The big news for Thursday, July 30 – at least for one hour – was that Herman Cain, Republican activist, businessman and former presidential candidate, died today from coronavirus after attending resident rump’s campaign rally in Tulsa in June, in close quarters without a mask.
This really isn’t something that deserves either sympathy or gloating. When you refuse to take cheap, common sense precautions against a disease with at least a one-percent fatality rate, and which may cause permanent damage even if you do survive, that should not even be considered a news event. “Conservative Mask Denier Dies Of COVID-19” is no more a news story than “I Turned On The Tap And Got Water” or “Man Wearing Honey and Raw Steak On His Skin In Bear Country Eaten By Bears.”
It is no more a surprise than Wednesday’s big story, where Congressman Louie Gohmert (R.-Gohmert) revealed that HE has the coronavirus, which apparently he only found out about because he was scheduled to go with Trump on a campaign event in west Texas (Gohmert’s district area) and as part of the president’s security procedure, he had to be screened. As it turns out, it was a surprise not only to Gohmert but to his staff, who found out when he told them in person. (Most likely, without a mask.)
So no surprise either that one of the other stories surrounding the event was when a staff member sent a tweet to the reporter who broke the story and asked: “When you write your story, can you include the fact that Louie requires full staff to be in the office, including three interns, so that ‘we could be an example to America on how to open up safely,'” the aide added. “When probing the office, you might want to ask how often were people berated for wearing masks.” As it turns out, he could do this because there was no policy in Congress for containing the coronavirus other than the decision of individual politicians for themselves and their staff, and it was only as a result of this event that Speaker Nancy Pelosi instituted an official mask mandate for House buildings and the chamber. And that of course, is because so many representatives, pretty much all Republicans, resisted the idea of any guidelines for containing coronavirus, let alone requirements.
As they say on the Internet: “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”
I mean we’ve heard the phrase “King Midas in reverse”, and Trump certainly is that, but he also seems to be Jesus in reverse: Everyone around him seems to be getting sick all of a sudden.
What we are seeing is what happens when you assume that laws – whether the Laws of Man or the Laws of Nature – don’t apply to you, because your tribal allegiance trumps reality itself. This is what happens when you ignore the people screaming in your ear that you’re driving the car off a cliff, and tell them “Fake News” or “Look man, gravity’s just a theory.”
The other huge event – at least for one hour – was when the financial reports came out for the end of the month and the second quarter, and it turned out, “Gross domestic product shrank 9.5% in the second quarter from the first, a drop that equals an annualized pace of 32.9%, the Commerce Department’s initial estimate showed on Thursday. That’s the steepest annualized decline in quarterly records dating back to 1947 and compares with analyst estimates for a 34.5% contraction. Personal spending, which makes up about two-thirds of GDP, slumped an annualized 34.6%, also the most on record.”
It is of course not good to an incumbent president’s chances to have the worst quarter and the worst consumer spending slump ON record, but never mind that, never mind the coronavirus, never mind the coverage of John Lewis’ funeral, to Trump, the REAL atrocity is that the news wasn’t all about him, even if he is the proximate cause for most of what’s wrong with this country. So once again he sought out the short-attention-span media by making himself the biggest atrocity.
So after the economic news and the Herman Cain news, and the Barack Obama eulogy for Herman Cain, but before his press conference, Trump twitted, “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good) 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely, and safely vote???”
Translated into Lucille Ball: “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA”
As one guy on Facebook said: “Well yeah, cause see, if you have enough money to travel, it’s important to be able to vote. But if can’t afford to travel, you should instead drive 5 miles to wait in line for 4 hours to vote.”
Sure, we can say that the president has no authority to delay an election on his own behalf, and the term of the president and Congress end on January 2021 whether there’s an election or not, but the fact is, Trump has been able to bullshit his way around every other aspect of the Constitution up til now – largely because the enforcement mechanisms are mostly in the hands of the president himself – so why not this one?
The fact of the matter is that the president can’t unilaterally stop an election, but as with Trump’s deliberate efforts to undermine mask wearing and an organized campaign for virus containment, he can exert influence on various voters AND state governments who take his rhetoric seriously, and get them to undermine vote-by-mail in their states. The irony being that these efforts are most likely to succeed in the states that were more likely to vote for Trump anyway, and thus discourage senior citizens and other high-risk groups (who are more likely to vote for Trump) from using alternative voting methods, and thus encourage them to either risk the coronavirus by in-person voting, or be safe and not vote at all. Thus Trump’s disingenuous bellyaching is most likely to suppress the vote in the states where he is most likely to need it. In any case, “vote-by-mail is illegal cause it hurts Republicans” (allegedly) is like saying “we should abolish the Electoral College cause it hurts Democrats.” (Mind, I have gone over serious reasons why we should ditch or at least modify the Electoral College, but ‘Democrats don’t like the results’ should not be one of them.)
Then there’s the other liberal fear that Trump will call out the troops to enforce his will, but the reason he had to cobble together his wannabe stormtroopers from the “alphabet soup” bureaucracy to engage in the suppression campaign in Portland was because after the limited military participation for Bill Barr’s publicity stunt in Lafayette Square, the negative feedback, both outside and within the ranks, was such that the Defense Department heads made it clear they weren’t going to get behind such tactics again. As for Portland, Oregon’s Governor announced Wednesday that they will begin pulling out tomorrow. So either the “riots” failed and Law & Order (TM) succeeded, or the latest distraction campaign failed and it’s time for this week’s distraction.
I mean this is the problem that Trump is only now starting to deal with. He’s such a fountain of evil ineptitude that any horrible thing he does is going to be overshadowed by the even more horrible thing he does tomorrow, but that creates its own problems. “Never mind that teenage girl I raped! Lookit all these 10-year olds I killed!”
And if Trump is starting to get pushback from “my” military when he clearly DOES have presidential authority, I am not sure he will be able to use the military to save himself once his authority is in doubt. It’s testimony to the personality we’re dealing with that his delusions of godhood become more loud and insistent the more incompetent (and impotent) he proves to be.
None of which will make any difference if Biden can’t win a clear victory in 2020, at least as clear in Electoral terms as Trump got in 2016. Which is where we come to the next round of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes. Early this week, Joe Biden announced that he will announce his choice for Vice-Presidential running mate by next week, before the Democratic National Convention, which due to coronavirus will be mostly video-conference this year. And most people would say the choice of Vice-President doesn’t mean much, but then Joe is 77 and there’s a good chance he could die in office. He probably won’t, but then in 2016, a racist and obvious dumbass was probably not going to even get nominated by a major party, much less win an election, cause everybody could SEE how unlikely that was. I mean you have to admit, Kennedy’s choice of a running mate in 1960 was pretty consequential, wasn’t it?
Biden has already decided his running mate will be a woman, and it is increasingly likely to be a person “of color.” These are the most likely choices, with their pros and cons:
Senator Kamala Harris (D.-California) – by libertarian standards, both she and Biden are bad choices, given that both suffer a reputation for counterproductive ‘law-and-order’ legislation that they try to counter with even more ham-handed moves to the ‘progressive’ wing. Which of course makes it that much more likely that she’s going to be Biden’s pick. The main factor against her is that she cut Biden hard in the pre-primary debates when it looked like he was the weak one in the pack.
Senator Elizabeth Warren (D.-Massachusetts) – certainly the best choice from a ‘progressive’ standpoint, but that may be the best reason to keep her in the Senate where she would actually stay on the floor. As a matter of fact, that’s the main factor against any pick who is a current Senator. If Democrats are smart (and if they were, we wouldn’t be here) they would realize that taking out Mitch McConnell and/or his Senate majority is more important even than taking out Trump, because Mitch is the one who’s been enforcing a one-man veto on any government reforms even before Trump took office. If McConnell lost his seat, even if Republicans re-take the majority in 2022, it’s unlikely that any other Republican Senator will have the same seniority, or ruthlessness. And Republicans have to defend 23 seats this cycle. Prior to coronavirus, most of them were safe. Now, even Mitch’s seat is in question. All Democrats need to take a majority is a net gain of three (with the Democratic Vice-President as a tie-breaker) or four if they somehow win that many without winning the White House. But it is now feasible that they could take enough seats for a three-fifths majority. That’s not very likely, but no longer impossible. In either case, Biden will need all the Senators he can get.
Senator Tammy Duckworth (D.-Illinois) Along with Warren, she is the leading non-Black candidate to be running mate, and again, simply because she is a Senator, this is a problem. On the other hand her being maimed during active service in Iraq undermines Republican attempts to say the evil Demonrats don’t support our troops, unless of course you think that baiting a combat veteran worked better for Tucker Carlson than it did when Trump insulted McCain. And in the long run, it’s hard to say how well THAT worked.
Stacey Abrams – was the Democrat candidate for Governor in Georgia and lost largely because Republican Brian Kemp was the Secretary of State setting the rules for the same election he was running in. (Nice work if you can get it.) Con: unlike the Senators, she doesn’t have much experience with national government. Pro: simply for being who she is, she, along with Duckworth, would be the most likely choice to make Republicans cry.
Who will Biden pick? Will he survive to January 20? Will Trump declare himself Emperor? Will he make Ivanka a Senator and Jared his horse? Tune in next time for: Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes!