Fearfully Fearless Predictions for 2024

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?

Florida Man Arrested: Trump Mug Shot

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.

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?

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

@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.

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.)

This morning’s Murdoch-owned NY Post.

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

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

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?

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?

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?”

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.

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

Is that the story? Am I missing anything?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right?

Right?

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

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

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

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

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

Way too far.

The Bullshit Has Gone Toxic

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

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?

Let’s Play Nightmare Scenario 2020

Well, 2020 has certainly started with a bang, hasn’t it? For months I’ve been telling the (very few) who would listen to buckle up for this one, because “normal” has never been an option. Never mind duelling attack/counter-attacks with Iran, the simple fact of Donald Trump requiring re-election to avoid a torrent of criminal indictments guaranteed a long season of ever-compounding insanities.

So, since dystopian fantasies are all the rage in teen sci-fi and Hollywood, let’s imagine what the next 358 days might be like.

Mid-January: With Congressional Democrats denied access to any intelligence proving the existence of the “imminent attack” necessitating the killing of the Iranian general, the House opens hearings … and as usual is denied access to administration communication and officials, many of whom do however go on “Fox and Friends” to vilify Democrats as “soft on Iran.” Simultaneously, Nancy Pelosi continues to outrage Lou Dobbs and Tucker Carlson by not accepting Mitch McConnell’s conditions for a Senate acquittal trial.

Early February: ISIS forces, no longer constrained by American troops, re-constitute, attack and re-take a major Iraqi city. This follows a mysterious day-long black-out in New York City. With impeachment still in limbo and thousands more U.S. troops re-deployed back to the Middle East, Trump delivers his State of the Union speech amid large-scale anti-war/pro-coniction protests outside the Capitol and around the country. An organized mid-speech walk out by progressive Democrats leads to Trump to extemporize about “America-haters”, for which Laura Ingraham says he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

March: Simultaneous terror attacks on U.S. government targets in South America and Asia and a Trump Hotel in the Phillipines are all Trump needs to demand a large-scale attack on Iranian military and government targets in Iran itself. Several key Pentagon offcials refuse to obey the orders and resign. Their replacements carry out the bombings, which kill hundreds of civilians as well. Iranians close-ranks around the once-reviled ultra-conservative religious government. Meanwhile, the Democratic race, post-Super Tuesday, has boiled down to Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, with Sanders the standard bearer for impassioned anti-war activists. Bolstered by long-delayed court rulings, Pelosi and House Democrats add new articles of bribery to impeachment charges. But the Supreme Court rules along straight ideological lines that White House officials do not have to obey House subpoenas.

April: After demanding NATO allies join the U.S. build-up of forces in preparation for a major attack on Iran. Only Montenegro agrees, at which point Trump announces the U.S. is leaving NATO, a decision Lou Dobbs, Rush Limbaugh and Vladimir Putin hail as a “courageous, principled stance.” This is followed by a series of large-scale hacks, brown-outs and cyber-corruptions of major U.S. corporate infrastructure. An actual invasion is left in limbo.

June: Three oil tankers are attacked and sunk, blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Gas prices in the U.S. spike to $5.50 a gallon. In retaliation, Trump orders attacks on all major Iranian military ports. The U.N condemnas Trump’s “reckless adventurism”. Trumps withdraws the U.S. from the U.N. Democrats fume and “call for” restrictions on his war powers but are, us usual, ignored by McConnell’s Senate. Despite a fever pitch of anti-war fervor, and the deaths of dozens of U.S. troops in skirmishes in Iraq, Joe Biden wraps up the Democratic nomination under the familiar cloud of “inside power players” freezing out Sanders. Bernie’s supporters denounce the system and mount a write-in third party candidacy for him.

August: Full-scale, violent riots break out at Trump’s nomination convention. Several demonstrators are killed, hundreds injured in the police/security response. Sean Hannity suggests that demonstrators were actually “Iranian agents and sympathizers.” Water purification systems in over a dozen U.S. cities fail simultaneously. ISIS attacks and seizes a Carnival cruise liner in the Mediterranean and holds 3000 Americans hostage. The impeachment deadlock is broken when Pelosi and McConnell agree to two witnesses and limited questioning. Trump is quickly acquitted and Brian Kilmeade appears on the “Fox and Friends” set wearing a red, white and blue “exonerated” t-shirt.

September: After a 21-day siege, Trump orders a SEALs/Special Forces rescue of the cruise ship hostages. ISIS terrorists blow up the ship. Only a couple hundred passengers survive. Trump, riding hardened support among his base, who are filling is twice-weekly rallies in West Virginia and Alabama to over-flowing, declares all-out war on Iran to ecstatic cheering. Democrats demand a formal Congressonal inquiry and vote on war, but on the advice of Bill Barr, Trump declares he has “total power” to “protect America” and ignores them. It goes to the Supreme Court. Anti-war rioting becomes a constant feature in every major American city.

October: On a straight-line ideological vote the Supreme Court rules Trump does not need Congressional authorization for a war against Iran. Rioting takes place outside the Supreme Court. Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies. Trump nominates Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to replace her. McConnell orders a “fast track” confirmation. Polling shows Trump — who has refused any debate not moderated by Lou Dobbs — leads polling with 41% to 37% for Biden and 20% for Sanders.

November: Election day. Hundreds of computerized polling precincts across the country report hackings, breakdowns and “wildly erroneous” tabulations, yet Biden wins by two electroal votes. Trump though refuses to concede. The latest cyber attack cripples VISA and American Express, rendering them unable to process transactions. Washington D.C. endures a three-day power outage. Bill Barr meets with the Supreme Court to decide how to rule on the election melt-down. After more than a month of deliberating, marked by more demonstrations and rioting, the Court rules to void all election results. The decision about when to hold new elections is left to Congress. Pelosi and McConnell begin discussions … which linger well into 2021.

Until then Trump remains in office.

And What If Mitch Has Finally Had Enough of Donny?

Watching the shock wave rippling out after what should be Donald Trump’s fatal blunder, I keep wondering how close we are to Mitch McConnell at deciding at long last that Trump is no longer a useful idiot?

The fundamentals of McConnell’s support, (with McConnell being the most prominent face of establishment conservatism), remains what it has always been. Any intelligent, calculating conservative — in politics or business — can see clearly that America’s demographic trend lines are not moving in their favor. The USA will soon be a minority majority country with more and more citizens refusing to vote for, much less protect the oligarchic ambitions of rich white guys.

The great backstop to this inevitability therefore is stocking the U.S. court system with hundreds of conservative-to-right-wing judges who will reliably thwart liberal legislative goals designed to realign the country’s wildly out-of-whack economic balance.

And to date McConnell, in mitered-tight coordination with the Federalist Society, the influential conservative legal club — Bill Barr, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh being among its most celebrated members — has done a superb job. With Donald Trump sucking up all the attention the media has to give, McConnell and Barr’s re-fitting of the country’s judicial system has gone on with very little notice and resistance.

In the wake of this week’s Trump meltdown(s) we’ve heard more about how Capitol Hill Republicans “loathe Trump”, and how if the vote could be taken in secret, without their names attached, 30 GOP senators would vote for impeachment. Allowing the usual 50% for hyperbole and bullshit, this rings true.

Trump has been a useful dunce. He’s inattentive to policy, bored by “intellectuals” and think tanks and, as we see with this self-inflicted Ukraine fiasco, all but entirely focused on his personal needs. In other words, up to this point, he’s been a nearly ideal fool, easily manipulated by characters like MCConnewll who truly understand the long-term demographic peril facing the Republican party and are skilled at manipulating the bureacraciesa most critical levers of power.

But now … McConnell has to be reassessing this relationship.

Trump appears to have blundered so badly, so flagrantly, and in a way so easily understood by the general public, that Moscow Mitch has — has — to be running separation scenarios. It’s simply due diligence.

Trump has always been expendable to McConnell (and Barr, et al) if they could do it without infuriating Trump’s base. (Please note that for once I’m not referring to them as slack-jawed racist goobers.) That’s still a tricky move. But with the control they already have over the court system, McConnell and Barr could effectively throw Trump under the bus simply by lifting the myriad obstructions they’ve planted.

By allowing subpoenas to take effect and permitting key witnesses to testify — given that impeachment is a clear “legislative purpose” — and letting the Democrats’ case proceed they could argue to Trump’s low-information voters that they resisted as best they could. “But those damned radical Democrats just built up too much of a head of insane steam and (illegally) railroaded the process!”

Better yet, they could maneuver in a replacement for Trump appealing enough to the base and far, far more appealing to traditional Republicans repulsed by Trump’s vulgarity and corruption.

And no, I don’t mean Mike Pence. Pence is what he appears to be, a vacant stooge. In that way he would be every bit as easy to manipulate as Trump. But he possesses not even a scintilla of charismatic attraction for “the base.”

Far better — McConnell’s dream — would be somehow replacing Trump with the scariest proposition of all, namely, “competent Trump”. A candidate every bit as reliably retrograde and autocratic as Trump, only vastly smarter and therefore capable of functioning — of doing McConnell’s will and protecting conservative power for another generation without a popular majority — in a manner that presents the public face of a thoughtful adult, not a scatter-brained teenager without impulse control.

And who might that be? Among all the names regularly churning among conservative deep thinkers (sic), Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton strikes me as Candidate #1. His style of corrupted intellect — in the vein of Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan and that ilk — could reliably sell and deliver everything McConnell and stegosaur Republicans believe they need to maintain power as places like Texas and Arizona and Florida tip blue.

Sci-fi scenario: Pence resigns for “health reasons” and is replaced by Cotton sometime in the spring.

Far be it for me to give Donald Trump any advice, but Donald, if you’re listening, I hope you’re not so stupid you believe Mitch McConnell has your back come hell, high water and catastrophic election defeat.

Trump’s “Are You [Bleeping] Kidding Me!?” Moment, Episode 3216

Frankly, I could give you a dozen other reasons why Trump should have been impeached months ago. But if this latest WTF! moment — where he’s (apparently) “promising”/i.e. threatening to withhold US military support to Ukraine (a leverage against Donald’s pal, Vladimir Putin) unless Ukraine coughs up some dirt Team Trump can use against Joe Biden — is without question the great rotting egg of Trump in-the-White Houe corruption. It’s an abuse so flagrant and impeachment-worthy that if that if it isn’t the tipping point for Nancy Pelosi to fire the impeachment starting gun nothing ever will.

And I say that as someone who has appreciation for Pelosi playing the calendar — the months between now and Election Day 2020 — strategizing to deliver a maximum blue wave while simultaneously thwarting the shameless mendacity of Bill Barr and “Moscow Mitch” McConnell. But now, with Trump (apparently) caught red-handed corrupting foreign policy for rank personal political purposes, Ms. Pelosi truly has no other choice.

She can expect the volume of outraged (regularly contributing) liberal voices to rise to an air raid siren pitch for her to consent to the Full Monty of Trump trials. (My apologies for the imagery.)

Part of Pelosi’s concern about pushing impeachment to the forefront, and thereby making it effectively The Only Story Anyone Talks About all through the election cycle — screw health reform, climate change, etc. — is that it would alienate voters (blue collar whites, mainly) who think DC never gets around to doing anything for them. To translate that thinking: Pelosi worries voters who never pay any great attention to the details of politics and never will, will digest Trump’s impeachment as just more of the never-ending DC food fight and stay home — or vote for next year’s Jill Stein or Gary Johnson.

The counter argument has always been that No Impeachment makes Democrats look timid and ineffectual (yet again), this time in the face of the most flagrant presidential corruption and incompetence in US history. If you don’t have the cojones to impeach Donald [bleeping] Trump, a manifest fool, you might as well strike impeachment from the Constitution.

Liberals will flock to the polls to exorcise Trump next November no matter what. But lacking an aggressive counter-attack on Trump, their faith in and fervor for Pelosi-like establishment Democrats is going to seriously dissipate. Much of Elizabeth Warren’s appeal is big time structural change and a head-on fight against corruption.

I have also emphasized that Pelosi isn’t playing impeachment chess so much with Trump’s band of White House nitwits, (good god, Rudy Giuliani) as she is with McConnell and Barr and the judges — a disproportionate number on appellate courts those two Federalist Society warriors have squeezed into service. Each with very real power to ram a wrench into every subpoena Democrats issue.

Finally, there’s the fact that Senate Republicans remain so terrified of Trump’s base, the star-spangled twits, bros and goobers hootin’ and stompin’ at his backwoods bund rallies, voting to convict him in a trial remains the equivalent of self-immolation.

For me the answer to that has always been a matter of sequencing and timing — which may turn out to be Pelosi’s game all along. Namely, never give McConnell’s craven Senate caucus a chance to vote. Stage hearings — along the lines of the Corey Lewandowski farce last week — steadily all through the election cycle, laying out more and more (and more) details of Trump’s clown car kleptocracy until — oh, sorry Mitch, no time left on the clock — it’s Election Day.

Does that mean enduring 12-15 more months of an ugly, rancid, hyper-partisan, pigs-in-the-slop brawl right through priaries and conventions and fall campaigns? Yeah, but we’re going to get that impeachment or not.

Does anyone seriously expect anything about the coming year to be precedented and polite? People! It’s going to be insane. You know it and I know it.

Trump long ago went to cornered rat tooth and nail. He knows he’s looking at jail time and financial ruin if he loses the next election. Given a clear existential crisis for a reckless sociopath, I don’t see how Democrats have any option other than girding up and fighting the war they’ve been presented with on much the same (albeit it smarter) terms.

It’s an all-in game. Indisputably.

As Donny Waits for the Sheik to Tell Him Who to Shoot …

From the moment he “won” on November 8, 2016, I’ve tried to imagine what America’s intelligence and military leaders would do if reality TV host Donald Trump gave an order for a full-fledged, consequences-be-damned attack on some country. (Shooting off $120 million worth of cruise missiles at a mostly empty Syrian airfield doesn’t compare.) Today, we’re closer than ever to finding out.

My geezer buddies and I were observing a fall tradition hiking the Grand Canyon last week, only to emerge to find Trump “locked and loaded” and apparently waiting for the Saudis to tell him who to shoot and when. The Saudis are very major customers of Trump Inc., so the leader of the free world has obligations to the people who pay his bills, and those are just the obligations we know about.

Frankly, I haven’t heard a convincing explanation for what Iran has to gain from sending drones to blow up some Saudi oil facilities. The only scenario that fits is basically a variation on Osama bin Laden’s (highly successful) strategy to draw the United States into a land war in the Middle East and inflame a new generation of jihadis.

But since we’re talking Trump here — a guy who is bored with briefings and quite likely has never read a book on Middle East history or diplomacy, and calculates everything based on how friendly someone is to his bank accounts — all he needs to be convinced is a reminder of the favors he owes his “investors.” In this case that would of course include noted bone saw artist, Mohammed Bin Salman.

The U.S. military and the vast American intelligence apparatus though are a whole different species of animal. The betting line would be that given an order the militarists and spy world careerists will salute and charge into any breach their commander orders. It’s what they’re trained to do. Certainly the military, anyway.

But I have to think — naively, perhaps — that everyone with any sophisticated judgment of character long ago concluded that Trump is, to quote Rex Tillerson, “a [bleeping] moron” and a highly compromised one at that. Watching him insult their work and value to Vladimir Putin’s face was galling enough, but conceding and cooperating with such an abject fool — for the permanent historical record — doesn’t strike me as something they’re eager to have on their resume.

Trump, who is notoriously gutless about firing anything face to face — note pretty much everyone dismissed from the White House by tweet — is probably hoping the Saudis don’t demand he drop some “shock and awe” on Tehran. I mean, tracking all that rocket activity could really cut into his golf time. And in truth, he may be spared that dilemma by Sultan Bone Saw’s concern that a bigly war with Iran’s air force could quickly demolish much of the rest of the House of Saud’s oil production/cash printing macinery. That would be a serious bmmer. Money (i.e. subsidies to its citizens) being the primary way the Saudi tribe keeps control in their grim, corrupt desert theocracy.

The situation has got a lot of people talking about why exactly the United States owes Saudi Arabia anything? We’ve been handing them billions of dollars a month for well over 75 years — both before and after 15 of their spoiled brat off-spring flew jets into buildings on 9/11 and murdered 3000 Americans.

The old guard Saudis were bad enough and young Mohammed Bin Bone Saw appears to be worse. His coziness with Jared Kushner and the financially bungled Kushner Properties, Inc. withstanding, the Saudis have all the resources they need to fight it out with Iran if that’s their idea of righteous retribution. (And for the record, I still need a lot more cnvincing it is was Iran behind the drone strikes.)

Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear that Trump has a “special relationship” with the Saudis that goes well beyond pumping gas into American SUVs. The general publc may be a little foggy about this, but real generals and the wonky spy nerds are certainly not, and up to some point at least that crowd has to decide whether to attach their reputations to kill orders from a bought-off buffoon.

Impeaching Trump Will Require Smart, Savvy Storytelling

If the Democrats are going to impeach Donald Trump — and there’s zero doubt that’s what Trump wants them to do — they’re going to have to be a hell of lot better storytellers than they’ve been so far.

All the reasons not to impeach Trump remain as valid as they’ve ever been.

A: No amount of evidence will convince the Republican controlled-Senate to convict him. As headlines go, he will be found “innocent.”

B: The “verdict”/acquittal will be strung out by Trump’s legal team and Mitch McConnell to conclude dramatically in the heat of next year’s election season, allowing Trump to rant with true finality, “Total exoneration!”

C: As infuriated as every anti-Trump voter will become over the course of the process, there’s no reason to believe the critical fraction of voters who pay little to no attention to details will respond in any other way than by voting in Trump’s favor in 2020.

D: Impeachment will be the only topic every Democratic candidate will be asked about and judged on until election day 2020.

If you are “the chaos candidate” (tutored and guided by the international maestro of chaos, Vladimir Putin), the all-consuming, total partisan warfare of impeachment with certain acquittal is a dream campaign strategy.

That said, Elizabeth Warren and others are absolutely correct when they say Democrats have a constitutional obligation, based only on what is known about the Mueller report today, to bring charges against Trump, politics be damned.

The essential issue is storytelling, which in modern America does not come in the form of a legalistic, 448-page government document, or blockbuster reporting like the two New York Times stories on Trump’s freakishly fraudulent tax-filings. Big complicated stories — a bit like “Game of Thrones” — are best presented on television, serially, regularly, with heavy advance marketing, an eye and ear for sympathetic characters and shrewdly ascending drama.

Raise your hand if you think today’s Democrats have that skill set.

In addition to the enormous obstacles everyone can see in plain sight, (the GOP Senate looking at Trump’s 91% approval among their voters), Democrats have to be aware of what lurks hidden beneath the surface.

A lot of what explains Bill Barr’s behavior — a 68 year-old establishment Republican coming back to go all-in for a flagrant fool and scoundrel like Trump — has to do with his sympathy for the power game as played most recently by Dick Cheney. Barr’s “go [bleep] yourself” attitude toward both Congress and legal tradition is a step-for-step repeat of Cheney’s reign “under” George W. Bush. (I refer everyone interested to Bart Gellman’s “Angler” for a full dramatic narrative of The Cheney Process.)

More to the point — and this is absolutely critical — as Bill Barr plays lead pharisee for a fundamental restructuring of American governmental (and economic) power, he can draw confidence that McConnell, with the conservative and highly influential Federalist Society, have now thoroughly stocked most levels of the American judicial system, including the Supreme Court, with judges sympathetic to their belief system. This is key to support of the so-called Unitary Executive Theory.

As of 2019 the court stocking is so thorough — or at least adequate — that (Republican) presidents truly are immune to any kind of traditional criminal prosecution. The guess is Barr believes that there are now enough judges on “the team” that the wheels of investigation can be gummed up, delayed and conflicted so badly that the only likely result of anything as supposedly conclusive as impeachment is … confusion.

Mitch McConnell, accurately reading the changing demographics of America, where white Americans are rapidly diminishing toward minority status, has long understood that gaming and stocking the judicial system is the best (only?) way to sustain control over American culture well past the point Republicans are able to win presidential elections … by normal means.

However Democrats imagine impeachment playing out, are they truly prepared to deal with how far outside the bounds of good faith, normal politics and litigation McConnell will take Republicans to protect Trump?

I have no confidence that they do.

Democrats are still playing the game as though the rules matter, while McConnell, Barr and others are quite literally writing new rules on the fly.

But … good storytelling is as powerful an emotional device today as it was around the cave fires of the Neolithic age. The Trump-Russia saga has so many primary characters, so many sub-plots, supporting characters and red herrings, unless you’re a sad nerd consuming this episode daily like a tele-novela (guilty) it’s mostly a blur.

Democrats would be smart to seek out some crowd-sourced expertise from professionals with a demonstrated talent for strategic storytelling. When to play up or play down certain characters and information. Key emotional plot lines. Where personality matters. Likewise, they have to conceive of a way to advance their investigation beyond the realms that Mitch McConnell and Bill Barr can control.

The normal, traditional judicial system is not going to be their friend in this matter.

Beto the Celebrity Man-Child v. The Women

By my estimation, less than two hours elapsed between the time Beto O’Rourke announced he was running for POTUS and the moment he took  fire for being straight, white and male. Welcome to the big show, Mr. ex-Congressman!

I have no preferred horse in the race at this moment. (There are several Democrats I wish would just shut up and go away.) But the immediate, visceral reaction to O’Rourke — who announced simultaneous with a full-on giga-as-Gaga celebrity Vanity Fair cover — is going to be not just one of but maybe the critical factor in terms of who liberals/progressives choose to run against Trump.

In case you haven’t noticed, the ladies have had enough of the straight white male thing.

For The Cut Kimberly Truong says, “… as charismatic as O’Rourke may be, his candidacy already seems to be drawing anxieties and misgivings from women, for multiple reasons. One of those has to do with the announcement video itself, in which his wife, Amy, sits beside him on a couch, doing not much more than simply gazing at him in a show of support. … That is of course, not to mention the stark contrast between the ways the media has presented O’Rourke’s persona as charming and magnetic and the ways some of those same outlets have covered Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy, which often focus on doubts about her ‘likability’.”

For Vox, Laura McGann wrote, “Beto O’Rourke jumped into the Democratic presidential primary on Thursday sounding like he hasn’t heard much about the big debate in recent years over how we judge male and female leaders. Just before he announced his run, O’Rourke boasted to Vanity Fair that ‘I want to be in it. Man, I’m just born to be in it’. NBC reporter Kasie Hunt spotted the inherent double standard the comment represents: Men are rewarded in politics for showing ambition, while women are punished.”

And here’s Jessica Heslam in the Boston Herald and Pete Kasperowicz from the (conservative) Washington Examiner.

The counter-balance though to millions of activated women disgusted with Trump (and Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz and Rush Limbaugh and their loudmouth, overbearing brothers-in-law) is everyone else who just wants to win. To sweep Trump and his enablers out of power. The latter crowd — still the majority is my guess — is less concerned with gender and policy than the ability to lead another wave election. A wave large enough to immediately reverse catastrophic neglect and corruption fostered by Republican rule.

Who knows if O’Rourke has the chops to pull that off? Critics point out that he raised $70 million and nearly beat Ted Cruz in [bleeping] Texas because … well, because he was running against Ted Cruz, one of the most loathsome trolls ever dropped into a Senate office, (which is really saying something.) The obvious and immediate counter to that one is … “WTF! Trump is worse!”, something no one can dispute.

Establishment conservatives like George Will (a “never Trumper”) mock O’Rourke, calling him a “skateboarding man-child”. But Republicans are truly afraid of him. Uber-progressives meanwhile are complaining he lacks sufficient policy gravitas, which again is also true. Right now O’Rourke is a lot like Barack Obama in 2007 in that he’s this neon-bordered celebrity idol-like white board on which anyone can imagine anything.

But here’s the bummer for both activated, pissed-off women and uber-progressives … that celebrity-vague [bleep] works. At least if the goal is winning an election in the most sweeping and convincing manner possible.

At this moment my betting money is still on Kamala Harris. She seems, well, wily, without being devious. To mis-paraphrase Lou Grant, “I like wily.” I’ve never thought Bernie Sanders is wily enough. Harris also seems truly comfortable up close in the retail game, and she too has a lot of celebrity vibe going for her. Not as much as straight, white and male O’Rourke, but plenty enough to work with.

O’Rourke ran a remarkably error-free campaign against Cruz. He displayed abundant energy and he speaks effortlessly and naturally in a contemporary, pop culture-laced language familiar and therefore appealing to voters who are not policy wonks, but who know enough by now to understand that Trump is both a fool and a criminal.

So that was Day #1 in Beto 2020.

Let the circus proceed.