What Do Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeb and George Bush Have in Common?

Posted on October 30, 2024 by Brian Lambert

As of late yesterday something like 250,000 people had cancelled their subscriptions to The Washington Post. That’s roughly 10% of their subscriber base. So yeah, not good. I’m a Post subscriber and I didn’t. But I did cancel my Amazon Prime membership. (That’ll show ’em.)

The reason as I’m sure you know, is that the Post’s owner Jeff Bezos, prohibited the paper’s editorial board from making an endorsement in the presidential race … barely a week before the election. (The Post still makes endorsements in local races.) The Post was going to endorse Harris, and Bezos, who has myriad contracts with vital regulatory and financial issues connected to the federal government is justifiably afraid of what Trump could do to him if elected … and pissed off. Never mind Bezos’ blather saying, “What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”

That folks, is bullshit. What anyone with two eyes, two ears and half a brain fully understands is that Bezos is worried — and with good reason — about what Trump could do to the shareholder value of his sprawling empire. But multi-multi-billionaire Bezos is hardly alone in his fear of Trump 2.0 settling scores with anyone “disloyal” to him.

America’s signature titan of finance, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, is understood to support Harris over Trump, but will not step out on the record and say so, for the same reasons as Bezos. Said a New York Times story on Dimon’s silence, “Mr. Dimon isn’t making his stance known publicly because he’s fearful that if Mr. Trump is victorious, he could retaliate against the people and companies who publicly opposed his run, his associates said. That’s a concern shared by other powerful corporate executives, and not without reason: Mr. Trump has begun to increase threats of political retribution in recent weeks.“

Bezos and Dimon are hardly alone. Even Bill Gates, these days recognized as a progressive-enough philanthropist, is keeping quiet on a risky public choice in this particular election.

Likewise, Warren Buffett is staying on the sidelines this time around. “Warren Buffett is not taking sides in the election despite any online speculation, AI deepfakes or falsehoods that have or may emerge. Buffett, often called the ‘Oracle of Omaha’, has been mostly neutral regarding politics for years. Buffet has been unusually silent in the lead-up to November 5 despite formerly being a vocal advocate of Democrats like Clinton in 2016 and Obama in 2008 and 2012.”

Weasely tech twits like Mark Zuckerberg at Meta/Facebook are of course playing their usual, “We have no role here” game. But that’s what they always do.

The fear Trump strikes in the minds of people like Bezos, Dimon, Gates and Buffett is startling — to me at least. “Startling”, but as I say, understandable. A Trump 2.0 administration stocked with a deep bench of capos far, far more devious and disciplined than 1.0 idiots like Kash Patel, Peter Navarro, Mike Flynn, Rudy Giuliani and on … and on … is a legitimate, real world concern for any executive with responsibilities to investors. Not that that makes their silence any more courageous.

But what, I keep wondering, about Jeb and George W. Bush? What are they afraid of?

I don’t for a second think either Bush coming out and endorsing Harris over Trump would have a decisive impact on voters, even old school country club Republicans. But it couldn’t hurt. A couple silver-haired geezers tallying up their latest dividend statements before teeing off might say to each other, “Sure, she’s a radical socialialist. But if Jeb and W* are with her just this once, maybe I will too. I mean WTF is with that tariff shit?”

Neither Bush has any future in the fully Trumpified Republican party. (Ever notice how W* is never mentioned … ever … by Republican pundits?) But they might feel some restored legitimacy in the event of a Trump-induced GOP blow-out. Maybe. But only if they did the brave thing and stood up before the election and said something.

I mean, I understand W* and Dick Cheney are no longer close. (Letting Dick talk him into an off-the-books trillion dollar 12 year war will do that to a friendship.) But my god, if Dick Cheney, in Wyoming, can summon the guts (and lower) to call Trump a disaster and publicly endorse Harris, what possible reason do the Bush’s have for not doing it?

*Elected not by a majority of voters, but by a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court.

Oh My God, Joe.

Posted on June 27, 2024 by Brian Lambert

Well, that didn’t go well did it?

“The most important 90 minutes in this campaign*,” pretty well confirmed what both critical “disinterested” voters and ferocious, Trump-fearing liberals feared most. Yes, Trump is as despicable a fraud and liar as he’s ever been, but Joe Biden, “our guy”, is plainly not up to the challenge of rebutting him.

Curious about how rural, white America would to the two performances I rolled in to my favorite northern Wisconsin road house for Taco Thursday with Trump and Joe. There were a dozen patrons, including four young women having a late happy hour. No one other than me paid any attention to the debate for the entire 90 minutes.

A cold Spotted Cow at hand, after 10 minutes the taco sauce was starting to curdle in my stomach.

Not only did Joe look every minute of 81 years, white and frail, he appeared completely unprepared for standard rally-issue Trump’s usual Niagara-like torrent of lies and bullshit. I mean, the look of stunned incredulity on Biden’s face as Trump lied about every issue in every question and called him every name in the book — except “alley cat” which Joe did manage to level at Trump — was demoralizing. There is no larger, fatter or riper target for easy evisceration on moral, ethical and competency grounds than Donald Trump and all Biden really had was indignation over “the idea” that Trump would say such things.

Trump is a known viral menace. Where was the attack, for chrissakes?

It is no doubt sage advice to give tonight’s lamentable performance a day or two or three to shake out. But it is very hard to see how this situation gets better. We live in an age where appearance carries at least equal weight to competence and Biden ‘s performance tonight very likely — very likely — confirmed exactly what people, from the low information to the high information types feared most.

So what happens now? I won’t make the Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott going to Nixon comparison, but I believe with 100% certainty that very senior Democrats, fund-raisers and influential party poobahs are already pulling the fire alarm and will soon, (very soon), begin the work of convincing Biden to step aside. Unless polling shows something I certainly don’t expect, he’ll have no choice but to listen and acknowledge reality. He, like everyone else, knows what a hideous threat Trump represents.

There’ll be a short window — seven weeks — to mount a frenzied, whirlwind campaign of possible successors, something unheard of in the past hundred years or so, LBJ in ’68 sort of withstanding. A fresh candidate — almost any candidate save Bernie again — will invigorate the remainder of the campaign.

We live in unprecedented times. But Donald Trump restoration is an apocalyptic fate none of us on this side of the aisle of competency and decorum can allow to happen.

What a goddam mess.

Obama campaign manager David Plouffe.

The High(est) Anxiety Debate Ever.

Posted on June 27, 2024 by Brian Lambert

Quite frankly, it is unsettling when someone like David Plouffe says he’s never felt a higher level of personal anxiety for a presidential debate than the one tonight. Plouffe, if you follow the news, is the man who led Barack Obama’s two campaigns and has been through more debate prep and spin than he cares to remember.

Plouffe was talking with his fellow Obama team colleague David Axelrod and long time Republican campaign operator turned ardent Never Trumper, Mike Murphy on their “Hacks on Tap” podcast yesterday.

To summarize his key points of concern/anxiety and strategy for Biden:

1: Biden has to be not just “ok” or “passable” in the eyes of the general, largely disinterested public. He has to be surprisingly good. While expectations for him are low, despite Team Trump lately trying to re-imagine sleepy and senile a veteran, polished debater jacked up on coke or Mountain Dew, the TV audience — a much larger audience than has paid attention to this race until now — has to leave the night nigh-on-to-startled by the Joe Biden they’ve just seen. Anything less and the balance of the race remains static or, given a Biden flop, collapses to a point of no return.

2: Biden has to attack early and often on the abortion/reproductive rights issue and the threat of more like that to come given that Trump will likely have two more Supreme Court seats to fill next term. (He also believes CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash have to press that issue.)

3: On the economy, Biden has to have a deft pivot on Trump’s assertions that inflation and the world in general is out of control and things were much cheaper and calmer when he was in office.

4: If Trump comes out of the debate perceived as the victor, largely as a result of Biden fitting the perception that he is too old and feeble, Plouffe expects Trump to pass on the second debate in late September. He’ll have made his point and see no reason to risk a re-match. Likewise, Plouffe thinks Biden should consider something similar if he far exceeds expectations. In other words, this could be the one and only face-to-face we see … in a race where the country is unequivocally exchanging competence for chaos and personal retribution.

5: There has never been a debate remotely comparable to this one. No debate ever with so stark a contrast between the two candidates. Biden has to make that contrast indelible in the minds of viewers. And he has to do it while maintaining the image and tenor of the adult in the room.

Good luck, Joe.

To Prove How MAGA I Am, I’m Going to Shoot This Dog

Posted on April 29, 2024 by Brian Lambert

[Update: Because of a serious lapse by WWP’s over-paid copy desk, the original version of this screed included several unforgivable typos. We apologize. The staffer responsible has been fired, flogged and given a referral to Power Line.]

Every time I read one of those “Neighbor from hell” stories, where, you know, the guy next door demands a survey crew come in because he’s convinced your hostas are three inches over the property line, or the hoarder lady hauls in and drops an eighth garage sale Barcalounger on her front lawn, I think of what we here Minnesota have to put up with. And by that I mean … South Dakota.

I’ll spare you the tale of my long-running interaction with SoDak’s unique concept of law enforcement. (Short version: Stopped and searched on an Interstate for transporting a half-ounce sample jar of CBD-infused foot cream.) Except to relay what a former reporter for the Sioux Falls Argus Leader offered by way of explanation: “This place is really stupid.”

In case anyone ever forgot that, we now have the head-slapping story of the state’s current governor taking out a gun and killing her “playful” puppie because she didn’t want to bother training it not to chase chickens. That and because her dream job is becoming Vice-President to a flabby 77 year-old playboy who very well might keel over on a golf course some day making her — who I refer to as Governor Barbie — Queen of All She Sees.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem sees nothing wrong in Donald Trump paying hush money to pornstar

I am of course responding to the story, told by Kristi Noem herself in her new autobiography, of how in the context of making the kind of tough choices self-infatuated, gun-fetishizing right-wing politicians have to make to gain cred with their people, she gunned downed her puppy and a goat and tossed them in a gravel pit. It’s the kind of story most politicians would pay serious money to cover up, but Noem, reading the winds of MAGA … brags about it in a book she … had written for her.

This is the same South Dakota prairie princess who:

Ignored the COVID pandemic even while her state led the world in deaths per thousand.
Refused to call off a motorcycle rally of 500,000 COVID deniers at the peak of the epidemic, allowing them to ride home and spread the disease across the country to their family and neighbors.
Dipped in to the state fund to erect a $400,000 fence around the, um, governor’s mansion in more-than-a-little-off-the-beaten-path Pierre, South Dakota out of fear that antifa or The Squad or Bernie Sanders might break in and assault her … despite her clearly being armed and willing to shoot them in the face … like a playful puppy.
Cooked a deal to get her daughter a real estate license no one else whose mother wasn’t the Governor could get.
After getting a ride on Air Force One ordered up an $1100 four-foot sculpture of Mt. Rushmore with Donald Trump wedged in as the fifth president.
Continued to engage in an “abusurdly blatant and public” affair with Trump “advisor” Corey Lewandowski months after denying it. Said a source, ” … they personally witnessed Noem ‘sitting on his [Lewandowski’s] lap’ and ‘playing grab-ass’ during an event at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in December 2020.

Kristi Noem-Corey Lewandowski affair shakes up Trump running mate stakes

Is currently banned from fully 10% of her state thanks to pissing off tribal leaders of the place’s sprawling reservations … that she proudly does little to nothing to improve and insinuates are league with drug cartels. Quite possibly the kind hooking kids and puppies on CBD-infused foot cream.

And all this while allegedly governing a state where:

*A distracted Congressman/ex-Governor traveling 75 in a 55 blew a stop sign, killed a constituent on a motorcycle (minor irony there) and in his defense claimed he was having a diabetic reaction.

*A distracted (South Dakota) Attorney General swerved off a highway and killed a guy walking on the shoulder, told (South Dakota) law enforcement he might have hit a deer, despite clear evidence the dead man’s head came through the windshield depositing his glasses on the front passenger seat.

And * A state where, as we learned from the Pandora Papers expose, banking regulations are so opaque the place could well be and probably is happily serving as safe haven for billions of dollars in highly suspicious deposits. According to the Washington Post story, South Dakota is protecting $360 billion in very murky assets while, if you’re scoring along at home, producing only $50 billion in GDP, via ranchin’ and bikin’ and shootin’ puppies.

I could on for another eight hours it’s so lunatic over there. But if there’s a bottom line to this “shoot the puppy” story (and so many others) its that, as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer put it so succinctly, when it it comes to understanding what MAGA leaders and cult members are thinking, “Cruelty is the point.”

Cruelty is what they’re selling … and buying.

Put another way, when you’re asserting your MAGA bona fides by telling a story of how you shot your puppy, you are appealing to MAGA’s insatiable, bottomless appetite for transgression. The desire for sound and fury against the prissy, “politically correct” norms of “urban elites” and every other adversary who doesn’t respect the agrarian American freedom to … ignore pandemics, protect the assets of international criminals, play grab ass and shoot puppies.

You want to put up a wall? I got a border that needs a wall.

How About We Let Triumph the Insult Comic Dog Cover Trump on Trial?

Posted on April 23, 2024 by Brian Lambert

You’ll have to trust me on this one. Back in the immediate aftermath of the police killing of Justine Ruszczyk — the Australian-born woman in her pajamas in an upscale neighborhod who so terrified a Minneapolis cop he shot her through the window of his patrol car — several journalists from Down Under landed in Minnesota to report on how authorities here were explaining that one.

The item I can’t find, but vividly remember, was one of the Aussie reporters commenting on how weirdly polite the local press was in press conferences with Minneapolis cops and city leaders. It was jarring, he said. The incident was nuts on the face of it. The cop was so freaked out and trigger happy — in a quiet, generally crime-free neighborhood — that he snapped and killed the nice lady in her jammies who reported a noise in her alley. But that withstandig, Minneapolis cops and leaders were up there day after day tap dancing, prevaricating and giving it the old All-American legalistic spin. “We must wait for all the facts to be known …” Yadda yadda.

The Aussie made the case that instead of any American reporter standing up and saying, in effect, “What the fuck are you talking about? He killed her! Who hires these people? Do they get any training at all?” the local press meekly played along with the bureaucratic, mumbo-jumo niceties of American cops ‘n press protocols. Maybe because freaked-out cops killing innocent civilians is so common here, no reporter feels the outrage anymore.

This all comes to mind (again) watching the Trump trial circus now unfolding in New York.

Last night Jon Stewart gored his cable news colleagues — most of them in the CNN and MSNBC universe — for the hours of over-coverage of Trump trial banalities they’ve already served up, pretending any of it has news value. Like for instance … OJ-style chopper coverage of Trump’s motorcade driving downtown to the court house. And … straight-faced analysis of … court room sketches. And … yet more of the tiredest of Trump-era cliches. Like the one about how this time “the walls really are closing in” on Donny JT. (Nine years and counting on that one.)

One item Stewart didn’t get to was the already ritual Trump-bullshit-and-whining appearance outside the court room every afternoon.

To paraphrase the Aussie, “WTF?!”

Are you telling me there isn’t anyone in the waiting press horde who can do a Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and bellow back at the cartoonish fraud and fool, “Sir! Sir! What is worse? Your chronic flatulence or the appalling sleaze and cheesiness of your crimes?”

Obviously the answer is, “No. There’s no one who dares.” That would be so puerile and impertinent. So … so … unbefitting an interaction with a former POTUS.

So, no. There’s no one in the so-called legitimate, professional press who has yet taken the attitude that this guy is and has been for 40-plus years an absurd-to-obscene fraud, deserving of nothing more than derision and mockery … to his face. If the legal system wants to treat him like a super defendant, and allow him to tie it in knots and years of delays, well that’s fine. That’s their game. But what compels the press to play along?

The underlying point is that American journalism still hasn’t figured out the best — which is to say the most moral and ethical — way to cover a profane and dangerous circus act like Donald Trump. Despite giving him something like $5 billion in free advertising in 2016, a factor at least comparable to The Comey Letter in terms of pushing him over the top … in the Electoral College … the master plan for this current coverage, while less flattering, is predicated on sustaining ratings and ad revenue, just as it was in 2016.

Sorry. But I say we’re waaay past the point of requiring a much different game from “the media”. Certainly when Trump is standing there right in front of them and still lying his ass off.

Who Would Give This Guy a Dime, Much Less $500 Million?

Posted on March 21, 2024 by Brian Lambert

High up among the questions I’d like answered about this era is how and why so many people seized on Donald Trump as The Man with the Answer? As the guy who could get “it” done? Was it really because in their minds he already got it done? As the wildly successful and glamorous businessman, like the one he played on TV?

Was it really that simple (minded)?

In a culture that regards fame as an unalloyed virtue and keeps score based on the number of gold-plated toilets seen in your publicity photos, TV-created Trump and his repeated claims that, “I’m really, really rich” seem to have played like fentanyl-laced salted caramel candy to a certain type of brain configuration.

I believe there’s testing to prove that.

But if that’s true, what do those same people think now as they watch him flounder and squeal and rant trying to cover the half billion dollar tab on his New York fraud conviction?

Yes, yes, it’s all “the Deep State picking on him” for no reason at all other than they hate freedom. But it’s just a bond. He gets the money back if he wins his latest of hundreds of time-sucking appeals. Are any of his adoring mob asking themselves, “Why doesn’t he just write a check?”

I’m absolutely certain even Trump TV hosts and pundits on Fox and NewsMax have reported his inability to convince any bank or insurance company to give him a loan. So the “money problem” is “out there”, as the kids like to say.

As of this morning Team Trump is asking the judge (uh, excuse me, “liberal, biased New York judge”) to allow him — the “really, really rich guy” with the gold-plated toilets — to pay just 20% of his tab, much like a court would allow you or me to cough up $20 to cover a $100 parking ticket.

Maybe some of the folks who confused the opening credit sequence of “The Apprentice” with reality are wondering, “Why didn’t he set aside some dough just in case he lost — at the hands of that biased, uppity, colored babe?” Or maybe take out a revolving line of credit on one of those big New York ofice buildings he says are worth billions?

Most likely the gullible fans of famous and “really, really rich” aren’t wondering much at all. This is all just another liberal attack on the “one true real American.” A tycoon who is again turning to them and pleading for their money to save his ass. Not cash for bogus college courses, knock off vodka, tough steaks or gold-plated sneakers, but to cover his legal bills, “Right now … before Monday! Before thewy get their filthy hands on Trump Tower and those toilets.”

Why anyone making south of $100k a year (and much less) would send a “really, really rich” billionaire money for anything boggles my mind. But Trump’s celebrity-struck masses have and still are, although less and less as time (and repeated appeals for more) have gone on. I mean, they gave him over $200 million to fight the “rigged election” almost all of which he pocketed in (another) naked fraud that he is not being prosecuted for by the Deep State. But they Belivers gave it and few if any complained about getting ripped off.

That PAC, his Save America gimmick, is still up and running, and he now has full control of the Republican National Committee’s fund-raising as well as his own Trump 2024 campaign income. All of money sucked in by all three could … could … go to his legal bills and not to getting him or any other Republican elected. Does the Trump herd understand that? Or care?

If I were a betting man, based on Trump’s fifty-plus years of marketing himself as vastly richer than he really is and evading America’s sclerotic legal system all along the way, I’d say he’ll skate on this one, too. Either the system will give him some pennies-on-the-dollar relief, or he’ll suddenly come in to a windfall from an undisclosed benefactor.

He may not like the look of (yet another) bankruptcy, but there’s no way he says “No” if a Russian oligarch or Saudi prince bails him out … on the down low, of course. No names on anything. Just a gift out of left field to a “friend”. A gift to a friend … with an “understanding.”

(The fine point being, as many others have pointed out, a guy desperate for money is the classic mark to be converted to an intelligence asset. Or, put simply, money from Russia makes Trump Russia’s man, even more than he already has been. And that all the while he is legally entitled to regular top security briefings as the presumptive Republican candidate. Jesus christ … ).

The mentality of the average fame-struck Trump idolator would have a much harder time with bankruptcy than a half billion dollar “gift” from an undisclosed, mysterious source. Bankruptcy looks so, mm, “shabby”. So much like drunken cousin Ted after buying that $80,000 pickup. But hundreds of millions from some unnamed source would be to them just further proof that “he’s a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy” … even if the guy in question is currently slaughtering Ukrainians by the hundreds and/or chopping up up newspaper columnists.

But “The Apprentice’s” producers never showed them any of that.

Fearfully Fearless Predictions for 2024

Posted on January 2, 2024 by Brian Lambert

Voici les prédictions 2023 apocalyptiques de la célèbre "Nostradamus des Balkans"

Having reached the point where I can say conclusively that I’ve been around for a while, I’m here today to say that I do not recall anytime in my many years that so many people I know or read have expressed so much apprehension for the coming of a new year.

Everyone is expecting the worst.

It comes up in conversation — ok, mostly with my lefty, Trump-despising cronies — but also in blogs, in comments, in asides from strangers. With “Jesus, this one going to be sick … “, being — in para-phrased form — a common refrain. Maybe you do, but I don’t remember this as the calendar turned from say, 2013 to 2014. Or even 1967 to ’68, and ’68 was a seriously bad year anyway anyone looks at it.

For a while I was thinking of doing a semi-facetious list of the ways 2024 is really going to jump the rails of common sense, decency, legality, etc. This list would have included predictions like:

1: Thanks to a ruling of the Supreme Court, with Clarence Thomas refusing to recuse, Donald Trump will be declared the winner of the 2024 election despite again losing the popular vote by millions. Legal battles in Ohio, Michigan and Arizona will result in the Court certifying contested Electoral College electors mere days before the inauguration.

2: Violent protests will erupt across the country and in D.C. as a result, suspending the inauguration and forcing Trump to take the oath indoors under heavy security.

3: An “October surprise” — a startlingly realistic AI-generated deep fake — will so badly damage Joe Biden, much as the Comey letter eroded Hillary Clinton’s support days before the election in 2016, that it will shave tens of thousands of votes in key states, putting a Court decision about the Electoral College in complete control of asserting the winner.

And so on …

But, good lord! What a bummer, right? Who wants to think about this stuff, even if — guessing here — millions already are?

While I continue to doubt both Biden and Trump will make the 2024 ballot, neither has any serious impediment — other than age — in this first week of the new year. I can not imagine the Supreme Court, its dogmatic allegiance to “originalism” withstanding, will do anything to complicate Trump’s myriad legal fights. It certainly won’t uphold Colorado’s 14th amendment decision, no doubt resting its decision on an argument Sam Alito intuits from a Spanish Inquisition case from 1503.

Likewise, in my morose stupor of the moment, I predict the same Court will strategize a way to avoid making any definitive decision on Jack Smith’s request for a ruling on Trump’s total immunity from prosecution on anything; parking tickets, exploiting illegal immigrant labor, stiffing contractors, raping women in department store dressing rooms, inciting a riot to overthrow the government, you name it. The Alito-Thomas bloc will devise a plan effectively exonerating Trump, certainly until after he’s reelected, at which point he can (and will) pardon himself.

I had a couple dozen more like this penciled in for added emphasis, but, damn man! It’s just too dystopian, even for me, a guy who can’t wait for the “Mad Max: Fury Road” sequel.

One thing that constantly rattles through my alleged brain though is how much of the over-arching chaos of this moment, and the looming chaos of 2024 (and beyond), rests at the feet of two people: Trump and Vladimir Putin, two guys who are not exactly unfamiliar or uninvested in each other.

Putin is obviously the key element in the war in Ukraine, and the powerful suspicion is that he is also a primary figure behind Iran’s support of Hamas and Hezbollah, on the grounds that any and all chaos that absorbs and consumes western democracies serves his long term interests.

It seems smart to bet that Putin’s long-standing support for Trump — via internet troll farms and social media disinformation — will, as I suggest with that “October surprise” business — only accelerate and become much more sophisticated this year, since a Trump defeat could likely seal Putin’s fate as well among the Russian elites.

Anyway, I promise I’m scouring the web for more uplifting topics to rant on about in the months to come. Maybe even something about Taylor Swift! Please stay tuned.

And The Odds Biden Pardons Trump Are What?

Posted on August 25, 2023 by Brian Lambert

Now that we’ve all had a good, hard-earned laugh at the mug shot of Fulton County perp #P01135809, we should probably turn to a discussion of the unlikelihood that convicted or not that glowering fool will never see the inside of a prison cell. If you’ve followed the game of scandal-mired high-profile politicians you know as well as I do that there’s an industry around them to prevent them from enduring the indignities of justice that would befall you, me and any platinum-selling rap star.

But nefarious scheming withstanding, its possible to foresee a scenario where Joe Biden might agree to pardon Trump, for the simple reason of finally and fully excising a festering tumor from the public corpus.

Sounds crazy, I know. But hear me out.

I couldn’t bear to watch more than five minutes of Trump’s Twitter/X interview with Tucker Carlson. (Someone tell me if Carlson ever reminded Trump to his face how much he hated him.) But the snippet I endured showed me a tired, flabby, addled old man with no coherent thought in his head other than mewling — on and on — about how unfair everything and everyone has been to him. “Standard Trump”, you say. But the fatigue in his face and posture was what was striking. The guy is exhausted.

As many have said, Trump is running again purely to return to the Oval Office and pardon himself. He’s never had any policy goals, other than wreaking havoc on his enemies, so why assume now that he’s got some big “to do” list, you know “infrastructure week 7.0” or “repealing Obamacare” or … oh, hell, why even bother … he doesn’t care about anything other than self-preservation. And by that I mean not sharing cell bunk with Big Louie or some MS 13 gangster.

This then is where “The Art of the Deal”, to borrow a phrase, steps in. Given his unpardonable exposure in Georgia, Trump’s only true all-purpose Get Out of Jail Free card is a grand, overarching plea deal with … the Biden administration. A deal that pardons him for all his federal crimes, criminal and civil accrued to date and in the future, plus … plus … a coordinated arrangement with Fulton County/Georgia to waive detention in that case. All in exchange for dropping out of the 2024 race, never again running for public office and just basically shutting the f*ck up, under penalty of voiding the deal and reinstituting every sentence he faces if he screws up.

In other words, “Go back to one of your goddam golf clubs and disappear. And by that we mean don’t stick your jowly orange mug up over the privet hedges ever again.”

The viability in this idea rests in Trump taking seriously his attorneys’ counsel that he stands a near 100% likelihood of being convicted on at least one of the 91 counts against him. (Jesus Christ, man! 91!)

Conviction on something, and maybe a lot of somethings, is nigh on as likely as the sun rising tomorrow over ex-wife Ivanka’s unmowed grave. And conviction is far more likely and certain than him winning another election against Joe Biden.

No one seems to doubt Trump’s had the idea of a plea deal presented to him by one or more of the semi-legitimate lawyers who have passed through his gilded office doors.

But, you ask, “Why would Biden do this? His chances of reelection are far better facing Trump than just about anyone else currently in the race.”

And that’s true, if you accept conventional wisdom, which I do. Obviously, as a gift to the country, a deal that removes Trump and all his relentless bullshit from the media marketplace with the stroke of pen, is an unalloyed public good. But politics are politics. So the strategizing from Biden and the government is how and when to float the deal that best minimizes the ability of the Republicans to prop up an effective alternative.

That moment is certainly not now or any time before next spring’s primary season has run its course. But what about — just spitballing here — right after the Republicans anoint him anew in Milwaukee next summer?

More sage heads than mine will argue that the “excitement” of a new, fresh GOP nominee — perhaps an annoying, jabbering tech bro, a woman who is more weather vane than serious administrator, or a pious ex-talk show host-turned-veep who they tried to lynch a couple years ago, take your pick — would push anyone of them over the top against “Sleepy Joe” and his “crippling inflation” and “crime infested blue cities”. For that kind of thinking, the risk is too high.

But what percentage of the MAGA cult, deprived of their 6’3″ 215, Muhammed Ali-in-his-prime thought leader, might simply stay home? Would their evaporation out balance the “normie” suburban Republicans who’d come flowing back, relieved not to have to vote for an exhausting fat fraud/rapist/coup leader?

No one knows. But $50 says both camps, Trump’s and Biden’s have given thought to how to make this happen.

The Very Big Difference Between Nixon and Trump.

Posted on March 31, 2023 by Brian Lambert

In the wake of the decades-overdue indictment of Donald J. Trump there’s been a lot of talk about my previous favorite Republican criminal president, Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon. The obvious comparison being that A: Both at one point were looking at possible jail time for their behavior, and B: Cases were/are being made that indictment and jailing would be a bad, banana republic look for the USA.

A month after Nixon resigned Gerald Ford, the epitome of your dull, institutional D.C., no-wake team player, pardoned Nixon to put an end to “our long national nightmare”. Never mind that vengeance-crazed twerps like myself and 70-80 million others were popping corn in anticipation of Dick’s televised trial. (Ford’s approval rating dropped 25% in one day as a result.)

There’s a line of thought that Nixon and Trump are comparable on the scale of malfeasance, criminality and their rot-from-within threat to democracy, and should be treated similarly. I don’t see it that way.

Without diminishing the illegal and barbaric bombing campaign Nixon ordered to deliver a “victory” in Vietnam — long, long past the point when it was obvious the North Vietnamese weren’t going to submit to anything we did — Nixon’s Watergate fiasco was very small beer compared to what Trump has engaged in. And by that I’ll let it go at, A: kowtowing to a homicidal dictator like Vladimir Putin in general, B: withholding duly-appropriated weapons to Ukraine in a mob-style shakedown to force them to invent a scandal around his election opponent and … oh yeah … C: inciting a riot to overthrow the government based on a lie about an election he plainly lost.

For all his deeply ingrained psychological failings and insecurities, Nixon was a familiar enough institutional actor. We’d seen his type before, going back to the likes of Warren G. Harding and other flagrant abusers of legal niceties. Additionally, Nixon, who was intelligent and disciplined enough to carry out the basics of the job did interact with Congress well enough to produce and handful of commendable legislation.

Not so with Trump … ever. As we’ve seen in shockingly explicit relief during his now eight year rampage through our consciousness, Trump has neither the interest or the ability to focus on legislation or anything that doesn’t primarily benefit him. Unlike Nixon and every other corrupt politician who achieved the grand stage, Trump was and is solely … a personality. A creation of pop culture, with no footing at all in serious “public service”, however you take that to mean.

As many have long said, Trump is a manifestation of a deeply anti-intellectual strain in American culture, something that has always existed, but never before at this scale or volume, thanks to the virulence of our media/social media entertainment culture. (The irony for me always being that where most think of entertainment as providing pleasure via laughter, escapist adventure or titillation, the entertainment culture that has produced Trump and the Trumpists infecting Congress, delivers instead regular, reliable doses of outrage and greivance. Good times! Bon appetit!)

The salient point here is that where it was possible to agree with Gerald Ford that enough was enough and it was time to move on, because Nixon was, well, just a standard-size politician who got a bit out over his skis, Trump is something more sinister and worrisome.

Unlike Nixon, Trump inspires a clearly violent cult of irrational partisans. Unlike Nixon, Trump still enjoys a near lockstep (public) support of fellow Republicans. (Never mind 90% are privately wishing he’d die and be gone tomorrow.) And unlike Nixon, Trump’s career-long strategy is to never concede defeat, while ignoring and disrespecting every process that tries to contain his criminality. And — this is important — unlike Nixon, Trump has already demonstrated the willingness and ability to summon mob violence to “defend” him.

Historian Jon Meacham was on TV again this morning making the point that part of any nation’s maturing process is recognizing when history doesn’t apply. That is to say recognizing unprecedented threat and responding in unprecedented ways.

The response to presidential criminality 50 years ago probably doesn’t meet the broader, louder, more violent demands of today’s conflict. So right now, that means dropping every appropriate legal hammer on a character who has shamelessly, unrepentantly abused the values of this country, no matter how much howling and mayhem he sets off.

No doubt something bad will happen … somewhere. But the country/culture will be far better off for facing up and defending its values, as opposed to begging off in the vain hope of ending this latest long, long national nightmare.

Ok, He Paid Off a Porn Star. But Where’s Some Justice for Being a Sociopath About COVID?

Posted on March 23, 2023 by Brian Lambert

I swear to whatever god you send money to and the continued health of my dog Sam, the world’s scariest beast, that I wake up every day committed to not giving Donald Trump another square millimeter of space in my brain. Enough was enough six goddam years ago.

But still. If and when he actually is indicted — for paying off the porn babe, inciting a riot to overthrow the government or anything in between — we’ll soon all be back in The Psycho Cheeto’s unstable orbit. Even now, his (never very bright) team is spitballing ideas on how to maximize/monetize the spectacle of his arrest. To cuff or not to cuff? To march in the front door or enter via the Waste Management garbage dock? To make a grand “Braveheart” speech (i.e. plea for another riot and more “legal defense funds”) or simply hustle back into the SUV with a brave, “tormented-by-the-libs” wave?

Amid all the hysteria of the past few days, as Manhattan authorities hardened the defenses around the court house, and the usual MAGA invertebrates threatened … something … against the DA, and it was revealed that Trump pulled in another $1.5 million just for claiming he was going to be perp-walked, I couldn’t help but notice a small, back-pages item on the internets.

Maybe you too caught The [Failing] New York Times piece a couple days ago describing the scene inside the CDC as the virulence and scope of the COVID virus was becoming clear?

If you live inside the reality bubble none of it was surprising. Basically, the Trump administration threatened CDC administrators and scientists to playdown/ignore/outright dismiss trending data — woke science-y stuff, y’know — that this thing was going to be big. All while, as we know from Bob Woodward’s recordings of Trump, the sociopath knew how serious it was, but preferred to do … nothing.

Now, inciting a riot to overthrow the government is to my mind a fairly serious offense. But being deliberately, consciously indifferent to a coming plague that was already shown to be lethal is psychopathic incompetence on a far grander scale. (I love the part where CDC employees were sent to airports around the U.S. to screen passengers arriving from China … but not to wear masks in order not to “alarm” bystanders.)

Says the piece, ” … many of their reports — including ones on when the virus arrived in the United States, guidance for meatpacking plants and religious services and on the risks to children — were suppressed or altered beyond recognition by the Trump administration, several said. (The House select subcommittee on the pandemic concluded that the Trump administration had meddled in or blocked at least 19 reports.)

“Morale plunged after a May 2020 report estimated that imposing social distancing measures one week earlier in March 2020 would have saved 36,000 lives.”

36,000 for that week. Think about that. Or consider other estimates that Trump/Jared/Mike Pence’s incompetence — that is to say the astonishingly inadequate logistical preparation by the government of the most technologically advanced nation on earth —- could very well have been responsible for hundreds of thousands of additional, unnecessary deaths over the longer run of COVD. (Some of the deceased obviously being MAGA cultists who gave serious thought to drinking bleach instead of listening to woke lib doctors.)

Yet this atrocity will likely never be adjudicated anywhere by anyone. Perhaps it would be different if a porn star had died somewhere … . I don’t know. But in that great mythical, sane world somewhere out there we would have had a full-scale 9/11 style commission, with public hearings and CDC witnesses and depositions of The Cheeto, Jared, Pence and all the other gross incompetents muzzling scientists … in their self-serving effort to avoid responsibility for a disaster that might impact their reelection campaign.

So yeah, I guess we’ll have to be satisfied with an indictment over a porn babe pay-off. A small beer arrest that will set off yet another freak show spectacle wherein Trump the Victim raises millions off MAGA shut ins, gun nuts and anti-wokers and likely gooses his poll numbers with that same crowd.

It ain’t much. It ceretainly isn’t justice for the 35,00-100,000+ dead from a combination of gross mendacity and incompetence. But it’s what we’ve got.

This Just in from Twitter/ Sarah Palin

Posted on November 14, 2022 by Brian Lambert

@ICanStillSeeRussiaPalin

Lovers of Freedom, Big Honkin’ Firearms and Anyone Who Ever Played Football! Keep the faith! Radical Socialists have stolen another election from us! Terrible, pizza-eating pedophiles have seized offices meant for people like myself (mainly) but also other pretty much smokin’ hot gals like Kari Lake, who is so obviously way better looking than that frumpy liberal whose name I forget.

“Stolen”, I say! From qualified, tireless public servants. People who know how to apply mascara, have a keen hunter’s nose for where the camera is and always look hot in tight skirts whatever their age.

Right now, fake news stooges like The Wall Street Journal and that elitist socialist rag, The New York Post, are trying to convince you that this latest stolen, rigged election where so many people were allowed to vote for Democrats was all because of Donald Trump.

This is moosepucky, as we say when we’re out in the bush hunting grizzlies here in Wasilla. We owe everything we are today to Donald! Everything! (Although, you know, I did come first. Just sayin’.)

Which is why, while I wait for the recount here in the state that’s bigger than Texas, I am twitting today and urging every freedom-loving, concealin’ and carryin’, snow-machine ridin’ American to open their hearts and their checkbooks for the man who has brought the Republican party to the Mt. McKinley kinda heights we have achieved.

(BTW, I have launched a new Super PAC, called Grizzlies for Freedom. And with two simple clicks on your Google thingie you can send 20% or 30% of your Social Security check automatically to me each month, after which I’ll pass quite a bit of it on to President Trump to protect you and me from those awakey or wokey or whatever liberals. It’s so easy to give! And fun, too! (I have a limited number of autographed pictures of myself … with Todd cut out. So the first 200 of you who donate $100 or more can have one for only $20.)

But, back to President Trump, (the only legitimate President we’ve had since that old actor guy way back before I got my first L-Oreal Makeup Kit … which BTW is still available on Amazon for $99.99, just enter Gobs-O-Shadow/GrizMom-’24 for 5% off.)

Midterms elections 2022: Sarah Palin's last chance | USA | EL PAÍS English Edition

Down at his beautiful home in Florida tomorrow, (which I visited once and have several pieces of silverware to prove it), President Trump will announce he is willing to return again to the White House, in Washington D.C., to finish up all the important work we started six short years ago.

It’s so easy to forget all that he accomplished (with NO HELP FROM LIBERALS!) what with all that’s going on in the world. You know like the next episode of “The Masked Singer”, or who’ll be on “Dancing With the Stars” next, and what those crazy cute Kardashian girls are doing today … oh! and “The Real Housewives” of wherever — let’s not forget that! Even though they should have a “Housewives of Wasilla'” show, if you know what I mean. Hint, hint.)

But people! Remember The Wall? And how beautiful it is? Well, we need just a few more thousand miles of it and no one will ever get in OUR country again. No one! And by “OUR” I mean yours and mine! Real Americans who don’t run leaf blowers at 7 in the morning! President Trump will complete the wall and we’ll all finally be safe from those scary, MDX-28 rappers with all those tattoos (ick!).

Oh, and how about that crazy COVID stuff? Under President Trump it was over by Easter so we could all go on vacation back down to Florida without those stupid “science” rules and not have to wear those liberal face diapers that Todd hated so much, not that I even think about Todd anymore.

And this whole Russia-YouCrane thing. It’s totally confusing. I know, because I live practically across the street from Russia, which is actually a lot like Alaska only with even less scary black gang people.

These people fighting President Putin are so weird. He’s very strong, y’know. (He even still looks pretty OK without his shirt on, although not as good as Todd before he let himself go … after I dumped him.) President Trump will stop all those crazy U-Crainians, or whatever you call them, from being so mean to the Russians. I mean remember how much they did for freedom right here in America by supporting President Trump in the two elections he actually won, (but one was stolen from him, don’t ever forget.)

Oh, oh and one more thing. Judges! Judges that will do what needs to be done to protect you and me. Think of it. Courts that’ll allow us to arm our kindergartners and grade school kids so we don’t have another of those Sandy Crook things — which I know, might have been fake, but … well … never mind. Judges in courts that’ll let us sue anyone who gives us a stink eye … and boy did I get one from some frumpy liberal-looking bitch (in sweat pants and no makeup at 9 in the morning!) when I was gassing up the F-350 Super Duty today.

More President Trump will mean more Super Top Notch judges on the Supremest Court!

And yes, I know what you’re thinking. I am available to serve. In fact you contribute now to my other SuperPAC, “RealJusticeInTightSkirts”. At the $50 a month level you get a souvenir tote bag from the 2008 campaign I did with that crabby old guy who was never nice to any of us, including Todd, who if you really want to know kind of deserved it after he drank all that tequila and said that stuff about Arizona women and their leathery neck wattles.

Yeah, It Could Have Been Worse. But We Ain’t Seen Nuthin’ Yet.

Posted on November 10, 2022 by Brian Lambert

The most oft-heard line yesterday — the day after election day — was, “Well. THAT could have been worse.” To which my standard reply was, ‘No sh*t’.”

Something happened that almost nobody quite predicted. Certainly not me. (The record will show I played my customary Low Expectation Game with remarkable brilliance.. Especially in this MAGA era, one must guard oneself psychologically. Assume the very worst and be heartened if it’s … not that bad.)

According to exit polls from different areas of the country, abortion — i.e. Republican gaming of the Supreme Court — actually was a driving force for Democrats. Crime and inflation played about as vigorously as “threats to democracy.” And … this is less well established by the current data … voters appear to have reacted quite negatively to what we’ll refer to as the tone of The MAGA Revolution.

While dozens-to-hundreds of utter trolls were re-elected, including Ron Johnson next door in Wisconsin, (and hoo boy, the second guessing there over running a slick, Obama-like black guy), Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordon and various other leading lights of the modern conservative intelligentsia, places like Kentucky (!) voted to protect abortion and both Minnesota and Michigan hit a liberal “trifecta”, winning control of both houses of their legislatures and re-electing Democratic governors … you know those “tyrants” who bought into the COVID-19 hoax.

But while we take a (very) brief moment of comfort in a (slim) majority of sanity, we must turn our attention to … the next election … the campaign for which has already begun. Particularly on the Republican side.

Our raging, policy-averse conservative friends are already trying to digest the one-two punch of Donald Trump’s election night faceplant, and Ron DeSantis’ 20-point wipeout of Democrat(*) Charlie Crist. More to the point, practically overnight DeSantis has been effectively anointed as “The Next Crass White Hope” by Rupert Murdoch and other big money players.

So, that said, let me offer a fresh dystopian prediction.

Trump has already declared he will make “a big announcement” at Mar a Lago next week. Other than blaming Melania for picking Dr. Oz to run in Pennsylvania, the assumption is he will tell the world he is once again ready to return to the golf course, the White House dining room or the Presidency, whichever gives him more “executive time.” The Presaidency being the one that was stolen from him by pedophile satanist liberals and is owed to him through the divine hand of God. (Ask any white evangelical.)

But given DeSantis’ performance Tuesday night, his relative youth, his every-bit-as-cruel theatrics and Trump’s vividly evident failures in this week’s elections, DeSantis now has even less-to-no reason to concede the stage. And as I say, while Logan Roy, excuse me, Rupert Murdoch, has already made his choice known, you can bet other tycoon-level Trump benefactors, like Chicago Cubs owner Todd Ricketts, now see a far, far better bet in DeSantis than another date with a whiny, obese, flagrantly incompetent three-time election loser. (2018, 2020 and 2022 for those of you scoring at home.)

I regard this as a given: As the pile-on against Trump from people like Murdoch continues, DeSantis will move ever closer to announcing his candidacy. Which presents you, me and anyone who can bear to watch with a solid, two-year race to the deepest pit of ugliness and cruelty.

And that’s just what they’ll do to each other. Never mind what they propose for immigrants and anyone who isn’t clustered in The Villages.

DeSantis’ situation is a bit trickier of course, in that he still can’t know how adhesive MAGA nation is to Trump and Trump alone.

DeSantis after all is not a TV celebrity. (Insiders regard him as “a weird dude.” Not that Trump isn’t. But Trump made MAGA laugh.) DeSantis is not a character gullible TV addicted geezers actually believed is fabulously rich, glamorous and all-knowing, despite constant, powerful evidence to the contrary.

Trump drew hundreds of thousands of astonishingly aggrieved chumps out from under rocks, largely because … they saw him playing a tough-talking rich guy on TV. But unlike The Big Money Boys who have keen olfactory lobes for losers and bad bets, pitiful MAGA nation may remain so deluded by Trump’s faux majesty that they will stick with him, and continue tithing their Social Security checks to “Donny 2024” come hell or high water.

Which makes DeSantis’ best play … the “Trump-is-a-Loser” card. “Loser” being the “brand” Trump, he of “so much winning” infamy, hates most.

DeSantis game will be to steadily, persistently convince the saddest of sad Trumpers that their former God-King is now a loser. A creaking hulk incapable of delivering them the meat they yearn for most, which isn’t lower gas prices or less crime but rather constant, ever more ugly slap-downs of woke liberals.

As for Trump, along with needing to hoover up every nickel of chump money he can for the 15-20 legal cases he’s fighting, (all of which should accelerate given his weakened political standing), the two facts we all know with absolute certainty are thEse:

1: Trump is simply not psychologically capable of responding to taunting competition with anything but more and worse ugliness.

And 2: He is can not under any circumstance admit and accept final, total defeat.

Not that DeSantis doesn’t deserve every bit of the ugliness and viciousness Trump will hurl at him.

In my many long years of despising and spleen-venting over cynical politicians, including of course Dick Nixon, I have never been more repulsed by a viable presidential contender than Ron DeSantis. This guy is truly, unequivocally rancid … and so content with being despicable, that ugliness and cruelty is actually what he’s selling.

So yeah, this one wasn’t as bad as it could have been. But if an obscene sh*t show is your idea of background entertainment, that act has already begun.

*Former Republican and treadworn politician Charlie Crist was the best the Democrats could do? Jeeeeezus.)

You Want to Laugh at Liz Truss and The Brits. But It’s All Too Familiar

Posted on October 21, 2022 by Brian Lambert

Purely as a distraction you understand, I’ve spent a bit of time these past few weeks keeping up on British politics. I mean, there’s only so much Trump and Herschel Walker you can take before your brain turns to grey sludge. Besides, the Brits usually play the political game with … a lot … more wit and cheek than we do. Even their farcical charlatans — Boris Johnson — demonstrate a passing acquaintance with literature and history. Not so many Marjorie Taylor Greenes clogging the aisles of Westminster, y’know what I mean?

But lately. Oh, my [bleeping] god.

Thanks (again) to the miracle of YouTube a Yank in the Midwest can observe in something close to real time the gobsmackedness (not a real word) of BBC, SkyNews, ITV and other mainstream news orgs, anchors and political pundits as Britain’s conservatives eat each other alive. As they throw the country’s finances into a death spiral and generally make a mockery of the idea of being serious adults. And then you get to British wags, the fringe characters vlogging from their disheveled apartments and cadging on-the-street interviews with dazed and confused citizens.

(This one with Scottish MP Mhairi Black is particularly good, even if you need sub-titles.)

It’s a mesmerizing entertainment. At least until you get to the stories of pensioners watching their power bills double over night, the interest rate on middle class mortgages jump a few hundred dollars/pounds a month as the conservative/Tory fire brigade announces that the only way to get the trains back on their tracks is to … wait for it … reduce spending on basic social services.

Predictably, much of the attention was focused on Liz Truss, now the shortest serving Prime Minister in British history. But as stiff, out of touch and clearly incompetent as she was, I couldn’t help but see Truss and the whole fiasco she was nominally managing as fully emblematic of conservative economics and performance here in the States. After all, as George Bernard Shaw is reputed to have said, we are “Two countries divided by a common language.” Point being, our political impulses are very similar.

Let’s take brief note of just a few of the key elements of Britain’s current dystopia. And please stop me when any of this sounds familiar.

1: Brexit. The membership of the Tory party — which is anyone of any age who can pay roughly $25/yr — is upset about stagnant growth and immigrants pouring in to allegedly “take jobs away” from Brits. Bolstered by fear-mongering on social media, the conservative government consents to holding a binding referendum, without any plan whatsoever of what to do if the “leave” forces win, which they do.

2: A leading player in the “leave” (without a plan) campaign is Boris Johnson. He denies he and his fellow conservatives have accepted millions in sketchy cash from wealthy Russians and Russian-linked players. This is proven false.

3: Post-Brexit, a bi-partisan investigation is launched into the influence Russian trolls played in inflaming anti-immigrant and anti-European Union sentiment. The conservative government is credibly accused of not even wanting to find out if this actually happened. The facts are ignored.

4: Lacking any kind of a serious plan, the departure from Brexit by the conservative government is unmitigated chaos. Far from improving Britain’s financial affairs, nearly all major economic indicators drift further downward.

5: Johnson himself is embroiled in a seemingly endless series of personal scandals, the impression being that rules, norms and laws apply to others, not him.

6: As Johnson’s situation worsens, fellow conservatives begin maneuvering even more aggressively for the backing of the party’s most impassioned members, the majority of them older and heavily opposed to the on-going influx of immigrants. Amid this, the criticism of “wokeness” on the part of softer conservatives and liberals becomes a popular rallying cry.

7: Johnson is finally forced to resign and conservative members, representing barely .2% of the British population, select hard-Brexiteer/Libertarian Liz Truss to lead them. She immediately selects “trickle down economics”, with fat tax cuts for Britain’s most wealthy, as the solution to the country’s problems. Markets go into convulsions.

8: Truss’s very Reaganomics/Bush-o-nomics/Trump-o-nomics/standard Republican-like plan is reversed within hours by a new chancellor who broadly hints that the next solution will be … serious cuts to social services, like the National Health Service.

9: Truss resigns and among the candidates considered as replacement is … Boris Johnson, who his own party canned barely a month ago, calling him “unfit to hold office.”

So yeah, as I say, the saga comes with a lot of familiarity for us Yanks. The stark exception being that after as much if not more gross corruption, malfeasance, incompetence and a deadly riot, our conservatives remain in lockstep adoration of their feckless leader.

Here’s Hoping the January 6 Committee Has Its Show Biz Pants On

Posted on June 9, 2022 by Brian Lambert

They stormed the Capitol, then posed for selfies | The Economist

The cheap and easy joke is that if producers want to guarantee an audience for these January 6 hearings they need to put Johnny Depp and his girlfriend on the stand. Or at least get a celebrity masked singer to blast out The Star Spangled Banner.

Whatever the issue — a worldwide pandemic, a military invasion, gun slaughter — Americans insist on being entertained. Not necessarily with a laugh, but with a story that has easily identifiable villains and relatable heroes, spectacle and most of all … pace. The characters and scenery need to change frequently. Things may not drag. If your show is “slow”, you’re dead. “Boring” is the cardinal sin of show biz. Alternate viewing is a half-second away. With a tap of a button your vitally important, democracy-protecting message, and — oops — your long-gestating cri de coeur, has been replaced in America’s family rooms with pizza-spinning super heroes.

So here’s hoping the (mostly all) Democratic committee staging the hearings over the next couple weeks are being honest when they say they’ve applied basic show biz thinking and pacing to the packaging of these 90-minute, primetime events.

The critical question is whether they’ve got enough suspense, revelation and sex appeal to reach beyond the usual Trump-reviling choir. Personally, I’m skeptical I’ll see or hear anything I don’t already know or suspect. And that includes the promised video-taped depositions of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

I have no confusion whatsoever about the “hows” and “whys” of Jan. 6. I understand what drove it, who fomented it and who was meant to benefit from it.

But I understand the central purpose of this capitol hill mini-series. It is, not to put to blunt a point on it, to create enough populist mass to compel Attorney General Merrick Garland to finally, formally indict Trump and his long … long … list of stooges and cronies responsible for everything that went into a plot to overthrow an election/stage a coup. Poor ratings and bad reviews may be taken as a sign there’s insifficient public “will” to prosecute Trump, with all the certain hellfire of backlash from MAGA-land that would ensue.

But … maybe … possibly … with a good, compelling TV show producing a large audience and that dominates a half dozen consecutive news cycles, the Justice Department will accept the risk of a US v. Trump trial and indict a man who has obviously, clearly committed a staggering long list of crimes against … contractors, bankers, insurance companies, individual women and oh yes, the vaunted Constitution.

So yeah, I’ll be watching.

I just suspect “The Masked Singer” will pull bigger ratings.

What Do You Say We Build a Wall Around South Dakota?

Posted on April 13, 2022 by Brian Lambert

A deer doesn't look like a human": Republican attorney general involved in fatal South Dakota crash | Salon.com

[Updated: With the proper use of “lying.”] With everything going on in the world you can be forgiven if you haven’t paid a lot of attention to … South Dakota. I mean, to most of us it’s just that big flat place “over there”. A place where unless you’re counting pheasants and super spreader motorcycle rallies nothing much ever happens.

But then you get a story like the one where the state’s top law enforcement officer — protecting and serving, y’know — kills a guy with his car — and given the place’s 90% Republican control, gets off with a hand-slap, essentially Scot-free, at least until he doesn’t.

Yesterday the South Dakota legislature finally summoned the courage to impeach Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg for, A: Killing 55 year-old Joe Boever by hitting him as he walked alongside a rural highway, and then B: Flagrantly lying about it, claiming he thought Boever, a guy whose head came through Ravnsborg’s windshield, was a deer.

South Dakota AG Ravnsborg was 'distracted' when he hit, killed pedestrian with car: Investigation - ABC News

The story has played here in Minnesota and nationally, but usually without the telling details, some of which were only partly known until the full North Dakota BCI report was released several weeks ago. (The incident took place Sept. 12, 2020.) Having already established that the dead man’s glasses were lying on the passenger seat of Ravnsborg’s car, thereby making it, well, pretty damned unlikely the Attorney General didn’t know he’d hit a human being, the report revealed that far from Boever walking on the road, Ravnsborg — a guy who at at age 46 has already accumulated 25 traffic citations — was completely off the road, as in his entire car, a full-size Ford, was on the other side of the rumble strips and fog lines, practicaly in the ditch, when he hit Boever, who was carrying a flashlight, so hard Boever’s head not only came through the windshield but one of his legs was torn completely off.

Ravnsborg crash: What we know about how it happened | KELOLAND.com

And about that flashlight … . A local sheriff rolled out to the scene in response to Ravnsborg calling in a report of hitting a deer, (something you have to do for insurance reasons). Neither of them bothered to check around for the deer. So neither noticed the light from the flashlight lying in the ditch back near the point of impact. (The car – traveling at 68 mph — carried Boever about 100 feet before throwing him off.) When Ravnsborg and other cops returned to the scene the next day and found Boever’s body, the flashlight was still on.

So much for thorough law enforcement work.

So now Ravnsborg will face a Senate trial that like — pick your Trump impeachment — requires a 2/3 vote to convict. How that goes is anyone’s guess. But — and here we get into more wildly dysfunctional, contemporary South Dakota politics — he does not have friends in high places. You see, Ravnsborg is in a death match feud with South Dakota’s “presidential contender” governor, former beauty queen Kristi Noem. She wants him gone real bad, and right now, she carries more water in South Dakota than he does.

Noem needs far less introduction than Ravnsborg. She is best known to anyone with a conscience as the appalling Trumpist politician who so resolutely denied COVID that South Dakota for a time (around when Ravnsborg killed Boever) had the highest death rate per capita of any place in the world.

For her brave stand for “personal freedoms” Noem became a darling of FoxNews and was catapulted into the pantheon of self-serving gargoyles considered suitable successors to the Trump mantle. (Semi-notorious Trump “adviser” Corey Lewandowski has become a, mmm, regular traveling companion as Noem makes the required CPAC/Trump rally circuit of activities having nothing to do with responsibly governing South Dakota.)

South Dakota Governor DENIES having an affair with ex-Trump aide Corey Lewandowski | Daily Mail Online

I could go on about Noem’s scandal-ette over big-footing her daughter’s real estate license, then pushing out the bureaucrat who denied it, and the $400,000 fence she had put up around the Governor’s residence (with no hint at all of any unique threat to her), or the constant use of state aircraft to get her and Lewandowski to MAGA rallies. But, in the annals of South Dakota today there’s something better … but far more opaque.

With all the news about sanctions on Russian oligarchs, seizing their super yachts and chasing their extremely murky finances all over the planet, it’s worth noting that flat, boring South Dakota is today a rival to Switzerland when it comes to — let’s call it what it is — hiding money.

Back in the ’80s another Republican governor, Bill Janklow, yet another Republican politician with a notorious driving record — 13 citations — and a guy who while speeding killed a Minnesota motorcyclist on a South Dakota highway, opened the doors to the industry of remarkably air-and-light tight trusts. Over the last ten years alone, as every millionaire-billionaire with a reason to hide money has set up such “legitimate financial tools” the amount of cash stashed in South Dakota has risen seven-fold, from $50 billion to $355 billion as of late 2020.

That’s a third of a trillion dollars protected from prying eyes and taxes by … South Dakota.

South Dakota Foreign Grantor Trust – Bridgeford Trust Company

How much of those billions is utterly nefarious, maybe even from Russian mobsters? No one knows and South Dakota certainly isn’t going to do anything to make it easier for investigators to find out. (Amazingly South Dakota — tough negotiators over there — doesn’t get even the tiniest of a percentage of a taste for hiding all that loot.)

It almost goes without saying that aggressive journalism is a deeply endangered species in full-on, proudly red and merrily Trumpian South Dakota of 2022. But there are a few brave souls doing what they can.

South Dakota’s descent into The Alabama of the Midwest was taking root back when Tom Daschle was a top Democrat. But I can only imagine what George McGovern and James Abourezk think of their once dull, fly-over home state?

As for us here in Minnesota, thank god we’ve got Wisconsin.

Really? The State Fair As Usual, Amid A Fools’ Surge of the Pandemic. Really?

Posted on August 7, 2021 by Brian Lambert

The red flag of extreme peril is out for the Minnesota State Fair. As all the COVID numbers once again head off in the wrong direction thanks to this latest surge — The Fools’ Surge / The Pandemic of the Unvaccinated — both The Lovely Mrs and Bouncing Baby Boy #1 have declared they will not be rubbing sweaty jowls with the masses at this year’s Great Minnesota Get Together.

Might as well board up The Food Building and The Beer Gardens.

Little by little businesses are coming around to the only effective conclusion. Namely, that they’re open only for clients and staff intelligent and morally responsible enough to have gotten themselves vaccinated. The rest — those clinging to their “personal beliefs” — can stay home, or like CNN, be fired.

Given the month it takes to acquire full efficacy from the three vaccines, we’ve already blown by the window for the Fair and the 1.3 million or whatever who show up to sweat and breathe all over each other. Fair authorities say they are “keeping all options on the table”. But as of this moment they are only seriously considering mandating masks for indoor exhibits and venues … which is ludicrous on the face of it.

Is some hapless employee really going to stand in front of O’Gara’s, The Food Building, the Grandstand or (my personal favorite) the Northern Tool shed and deny entrance to the “mask hesitant”? Give me a break. Mask mandates are unenforceable. Far better just to deny entrance to the grounds to anyone who can’t prove they’ve been vaccinated.

Our Great Cholesterol Get Together is hardly National Priority #1. IMHO getting schools back to normal operation gets top billing. But government leaders — the people we elect to make sometimes (very) unpopular decisions — are reluctant to take a walk out on the legal/political plank and make vaccines mandatory for every school with a link to public funding.

You don’t have to watch a couple hours of Christopher Hitchens/Sam Harris YouTube debates like I did the other night to get into a steaming seethe over all the unintended consequences of America’s anachronistic enshrinement of “religious and personal beliefs”.

With a vast majority of states genuflecting at the notion that what someone prefers to believe is every bit as valid and real as … well, reality … we find ourselves in a moment like this. Locked up and incapable (i.e. unwilling) to say, “No. Sorry. I’m happy for whatever you want to believe. But this disease is not a Sunday school fantasy. It is real. And deadly. And spread by people like you. Meanwhile, the vaccines are safe, widely available, free and effective. If you want to go on believing that the Great Bearded White Man in the Sky and/or His Son, the Beardless White Guy Who Looks Like the Drummer for Foghat, will protect you no matter what. You go right ahead. But until you get with the reality of science you’re not allowed in, and your kids can stay home another year.”

I don’t if anyone famous ever actually said, “Sometimes you’ve just got to take the heat.” But the line has been running through my head as I listen to people from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to U of M officials to White House spokesfolks to State Fair authorities wring their hands over vaccine mandates.

Frey was recently quoted saying he’d prefer not ordering another mask mandate given the impact that kind of thing has on restaurants and small businesses just now getting back on their feet after the first three surges of COVID. That said, he still didn’t want to demand public employees get vaccinated or stay away from work.

Public officials at nearly every level are conceding to this Fools’ Surge rather than biting the bullet and doing the only thing that will truly, once and for all stop the disease and the dying, which is to issue vaccine mandates.

No doubt all of them assume that given the country’s Federalist Society-polluted judiciary, any mandate will be hit with an injunction by some Trumpist-Libertarian judge within seconds of it being issued. Many on the basis of a violation of the basic Constitutional right to “religious or personal beliefs.” It goes without saying that at this point, with 640,000 already dead and more dying not to mention the recovery in danger of relapsing, I personally could not care less about some nitwit’s “religious beliefs.”

Generally speaking, public officials are of course required to care more about Constitutional nuances than me. But again, consider the context. We’re not talking about school prayer, or Critical Race Theory or some storefront preacher’s tax-exempt status. We’re talk the stark reality — reality, not fantasies — of serious illness and death wholly because of the ignorance, obstinancy and selfishness of a minority of the population.

Issue the vaccine mandates. Let it go to the courts. Play hardball with Trumpist judges. Slow walk the legal fight — a la Trump — for the two, three, four months it’d take to force the fools to get the vaccine. Achieve herd immunity. (Before the 30% idiot petri dish stirs up another variant that blows past the vaccines). And apologize for reckless, unconstitutional behavior later.

The Big Upside? The Lamberts afoot at the Fair, streams of grease and beer rolling off their chins.

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

Posted on August 31, 2020 by Brian Lambert

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.

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

Posted on June 29, 2020 by Brian Lambert

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?

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.

The Bullshit Has Gone Toxic

Posted on March 22, 2020 by Brian Lambert

Traffic for Rachel Maddow spiked a couple days ago when she observed the nose dive the stock market takes every time Donald Trump opens his mouth. Her entirely valid point — to her bosses and media colleagues — is that if Trump can’t spew anything other than wildly misleading to totally false “fairy tales” about miracle drugs being rushed to market, trainloads of medical equipment rushing to the front lines and all the people everywhere telling him what a terrific and impressive job he’s doing, he’s a bona fide health hazard and we’d be better pulling the plug on his daily “briefings“.

To put it in a way the refined and well-mannered Ms. Maddow never would, “The bullshit has gone toxic.”

Put aside flat out ignoring January and February intelligence briefings that this virus was going to get real, big and bad. Put aside all that claptrap about it fading away like a miracle and containing it at 15 cases … and on … and on … and on. What he’s doing today, lying about resources that don’t yet exist, refusing to declare a full-out national emergency and not calling out the Army to set up field hospitals, all while yabbering nonsensically about a malaria drug that’s really “impressed” him has a real world lethal effect. It falsely reassures some people, (most likely his devoted base), who then take fewer precautions with their own health and those around them.

Simultaneously, every briefing, where every time he reaffirms how wildly incompetent he is for this moment, adds a new level of fear among intelligent, informed people.

So yeah, the bullshit has gone toxic. Get Trump off the air. Like Maddow said, if it turns out by some miracle he does say something demonstrably true during one of these appearances, roll the tape. But for god’s sake don’t continue to give millions of overly credulous Americans the idea that this guy A: Knows what is going on, or B: Has any semblance of any idea about what to do next.

He doesn’t. He never has, and we all know that.

And while you’re at it — American press corps — either get tough and in the face of characters like FEMA administrator Peter Gaynor, (appointed two months ago by Trump), or dial back the airtime you’re giving them as well.

Gaynor made a disastrous round of Sunday morning chat shows today and, like Trump, his evasions, non-answers to direct life-and-death questions and “authoritative-y” assurances that everything was under control had precisely the opposite effect on any viewer actually paying attention. Gaynor sounded like every Republican apparatchik in the Trump era, namely, terrified to misspeak the truth and risk the wrath of Dear Leader.

In the best of times American society runs on vast and deep levels of bullshit. Every bag of snack food is the “richest” and “crunchiest” and “butteriest” and most “delicious”. Every car is a “best in its class” performer, dripping “prestige.” Every cookie cutter TV show is “the year’s number one new hit”. Every celebrity is a “break out star” even when they’re not the “Sexiest Man Alive.” It never stops.

And the reason it never stops is that we like it. It’s fun. It’s amusing. It works. We actually buy stuff and lose hundreds of hours of our life because we enjoy the fiction and make believe of being part of the “sexiest”, most “prestigious”, “crunchiest” thing going.

But now the bullshit has gone toxic. What is unequivocally not true, not really happening, not ready for prime and therefore a … lie, is now poised to kill us. Or if not us, our parents, grandparents or anyone with a compromised respiratory system.

So FFS, at least put Donald Trump — the quintessence of sociopathic bullshit — on tape delay.

Now back to my thrice-daily screening of “The Shining.”

We’re Failing a Critical Test of Basic Evolution

Posted on March 17, 2020 by Brian Lambert

Among all the odd things I find myself obsessing over in this, um, interesting moment are the basic laws of evolutionary biology. Namely what every individual cell does (or does not do) to survive attack and crisis and thereby advance its DNA into another generation. The story of evolution, (which — much to my point here — a large number of Americans don’t believe in), is a multi-billion year saga of trial and error. A few winners. Lots of losers.

Sped up from the pure microbiologic level to mammals, there’s been a lot of deeper understanding since Charles Darwin on the ways packs and tribes of “advanced” species, (individuals themselves composed of roiling colonies of cells}, screw the pooch. How? By failing to adapt to high-peril changes in their environment or … by entrusting their survival to leaders, think “alpha apes”, who prove too weak or insufficiently wily (i.e. intelligent) to beat back an attack by another tribe, or adapt to change.

You can see where I’m going here. But it isn’t just Donald Trump, although god knows his narcissistic-to-the-point-of-sociopathic incompetence has been confirmed in granite by this epic debacle.

The decision 63,000,000 of our pack/tribe made in 2016 when they voted for Trump was based heavily on a popular but deeply-flawed misconception that all government, really any government, is incompetent, corrupt and fundamentally untrustworthy. A drag on our freedoms and wildly too expensive. This is a message that is essential to the modern conservative movement. From Ronald Reagan to Rush Limbaugh, from The Freedom Caucus to “Fox & Friends.” To quote Grover Norquist, “I just want to shrink [government] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

This self-defeating fallacy explains as well as anything why preparations for a pandemic, not at all a sci-fi improbability in a fully inter-connected world population, have been under-funded and eradicated entirely when they haven’t simply been ignored. These are the agencies dismissed as “wasteful social programs” and are therefore routinely and fairly easily under-funded or shuttered by conservative politicians. (Usually as a way of making some sense of the government books relative to another massive tax relief package for wealthy donors.)

Here’s a good, balanced overview of recent health-related funding.

We’ve learned in recent days that despite wasting three months since the first outbreak of the “foreign virus”, there hasn’t been even the most minimal marshalling of testing equipment and facilities (and national protocols) in case, you know, something did go wrong. Put in basic, conservative business terms: no contingency planning at all.

This is how tribes perish. By blindly accepting and following ignorant, incompetent leadership’s utterly false narrative. Ergo: no preparation for a life or death crisis.

So in this context, as we sort out how to prevent this from happening again, it’s worth discussing what are — truly — the fundamental matters of defense of the pack/tribe?

Put another way, what is “defense” today, for 21st century America? Is it really preparing for a full-out military attack from Russia, a mafia-style kleptocracy that remains in business solely because of unpredictable oil sales to western markets? Or is it China? Where we are required to believe they would for some reason attack their primary customer base, the primary engine of their economy?

Or is the real “threat” over the next 20-30 years, considering climate change and the ever-increasing human/wildlife interface, the much higher likelihood of a truly fatal, plague-like contagion, killing millions instead of “just” thousands?

If we’re now inclined to think the latter is far, far more probable, how do we then continue pumping $1.5 trillion into farcical shit shows like the Joint Strike Fighter while CDC funding amounts to 1.5% of the Defense budget, barely the cost of change of tires on that one ridiculous airplane?

Wry Wing Politics

Politics on wry.

Tag Archives: Trump

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What Do You Say We Build a Wall Around South Dakota?

Really? The State Fair As Usual, Amid A Fools’ Surge of the Pandemic. Really?

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

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

The Bullshit Has Gone Toxic

We’re Failing a Critical Test of Basic Evolution

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