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The Screaming Moderate

Trump is the proof our Founders were right

12/23/2020

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 I have a friend who recently lost his father to COVID.

His dad followed all the government guidance. He wore a mask, socially distanced, washed his hands, stayed inside his family pod. Yet, he caught the virus obviously from someone who didn’t follow the guidance and who went about his or her carefree way denying the science and ignoring that part of the guidance is to wear a mask, etc., to protect others from you giving them the virus. As with hundreds of thousands of others, his dad died for no good reason. Government leaders and many fellow citizens have mishandled the virus. And, his dad is dead.

My friend then went through the horrible things you have to do after the unexpected death of a  loved one. Plan the funeral, draft a heartfelt and pained eulogy, place an obit he was paying for into a Florida paper that was refusing to run certain lines that criticized the Florida governor for his mishandling the virus. He said to me in a text:

“What’s happened to our country?”

Indeed. Consider:

An innocent air conditioner repairman recently was run off the road on his way to work, the target of a vigilante who was surveilling him for days, paid for by the recently founded Liberty Center for God and Country, funded by a supporter of President Trump and seeking to find the “millions” of votes the President said were missing, costing him the election. Thinking the repairman’s van contained millions of fake ballots, the vigilante crashed his car into the repairman’s truck, got him on the ground, pushed his foot into the man’s back, holding him at gunpoint until a real cop passed by and righted the dangerous and wrong-headed  operation.

What was found in the van? Air conditioner repair equipment.

Republican Congressmen (plural) are making noise about objecting to the certification of the Electoral College count by the Congress. They are claiming certain states, some led by Republicans, rigged the election and the Democratic votes should be tossed out, awarding the election to Trump. Normal certification of the electoral vote is routine and mundane. Not this time around. Trump meets with conspiracy theorists to find ways to block the vote. And his vice president, Mike Pence who will chair the session where Congress will certify the votes, has been part of the planning.

The President is bitching that he won an election that he’s lost by seven or eight million votes and, in his own description, a landslide vote in the electoral college.

The President stayed out of negotiations with the Hill over legislation aimed at giving money to millions who need it to pay the rent, buy food, buy medicine and more but who are basically financially wiped out by the virus. 

As soon as those negotiations were completed, with the involvement of Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Trump said it wasn’t enough and the payments should be $2,000 a person rather than the $600 negotiated. Personally, I’m fine with the $2,000 but the president rejected that offer months ago.

Now, in an effort to pretend he is the outsider who doesn’t think (his) government is doing enough, he creates a situation where help to those fellow citizens (many of whom are his voters) won’t see any money until a new president is sworn in. Because Trump wants to be seen as the generous man. Instead the self-proclaimed master negotiator stayed out the negotiations and then announced what he wants.

Trump supporters are rallying in states that went for Biden that Trump is imagining went for him. They parade, they chant "Stop the Steal." Meantime where is that majority of voters who elected Biden? Why aren't they marching because President Trump is the one trying to steal the election?

The President completes his term as he started it, refusing to criticize Russia's Vladimir Putin whose government hacked into the computer system of many businesses and the U.S. Government. These hacks are very serious could do long-lasting damage to our country and so far among those who have pointed the finger at the Russians are Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Attorney General Wililiam Barr, and the Intelligence Community. Trump though says it was China, China, China.

 And that's just a brief list.

Meantime, the virus has gotten worse than ever and Trump doesn't mentioned it at all. Thousands of Americans are dying every day. Our hospitals are pushed to the maximum.

Except for telling reporters they better not give credit for the approved vaccines to President-elect Biden, that is. Trump, as his spokesman said, “oversaw” development of the vaccines as if he was in the lab searching himself for the solution.

Fact is, the rapid discovery of vaccines is partly due to President Trump’s administration putting Operation Warp Speed into place. He should be spending his last few weeks in office promoting that as one of his positive legacies along with other accomplishments (many I disagree with) such as appointing hundreds of conservative judges and three Supreme Court associate justices.

Instead he rails against some of those judges because they are among about 50 who threw out his campaign’s election-rigging lawsuits. Judges said there was no proof introduced into evidence proving the claim.

Alas, that is because there is no proof that the election was rigged. Anywhere.

The President of the United States has attacked every democratic institution we have – the Congress, the Courts, the military leadership, the intelligence community, a free press and more – because he sees himself as a victim of those institutions.

In fact Trump is the proof that the founders of cur country did a good job of drafting our Constitution. The Constitution created institutions that protect the country from someone who tries to rule as the tyrants they ran from in England.

The institutions held as they were intended.



 


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70 is the new...whatever

12/17/2020

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 I’m not all that old. I mean, I turned 70 on my last birthday and in the crazy year that is 2020, they tell me 70 is like the new 50 or some nonsense. Fact is, I am 70.

Heck, couple of weeks ago my 26-year-old grandson and his partner had a baby making me a great-grandfather. At 70.

How can that be, you ask? I’ll tell you: I had kids when I was young and my kids had kids when they were younger. My oldest daughter made me a grandfather at 45 and, proving karma lives, her son turned her into a grandma at 45.

(When I first heard my grandson was going to be a father, I said to him, "Lord, you're making me the father of a grandmother!" My wife, ever helpful, quickly reminded me, "and you, a great-grandfather!" Thank you, dear.)

Thus, great-grandchild (she’s beautiful if you hadn’t guessed).

I’m beginning to get all the things those of us of a certain age get. Little maladies, little issues to deal with; doctors with specialties I never before needed are now regular appointments.  Comes with the territory, from what I’m learning, for most of us.

But today, today is what drove home my age. It’s snowing here in Massachusetts. Now, I’ve had a couple of strokes (the last one 15 years ago, so I'm back to the same risk of having one anyone is, thank goodness) so my wife doesn’t let me do anything too taxing. (Some of those things I really could do, but I like to do what my wife tells me.)

Today, though, by about 9 a.m. we had maybe 4 or 5 inches of snow on the ground and the cars. So I headed out before my wife to begin shoveling a path to the driveway and, importantly, to where we keep our trash container because, after all, tomorrow is trash day and I need a clear path to the street.

Before I lifted the first shovel of snow, I heard a voice behind me saying, “You shouldn’t be doing that.” No, not the gods. My obviously very  nice neighbor across the street was standing there, shovel in hand and, like the Energizer Bunny, was scooping up snow at a pace I could never have matched. And I’m guessing he’s in his 50s.

Thus, the realization hit: I have become the old man across the street who kind people "look in on."

Oy.


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The grifter-in-chief

12/8/2020

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As President Trump’s term ends, let’s talk just for a moment about one of the two things that drives him. No, not ego…that’s the other thing. This thing is money.

Trump is leading the grifter’s dream right now. Since mid-October he has raised nearly $500 million. Since he lost the election, he has raised more than $200 million of that for his “defense fund.”

But there is no defense going on.

His people are going around the country screaming “fixed election,” but so far they have gotten traction exactly … well, nowhere, including states run by Republicans who voted for him. Those folks, I doubt, were even thinking about rigging the election because they took oaths to follow the law.

President Trump swore an oath to the Constitution, too. That mattered not to him. For one, he lies. And, two, he has broken his oath of office repeatedly.

He said he’d donate his salary to charity and his office has, steadfastly, announced each quarter (except for this year, so far) his targeted fund. His targets, though, instead of charities have become departments in the federal government.

Now, there is a law that federal agencies can’t accept donations but Trump’s spokesman says that he has donated the money. I don't know if that's true because I can’t stop thinking about that charity foundation he had before he was President and the court ordering it to cease because the money was being used for personal purposes, not the no-tax reasons it stated publicly.

Then again maybe he is donating his salary to the government because he never met a law he couldn't break.

That money he’s been raising since the election, if you read the small print, can be used by him for his future political endeavors or to fund his private lifestyle.

This is the grifter part.

His supporters literally are throwing money at the grifter-in-chief because they believe him when he says that the election was rigged against him. Apparently they forget that it is their family, friends and neighbors who count the votes and could, if it were true, reveal the dastardly deed. A couple of folks have testified but, if you’ve seen them on TV, their credibility is, at best, questionable. (Although that lady last week made for great Saturday Night Live fodder because the writers just had to use her actual testimony to be funny.)

Anyway, he could scream “fake news” about all this but he as admitted to Lesley Stahl of CBS before the election that he does that “to discredit you all (the media) and demean you so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

And, that strategy has worked. A big portion of the country now shouts and threatens reporters attending events related (and some not) to him.

 It’s true, though, that he lives out loud.

His “me-me” personality is showing very clearly right now – ostensibly he is raising money to contest an election that was handled fairly and properly, while thousands of Americans die every day because of the mismanagement of the coronavirus by his Administration. Even his lawyers in court don't argue there was fraud because to do that would put their law licenses at risk because, well, the widespread fraud claim is just not true.

In Donald Trump’s mind, though, there’s never a bad time to grift.
After all, this is the biggest bully pulpit he will ever have. The presidency is the dream of any grifter – a big audience and lots of money to pilfer.

One thing he could have done was use that biggest pulpit in the world to ask for people to wear masks, wash their hands and stay socially distant to control the disease. He then honestly would have saved thousands  of lives.  Instead he used it to circulate one of his biggest lies -- to play down (as he also admitted) the virus so as “not to cause a panic.”

It’s a tie for his biggest lie. He also is lying about the election being rigged against him. It wasn’t. He earned that defeat all on his own.

Through it all, though, he continues to grift.


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Things that make you go hmmm.

12/2/2020

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It isn’t only Trump coming up with ideas that seem crazy to most of us over the last four years. I mean, creating a Schedule F to get rid of career employees you don’t want or who represent the "Deep State," or to cripple the Biden Administration when it comes in and finds fewer experts on the payroll? Trust me, Donald J. Trump didn’t come up with that. But …. who did?

Trump’s future plans are … what? I’m not sure he knows, or should know, at this juncture. He could run in 2024. He could create or buy or join a cable network to have a platform for the next four, or 20, years. He does like attention. And he’s sure gotten it. For a guy who impersonated his own spokesman when he was in the private sector just to plant gossip items in New York City tabloids extolling the virtues of himself, to a guy who commanded the world stage just by waking up … it will be hard to settle for something in between. So, running in 2024 or not – he will be heard, as he likes to say, "strongly."

And you get a pardon, and you get a pardon … Trump has not been bashful about taking care of “friends” via the pardon process or trying to leverage pardons for his personal political gain. He’s probably used it fewer times than his predecessors but he definitely has used it more for friends and loyalists, or people he wants to stay loyal to him. There’s the predictable rumor that he is considering pardons for most of his adult children and himself, and I expect we’ll see those. Maybe not for himself though it would “stay” potential charges against him while the constitutionality of pardoning oneself is battled out. A pardon for Rudy Giuliani? Strong possibility. He certainly has been a loyal foot soldier, especially post-election as he floats, unabashedly, idiotic claims of voter fraud.

Will he concede? I can’t imagine Trump conceding to President-elect Joe Biden nor can I imagine him attending Biden’s inauguration. I mean, sit by idly while someone else gets all the attention? Especially someone he knows defeated him at the polls and made him a (shh) "loser."? It just isn’t in his psyche to do that. Imagine the faces he’d make with his arms crossed in front of him as Biden takes the oath of office? Not a good look.

‘No way Biden got 80 million votes´ is the claim being made by Trump and his male adult sons. Well, Biden did. My guess is his total was that high for various reasons -- partly because of the virus giving millions of folks nothing to do but wait in line to vote, or no excuse to avoid mailing in or delivering a ballot to town halls and other official drops. Plus, a motivation by folks to get out and vote and not allow a close election like 2016, or avoiding third party candidates because they experienced that doing only harm in 2016. Plus, Trump got 74 million votes … a record for a sitting president, for sure, and probably for similar reasons – his supporters are all very loyal believers who saw his reign threatened so they made sure to vote, in person. Again, they had plenty of time to wait in line. Plus, they were apparently less concerned about the virus than Biden supporters.

Damage to our democracy has been done. The only question is, can we repair it? Open question. While Joe Biden will be providing a less dramatic and more stable leadership, Trump will still be out there tweeting and sitting on his own or someone’s TV network bloviating. And with 70-plus million supporters in this election, there will be people paying attention to him. His supporters are going nowhere and will be willing opponents of a Biden Administration.

Sen. Marco Rubio is making an early play to anoint himself the heir to Trump’s throne. Not likely. One, Trump won’t be ceding his role … ever. So there’s no vacuum to be filled. Plus, the ambitious Rubio doesn’t have the gumption Trump has nor his instincts. His first shot was tweeting of Biden’s Cabinet nominees, “Biden’s cabinet picks went to Ivy League schools, have strong resumes, attend all the right conferences & will be polite & orderly caretakers of America’s decline.” One, that ignores that Trump’s Cabinet, and Trump himself, are products of the Ivy League. And, two, not exactly pithy like, “Liberate Michigan!”

Fill the coffers while you can seems to be, and always has been, the Trump life goal. While Giuliani and others are out there falsely yelling “fraud” in the election Trump is sending out hundreds of emails calling for donations to his voter fraud defense fund. As has been pointed out, though, the small print of those emails states the first 75 percent of every contribution goes to a new political action committee Trump set up in mid-November which can be used to fund his political activities going forward, including staff and travel. The other 25 percent goes to the Republican National Committee. So far, he’s approaching $200 million in fund raising from what many of us would see as annoyingly too many requests.

    (Tangent: I was on a trip with President Reagan’s Commerce       Secretary Malcolm Baldrige years ago. We stayed a night at the working ranch of a friend of his in Colorado. After dinner the friend’s father proudly pulled out a pile of letters he received “From President Reagan” seeking donations. He said he’d given $5 or $10 when he could afford it. Baldrige said to him, “the President appreciates your support and he told me before I came out to let you know that you’ve given enough and you may still get letters but please don’t contribute.” People do believe the claims in those letters. And have for many years. Tangent over)
 
The Biden Administration. I have to confess, as the President-elect has been announcing his appointees, he's had me tearing up. He’s been appointing to senior positions men, women, Blacks, Whites, Browns, South Asian, out gays and lesbians, offspring of immigrants, of single mothers and people who are products of broken homes and single mothers, who were on public assistance of some kind.  I’ve never reacted that way watching a President make his nominations. But, while the special interest groups still aren’t satisfied that enough of their own have been appointed – and no doubt more will be – I have never seen a Cabinet and sub-Cabinet that so looks like America, the real America. It honestly not only reflects the coalition that elected Biden but, more importantly, makes a huge difference  in assuring more views are at the table while making policy.

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    B. Jay Cooper

    B. Jay is a former deputy White House press secretary to Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He also headed the communications offices at the Republican National Committee, U.S. Department of Commerce, and Yale University. He is a former reporter and is the retired deputy managing director of APCO Worldwide's Washington, D.C., office.
    He is the father of three daughters and grandfather of five boys and one girl. He lives in Marion, Mass.

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