So, I’m watching Joe Biden on Nicole Wallace’s show and I start to think about the Democratic Primary and all it’s ramifications. The first thing that strikes me is that I really like all the candidates. I think all of them can beat Trump if for no other reason than Trump keeps trying to cut his own throat. But then I look at the field and start to worry about the fact that three of the leading candidates are almost 80 and Bernie has had a recent heart attack. Who the hell elects an 80 year-old person to a job that wears out 50 year-olds? The Presidency, except for the way Trump does it, is a killer job, turning young men’s hair white in the first four years. It’s not a job for old guys. I can attest to that as I’m a few years older than the guys fighting it out for the job and I can see how I have slowed down.
That said, they are all formidable guys. Sure each has one or more faults and problems but so does everyone. In my memory, there has never been a perfect candidate for the Presidency. Hillary came the closest having been First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State and look how she did, even against a loser like Trump.
The most annoying thing about the primaries so far, is the media’s stupid habit of telling us how things are going, and from a sample, how they will go. Sure, I know they need stories but there is more news happening right now than I can ever remember happening at any time in history. If these lazy slugs can’t find legitimate story material in this blizzard of political happenings they should fold their tents and go back to writing poetry.
So far the Dems have decided about 50 delegates out of 1991 that one needs to get the nomination. So practically speaking, nothing has happened yet. Given that, how the hell can they start writing people off? Especially people like Joe Biden who was the leading player in the game barely a couple of weeks ago. I will state unequivocally as of this moment that I have no idea who is going to win this race and anyone who tells you different has been studying at the knee of Donald Trump.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings about various candidates or that I don’t know who I would like to see win. But that’s a whole different story. It still drives me nuts, even when I hear someone I respect, like John Heilman, talk about who is already gone. There is way too much track to lay for any talk like that to be even close to valid.
With three races out of the way and a fourth at the underway, Bernie seems to have a fairly good lead but that means nothing, especially because it’s Bernie. I say that because Bernie has some serious limitations that the others don’t. Forget about the fact that he calls himself a Democratic Socialist, or that his followers are sometimes more Trumpian than those of the Fat Liar in the White House. The real problem is, in leading the races in the three states already out of the way, Bernie has accumulated only a little more than 25% of the votes cast. The rest of the crowd has accumulated the remaining 75% of the votes, but because there are so many of them they have split them up so they don’t really mean anything.
What that tells us is that Bernie, being the only really far left candidate and getting all the votes that lean that way, has a serious ceiling of somewhere below 30% of the votes available. When other candidates either run out of money or finally realize that they will not be the chosen one, where will their votes go? Not to the guy whose programs are too far let, even for a democrat.
They could all prove me correct right now by sitting down in a meeting and deciding who has the best shot at both beating Trump, and living long enough to create serious change in the country. That however, would be too much like old school politics and this bunch is way too PC for anything like that,
My best guess is that things will hold tight until after Super Tuesday at which time about 30% of the total votes will have been cast and maybe some of the trailing candidates will have seen the light. If at that point Bernie looks like he might get the 1991 delegates he would need to win, maybe the fear of God will take hold and they will be able to pick one of them to go head to head with Bernie. If that happens, it would appear that whoever emerges will be the eventual winner, even if the whole thing goes to convention.
If they ever get to that point maybe the Democrats can get it together long enough to show what a hideously vile, grossly incompetent and criminally degenerate, piece of crap Donald Trump really is. It would be a far more substantial use of time than anything else they can do now.
*****
Donald Ayer, Deputy Attorney General under George Bush has authored a piece for the Atlantic, which is the most outspoken accusation against Bill Barr yet written. At the same time a letter has been released, signed by more than 2500 former justice department officials, that calls for Barr to resign because of a long list of actions and beliefs that make him categorically unfit for office.
This may be the broadest indictment of a President and his AG in my lifetime We all know that two AGs went to jail because of Watergate but that was for specific crimes attached to that criminal event and its attempted cover-up. This is an indictment of Barr as an individual for general activities damaging to the entire legal system and it’s accompanied by a hard call for him to resign because of his Un-American beliefs.
*****
It’s time for Trump to stop lying about our economy. It isn’t the best in the history of the nation; it isn’t even close, not even by the untruthful criteria used by Retrunmplicans to describe it.
The National Recovery Act was instituted by Barak Obama eleven years ago. Since it was instituted our GDP has been on a steady incline. That incline has flattened out the last three years since Trump took office. Trump keeps claiming his economy is the strongest in history. That’s a lie too. Out of the last ten presidencies, six have had better economies than Trump’s. He claims he has had the best economy ever but that’s only true if you discount 60% of the last ten presidents. Otherwise he’s a dismal loser.
******
It was looking like a good month for Donald Trump; he beat the guilty plea in his impeachment, the Democrats were engaged in a street fight over who was going to run against him and an economy that he was always bragging about but at which you couldn’t look to closely and maintained the big lie that said economy was good for the people who had voted for him. Then the shit hit the fan.
A little something that the Chinese were trying to keep under wraps managed to sneak past their borders and get out into the world. Nothing panics people like plague and as soon as the Coronavirus hit the headlines the world flipped over onto its back and started wailing. The first to panic, as they generally are, were the pampered frat boys who trade on the stock market. So in six days the market, which was going through the roof, reversed itself and lost 10% of its total value.
Little eruptions like this make some of us who are invested in the market; think for a moment that maybe we should check with our brokers. But for a clown like Donald Trump, who has sold his whole presidency on the myth that the economy is fabulous, it was like getting run over by a loaded garbage truck.
So what did he do? He immediately took charge of the entire virus problem, despite the fact that he knew nothing about viruses, or plagues, or medical preparedness or anything else involved. Of course in the process of wallowing in his complete ignorance, and just to prove what a dolt he really is, he called a press conference. In the course of that press conference he informed us that the virus would be gone by April because that’s when the weather changes. He also told us that the virus was completely under control and sloughed off any idea that it might become a danger to anyone in the US. Of course that concept had already been burned to the ground by DR. Anthony Fauci head of the NIAID, who had already stated that due to fund cutting by a wall invested Trump, the CDC and the entire medical structure was way behind where they should be in preparation for this coming catastrophe. When the market heard that, it tanked and drove Trump into a tantrum.
That tantrum caused Trump to dump Alex Azar, Secretary of Health & Human Resources, who was supposed to lead that fight against the pandemic. Instead he named Mike Pence as the Coronavirus czar. Why would he do such a thing? Because of Pence’s long medical and leadership history of course. After all Pence is the one who pulled the clean needle exchange program that was successfully helping to fight the HIV plague in his state when that virus was at it’s peak. Why would he do that; because of his deep medically based conviction that God hated gays?
Pence was handed this job because Trump wants someone he can trust to control the messaging that comes out of the healthcare community and especially the CDC. Trump knows Pence can be trusted because he always has the VP’s nose up his ass where he can hold him accountable.
In the same vein, Russ Limbaugh was busy paying off the Prez for that unearned medal he got at the “State of the Union” speech. He attacked Nancy Messonnier, the award-winning director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, for stating that “it’s not a question of if, but when,” the Coronavirus will sweep across the country. Of course it didn’t hurt that Messonnier was the sister of Rod Rosenstein who oversaw the Mueller investigation, thereby incurring Trumps wrath. Limbaugh added to his attack by throwing out conspiracy theories involving Messonnier in a Deep State plot to undermine Trump. Yeah, like Trump really needs undermining by someone other than himself.
The conspiracy theory is a natural form of attack by the Trump administration and we should buy into this one about as hard as we have bought into the ones about Joe Biden, Hillary and just about anyone who has ever crossed the Fat Liar.
If you buy this kind of crap I have a really good one for you to sink your teeth into. How about that Trump had Jeffrey Epstein killed in his jail cell because Epstein was about to reveal all the facts about Trump diddling pre-teen girls on Epstein’s boat, plane and resort? And there are pictures. If that’s not good enough for you, add the news that Harvey Weinstein has already gotten a promise of pardon from Trump because Harvey has pics of La Grande Orange and a number of starlets that Harvey set up for him. Sounds good doesn’t it? Unfortunately it’s only as true as most anything Trump tells us everyday.
What’s really satisfying about this whole thing is that Trump’s monumental ignorance along with his refusal to learn anything will be the engine that drives the market into the ground and kills his only argument for being president. All this dumb clown had to do, was put all the authority and a big chunk of money into the hands of the CDC and let them do their thing. He could sit back and take all the bows for being smart enough to know how to handle the biggest crisis of his presidency. Instead his ego forced him to overstep what little intelligence he had and stick his nose into a shitstorm of which he knows nothing, thereby once again proving him to be the worst president in the history of the nation.