Fight The Fight

“Lean to the left, lean to the right, stand up sit down, fight fight fight.” According to Trump’s impeachment trial lawyers, we who’ve chanted it are as guilty as Trump.  

Coherent arguments weren’t required. Though Trump’s guilt was as obvious as shattered glass, they knew acquittal was assured. So they lied, whataboutized, Trumpified. Their audience was Trumpists and Trump, figuring, one assumes, that if they didn’t do it his way they’d be joining the fraternity of stiffed contractors. No-lose for them, it was much-lost for the country. 

We needn’t recount the evidence or praise the persuasive House managers, as compared to Trump’s overmatched team. Everyone understands that without Trump’s months-long crescendo of incendiary election lies, the insurrection wouldn’t have happened. It’s worth noting, however, that most Republicans who voted to acquit had joined Trump in perpetuating the big lie that led to the murderous violence. To affirm his guilt would be to admit their own. In a courtroom, those senators would have been preemptively rejected as jurors.

Likewise, if courtroom jurors colluded with defense lawyers, as did Graham, Cruz, and Lee, they’d be held in contempt. Which is exactly what they displayed: intentional, smug indifference, as they and others sat, desk-footed, reading magazines, dumb-phoning, ho-humming their oaths and the Constitution. They’d welded their minds shut five years earlier, when they locked in with a dishonest, amoral “businessman” nominee.

Several Congressional Republicans who gave Trump a pass for provoking a bloody insurrection with countless lies, had voted to impeach and/or convict President Clinton for a harmless one. Protecting the future of democracy and, for that matter, their own party, required finding seventeen honest Republicans. Like finding rock candy in a window-well. (Tried, failed, age seven.)

57 – 43 is a historically bipartisan vote for conviction. Senators who did so represent seventy-six-million more Americans than those who let him off. So we ask: do Trump’s treacherous lies about fraud, attempting to discredit fair elections forever, really exemplify what’s left of conservatism in his party? Do his tweets and inaction during the depravity, failing his duty, inflaming the rioters, tossing Pence to his mob like paper towels in Puerto Rico, abandoning everyone in the capitol but the insurrectionists, constitute the Republican presidential ideal? Guess so. Seventy-five-percent still want him, a sedition-provoking sociopath, as their leader. 

Are there no future Republican stars as admirable as the Democratic House managers? Will Trump’s successor be the fisting Josh Hawley? Ted Cruz or Lindsey Graham? Marjorie Tantric Greene? Matt Gaetz? Evidently. Cowed by Trump’s deluded, angry cultists, Republicans must, for a very long time, provide only such mendacious embarrassments as those.

One after another, state parties are censuring members who voted against Trump. (Cancel culture!) Said a Pennsylvania GOP chairman, of Senator Toomey, “We did not send him there to do the right thing...” Integrity and conservatism: officially ostracized. We who long for two honorable parties find it dispiriting. 

After voting for absolution, McConnell excoriated Trump with words that could have been the prosecutors’, calling his behavior leading to and during the riot unprecedented dereliction of presidential duty, for which he’s fully culpable. Avouching every prosecutorial argument, he then justified voting “not guilty” with the refuted, outvoted claim that it’s unconstitutional to impeach a non-sitting president; not mentioning it was he who prevented a timely trial. We sometime-hypocrites tip our hats, shirts, pants, socks and shoes to the greatest of all time.

As real conservatives repudiate the party, Republicans are increasingly defined by their worst, like those who still believe, or claim, the election was stolen; who say the Capitol riot was “staged,” a hoax, antifa. Rand Paul, who just called senators who wear masks “science deniers.” Thus we understand unwavering support for Trump: asininity. And oleaginous, Grahamic cowardice. 

What else can it be? His biggest accomplishment was maintaining the Obama recovery for three-fourths of a quadrennial. His response to Covid-19 was, using his favorite word, a disgrace. Denial, lies, multi-level mismanagement. Silencing scientists, mocking the measures needed to slow the spread. Finally, giving up. He got manhandled by China, Russia, and North Korea; increased the risk of a nuclear Iran; made the US pitied, and the only country in the world not taking climate change seriously. Any Republican would produce tax cuts and deregulation. (And deficits.) Even after his hand-crafted insurrection, though, Trumpidolatry remains. 

Finding him guiltless, those non-conservative senators and their no-longer-conservative party announced, in effect, “Trump is the best we’ve got. The Republican party commits to the uninformed, conspiracy-believing, anti-democracy, white-supremacist, insurrectionist mob we spent decades creating. Come, join us.”

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Gallbladder: The Donald Trump Of Viscera

Though the outcome of Trump’s impeachment trial isn’t in doubt, it’s still going on, making now the obvious time to talk about your gallbladder, the Donald Trump of internal organs. Mostly unnecessary, it makes millions of people sick, and when it does, most are delighted by its removal and better off without it. Also, it has its own fake news.

Having separated a few thousand gallbladders from their owners in my surgical career, I claim more authority on the subject than, say, Trump on election fraud, Covid-19, or climate change. But this is bile of a different sort. 

Tucked underneath your liver, just below the midpoint of the bottom of your right-front ribcage, the gallbladder is a slightly pear-shaped sac. Unlike your other, generally earth-toned viscera, when healthy it’s a startlingly beautiful robin’s-egg blue. Empty, it’s about the size of my thumb, which is likely bigger than yours. Full, it can be more like that pear. 

Its purpose is storing bile, a liquid made in the liver to the tune of around a quart per day, passing into the gut via a tube called, appropriately enough, the bile duct. Most drips steadily into your intestine, where it facilitates fat absorption. Via a branch off the bile duct, a few tablespoons detour to your gallbladder, where it waits to be squirted into your intestine in response to eating, particularly a fatty meal. 

Before civilization and supermarkets, gallbladders were essential. Back then, humans and other bile-producing fauna might starve for a while between meals, so a bilious bolus when gorging on a kill made sense (during fasting, your gallbladder gets very full). Nowadays, since we eat regularly and frequently, food exits the stomach comparatively constantly, rendering bile storage mostly inutile. Remember: the gallbladder doesn’t make bile. With or without it, that daily quart gets to your gut; just a matter of pacing.

A complicated solution of salts and other stuff, bile makes fats soluble in water. Like detergent. Evolution, or whatever alternative you believe in, is imperfect. For reasons including heredity, diet, hormones, and gravidity, ingredients can become insoluble, forming crystals. Which, concentrated in the gallbladder, can grow into what we call gallstones. Looking like kaleidoscopic, multi-faceted agates, some are quite beautiful. I’ve seen them made into jewelry. Others are ugly, clay-like, or both. There can be hundreds of them. Or few, or single, large enough to fill the entire gallbladder.

Unlike Trump, gallstones aren’t always an affliction. Many – possibly most -- gallstone-bearers are asymptomatic, some never knowing they have them; so the discovery doesn’t always demand surgery (cholecystectomy, commonly an outpatient laparoscopic procedure). Except for the presence of certain risk factors, it’s typically done if stones are causing problems, which they can do in several ways.

Most often it’s pain, occurring if a stone blocks the outlet of the gallbladder when it decides to squeeze out some bile. That can be extremely painful, felt below the right ribs and straight into the back. Or shoulder. Or lots of places. Called biliary colic, it usually goes away in a few minutes or an hour or two, as the cramped gallbladder muscles relax. The pain pattern is not always “textbook,” leading to potential misdiagnosis. Which explains, I think, most of the people dissatisfied with treatment.

More easily diagnosed and more serious is a stone lodged tight, in which case the pain persists, the gallbladder become inflamed, sometimes infected (cholecystitis). Worse still is a stone (has to be fairly small) passing out of the gallbladder into the bile duct. If it passes out into the gut, the problem resolves. If not, obstructive jaundice, pancreatitis, or severe liver and blood infection can result (cholangitis).

As explained, with some exceptions people get along fine without a gallbladder; therefore, treatment is almost always surgical removal. Pills can dissolve certain kinds of stones, but it can take months and there’s a high recurrence rate; true of any treatment that eliminates stones, or claims to, without removing the gallbladder. Which brings us to the foreshadowed fake news: gallbladder and liver “flushes,” “detox” cleanses. All-consuming, alt-med bogosity.

If you drink olive oil along with some sort of acidic juice, curdled lumps of oil may appear in your stool. The internet and some naturopaths will assure you those turd-curds are gallstones and you’re cured. Convinced, people have brought me theirs in Dixie cups. Nope and nope. There’s a belly-full of reasons why; pathophysiology, anatomy, and biochemistry among them. Demonstrably false (have them tested, get another ultrasound), it’s nevertheless believed like Q among the credulous.

Lacking enough space here, I offer an ancient post on my surgery blog, where there’s more explication. And, found by searching “gallbladder” on the blog, more still. 

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Gored By A Whirlwind

Having chosen, for decades, to sow disinformation to the easily gulled, creating preferential feelings for falsehoods among the flock, the Republican Party is now reaping the horns of a Gordian whirlwind. A course correction by the Republican Party isn’t as simple as saying, “Make it so.” They are, in other words, hoist on their own Picard.

Of such a cynical and condescendingly dishonest attitude toward their voters, Trump and Qanon were the inevitable result. And now they’re damned if they dump, damned if they don’t. For those of us who’ve been warning about what was coming, this ought to be a time of overflowing schadenfreude. 

It’s not. America’s ability to confront challenges has always depended on having opposing parties operating in good faith to find workable middle ground. Until the Republican Party began on its scorched-earth Gingrichian path decades ago, that was generally the case. Now, though, the support of Qanon and people with similar conspiratorial fantasies has become so integral to maintaining today’s Republican Party’s base that they’re stuck with them. Despite the desire of a few within the party and many true conservatives who are leaving it, there seems no way back to assiduous participation. It’s still the party of Trump and his cult of the deceived.

The dilemma’s horns on which they’re Pamploned is no better demonstrated than by the schizophrenic squirming of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Both-Ways). First, he led his members in rejecting the results of the Electoral College, even after the insurrection threatened their lives and democracy. Briefly brave, he then declared that Trump bore responsibility for inciting his mob. After which, he decamped to Mar-a-Loco for abject genuflection, earning from Trump the same feculent grin we saw when he played poor Mitt into thinking he had a shot at Secretary of State.   

Back in D.C., McCarthy held a late-night congregation of House Republicans, during which Liz Cheney (R-WY), in hot dihydrogen monoxide from the rank for voting to impeach Trump for his dereliction, escaped from a secret-ballot vote to remove her as leader of the Republican caucus. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA), on the other hand, loved for her enthusiastic support of killing Nancy Pelosi and other baby-biting Democrats, for 9/11- and school-massacre-denialism, almost eclipsed by belief in Jewish-controlled space lasers causing forest fires, received a standing-ovational tap on the wrist. And a “great” call from Trump. (Still promising, in public, never to apologize, she did, evidently, behind closed doors.) 

The party that had previously stripped committee memberships from Steve King (R-cantaloupes) for less insane and threatening words, refused to do the same to Ms. Greene for far worse. Different times, different constituency.

Dependent as they are on the Greene wing of their supporters, can the Republican Party return to rationality? If some, including M. Mitch McConnell, would like to see it – he called her out forcefully – it’s not looking good. Why? Because the media that rake it in by peddling conspiratorial thinking, stoking fact-free anger and victimhood, are responding to insurrection by making it worse.

Said Republican pollster/sloganeer Frank Lunz: “Fox has succeeded for years in straddling the line between a quality news organization and the opinion side. But Trump won’t let that happen anymore, and neither will his supporters. They want their ‘news’ to affirm them rather than inform them.”

Affirm, rather than inform. Nutshell. 

Desperate to stop the flow of viewers to even more affirming sources like OAN and Newsmax (now attacking each other), Fox is ridding itself of its “news” wing, making more space for the vitriol. It’s what gets Trumpist eyeballs. Thus Mr. McCarthy’s pilgrimage to see Florida man. Thus, letters to the editor in this paper, regurgitating what they’ve swallowed, crook, lying, and clinker: Democrats are the hypocrites (cf. Garland/Barrett); they spent their time “harassing” Trump rather than legislating (cf. hundreds of bills spiked by the aforementioned Muscovite); Democrats want illegals to vote (cf. reality); the election was stolen (cf. DOJ review); we won’t stop the insurrection till BLM stops demonstrating (cf. planet earth).

Affirmed, not informed. Fox’s move proves it’ll only increase. What else explains Trumpist/Covid-deniers blocking access to vaccination sites, forcing their way, unmasked, into grocery stores, claiming they’re protecting “freedoms”? Like the capitol-defiling, police-beating murderers, these are people willing, based on lies, to harm themselves and others. Constitutionally.

Having lost the presidency and senate, Republicans are seeking a more truthful, less obstructionist agenda. Kidding. In state after state, they’re turning to legislation making it harder for Democrats to vote and easier for the delusional. That’s where we’re heading. Where it ends is too awful to think about.

The Unity Delusion

 

Unity. It’s a divisive concept. After four years of Trump claiming Democrats “want to destroy you,” calling for his political opponents to be locked up, cancel-culturing journalists, and, now, threatening democracy by promoting his election big lie, it was disorienting to hear President Biden speak of it. Since our two political parties have starkly differing definitions, we know it’s impossible. 

For President Biden and Democrats, unity doesn’t mean policy agreement in all things, but common purpose when hashing it out. For current Congressional Republicans, it means Democrats don't propose anything they don’t like. Rejoining the Paris Climate Accords, for example: divisive. Unlike Trump abandoning them. Wanting to address domestic terrorism, racism, climate-change, take the pandemic seriously, create meaningful election reform. Most Americans don’t consider those divisive. Today’s Republican legislators do. Solutions, if any, will have to come from Democrats.

In the evenly-divided Senate, the fifty Republicans represent many millions fewer Americans than the Democrats. Add the Constitutionally-unmentioned filibuster and, for much legislation, the minority has veto power, which Mitch McConnell wields like a Samurai sword.

The minority rights protected by the Constitution are civil rights. Nothing in it says the minority should hold sway on political matters. Be recognized, considered? Sure. Especially back when they weren’t a haven for the insane. But preventing the will of the majority isn’t democracy. At the extreme, where Trumpism would take us, it’s dictatorship. The filibuster needs to go: something else that won’t happen.

Packing together during the insurrection, Republicans refused to wear masks. Afterward, packing side-arms, they declined to pass through metal detectors. In Georgia, several school board members remained defiantly unmasked at a meeting, despite the posthumous request of a teacher who’d died of Covid-19. This is how deeply Republicans are dug in to Trumpism.

Oregon’s Republican Party, having once produced such admirable people as Mark Hatfield, Tom McCall, and Portland’s then-favorite politician, my amazing aunt, recently selected a Qanonymizer as its senate candidate. This week they officially declared the D.C. insurrection a “false flag” operation, created to discredit Trump and Republicans. Right. Imposters: the whole maskless, Parler-posting, kill-Pelosi-and-Pence, Trump-cheering lot of ‘em. When even Oregon Republicans follow red-staters down the rabbit hole, their party has fully embraced the crazy.

Mountains of evidence to the contrary, three-quarters of Republicans still believe the election was stolen. Half think Trump should play a major role in their party’s future, seeing nothing wrong with a “president” pushing the big lie in an attempt actually to steal the election; nor with exhorting a crowd, boiling with manufactured anger, to march on the Capitol and not be “weak.” (The moronic, destructive, useless “anarchists” and “Youth Liberation Front” in Portland, by contrast, are neither supported nor encouraged by any major party.)

Momentarily bewildered when Trump didn’t show up at the last minute to take office and begin executing child-trafficking, cannibalistic liberals, Q-anoners now believe he’ll be inaugurated as the nineteenth (!) president on March Fourth. Not kidding. These are not rational people. Republicans, though, have elected several, including to Congress, at least one of whom supported calls to murder Democratic leaders. Too cowardly to censure or expel her, they put her on the education committee.

Trump will escape impeachment conviction. What consequences does the party of “law” and “order” and “personal responsibility” think he should face? None: there was no incitement, the rioters weren’t even his. No crime when the election was as fraudulent as Trump University. (They put it differently.)

Hoping to avoid taking a stand on his sedition, Republican senators say Trump’s gone, so why bother? Paraphrasing others, here’s why: Unpunished, a failed insurrection is a dress rehearsal for worse. Fearing their party’s new base, still the party of Trump, those public servants ignore their oath to defend the Constitution. Proclaimed patriotism, evidently, doesn’t include integrity. “Time to move on,” say those who pursued Benghazi for years. 

After taking office, Trump issued orders to please the minority that “elected” him and the corporations that paid for it, but which were unpopular with most Americans: undoing environmental protections, climate change agreements, worker protections, and the Affordable Care Act. His lopsided tax cuts. The Muslim ban.

In reversing Trump’s deleterious actions and introducing progressive ones, President Biden is doing what the majority of Americans want, which defines a functioning democratic republic. In its shrinking demographics and shaky future if democracy prevails, the Trumpublican Party doesn’t see it that way. Now, their D.C. insurrectionists and their Oregon party’s devolution, among many sad examples, prove how far down they’d take us.

Post-Inaugural Thoughts

In a post-inaugural interview, Congressman James Clyburn quoted Alexis de Tocqueville: America is great because its people are good. If its people cease to be good, America will cease to be great. That it was an inaccurate paraphrase of a misattributed quote is beside the point: in recent years, more clearly in recent weeks, we’ve seen the truth of it.

Trump’s insurrectionists who trashed the Capital, whose internet sanctum, Parler, is now hosted by Russia, aren’t good people. Nor are the politicians and media propagandists whose outrageous lies they believed. The result is a stain on America: A Green-Zone inauguration secured by thousands of troops; streets cleared; the National Mall – if movingly decorated – empty; the building still bearing wounds.

Addressing the tens who showed up to see him off, the blame-worthy “president” was absent; the first since 1869 to abscond from that confirmation of enduring democracy. Trump et uxor chose not to welcome the Bidens to the White House, nor did they join his predecessors and successor at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Amazing gracelessness.

Exiting, Trump, who only started domestic wars, pardoned a parade of perfidious politicians, tax-evaders (including a Fox spouse), and secret-keeping cronies. Among the excused, though, were some who deserved it, including several who’d received harsh sentences for minor drug crimes, mostly marijuana-related. Good for him. (For those whose lips are forming the words “Clinton” and “Marc Rich,” virtually all Democrats were outraged.)

Showcasing the scamanality of his “presidency,” Trump’s penultimate act was reversing his own “swamp-draining” order preventing his hires from lobbying, for five years; they’re now free as he to access the grift. “So long, suckers,” should have been his final words.

While Trump bunkers at Mar-a-Lago, we turn to President Joe Biden, recalling the astounding difference between his and Trump’s inaugural words.

Trump inherited a soaring economy, history’s longest run of rising employment, decreasing budget deficits, nuclear containment of Iran, and the tail ends of wars President Obama didn’t start but from which he was trying to disengage. Yet Trump spoke darkly about “American carnage,” a weirdly dystopian view of a country that was, but is no longer, surging forward; a speech foreshadowing the cascade of lies for which his “presidency” would become known, ultimately leading to the insurrection from which we’re trying to emerge. 

(If only one is feasible, let Congress invoke Section 3 of the 14th Amendment rather than finishing impeachment.)

In contrast, President Biden heads a nation deeply divided between fact and fiction; reeling from a pandemic so poorly managed by a mocking “president” that hundreds of thousands died unnecessarily, and the delivery of vaccines for which has been a cavalcade of disinformation and absent planning. Businesses closed by the thousands, staggering unemployment, people struggling to maintain food and shelter.

Yet, not ignoring the source and implications of the insurrection, he spoke with optimism and words of healing; reminders of what can be done when Americans cooperate with one another (already falling on many senatorial and rightwing media deaf ears.) Without specifying Trump’s biggest lie, he called for a return to truth -- tough for Tucker, Sean, et. al., whose success depends on inflammatory untruth. It’s doubtful they’ll reassess their complicity. (One sane Foxian approved.) 

Opposite to “I alone can fix it,” acknowledging it’ll take all of us, President Biden enumerated the challenges: racism, domestic terrorism, climate change (we’re back in the Paris Accords!), the economy. And, of course, the pandemic (we’re staying in the WHO!) Which is not to say he, or anyone, expects Congressional kumbaya; just a remembrance of commonality when arguing. It’s happened before, if so long ago it seems like an illusion.

Afterward, Kevin McCarthy, leader of the Republican insurrection in Congress, mouthed pleasant words. Likewise Mitch McConnell, who, after four years of catalyzing Trump’s destruction of Constitutional separation, comity, economic sanity, trust in elections, and pretty much everything else, had just, belatedly, acknowledged it was Trump’s lies that led to the attempted coup. Action, not words, are what’s needed now.

She gave no inaugural speech, but Kamala Harris’ presence was powerful. So many welcome firsts. The tie-breaker in an evenly-divided Senate, she might become the most consequential VP, ever.

Sincerity. It’s said if you can fake that, you’ve got it made. Wordlessly holding a never-read Bible after gassing peaceful demonstrators, Trump faked it and seventy-four-million Americans bought in. You can’t fake the sincerity we heard in eighty-one-million-vote-getting President Biden’s speech. If we can’t all agree with his plans, let’s agree on that. And, with a little cooperation, see what happens.

They NEED To Be Lied To

You don’t just have to be delusional to believe Trump’s lies about the election. To pillage our nation’s capitol, deface it, destroy treasures, defecate and urinate on it, set up a hangman’s noose and a guillotine, attack and murder cops whose blue lives you once said matter, you NEED to believe them, for reasons so deep-seated that nothing will open your eyes.

Self-evident to those whose eyes aren’t glued shut by Trump’s adhesive mendacity, you have to be – mostly – white, racist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic. The logo shirts, the signs, the flags, the chants. The faces. The feces. Reenacting George Floyd’s murder. Seven FBI-identified racist groups. In Trump’s madding MAGA terrorists, there’s no mistaking it. Inside and outside the Capitol, in the White House and in their media fantasy-fortresses, democracy is despised for an obvious reason: in increasingly diverse, multicultural America, it threatens white supremacy.

It helps, too, to harbor such devotion to a lying “president” who affirms your hate that you’ll turn with him on people he praised moments earlier. Mike Pence, for whose execution they ghoulishly chanted, swallowing more Trumpdacity about the Constitution. They aimed to kidnap, possibly kill Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress. Impossible? They beat a police officer to death; another, they dragged down stairs and repeatedly struck with an American flagpole. “We love you,” Trump told them. “You are special people.”

Patriotism ended when they began shouting invective and marching to the tune of a criminally dishonest “president,” who even lied about joining their parade; instead, slinking back to the White House to do what he does best: watch TV. He loved seeing his inflamed hoard, it’s reported, desecrating the Capitol. Unmasked and unworried, traitorous Trumpists yelled “this is OUR country!” Not, evidently, Americans’ who, because we’re a democratic republic, voted Trump out overwhelmingly.

Posting their crimes on favored fascist websites, MAGA terrorists were surprised, later, to be hunted down by the FBI. “This is not who I am,” they wept. But it is. Freely, they chose to riot over freedom.

Not only those MAGA terrorists are inimical to America; it’s also Republican lawmakers and pundits who ceaselessly replayed Trump’s big lie, hypnotically exhorting their manipulees to “stop the steal.” They knew the election was fair; confirmation came from everywhere. 

Casting their lot with blood-eyed felons, they peddled the lie even after the insurrection, saying it’s for voters who, deceived into believing, “have questions.” Polls show a majority of Republicans say they’ll never trust elections again. Mission accomplished. The bigger the lie, the better it works on Trumpists. Telling truth to them is a career-killer.

Their lies wed them to Trumpism, forever. Afraid to be honest, most Congressional Republicans went along. (To be fair, in Trump’s un-great America, because of his homegrown MAGA terrorists, to oppose him is to fear for one’s own and one’s families’ lives.) The ten (only ten!) who, this time, voted to impeach, deserve admiration. 

Well-armed came the MAGA terrorists. In the aftermath, we’re hearing of shocking complicity from within. Congressional sergeants-at-arms, Republican state attorneys general. Many Capitol cops, crazed Qanon congress-people. The FBI downplayed explicit online plans for “war.” Even the Pentagon, which sanitized them as “First Amendment protestors,” slow-walked authorizing the National Guard. Does anyone believe Trump was unaware of intelligence warning of insurrection? Is it unlikely he gave orders to stand back, or that his lackeys followed them? 

The difference from responses to Black Lives Matter demonstrations couldn’t be more revelatory. 

Having pushed their divisive dishonesty for months, Trump’s Congressional mouthpieces called for “unity.” Enough to question the existence of G-d, their faces didn’t melt. Stop the divisiveness, they hypocrisize, after perpetuating a “president” who couldn’t survive without it. Let’s not hurt those marauders’ feelings, nor the non-marauders’ who believe our lies. Including our latest, observably false, that the MAGA terrorists were antifa. 

Like debriding a suppurating wound, punishing Trump’s incitement is a prerequisite to healing. If “unity” is what those guilty Republicans suddenly want, let them state, unambiguously, that Trump’s claims about a stolen election are seditious lies; apologize for waiting so long to say so; renounce their craziest members and stop lying to voters who elected them.

Deadly as a virus, fascism is infecting America: in the White House, in some police, military, Republican legislators, and throughout Trump’s minions. If Trump and the nationwide terrorists he created aren’t punished maximally, our Constitution is meaningless. Demagogues like Trump – there’ll be others – easily create murderous mobs out of “ordinary” people. It can’t happen here? Abetted by millions of self-described conservatives who stood by, on the precipice, silent, it just did.

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Trump's Terrorists

This week we – and the world -- recognized who Donald Trump has always been, and what he and his party have done to our country. The good thing about Republican senators letting him off the hook after impeachment is that we’ve come to see how right Adam Schiff was when he predicted it. And we’ve learned the price of that party’s descent into insurrection. 

Henceforth, barring an unlikely return to conservatism and respect for the Constitution, today’s Republican Party will be remembered as the outlaw party. The party that chose a racist, xenophobic, lying bully, sex predator, and scamming, tax-cheating “businessman”; and, for four disgraceful years, condoned his contemptuous spurning of the law. That chose authoritarianism over constitutional governance, that embraced Trump’s attempt to delegitimize a fair election Joe Biden won decisively. (It wasn’t Trump’s election most Democrats contested: it was his subsequent criminality.) 

The party that considers any vote not for them to be fraudulent; a win by any Democrat, anywhere, to be, by definition, illegitimate. Whose claims of election fraud have been debunked, their legal arguments dismissed as ridiculous; who didn’t care and kept pushing, right until – and for some, even after – Trump’s riot.

What’s the constituency, other than the psychopath-in-chief, to whom those refusenik R senators and representatives were playing? Violent Proud Boys; the cult of Q-anon; domestic terrorists responding to Trump’s call to “be wild” by storming the Capitol; the millions of Trumpists (including tens who write to me) who, believing his hallucinatory claims of massive fraud, repeat the disproved “evidence” as if it’s implanted in their brains -- not by Bill Gates’ vaccines, but through the neurotoxicity emanating from rightwing radio, internet, and TV.

To secure permanent deregulation and tax cuts for themselves, Republican leaders have created ignorance and suborned rejection of democracy among their voters. To them, our system of governance and its institutions are anathema.

So let’s call them what they’d become, until, maybe, around midnight Wednesday: the party of treason, led by a traitor to the Constitution, who, throughout his entire “presidency,” fomented the violence that occurred during a process that’s always been a testament to America’s tradition of peaceful transfer of presidential power.

The list of those responsible for that seditious despoiling is long, starting and ending with Trump, who’d brutally cleared peaceful, non-violent protestors so he could wave a Bible as if he knows what’s in it, but did less than nothing on Wednesday. Who, after his phalanx of phools responded to his incitement earlier that morning, unconvincingly called for “peace,” then canceled the call by repeating his malignancy about stolen elections and evil people, announcing his “love” for those defiling “special people.”

The list includes Pence, McConnell, Graham. Cruz and fist-raising Hawley. Rightwing media ogres like Hannity, Limbaugh, Carlson, Ingraham, who profit from making their listeners angry and stupid, the success of which we’ve just witnessed. Every complicit Republican who, save but one, either perpetuated Trump’s lies and malfeasance or cowardly ignored them, who forsook their duty during impeachment, who feared telling the truth to their voters. 

Buffoonish Rudy Giuliani, who called for “trial by combat” right before the Capitol was stormed by rioters seemingly confident police wouldn’t stop them or, because they’re white, do them harm. (Some cops, who should be fired, took selfies with the rioters.)

Every brainwashed Trumpist who repeats his lies, refusing, as taught, to become informed. Who swallowed Trump’s mendacity about BLM but cheer rightwing terrorists whose goal – unlike BLM’s – is violence. Who continued to follow him, despite – or maybe because of – his perpetual lying.

How worse than ironic, seeing Trump’s terrorists vandalizing the Capitol, waving the American flag while figuratively burning it; raising Trump and Confederate flags, confirming their rejection of the Constitution. Every one of those delusional subversives, whose hate for America they consider, in their poisoned minds, love, should be arrested, tried, and deported. To a country whose leaders think like they do: North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Russia. Countries that watch Trump and his traitors attacking America from within and cheer.

On January 6, 2021, the legacy of Trump’s “presidency” and of the sad fall of the Republican Party that led to it, was sealed. The culmination of cultivated ignorance by Republican leaders, at least since Newt Gingrich, it’s the whirlwind they reaped, their fleas from lying down with dogs. MAGA, indeed.

It’s Trumpists’ legacy, too; including those who write to me, slavishly repeating his lies. Even more than Trump, they shame America. And themselves. Maybe Trump’s insurrection will awaken enough Republicans to the damage they’ve facilitated, helping to assure someone like him will never again sit behind the Resolute Desk.

In Congress Wednesday night, after Trump disgraced himself and our nation, it almost seemed like it might. Sudden sententiousness, after years of ignoring the obvious.

Infectious Insanity

 

It wasn’t Einstein who said, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." It was mystery novelist Rita Mae Brown. You can look it up. I have, many times. Keeps coming up different. 

Here’s a more timely definition: “Insanity is observing Trump’s behavior and insisting he’s sane.” The politically and clinically insane may disagree, but claiming he won by a landslide, that he has indisputable proof while producing none -- what else is there to call it? He’s been twentyfifthamendable for months. Even for Trump, to whose daily dose of dishonesty we’ve become dulled, this is unraveling incoherence. One needn’t be an Einstein or a novelist.

If only the Supreme Court had agreed to hear his sixtieth losing argument, Trump says, he could have presented the evidence. Really? He couldn’t send his lawyer-like hybrid, Rudney Powliani, back to Four Seasons Landscaping to lay it out, ream by convincing ream, solid as a concrete birdbath? No court order prevents it. Like the “amazing” things his “investigators” found in “Hawaii,” where did it go? Insistence is insanity. His and his cultists’.

Joe Biden won by nearly eight million votes. Confirming Trump’s “landslide,” which he claims both in ballots and the Electoral College, then, would require proving twice as many votes were fraudulent (disallow Biden’s margin and they’d only be tied). Did Trump lose the data in a sand trap?

Like Covid-19, Trump’s madness is infectious, and he’s a superspreader of both. Witness Congress’ dumbest lawmaker, Louie Gohmert: along with several similarly blighted members of the deep-end state, he filed a lawsuit against ski-vacationing-during-Covid’s-deadliest-month, absent-coronavirus-task-force-leader, Mike Pence, in the court of a Trump-appointed federal judge. It demands a ruling that Pence has the authority to reject all non-Trump votes when Congress meets on January 6th to certify the election. It further demands that the judge orders Pence to do so.

Incredible. Do even the most Foxified Trumpists think, after enduring months of annoying campaign ads, predicting a lib-owning, God-produced landslide, wearing “F… Your Feelings” t-shirts, that that’s how it should work? That, in America, a semi-elected vice-president – overruling voters -- can bend the electoral outcome to whatever he/she wants? Louie does, and he keeps getting reelected. By exceptional American inmates of the asylum. 

To recognize insanity, sanity is required. Which explains why so many Trumpists, infected beyond their ability to recognize it, accept and parrot his lies. How many times, for example, have we heard them declaim Trump’s serially-debunked confabulation that there were two-hundred-thousand more votes cast in Pennsylvania than there are registered voters? (In fact, there were fraudulent votes in Pennsylvania. Three. For Trump. Two from the deceased, one from a guy who tried to vote twice. That’s it. That’s all.) 

If his election delusions were the only manifestations of Trump’s tangled wiring, perhaps we’d only be amused, not concerned. But there’s more. Threatening retribution like a cornered mob boss, raving as if from a padded cell, he’s seeing enemies everywhere. Not the usual Democratic and journalistic suspects, either: Republican Senators, Governors, and Secretaries of State. Fox “news.” Pompeo, Meadows, Thune. White House Counsel Cipollone. Even shameless groveler and looming defendant, Mike Pence. 

Psychopathically unable to accept his loss, Trump’s willing to prevent it by destroying faith in elections with his lies. Checked out of the fight against the virus, tweet-golfing, he’s offered no leadership to repair his mismanaged vaccine distribution. He called the economic relief package, negotiated by his own people, “a disgrace,” promising a veto for containing things he’d previously demanded. Uncaring about the impact on Americans, he changed his mind only when persuaded it could affect the outcome of Georgia’s senatorial runoff, about which he seems to care only marginally more. 

Self-proclaimed greatest-ever supporter of our troops, Trump vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act; primarily, it can be presumed, because it clamps down on foreign and domestic shell corporations of which he and his family have made frequent tax-evading and other Stormy use.

Long before it happened, Trump’s cruel deterioration was predicted by those who know him best -- his ghost-writer, his bag-man, his niece, among others. Plus millions of non-Foxified Americans. With almost three weeks left for vengeance, he’s creating as much damage to as many people as possible, including calling for a “wild” uprising on January 6. Pitiful Ted Cruz and ambitious Josh Hawley just announced their intent to fuel the fire. Trump’s idolatrous cult is preparing to comply. Insanity begets insanity. 

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I'm Hardly A Poet, And This Here Will Show It

 

Rather than writing my usual tome,

I’ll end twenty-twen with a post-Christmas poem.

There’s no point pretending it’s been a good year,

As several things became perfectly clear: 

No longer a nation that’s in it together, 

We won’t be till Trumpists can face up to whether,

They’ll re-value truth and can end their reliance,

On people who’ve told them that such things as science, 

Are kidnapping, cannibal, liberals’ lies.

So it’s perfectly fine to go out for supplies,

With a face that’s defiantly, proudly unmasked.

For Americans’ “freedom” means not being asked,

To consider your neighbors and act within reason,

Not now and not ever, not even this season,

In which we’re reminded that sacrifice still,

Is a virtue worth holding. But few of them will.

To those who are willing to follow the rules,

We’re glad you consider masks worthwhile tools.

But unlike that reindeer’s whose schnozz they say glows, 

Your mask won’t do harm if it covers your nose.

And maybe those saying they’ll not take the vax,

Will go to a care place and help fill the sacks,

That hold victims’ bodies. So sure they’d be fine,

They could sub in for someone out on the front line.

But not just a virus has cleaved the divide;

It’s the concept of letting the people decide,

Who their leaders will be by a time-honored vote,

Then accepting results, not some schemes so remote,

That believing them marks one impossibly dim,

Too easily hoodwinked by flam and by flim.

To claim your vote somehow the Democrats stole,

Just doesn’t hold water, because of a hole,

The size of a Trump-approved garish gold roof:

Despite all their claims they’ve presented no proof.

The reason, of course – and for some it’s too quaint:

Any documentation there simply just ain’t.

Attacking elections for several weeks past,

It’s obvious Trump saved his worst for the last.

He’s gone on TV, he’s petitioned the court,

To ridiculous Rudy he has had to resort.

When judges rejected his lying deceit,

His diehards made clear they would never retreat;

Which bodes very poorly for us who consider,

Our laws more compelling than Trump’s latest Twitter.

To believe in our system you must be all in,

And accept that your candidates won’t always win. 

Patriotism can’t be only partial.

Presidents who lose and consider law martial,

Discredit their party and everyone who,

Thinks it’s what any poor loser should do.

This calls to mind something we’ve known for too long:

We no more agree on what’s right and what’s wrong. 

Trump’s lies just don’t matter, nor how much he steals; 

Turns donors to suckers whose silence reveals,

Preferring a despot is now what prevails,

In Trumpists, and that’s how democracy fails.

For proof, look to Congress, where plans are in place,

To attempt overturning results of the race.

There’s astoundingly more but we hardly have time,

To list all corruption in one meager rhyme.

Did anyone think we’d be witnessing such a,

“President” clearly beholden to Russia?

Who, with his enablers, have all turned their backs,

On Putin’s malicious and dangerous hacks,

Which accessed our secrets including our nukes.

But Trump has just said it’s a meaningless fluke.

So now it is more than a little suspicious,

That Trump will abscond with his ill-gotten riches,

And head back to Putin whom he can rely on,

To sell him a dacha and promised asylum.

If it means he escapes from the justice he’s due,

We’d accept it because it would also be true,

That enablers might finally be forced to agreeing,

Trump’s crookedness always was there for the seeing.

Like the power of pardon, right there on the books, 

By which he just freed more despicable crooks, 

Than any exec who had gone on before: 

Committers of murder and pols by the score.

To the occasion Trump’s cultists will never arise.

Let’s hope that some others will open their eyes,

To the damage his four years have already done,

And be glad it was Biden who finally won.

Since, like Billy Barr, he’s incurred Donald’s wrath,

By walking in brief on a truth-telling path,

Perhaps after Trump, Mitch will turn back the clock,

To when he and his senate did more than just block.

So now it is time, with no need for Zoom meetings,

To wish Merry Christmas and warm brumal greetings.

The year ends with hope that if rightists pitch in,

We can remake America great once again. 

Notwithstanding how badly Trump’s tenure has sucked,

It looks like we might not be totally … out of options. 

This Is Who They Are

 

Featured guest at last week’s pro-Trump, “Stop the Steal,” Proud Boils rally in D.C., Reich-wing radio hero Alex Jones had this to say: “We will never back down to the satanic pedophile globalist new world order and their walking-dead reanimated corpse Joe Biden. And we will never recognize him. So I don’t know who’s going to the White House in 38 days, but I sure know this: Joe Biden is a globalist, and Joe Biden will be removed one way or another.”

“One way or another.” Subtle as an NDA for a prostitute. And the armed and strutting delusionists cheered. After hearing much the same from Mike “I beg your pardon” Flynn, Trump’s first-born National Security Adviser and current Qanon acolyte (only the best people), the engorged deplorables roved through D.C., burning BLM flags and other displays from Black churches. “Very fine people,” Trump once called them. “Stand back and stand by,” he’d signaled. For this moment, evidently.

It’d be wrong to suggest that everyone who buys into or remains silent about Trump’s flagrant election-fraud mendacity approves of those dishonorable, democracy-hating discards. But their acquiescence empowers and allows what’s left of the Republican Party to become synonymous with them. And if acquiescence is empowering, what of the majority of House Republicans, including Kevin “no relation but you’d never know it” McCarthy, who signed onto Texas A.G. Paxton’s seditious attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election? They may as well have been wearing “Make America Colonial Again” hats.

Under investigation for various crimes, Paxton justified his pardon-pandering performance, thus: “[there] are legitimately good constitutional arguments that don't depend on actually proving every little instance of fraud." Right. “Every little instance.” No need to prove it. Say it enough, and they’ll believe. In fact, sixty-some lawsuits later, not a single instance has been proved. Irrelevant. (Okay, there was one: a Republican submitted a ballot from his dead mother.)

Undead lies notwithstanding, Biden’s win is now official. Not because of the Electoral College, mind you, but because Moscow Mitch McConnell, who congratulated Trump one day after the 2016 election but waited six weeks this time around, finally did so for President-Elect Biden, incurring Trump’s wrath. Mitch waited for Vladimir Putin, whose man in Washington lost, but who’s happy, at least, that Trump “burned the US” on his way out. 

Swindled Trumpists continue plying him with millions upon millions for his personal use. And because it’s who he is and what he does, he’s keeping the money he’s “raising” for the Georgia runoff, too. Grifters gotta grift. Suckers gotta suck. 

History reminds us that when Trump lost the popular vote by three million in 2016, he empaneled a commission, headed by world-class vote-suppressor Chris Kobach, to prove there were that many fraudulent votes. Many months and much money later, they found nothing. And we recall how, during the impeachment, Republicans’ mantra was “Let the voters decide in November.” Had too much faith in their ability to suppress opposition voters, evidently, or to carry out their own fraud. In any case, it should be obvious by now that voter fraud, massive enough to turn an election, no longer exists in the US, if it ever did. Even Bill “I’ll sign it, don’t fire me” Barr said so. 

Seeing how uninformed the average American is about how our government works, or about science, or how to separate fact from fiction, one may wonder what is the level of such ignorance at which an open society fails. Put another way, what’s the minimum number of smart people required to keep it afloat? And since it’s immigrant kids who seem to be winning the prizes lately, how much less likely does Trumpic xenophobia make it?

The flipside is this: how many of the aforementioned, hate-infused, reality-denying marauders does it take to destroy a democracy? They get the headlines, but how many are there, really? Not enough, surely, to threaten a literal coup. But between them and the millions who still believe the election was stolen, the system is on the brink. Absent trust in the process, there is no process. Evidently, Trump and his enablers and excusers believe eliminating that trust is in their personal interest. Robbing us of a viable future, though, it’s in the interest of no one else.

Soon we’ll learn if it’s possible to reestablish trust and, more critically, whether the Republican Party will divest itself of anti-democratic, reality-rejecting Trumpism and return to the table where they once belonged. So far, it’s not looking good.

They've Gone Coup-Coup

Science confirms consistent neurophysiological and psychological differences between conservatives and liberals. How they react to threats. Their reliance on the observable and their response to presented facts. Evolutionary biologists have theories, but it’s intuitive that, in addition to rationalists, primitive societies benefitted from people who don’t need no damn proof to react to perceived threats. Noises. Shadows. Gut feelings. It could avoid becoming a meal.

Who knows why such brains remain in circulation? Individuals are safer now. More often than not, there’s time to think, evaluate. Threats from saber-tooth tigers (or, if you believe certain preachers, dinosaurs) are uncommon. Yet, having out-survived their benefit to society, such paranoid, no-need-for-facts people persist. Mysteriously, these evolutionary throwbacks appear to reside mostly in today’s retro-exceptional United States, and only in one political party.

A few days ago, reporters asked every Republican member of Congress who won the election. Eighty-eight-percent of them refused to say. Two declared it was Trump. (One of them, Rep. Gosar of AZ, is so awful his own family urged voters to reject him.) Of 251, only 27 were willing to say it was Joe Biden; Putin-adjacent Trump demanded their names. For what purpose, one wonders. Met with what level of Republican silence? A clue: Moscow Mitch just quashed a motion authorizing the inaugural committee to acknowledge it’ll be Biden and Harris.

Except for being indescribably dangerous, it’d be hilarious. Gaseous Rudy. Long-time Trump buddy and undeserving commutee, Roger Stone, claiming North Korea brought boatloads of fake ballots into the US via harbors in Maine. Around the Horn? Through the Canal? Seems logical. Same with believing votes for Biden were switched or faked, but not for down-ballot Democrats. McConnell, Graham, and Collins won. End of conspiracy.

“I’ve probably worked harder in the last three weeks than I ever have in my life,” whined Trump at a recent anti-democracy rally. He was referring to trying to nullify his resounding defeat, not to fighting the resurgent virus. “Working harder than ever.” Some jokes write themselves.

But it’s not funny, is it? A mob of armed Trumpists surrounded the home of Michigan’s Secretary of State, shouting threats and obscenities while she was inside, decorating for Christmas with her four-year-old son. “Stop the steal,” they chanted, convinced by … what? Zero evidence. Multiple recounts, investigations, fifty rejected lawsuits including, thankfully, without dissent, by the Supreme Court. Having confirmed their elections were secure, officials are fearing for their lives. But Trump says it, they believe it, that settles it. His second coming was an article of faith. The analogy is obvious.

It’s like the approaching, not-for-eight-hundred-years convergence of Saturn and Neptune, but perverse: years in the making, “conservative” denialism now converges both upon democracy and the lives of many thousands more from the virus. Is this what Gingrich and similars had in mind when they chose endumbification as their path to permanence?

Our founders feared it: millions of rabid, mis-educated Americans, convinced of fraud despite mountains of bipartisan refutation. Certain enough to destroy the Republic over it. Exhorting others to die for a lie (in our history, there’s precedent). Literally. 

For everyone’s sake, even delusional Trumpists, whose future is equally threatened whether they recognize it or not, this must stop. After decades in the euphoric fog of fiction mainlined from rightwing media pushers, to which millions have now, as intended, become addicted, can it? From armed, bulging-vein threats, to states suing each other, to legislators willing to disenfranchise their own citizens, this spectacle of sedition was a long time coming. It feels too late to put the genie back in the toothpaste. 

Plus, Trump-inspired, demented animus is a money-maker. Their malicious mendacity has made Hannity, Carlson, Limbaugh, et. al., very rich. From his compliant cultists, Trump is raking in millions. Republican leaders who remain cravenly silent are complicit in what amounts to a coup against constitutional governance. They’re already doing everything they can to delegitimize Biden’s presidency and his efforts to restore comity. Since the election, Trumpist Republicans’ disdain for democracy is undisguised. And incompatible with functioning government. Ahead of their January runoff, Georgian leaders are further reducing polling places in minority precincts.

With their terror campaign against honest state officials and continued efforts to reverse the election, Trumpublicans threaten the rule of law far more than a few misguided equality demonstrators breaking windows. Anti-democracy, anti-masks, and a poisonous, autocratic “president.” That’s “conservatism” today.

Maybe sanity will return if enough actual conservatives, seeing their party’s descent into insurrectionist lunacy, say “enough.” And there’s the problem: they’ve already had plenty of time.

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Fraud. It's Everywhere, I Tell You!

So much has befallen us during a brief columnar break, it’s hard to choose where to resume. But let’s go with Trump, about whose disregard for and danger to our country there’s no longer doubt.

Maybe he believes his own lie that, but for a massive, super-coordinated plot, involving both parties in several states, undetectably faked ballots, highly selective voting machines, and secrets kept by thousands of people, he won the election. Fraud so carefully constructed that its very invisibility, repeated denial by Republican election officials and now, even Attorney Generally-compliant Barr, PROVES its existence.

Once and always the conman, Trump has raised over $170 million by flooding gullible supporters with pleas to help “save” the election, set up so he can use most of it however he wants. Delusion or deception, out more he rants, in more he rakes.

Millions of planted, nurtured, and harvested Republicans believe. Maybe even Rudy, whose embarrassing act has been serially thrown out of court, even by Trump-appointed federal judges. How laughable must his arguments be for that to happen? 

So, other than furthering the grift with a worrisomely demented forty-six-minute video tirade (“it’s statistically impossible I lost”), what’s Trump doing, amidst the pandemic’s brutal resurgence? Taking charge, honoring his duty of office, putting aside wounded ego for the sake of America? Golfing. Tweeting. Golfing. Lying. And golfing. His “presidency” was always pretense, holding rallies, tweeting, and watching TV, dumping responsibility on others. Taking credit, never blame. Now he’s not even pretending to care.

Above all, history will remember Trump for his deeply destructive, unwell behavior since becoming a loser. Wounded, possibly hallucinating fraud in the absence of evidence, in language so inflammatory it endangers lives, he appears ever more detached from reality, as predicted by his niece, his ghost-writer, and his former bagman.

Yet Congressional Republicans say nothing, as increasingly vicious death threats to truth-tellers, including from Trump’s own lawyer, force recipients to hire bodyguards. This disgrace to America is entirely on Trump.   

Encouraging state legislators to overrule the will of their voters; threatening governors who certified elections; the unwillingness of his party to speak out: it’s a knife to the heart of the Republic without precedent. Long after Trump returns to kicking golf balls back onto fairways, the damage will remain, as his country-forsaking party continues twisting the blade.

Likewise, court-packing Mitch McConnell’s Supreme Court majority. In striking down New York’s restrictions on gatherings, they pushed the dagger to the hilt, spinning the First Amendment upside down. Covering all large groups, those restrictions in no way singled-out religion. SCOTUS, though, conferred special status. Like Trump, Church/state separation is on its way out.

In their silence, Republicans show they need Joe Biden’s election to be considered illegitimate, lest he awaken their voters to the damage they and Trump have caused when he addresses it with much-needed seriousness. When competent leadership and a well-intentioned Congress are more vital than any time since the Great Depression, Republicans are AWOL. Even here, where a trounced candidate is similarly Culpable in dismissing results of a fair election. 

Previewing a future stump-speech, shape-shifting Marco Rubio called President-elect Biden “elitist” for bringing educated, qualified, experienced people into government. It’s a time-tested call to the chronically mystified. Future of the Republican Party, other presidential timberlings Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley have chimed in, too, and worse. 

If Trump’s “presidency” is a stain on America that could conceivably fade, the devolution of his party, absent total tearing-down and rebuilding, is permanent. This post-election period has confirmed their disdain for democracy. Party to a minority of our population, it’s in their interest to discredit voting, as they resume what began with the swearing-in of President Barack Obama: obstructing, complaining, offering nothing, no matter the harm. 

Of which Trump’s creating as much as he can on his way out, especially to the environment. And his pardon of conspiracy-mad Michael Flynn, who subsequently called for a military junta, is an act Mr. Barr previously agreed would constitute obstruction of justice. 

Then, for those who dismiss Trump’s Putin-cahootin’, there’s precipitously ending the “Open Skies” treaty to explain. No longer can the US overfly Russia to observe, among other things, troop movements against neighbors. Making sure, he’s having the specially-equipped planes destroyed. And he’s threatening to veto the defense budget, which includes actions against international money-laundering, of which Putin, Russian oligarchs and, allegedly, he have partaken for years.

Post-election Trump is like the burglar who defecates on the bed after stealing a family’s treasures. Which is tricky while wearing a straitjacket. 

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