Friday Funky Fee Fee Reads: Cry Baby Cry!

Portrait of Marcelle Roulin December 1888 by Vincent van Gogh –

Good Day Sky Dancers!

This is the kind’ve headline I’ve been waiting to read!  From Raw Story: ” ‘The president is humiliated’ and doesn’t want to be seen in public: CNN’s John Harwood.”   Who’s the snow flake now?

CNN White House correspondent John Harwood on Friday said that President Donald Trump has not spoken in public for the past eight days because he’s simply too embarrassed about his defeat at the hands of President-elect Joe Biden.

While talking with CNN host Jim Sciutto, Harwood explained why the president has completely disappeared from the public eye even though the novel coronavirus pandemic has been setting records for infections and hospitalizations over the last week.

“The president is humiliated by the outcome,” Harwood explained. “He understands that he has lost the election, but he does not want to face that music publicly, so he’s been hiding out in the White House, hasn’t been talking before cameras as he typically does every day for a week now.”

Harwood also said that the president is desperately trying to maintain some kind of relevance in the public eye, which is why he’s trying to convince his supporters that the election was stolen from him.

“He’s throwing up these bogus lawsuits which aren’t going anywhere, which are getting tossed out of court as fast as he files them to try to string this out,” he said. “He’s fundraising for his political action committee as well as his legal fund, and he’s trying to create… a sense of grievance going forward so he will have something to rally his supporters around.”

Helene de Septeuil
Mary Cassatt, 1889

We always knew it was around white grievance.  But what about people dying and suffering from the pandemic?  How about all those understaffed and overworked healthcare providers?  What about all the children separated and orphaned by this President at the border? Then, there’s all that pandemic aid to people and businesses about to expire?  Is any one home in the Republican party to work on that?

This is exactly what former President Obama says about this situation via Politico “‘There’s damage to this’: Obama slams GOP for lining up behind Trump’s fraud claims. The president’s campaign has continued to mount legal challenges in several states aimed at reversing the election’s outcome.”  Even when Trump does nothing, he does harm to the country.

Former President Barack Obama said in a new interview that it “has been disappointing” to see congressional Republicans remain supportive of President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and his refusal to concede the 2020 White House race to President-elect Joe Biden.

“There’s damage to this,” Obama said in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” that is set to air in full this weekend. “Because what happens is that the peaceful transfer of power — the notion that any of us who attain an elected office, whether it’s dog catcher or president, are servants of the people, it’s a temporary job, we’re not above the rules, we’re not above the law — that’s the essence of our democracy.”

Obama also described the fraud allegations leveled by GOP lawmakers as disingenuous, saying that “they obviously didn’t think there was any fraud going on, because they didn’t say anything about it for the first two days” after Election Day, when the results in some key swing states were still unsettled. The election ultimately saw Democrats lose seats in the House of Representatives and underperform in competitive Senate races across the country, even as Biden clinched the presidency.

Still, Trump’s campaign has continued to mount legal challenges in several states aimed at reversing the election’s outcome, and congressional Republicans have broadly endorsed those efforts. Only a handful of Senate Republicans have acknowledged Biden as president-elect, although a growing number of top GOP senators have begun calling for Biden to receive intelligence briefings as part of the transition process the White House is working to slow.

More irregular, selfish stuff from the guy who lost while the world and the country danced and celebrated in the streets. What on earth will the kids reading history books a hundred years make of this?

Susan Comforting the Baby (no.1)
Mary Cassatt
c.1881

Meanwhile, the fallout continues.  This horrifying news comes via WAPO : “More than 130 Secret Service officers are said to be infected with coronavirus or quarantining in wake of Trump’s campaign travel”,

More than 130 Secret Service officers who help protect the White House and the president when he travels have recently been ordered to isolate or quarantine because they tested positive for the coronavirus or had close contact with infected co-workers, according to three people familiar with agency staffing.

The spread of the coronavirus — which has sidelined roughly 10 percent of the agency’s core security team — is believed to be partly linked to a series of campaign rallies that President Trump held in the weeks before the Nov. 3 election, according to the people, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the situation.

The outbreak comes as coronavirus cases have been rapidly rising across the nation, with more than 152,000 new cases reported Thursday.

El niño del pichón (1901), de Pablo Picasso

Alex Parene of The New Republic calls Trump’s current behavior–and those of fellow Republicans–a Coup.   “A Coup Is a Coup, It’s still an illegitimate power grab, even if Republican operatives are only doing it to protect Trump’s fragile ego.”

“They all know he lost,” the former Republican strategist Tim Miller said of other Republicans, “and they are lying about it to protect his little feelings.”

The knowledge that Trump lost apparently extends to the White House, and even the president himself, according to The Wall Street Journal. “Trump understands that the fight isn’t winnable,” the paper wrote, but its source described the president’s “feelings” as “let me have this fight.”

Before the election, Trump seems to have expected the same level of unflinching support from the institutions of the conservative movement that George W. Bush received in 2000, with the entire conservative media and legal apparatuses working to ensure that the ballot box would be no obstacle to his reelection. Instead, he ended up with a legal team led by a man most recently in the news for a creepy appearance in the sequel to Borat. And Rupert Murdoch—if we can guess his intentions through the actions of Fox News—has seemingly cut bait, trying to ease his audience into accepting that Trump has lost the election.

But, apparently believing it would be too cruel to cut Trump off from his institutional support base completely, conservatives decided to arrange for him a sort of Make-a-Wish Foundation version of Bush v. Gore. Before he is out of his misery, everyone will expend a lot of energy creating the appearance of challenging the results of the election in order to appease the president.

One issue arising from that scheme is that creating the appearance of challenging the results of the election in order to appease the president requires actually challenging the results of the election, in real life. The Trump campaign has filed numerous actual lawsuits in actual courts, and it is still weighing, reportedly, an insane strategy of suing to delay vote certification in certain states in the hopes that Republican state lawmakers decide to try appointing pro-Trump electors. As Ford wrote, such schemes are unlikely to work. But even if the conservative operatives behind these efforts are only going through the motions of seizing power, without any real expectation of success, they are still trying, however feebly, to seize power.

Felix Schlesinger, The New Dress,

Susan Glasser at The New Yorker explores this further: “Is This a Coup, or Just Another Trump Con? A post-election report from Minsk-on-the-Potomac.”  

At times, during this unnerving week in America’s capital, it has felt as though we were watching events unfold in Minsk or some other dictator stronghold where elections are not stolen the day votes are cast but in the weeks afterward, as the defeated President holes up in his palace, defying reality and increasingly urgent crowds in the streets. Here in Minsk-on-the-Potomac, Trump has been perpetrating the Big Lie, claiming the election was stolen from him and apparently persuading millions of Americans to go along with this evidence-free fantasy. Biden, so far, has urged calm. It’s an “embarrassment,” he told reporters Tuesday in Wilmington, Delaware, where he continued to plan his transition, took congratulatory phone calls from world leaders, and appointed a White House chief of staff. The official line from Biden has been clear and simple: concession or no concession, Trump will have to leave office at noon on January 20th, and that is that.

But is it? That we are reduced to even asking this question is a defeat for the United States and a win not only for Trump but for all the Trumpists to come, who will forever have the example of a President of the United States flouting the most basic principle of American democracy: accepting the election results and the consequences that come with them.

Ah, yes!  Those Consequences!

But, less we lose hope The NYT reminds us: “As Soon as Trump Leaves Office, He Faces Greater Risk of Prosecution. The president is more vulnerable than ever to an investigation into his business practices and taxes.”

President Trump lost more than an election last week. When he leaves the White House in January, he will also lose the constitutional protection from prosecution afforded to a sitting president.

After Jan. 20, Mr. Trump, who has refused to concede and is fighting to hold onto his office, will be more vulnerable than ever to a pending grand jury investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into the president’s family business and its practices, as well as his taxes.

The two-year inquiry, the only known active criminal investigation of Mr. Trump, has been stalled since last fall, when the president sued to block a subpoena for his tax returns and other records, a bitter dispute that for the second time is before the U.S. Supreme Court. A ruling is expected soon.

Mr. Trump has contended that the investigation by the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat, is a politically motivated fishing expedition. But if the Supreme Court rules that Mr. Vance is entitled to the records, and he uncovers possible crimes, Mr. Trump could face a reckoning with law enforcement — further inflaming political tensions and raising the startling specter of a criminal conviction, or even prison, for a former president.

But then, Trump is just the least of our worries. We have a Congresswoman that things the QAnon thing is real even though it’s short life appears to be over as a conspiracy. And then there’s this Congressman who thinks we fought World War 2 to defeat socialsim.

But worse than any of these congress critters is this terrible Judge with a Life time appointment to SCOTUS. This is from Mark Joseph Stern writing for Slate “Sam Alito Delivers Grievance-Laden, Ultrapartisan Speech to the Federalist Society. The justice railed against COVID restrictions, same-sex marriage, abortion, and the alleged persecution of conservatives.”  The Republican party is still knee deep in demonstrably  against the democratic and secular values that this country was founded about.  Plus, they hate people that don’t look or act like them even if they have no reason to participate or be a voyeur to it.

These comments revealed early on that Alito would not be abiding by the usual ethics rules, which require judges to remain impartial and avoid any appearance of bias. The rest of his speech served as a burn book for many cases he has participated in, particularly those in which he dissented. Remarkably, Alito did not just grouse about the outcome of certain cases, but the political context of those decisions, and the broader cultural and political forces behind them. Although the justice accused several Democratic senators of being unprofessional, he himself defied the basic principles of judicial conduct.

For instance, the justice criticized state governors who’ve issued strict lockdown orders in response to COVID-19, referring to specific cases that came before the court. Alito said these “sweeping” and “previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty” have served as a “constitutional stress test,” with ominous results. The government’s response to COVID-19, Alito continued, has “highlighted disturbing trends that were already present before the virus struck.” He complained about lawmaking by an “elite group of appointed experts,” citing not just COVID rules but the entire regulatory framework of the federal government.

Alito also warned of a broader, ongoing assault on religious liberty. “In certain corners,” he alleged, “religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored right.” Alito condemned the Obama administration’s “ protracted campaign” and “unrelenting attack” against the Little Sisters of the Poor, which refused to submit a form to the federal government opting out of the contraceptive mandate. The group alleged that submitting this notice burdened its religious exercise. Alito also disparaged Washington state for requiring pharmacies to provide emergency contraception—which, he claimed, “destroys an embryo after fertilization.” (That is false.) Finally, Alito rebuked Colorado for attempting to compel Jack Phillips to bake a cake for a same-sex couple.* He noted that the couple was given a free cake and supported by “celebrity chefs.”

It would be nice to think we could be less watchful given Trump’s exist from the world stage and back on to the stage of fools. The problem is that he left a lot of fools there making decisions that could wreck our lives including the ones caught up in conspiracy theories dating way way back.  The old Roman empire event a Roman Religion and now the Republicans want the American Empire to embrace the one they made out of thin air too.

We’re not quit ready to run any victory laps down here in New Orleans.  We’re making calls in to Georgia now try to ensure Mitch McConnell’s future damage will be limited.  Down here in the South you learn the losers never admit they lost and never quit.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?