stopped, interrogated and searched by a nervous young trooper (who kept repeating, “This is what I do and I’m good at”) under the pretense of being written a warning ticket for going 82 in an 80 has led to several revelations. Not the least being that South Dakota troopers tasked with stopping “drug smugglers” (i.e. anyone who they suspect might be running home with a gummi left over from their visit to Colorado) make no attempt whatsoever to stop, interrogate and search commercial truckers. Trucking companies have lobbies, y’know.

That and the South Dakota Superintendent of the State Patrol, replying to my complaint about the incident telling me, a 67-year old tourist, I didn’t deserve so much as an apology for the inconvenience of the stop because … wait for it … the twitchy officer, after rummaging through my wife and my underwear, eventually found an unopened jar of foot cream containg CBD oil. A jar my acupuncturist friend had given me. Foot cream you see is “an illegal narcotic” as far as South Dakota is concerned and therefore me smuggling it validated the entire stop, interrogation and search. (The Superintendent didn’t explain why I wasn’t arrested and forced to fork over the usual $2300-plus worth of fines to the state coffers.)

To date, the incident has to date led to dozens of conversations with South Dakota lawyers, journalists and politicians. (“It’s just an amazingly stupid place,” bemoaned one ex-journalist.) The still-developing picture is of a state like so much of Trump-loving conservative America that wears its “love of freedom” on its sleeve while routinely, regularly abusing the spirit of the most basic Constitutional laws. All in service to an ossified 1950s-style notion of “law and order.” (Throughout the incident above, I could only imagine what would be happening if I was a 20 year-old black kid, instead of an old white guy in a bland, late-model rental car.)

Point being. No matter what science or common sense or common courtesy say, no matter what’s good for the rest of the country, South Dakota wants the money the flagrant recklessness and naked stupidity Sturgis brings in.

So yeah, it’s a righteous protest. Ride on dudes. MAGA!

Cheers to You if You’re Ready for the Next 95 Days.

Posted on by

With everything coming at us, an unrelenting pandemic, a long winter lockdown and the most berserk election season any of us have ever experienced, I took eight days away to infuse myself with some Big Sky Montana social distance and peace of mind.

It was a valuable respite … that ended, since returning on Monday … with Donald Trump hyping a witch doctor who believes in “demon sperm”, who says that children should be whipped and claims that some government leaders are “reptilians” and space aliens. That in addition to revealing that in eight recent conversations (eight!) with Vladimir Putin he still hasn’t confronted him about Russian bounties for U.S. troops, and saying that those of us living “The Suburban Lifestyle Drem” no longer have to worry about “low cost housing” moving in next to us, and then this morning twitting that mail-in voting is so fraudulent he may have to “delay” the election.

And that, folks, is just skimming off the top. It leaves out Bill Barr seeing no legal reason why a guy running for reelection can’t accept “foreign assistance” … like from say, oh I don’t know, Vladimir Putin … again.

One easy way to become a master prognosticator is by extrapolating out the most obvious trendlines. For that reason I can’t claim wizardly powers for telling everyone who’ll listen, for months now, that we will enter a period of unprecedented chaos prior to this November’s election. And, for the record, I began saying that before the pandemic and America’s thug-like cop culture set off a new round of racial animosities.

If there’s a primary takeaway from the serene moments sitting on the hood of my rental car in a sprawling, mountain-ringed wheatfield, sipping a beer from the cooler, it’s the conviction that chaos is the only card Trump has left to play, and that it, like everything else about his sordid, fraudulent career, depends on … Vladimir Putin.

As hundreds have pointed out, nothing Trump is doing makes any normal, tactical election sense. Every day he hypes witch doctors, shows indifference to the killing of American soldiers, ignores the death of legendary civil rights leaders, bemoans the loss of confederate statues, sends (a la Putin) anonymous “Little Green Men” into American cities to gin up viral social media videos of “terrorists” and “rioters”, he loses another chunk of rational, functionally intelligent voters.

The thing is, by now he knows that simply hardening and “exciting” the always-Trumper base isn’t going to win … a normal, uncontested election. But what it will do is inflame their fundamentally racist, paranoid passions to the point that they will instinctively respond — passionately and recklessly — to his inevitable claim that the November vote against him was “rigged.”

Since no one ever knows what Trump talks to Putin about, (remember, Dan Coats, former Director of National Intelligence, left office without ever being briefed on what Trump and Putin discussed for two hours alone in Helsinki), it seems fair to suspect a coordination of nefarious strategies for election night chaos has been on the agenda.

And, as we are coming to understand, rather than election night, we are looking at something much more like election month, as mail-in ballots are sluggishly counted, contested and invalidated by legal challenges. My prediction being that Trump will declare victory based on in-person results from a handful of red states and then commence, with Barr’s help, a torrent of legal assaults designed to once again push the decision on a winner to the Supreme Court.

I truly wish I could imagine something more honest and straightforward. Something more respectful of “norms.” But this is the world modern Republicanism — the governing vehicle for rancid, know-nothing tribalism, anti-science voodoo hysteria and hyper-micro legal parsing — has ordained for the majority of the rest of the country.

I wish there was another beer in the cooler.

On Minnesota Police Reform, Show Me The Money

Posted on by

In the wake of the George Floyd murder, I’m appreciative that the Minnesota Legislature finally is about to pass some police reforms. But I’m also pretty underwhelmed.  

Based on reports I’ve heard, it seems heavy on mandates and light on investments in changing the face of law enforcement. The compromise package that will soon pass includes things such as requiring officers to intervene in cases of abuse, banning choke holds and “warrior training,” and having a better statewide database on abuse cases. 

That’s all good stuff, as far as it goes.  The problem is, it doesn’t go very far.  The New York Times summarizes the debate and the unfinished business:

“Ultimately, legislators could not reach a deal that reconciled the Democrats’ calls for far-reaching changes to police oversight with Republican leaders who supported a shorter list of “common-sense police reforms” that included banning chokeholds in most situations and requiring officers to stop their colleagues from using unreasonable force.

Democrats said the plan passed by the Republican-led Senate consisted of tepid half-steps that were already in place in most law-enforcement agencies and did not rise to the moment’s calls for dramatic action. Republicans balked at the proposals passed by the Democrat-controlled House to restore voting rights to tens of thousands of felons and put the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, a Democrat, in charge of prosecuting police killings.

Republican leaders later said they had agreed to alter arbitration proceedings when officers are accused of misconduct, but Democrats said it was not enough.

All week, state legislators held emotional hearings on proposals to increase oversight of how the police use force and are disciplined; change the process for firing officers; and explore alternatives to policing, such as sending social workers to respond when people in mental distress need help.”

What About Ending Marijuana Prohibition?

I was disappointed that putting the marijuana prohibition question on the ballot wasn’t part of this session focused on preventing future police abuses. After all, the ACLU has documented that marijuana prohibition is a root cause of much racial profiling and police abuse:

A Black person in Minnesota is 5.4 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person. Minnesota ranks 8th for largest racial disparities in marijuana possession arrests.  In 2018, marijuana possession arrests accounted for 35% of all drug arrests here. 

Although the overwhelming majority of Minnesota counties have racial disparities, Goodhue, Olmstead, St. Louis, Ramsey and Carver Counties have the worst records, ranging from Black people being 7.07 times more likely to face arrest than whites in Carver County to 11.19 times more likely in Goodhue County.  

Arrest rates decreased in states that legalized marijuana, but racial disparities remained. 

It’s clear what we need to do. Let’s take marijuana enforcement off of police officer’s plates, because marijuana is much less dangerous and addictive than legal alcohol, and it’s leading to much police abuse.

I understand this would have been a very tough sell with Senate Republican leadership, but this topic should have at least been part of the discussion. Legislators should have seized this educable moment to further build already strong public support for legalizing marijuana. (KSTP 2018 survey: 61% support marijuana legalization, including 54% of Republicans)

Reforms That Require Substantial Investment

Also missing from the list of reforms are any proposals to professionalize policing that costs more than a nominal amount of money. Spending money is something that both sides avoid, because neither side wants to take the political hit for proposing offsetting spending cuts and/or tax increases.

For instance, how about paying for a rigorous De-escalation and Racial Justice Re-Training Academy, to give every Minnesota law enforcement officer in the state extensive training about how to do their job more respectfully, lawfully, safely, and effectively.  How about requiring all officers to subsequently pass a training proficiency test to prove they did more than doze and wise-crack their way through the training? 

To keep this re-training top-of-mind and up-to-date, how about also funding biennial supplemental training courses, such as we require for other professions with life-and-death powers (e.g. Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits for medical professionals)? 

How about a Police Professionalization Fund to establish financial incentives for local governments that hire college-educated officers and/or officers from under-represented communities?

How about a Hometown Officer Fund to pay for moving expenses for officers who move their home into the neighborhoods they are serving?

(Note, a couple of these good ideas came from Wry World Messrs. Lambert and Austin.)

Think about it. More officers who are college educated people of color whose family lives in the community they serve and have extensive and regular training about how to be a different kind of public servant.  All of that coupled with the changes in the current bill would go a long ways toward changing the toxic culture in many law enforcement departments. 

But all of those things cost money. The State should be funding them because many unenlightened and/or financially strapped local governments are unlikely to do these things on their own without financial help. 

But apparently legislators from both parties still aren’t willing to put their money where their mouths are. So unfortunately there’s much more police reform work to do in the 2021 session.

Epstein’s Girlfriend Could Have Everything Needed to Destroy Trump.

Posted on by

Like you I am shocked by the claims made in Mary Trump’s book. By stories that her uncle, currently the POTUS, cheated in high school, cheated to get in to college, blew hundreds of millions of his father’s money on failed … casinos … is regarded by his sister as a “clown”, revoked medical coverage for his brother’s son suffering from cerebral palsy and instead of being at that same brother’s bedside when he died … went to the movies.

I mean, how after all these years, could we even begin imagine such behavior?

It’s easy. Way too easy.

Ms. Trump’s book arrives like so much other news of uncle Don’s unprecedented sociopathy and corruption that it’ll have a hard time maintaining a lifespan longer than a week. Amid a near-apocalyptic botch of response to an international pandemic, resulting in the worst economic crash since The Great Depression, throwing gasoline on the fires of racial tensions, ignoring Russian bounties on American soldiers and still holding children and families in corporate prisons in the deserts of the Southwest, new proof that Donald Trump is morally degenerate doesn’t come as a surprise or even news. Like COVID-19, it is what we’re living with.

But amid the new book and all the other horrors, I remain fascinated by what is going on with the Jeffrey Epstein case. Why? Because if there’s a coup de gras out there, one capable of delivering a fatal blow not just to Trump, but to Bill Barr and the Trump regime, it resides with — I believe — Epstein’s former girlfriend/teenage rape victim procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, now in a Brooklyn jail cell.

Maxwell was arrested last week in New Hampshire, and I’m not alone in believing the imminence of her capture was what motivated Barr to make his ham-fisted move on Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York a week earlier. At the time, many were asking, “Why now?” Well, Ghislaine Maxwell is prima facie for “why.”

She knows all the players involved, including Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew and on and on. And she knows where the money came from. And — if we’re to believe a story in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, she has — the videotapes.

Some of you may have watched the Netflix documentary series about Epstein, “Filthy Rich”. It’s a truly revolting tale of not just sexual depravity, but blatant, high-level legal corruption. (While I generally advise tempering most documentaries with heavy doses of sea salt, “Filthy Rich” has not yet taken any serious shots for factual inaccuracy. If anything, there’s frustration with it for not going further.)

Little too much ink on the eyebrows, Donny.

The Maxwell scenario that we know — and what we can sense — is straight out of countless pulp mystery crime dramas. Begin with the innocent victims and work you’re way up the ladder to the highest offices of power. And it’d be cheesy, melodramatic speculation if it weren’t for what we know about who Epstein consorted with, his absurdly over-the-top lifestyle and … the presence of Deutsche Bank, (yet again). The only bank in the world who would lend Donald Trump, he of five bankruptcies and 3500+ lawsuits, so much as a wooden nickel.

Simultaneous with Maxwell’s capture, at a luxury country home in New Hampshire of all places, (not exactly Walter White on the lam as “Mr. Lambert), Deutsche Bank was fined, again. This time $150 million for continuing to process Epstein’s enormous, mysterious cash flow despite knowing he was a convicted pedophile.

Even if she doesn’t have videotapes, Maxwell is in possession of enough data, hard evidence and testimony to make some — if not a lot — of prominent, influential people very uncomfortable.

I will speculate here that she can connect both Epstein and Trump to Russian “investors” in Deutsche Bank’s bank-within-the-bank lending desk, which as the feds have already asserted with Epstein was an unfiltered viaduct for criminal money laundering. If she’s also got tapes of Trump cavorting with impoverished teenage girls (my apologies for the imagery), all the better, although I should say “all the worse.”

None of this, not sex with 15 year-olds, a fake empire built on Russian gangster money, ignoring Russian bounties on U.S. GIs or crippling the U.S. economy for years through sheer incompetence, matters a whit to hard-core Trumpists. For them it’s enough he’s “owning the libtards”. Nothing else matters.

But the story Maxwell is able to tell, and prove, holds out the possibility of being the single most devastating link to all of Trump’s pathologies and to deciding who wins, as Bill Barr likes to say, the ability to write history.

Now all she has to do is live long enough in police custody to tell it.

The Super Spreader Event That Too Few Are Discussing

Posted on by

For good reason, there was a lot of national discussion about the 6,200 Trump supporters who gathered at an indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Americans were understandably concerned that Trump’s selfish rally would be a “super spreader event” that would needlessly cause a spike in COVID 19 infections and role model reckless behavior. 

While all of that national discussion was taking place, South Dakota’s ultra-conservative Governor Kristi Noem looked at that Tulsa scene and effectively said “hold my beer, Mr. President.”

In the midwest, you don’t have to be reminded when the ten-day Sturgis Bike Rally begins.  Even in my community, which is 600 miles from the Black Hills of South Dakota, and even in the two weeks before and after the ten-day August Rally, motorcycles and trailers towing motorcycles are everywhere on our roads and highways.

The Sturgis Rally is massive. Last year, 490,000 people traveled from around the nation to the Black Hills.  That’s equivalent to about 80 Tulsa Trump Rallies. Oh and by the way, unlike the Tulsa event, the Sturgis Rally lasts for weeks, not hours. 

That’s a lot of cash for a remote, sparsely populated state like South Dakota. It’s also a lot COVID-19 exposure. Make a list of major COVID-19 exposure risks, and you’ve described the Sturgis Bike Rally: Inability to distance in small indoor spaces? Check. Unwillingness to distance due to libertarian “live free or die” attitudes? Check. Too few masks? Check. Obesity and related comorbidities? Check. Advanced age and related comorbidities? Check. Binge drinking and the associated increase in risk-taking? Check. No small amount of casual sex? Check. Lengthy exposures over multiple days? Check. A merger of exposure pools from around the nation, and lengthy cross-country travel in all directions. Check and check.

Granted, bikers at the Rally are outside a fair amount, riding and camping.  But indoor bars, restaurants, hotels, stores, and tourist attractions within a several hundred mile radius of Sturgis also are traditionally packed with strangers in close proximity with each other. When it’s loud in those indoor spaces, visitors are forced to shout at, and expectorate on, each other.   

If a super villain were to design a super-spreader event to try to harm their worst enemies, they perhaps couldn’t do much better than the Sturgis Rally.

Without a doubt, Governor Noem out-Trumped Trump by refusing to cancel the Sturgis Bike Rally this August 7-16.  From the beginning of the pandemic, Noem has supported basically no public health protections for her citizens.  She wants to show corporations that South Dakota is pro-business, tax visitors so she doesn’t have to tax her conservative base, and show her conservative fan base that she is “protecting freedom.” She apparently isn’t interested in protecting the citizens of her state, a state that is disproportionately elderly and therefore particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 deaths.

So, if you’re thinking about summer travel this year, my advice would be to take a lot of masks and sanitizer, and to take an extremely wide berth around Kristi Noem’s COVID-19 mushroom cloud in South Dakota.

Russians Ordering Contract Killings of U.S. Troops? Hey, It’s No Benghazi.

Posted on by

Let me get this straight. U.S. troops find a boatland of cash in a Taliban hideout. They investigate and learn from captured Taliban that Russia has been offering — and paying — a bounty on U.S. soldiers they kill. This gets reported up and up through the intelligence agencies and the whole megillah of the chain of command, with special inter-agency meetings, until it gets to the White House where in Version #1: Trump was never told about it. Or, in Version #2: his people (meaning who? Jared? Ivanka? Mark Meadows?) decided it wasn’t credible enough for him to do or say anything about it.

Is that the story? Am I missing anything?

With everything else going on, and by that I mean everything else that has turned into an All-Time, #1 on the charts [bleep]show of incompetence and corruption by Mr. MAGA, it may be hard to assign proportionate shock and disgust at this one. But someone’s got to try.

Obviously, no one — and I do mean no one — outside the wire of TrumpNation believes Trump wasn’t told. We can believe he didn’t read his Presidential Daily Briefing, (the one later marked “President Has Seen”), because these briefing things are often longer than a paragraph, don’t refer to him specifically in every other sentence and have too few pictures. But this is … big stuff.

This is Vladimir Putin himself putting out contract killings on American GIs.

Stuff like that, if you’re in the intelligence business, you make 100% certain POTUS is told, face to face, that this is what’s going down. It’s why you simultaneously offer him a menu of options of how to respond.

So yes, he and his “people” are lying and praying to hell that the “fake news” doesn’t come up with any more proof of what they … haven’t bothered to do anything about.

As these things always go, attention turns immediately to TrumpWorld’s royal guard, namely congressional Republicans, including notable hawks like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Mitch McConnell and hell, if they can track him down, ex-South Carolina congressman, Trey Gowdy, former chairman of the United States House Select Committee on Benghazi.

We all remember Gowdy. Not just for the worst case of flop sweat since Albert Brooks in “Broadcast News”, but for the way his committee (the sixth “investigation” Republicans whipped up around Benghazi) spent two and a half years (eight months longer than the Mueller investigation) and $8 million to find that, big surprise here, Hillary Clinton didn’t personally feed ammo clips to rebels attacking the U.S. compound.

Certainly now, congressional Republicans will be seen everywhere, scuttling like crabs to get in front of the nearest camera, puffing themselves up and inveighing against the hated Rooskies for such a low down dirty hit job on our universally beloved troops, right?

Right?

Right?

Just kidding. Maybe a couple here and there, in tepid terms. But because of Donald Trump’s (tiny) fingerprints on this atrocity, the hive mind of the Trump-era Republican borg will have nothing impactful to say … again. They’re the bored cops waving gawkers past the flaming 20-car pile-up. “Nothing to see, folks. Keep it moving. But hey, did hear the one about Antifa?”

Assuming that Mitch, Barr and the usual suspects will keep the lid on any serious investigation of why Trump hasn’t so much as publicly scolded Putin … for paying medieval religious fanatics to kill American soldiers, this scandal, BountyGate, will quickly get tossed on the heap of cadavers from his monumentally fcked up preparation and response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the way he’s incited bigots amid the George Floyd/BLM protests.

Which leads to something I think about a lot. Hell, too much.

“What do you with this guy once he’s out of office?” A few days ago the Strib ran a guest opinion piece from a local attorney arguing that Joe Biden, like Barack Obama in the wake of Dick Cheney, has to just let it go and “move on”, in the name, you know, of helping a divided nation heal.

Sorry, but I ain’t there. From the highly-suspect-to-rancid-smelling Russian “investments” in his real estate “developments”, to the racist appeals in his opening “birth certificate” pitch, to soliciting and getting Russian help to win the White House, to kow-towing to Putin at every imaginable turn and now to this, to tacitly acquiescing to the killing of American soldiers, it’s gone too far to simply “move on.”

Way too far.

Walz Must Bar Bars

Posted on by

I like bars as much as the next guy.  Okay, maybe more so, depending on who the next guy is. But the most significant error Governor Tim Walz has made in his mostly wise mid-pandemic “reopening” plans was announcing that bars could return to serving customers indoors if they agreed to operate at 50% capacity to allow for adequate spacing.

Under pressure from Republican legislators and bar owners, Walz seemed to be making the decision in haste. He announced on June 6th that indoor bar reopening would begin on June 10. The announcement was made at a time when COVID-19 cases in Minnesota had only plateaued, not decreased.

While Walz has stressed allegiance to experts, national public health officials disagree with his bar opening timing. In April, the Trump Administration recommended that states only begin a gradual reopening process after they experience a “downward trajectory” of reported cases, or a falling share of positive tests.  At the time bars opened their indoor spaces, Minnesota had not met that criteria.

In fact, according to covidexitstrategy.com, Minnesota is still not meeting federal guidelines today, because the number of cases has been increasing for the past two weeks and ICU capacity is rated as “low.”

Contrary to popular belief, bars are not essential services, so this is not something we “just have to live with.”

Moreover, bars obviously pose a difficult social distancing challenge.  Many, particularly young adults, go to bars specifically to connect with friends and strangers, the precise thing we need to prevent during a pandemic.  Even those who arrive at the bar cautious and responsible get more open to a variety of different types of unsafe encounters as alcohol flows and inhibitions subsequently decrease. 

Bars are uniquely challenging. They work very hard to become social “hot spots,” which makes them especially susceptible to being pandemic hot spots.

So it’s no surprise that COVID19 spread at bars is swiftly emerging as a major public health problem in Minnesota, as the Star Tribune recently reported:

Outbreaks centered on four bars in Minneapolis and Mankato have contributed to a surge in COVID-19 cases in young adults, which state health officials warned could undermine months of planning and recent progress in managing the pandemic.

Roughly 100 people suffered COVID-19 infections related to crowding over the June 12-14 weekend at Rounders Sports Bar & Grill and the 507 in Mankato, while more than 30 cases have been identified among people who went to Cowboy Jack’s near Target Field and the Kollege Klub in Dinkytown between June 14 and June 21.

While growth of COVID-19 is inevitable until a vaccine is found for the novel corona­virus that causes it, preventable clusters could cause an escalation that could exhaust the state’s medical resources and leave vulnerable people at risk, said Kris Ehresmann, state infectious disease director.

“When you have 56 cases associated with one location from one weekend, that is not managing the rate of growth,” said Ehresmann, imploring businesses and individuals to take precautions “so that even as we open up, we are not putting ourselves in a position to overwhelm the system we worked so hard to strengthen.”

A young person familiar with the situation at Cowboy Jacks told me that the 50% capacity rules seemed to be followed, but customers eventually left their tables and bunched together tightly in one relatively small part of the bar. 

Well of course they did.  That scene is almost certainly playing out to varying extents in most of Minnesota’s bars.

I have a lot of sympathy for the bar owners. Most want to do whatever it takes to follow the rules so they can stay open. But forcing drunk people to stay 6 feet apart is not merely “difficult.”  Unless you use unacceptably heavy-handed enforcement tactics, it’s pretty much impossible.   Even for the most responsible owners with the best plans, getting patrons to stay at their tables after the booze has been flowing for hours is just not feasible.

That’s why the Governor needs to shut down bars until Minnesota truly is meeting federal guidelines on a sustainable basis. 

From a public health standpoint, these bars are creating a serious public health threat.  While young people are at relatively low-risk of dying, they’re at high risk of spreading COVID19, and most are in contact with networks of at-risk people. 

I wish there was another way, but I can’t think of one.  I understand this would be really hard on bars, so elected officials should find a way to keep them afloat during the pandemic.  

But legal mandates are the only way when individual choices significantly endanger innocent victims.  That’s why we have enacted legal mandates banning drunk driving, child abuse, driving at unsafe speeds, dumping toxins into water supplies, running red lights, smoking indoors, and many other things that individuals choose to do that inadvertently victimize innocent people.

This may be the least enthusiastic post I have ever written, but the public health logic of it is pretty undeniable.  There’s no getting around this fact:  In the midst of the worst pandemic in a century,  Minnesotans partying inside even half empty bars are significantly endangering innocent people, and there isn’t a way to manage around it. 

This won’t be fun for anyone. Taking hooch from people who’ve been quarantined for months will be like taking candy from babies–big, boisterous, beer-bellied babies. But if Governor Walz is truly prioritizing public health over public popularity, and following the public health science, he’ll admit his error and go back to limiting bars to outdoors only. 

The Grand Unifying Theory of Trump’s Demise

Posted on by

Like the scene in “A Beautiful Mind” where the now fully-mad John Nash has diagrammed his Grand Unifing Theory of Everything with lengths of thread maniacally criss-crossing pins in calculations, photos and clippings, I have completed my life’s work. Or at least this past month’s work. I see where Trump is going with his full dive into reckless bigotry and corruption.

Follow this if you can.

While those who tell him such things fear his spittle-flecked wrath, Trump, since giving up on any kind of plan to fight COVID-19, has by now processed if not accepted that he is going to lose in November. He understands that he is so deeply and intensely despised by such a substantial majority of voters there’s no way short of outrageously criminal voter suppression and election manipulation he can reassemble the 77,000-votes-in-six-counties Electoral College freak act he did in 2016. Put bluntly, it’s over.

But in the mind of Donald Trump accepting that it’s over doesn’t mean he has to, you know, lose.

There’s money, big money, to be made in a grand, vain glorious defeat. But there are steps that need to be taken to prepare the final battlefield.

1: He must re-engergize the hardest core of his base. Suburban women? College educated whites? Traditional Republicans? Screw ’em. They’re not the target consumer bloc, not that they ever have been. But now, in preparation for What Comes Next/The Big Cash Out, they’re fully expendable. The people Trump has to re-commit himself to is the rock solid 35%, or roughly 40 million maskless, MAGA-loving, AR-15 brandishing, cop-cuddling, immigrant-hating, QAnon-inhaling base. They must not only be fed the same toxic offal as always, but more of it, and more ferociously with less and less “Presidential” mealy-mouthedness. And this — as we see — he has begun doing with raw abandon. (And wait until he delivers his “acceptance” speech in Jacksonvile.)

2: He must clear away as many money-sucking legal obstacles to his post-presidency while he still has Bill Barr to do it. Many of us have been startled by the brazen nature of the moves Barr has already made, flagrantly lying about SDNY Geoffrey Berman’s “resignation”, as well as his greasy paw prints all over the cases of Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Michael Cohen. There’s nothing remotely subtle about it. Plainly Barr has been instructed to “move on this now“. The long, long list of pardon-immune SDNY prosecutions in particular. This list represents potentially tremendous legal costs to post-presidency civilian Trump, assuming a Biden administration ignores tradition and allows SDNY to continue prosecuting rather than, um, “moving on for the good of the country.”

The “now” part of Barr’s act this last couple weeks continues to baffle legal experts. What’s so important that he’d do something this naked and clumsy …now? Suspicions are that Berman and SDNY had entered a new and more dangerous phase of investigation into — well, take your pick — cases involving Trump’s Russian-curated relationship with Deutsche Bank, his influence-peddling inauguration scam, his taxes, any or all of Trump Inc.’s real esatate deals, the squirrely $13 billion scandal with that Turkish bank or, maybe, his long, close bromance with Jeffrey Epstein and the case his former Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta signed off on prohibiting indictment of others “known and unknown.”

Point being, whatever can be done to snuff out or mitigate damage coming out of New York needs to be done …now … to protect the revenue stream produced by a righteous martyr’s defeat in November.

3: There is no money be made betting against Trump and Barr shrieking and howling about a “rigged” election. Hell, it’s already begun. Mail-in ballots! Too many polling stations in black neighborhoods! The “rigging” is already happening. But — I predict — nothing today compares with the indignant rage that will explode on election night over “serious discrepancies”, “irregularities”, “alarming misconduct”, “clear examples of voter faud” and on and on and on and on.

Such sore-loser pissiness might strike you as pathetic, futile whining, which it would be — even in the event of a Biden landslide — if it weren’t for the fact Mitch McConnell, Barr and The Federalist Society have now stocked the courts, in particular the Appelate Courts with so many Trump-sympathetic judges, there’s a better than 50-50 chance they can get one or more of them to uphold a challenge to the election results for weeks if not months. Certainly long enough for Trump to close the deal on his next chapter.

4: Money. It’s all that matters. Everyone who has known him or worked for him understands the foundation of his only ethos. A “rigged” election, even what is clearly a blow-out, has the advantage of acting like an accelerant over all the festering greivances and whack-doodle conspiracy theories of Trump’s non-college educated, self-pitying white base. And as Trump fully understands, there’s money be made in them thar rube-covered hills.

Out of the White House, (which he clearly won’t miss … too much work …not enough Donald time), Trump’s move is to tap that raging 35% base, or hell, even 10% of it with some new media platform. An ad-based rival to FoxNews (which will happily replace their affection for louche and stupid Trump in exchange for a more devious and competent version, like Tom Cotton) is a distinct possibility. A buy-out of the nitwit One America Network (OAN) would not be a bad investment. Or there’s always a subscription-driven streaming platform. That might reduce the 35% to 5%, as paying customers, but 8-9 million at $10 a month … you do the math.

Once you factor all this together, drawing 50 or 60 different colored threads back and forth across the wall, you see how Trump could actually embrace defeat, even will it.

How great would be to be a martyred hero to millions of fee-paying acolytes if you not only didn’t have to be burned at the stake but got to live in an even grander style than before?

And with that I’ll breakfast on another couple peyote buttons and await my next vision.