My CoviDiary: 08/31/2020: Projector-in-Chief

BY MAX BURBANK | “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?”--Joe Biden, early this afternoon

“Biden is using mafia talking points – the mob will leave you alone if you go along.”--Donald Trump, a few hours later.

“Bada bing, bada boom, capice?” Trump continued. “Sleepy Joe’s tryin’ to be a cutie pie. Tryin’ ta muscle in on my territory. He’s gonna come down with a bad case a’ the see-ment galoshes, OK? It’d be a real shame. Have to send the widow some nice flowers, amiright?”

I’m kidding of course. Trump said none of those things, I’m just using humor to make a point, and it’s not a novel one. As many people have observed, Trump uses that classic playground strategy of projection,  accusing people of doing everything they’ve accused him of doing. If there can be truly said to be a Trump Doctrine, it’s “I know you are, but what am I?”

It’s been noted many times (and a goodly portion of those times have been by me, but while you may read my stuff, and thanks, mostly people don’t) that Trump talks like a mob boss. Here’s my unique contribution to the cannon of writing on the subject; Almost. He almost talks like a mob boss. He talks sort of like a mob boss character in a movie. He talks like what he thinks a mob boss character in a movie would talk like, but he’s not very smart, he has a tin ear for dialogue and it’s a sure bet that while he’s certain he gets the basic gist of movies he’s seen, he doesn’t, but he doesn’t know that.  Because he’s not just an idiot, he’s an idiot who thinks he’s a genius. So the end result is he talks like a direct to video gangster movie made in Albania and dubbed into english whose entire marketing strategy is to have a misleading name that tricks you into watching it. Like The God’s Father. Or Goodfellers. Or Scareface. 

That’s where that “Cutie pie” thing I threw into the made up Trump addendum to his real quote came from. I know I’ve written about it before, but it bears repeating in this context. 

Way back in March of this year, about six centuries ago in Trump time, ABC News’s Jonathan Karl asked Trump what as president could do to assure “that everybody who needs a ventilator will get a ventilator.”

“Look, don’t be a cutie pie, Okay?” Trump snarled in reply, “Nobody’s done what we’ve been able to do.”

Wholly apart from the fact that this is IN NO WAY AN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION, it’s just stupid. Put the phrase “Don’t be a cutie pie” in quotes and Google it and you’ll find the Internet has no record of anyone ever saying those words except Trump. “Don’t be cute” sure, “Don’t be a wise guy,” absolutely, but “Don’t be a cutie pie” simply is not an expression. At all. It’s Trump, trying and failing to “Use Mafia talking points.”

People have been pointing out for YEARS now that Trump really, really likes to talk the way he imagines Mafiosos talk. So all of a sudden Joe Biden talks like a mobster? Before today, no one has EVER said that, but the right wing Keep-Trump-From-Finding Out-He’s-a-Totally-Transparent-Boob machine swung into high gear within minutes, supporting Trump’s projection as if was absolutely valid instead of reflexively moronic.

I’ll give you one for instance, Ben Shapiro, or as I like to call him, Ben “fucking” Shapiro, tweeted:

“If you’re willing to be blackmailed by Joe Biden, vote for him.”

Go back to the top of the page and re-read what Biden’s tweet. It’s a straight up question directed at Trump’s recent accusation (and apparently the only campaign message they’ve been able to cobble together) You won’t be safe in Biden’s America. Biden is saying “Seriously? Look out your window. Read a paper, turn on the news. Trump is president RIGHT NOW. Do you feel safe RIGHT NOW? ‘Cause it’s Trump’s America… RIGHT NOW!”

Ben “Fucking” Shapiro and all his ludicrous cohort casting that as a Mafia-type threat, as blackmail, as if Biden was saying “It’d be a shame if youse guys elect Trump and we hadda show you what violence really is.”… well you have to ask, is Ben “Fucking” Shapiro honestly that stupid… or does he just think we are?

Trump accusing Biden of talking like a Mafioso is like him saying “Somebody’s gotta tell Sleepy Joe to lay off all that orange pancake make-up! He looks like a jack-o-lantern! At least blend, Joe! We can see the line! And what’s with the pale pink eye sockets? You afraid of getting a little orange make-up in your eyes? Also, lose some weight, whydontcha, and stop playing golf every weekend! Riding around in a cart ain’t exercise, except for prying your morbidly obese ass out and then squeezing it back in again!  And if you gotta play golf, could you at least play at a course you don’t own and stop pocketing the fees for all the secret service fellas you know are legally required to tag along with you? Stop fleecing the taxpayer’s, Joe! And stand up straight, you look like a freak, leaning your upper body forward like you’re the front end of a two person horsey costume! And if you’re really as rich as you say you are, Joe Biden, hire someone to show you how to close an umbrella! It’s just INSANE, that you, JOE BIDEN, can’t close your own umbrella!”

Apparently projection is just Daddy’s game, Li’l Jr’s trying to be a big boy by imitating his pops now. Just this evening Beardy McHairgel-Hoarder tweeted:

“It’s truly sad that someone in his family hasn’t stepped in and said enough is enough. At what point is this sham basement campaign considered elder abuse?”

For three years or more, pundits, wits and wags have been noting that if any halfway decent human being’s dad was demonstrating the kind of alarming and rapid mental deterioration Trump has at every opportunity, they’d get him help. They’d take away his car keys and start shopping for the least abusive assisted living facility they could afford, or if they really loved him, maybe move him into an apartment over the garage. He needs medical care and if Trump’s children had a shred of human decency they’d get it for him instead of letting him do his daily clown show and waiting for him to have a stroke!  But Jr is so positively stupid he just now got what people are saying about the Trump clan and figured the best thing he could possibly do for dear old dad is accuse his opponents family of being the bunch of neglectful, callous bastards he and his own family ALREADY ARE!

I’ll tell you what, I’m spending between now and January 20th of next year praying I don’t wake up to see a Trump Tweet saying that if Biden doesn’t get to be the next president he’s going to fire every nuke he has the codes for.

BY MAX BURBANK | OK, so real quick, because it’s been a long day, it’s late, and I am PHAH-KING exhausted;

Four years ago, I covered the shit out of the conventions. Under the auspices of the late, lamented Chelsea Now, a fine, hard copy, physical, ink and paper NEW YORK CITY newsrag, I live tweeted both the DNC and the RNC. It was my introduction to the Twitter-sphere, and I would never have done it without the support, urging and dare I say it, coercive, relentless, hectoring of my old roommate, long-ago longtime comedy partner, legendary wit and editor without compare, Mr. Scott Stiffler (now the editor, and founder, of the very website you are visiting at this very moment). Also Kudos to my daughters, who helped me create an account and learn how to use it. One election cycle later, I have close to three thousand followers, George Takei stole a joke from me, Erica Jong “liked” one of my offerings, I got in a virtual slap fight with Dean “The lamest Superman” Cain, and my Tweets have been quoted in Newsweek, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, Raw story and Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” (That’s the one I’m most proud of).

So you might think it odd that my coverage of this year’s conventions was… lax? I don’t think I covered the DNC at all, and I did fifty percent of the RNC, which is my way of saying I’m not going to have anything about yesterdays offerings to post tonight and… well, I’ll let you know the rest in a paragraph or so.

First I have to let you in on a little secret. While I think you know that I have been interested in politics and followed it closely my entire life… I’m not that into the conventions. I think they are kind of bullshit. Basically fundraising telethons, a less fun version of the PBS pledge drive, The Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, but with no sleep deprived, drug-abusing Jerry Lewis 23rd hour freakout. There are usually a couple of decent speeches and every now and again a true history-making corker, like Obama’s 2004 speech, but mostly they’re a snoozefest and not a single American mind gets changed.

How I wished for something different!

Well, as the man at the bar with the 12-inch pianist would tell you, be careful what you wish for. Actually, that’s a joke about a magical being and the hilarious consequences of his hearing deficit, and not a nod to your typical cautionary monkey’s paw type story, but you take my meaning. The man at the bar  was hoping to enlarge his penis, see?  And “pianist” sounds like “penis.” All on the same page now? Great.

Anyway, the 2016 RNC was different, all right. Like, Nuremberg different. It was a relentless, shrieky hatefest that was literally difficult to watch. Which leads me to my point, specifically what I am NOT going to do is watch Donald J. Trump’s acceptance speech. I will read about it tomorrow, I may view clips of choice moments, but I refuse to watch it live.

Even back then, my bride would not allow the sound of its voice in our home, so I watched it on my computer with headphones in. And it was like that venomous, evil, corpulent orange fuck was in… my… head! Spilling his aicd bile and pettiness, his self-centered grievance, his utter loathing of all things human, his core neediness, his bizarre, intertwined cognitively dissonant impossible combo-plate of egotism and self-loathing, directly into my ears; A viscous, corrosive fluid that coated my brain and burned it! I felt literally ill by the time it was over, mentally, yes, but physically as well, like I’d been beaten! Like I’d been dragged behind a truck on a chain, and when I woke up the next morning I still felt sick. And that was back when  I was naively certain he could never win! I felt like I had exposed myself to true evil, like I had voluntarily embraced a person-sized lump of plutonium and now I was dying of radiation sickness. And I have never listened to anything longer than a minute from him since. I’m strictly a transcript guy if I need to research him. I will not expose myself to his poison. I know better now.

I’ll probably go on YouTube tomorrow and watch Giulliani, though. ‘Cause that guy is a whole flaming go-cart wreck of crazy. Plus, he’s got a head like a single elephant testicle with over-the-counter CVS dentures and glasses. Good luck going to bed now I’ve put that image in your head!

NIGHTY-NIGHT!

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My CoviDiary: 08/26/2020: RNC Day 2, And Other Idiocies

BY MAX BURBANK | Oh my goodness, but that rascal Mike Pompeo played the cutest little practical joke! See if you don’t get a chuckle out of this; Late last month, Secretary Pompeo sent an official communique to all State Department officials, which read, in part:

“As the 2020 general election draws near, all Department employees are reminded to review and comply with the restrictions on political activities that apply to Department employees… It is important that the Department’s employees do not improperly engage the Department of State in the political process, and that they adhere to the Hatch Act and Department policies in their own political activities.”

That’s the set-up; The punchline came last night when Popmpeo made a statement from Israel where he’s undoubtedly doing some good work preparing our Jewish friends to convert en masse to Christianity when The Rapture comes, and delivered an address broadcast all over the world to… wait for it… The Republican National Convention!

Get it?! He reminded all State Department employees not to violate the Hatch Act, (which he went out of his way to mention by name), by engaging the Department of State in the political process, and THEN, see, less than a month later, he went on TV and violated the Hatch Act by engaging the Department of State IN THE POLITICAL PROCESS!!

It’s like he saying, “Well, golly folks, I hadda make sure you all didn’t think I was breaking the law accidentally!”

You have to admire a guy who goes to such great lengths to establish the fact he doesn’t give a little tin shit  about obeying the law. I mean, he could have just pulled a Kellyanne or held up a can of beans like Ivanka and just greased his way through knowing ol’ Trump Lumpa wouldn’t give him so much as a slap on his chubby white wrist.

It’s OK though, because Chief of Staff Mark meadows says, “Nobody outside the beltway cares” about the Hatch Act. Thank goodness we’ve got renowned legal scholar Mark “I was chosen as Chief of Staff because I promised not to do anything” Meadows to clarify for us that our system of laws is based on how many people care about them. That’s why at my trial for a drunk driving hit and run, my lawyer was able to get me off by cleverly pointing out that people don’t care about drunk driving hit and runs. I mean, they might if they thought about it, the name kind of gives it away, but the Hatch Act? What is that, some silly old law about hatches? Aren’t those on ships? Arrr, batten down the Hatch Act, Matey! Who cares?!

Lets see, what else happened last night? Nick Sandmann, you remember him, that nice young fella in the MAGA hat with the very attractive smile you totally don’t want to smack off his face with one of those large wooden paddles fraternities keep handy for deeply closeted, homoerotic ass-paddling? He gave a lovely speech wherein he complained over a microphone on all the major networks and live streaming to a worldwide audience about being cancelled and silenced because IRONY AND SATIRE ARE TOTALLY DEAD IN AMERICA TODAY. He did not  literally swim Scrooge McDuck-style through the tremendous piles of coin and cash  he got from multiple media platforms with the help of Mitch McConnell’s PR firm and lawyers in settlements from major media platforms or allegedly defaming him by pointing out he’s kind of an A-hole, but whining publicly about being cancelled and silenced in such a way that you get heard by millions of people and acquire a fortune large enough you will never have to work a day in your life is pretty much the Republican version of making all forms of Scrooge McDuck money-swimming. Trust me, as a Democrat, I guarantee you, anything I might do or say that got me noticed enough to be “cancelled?” I would end up with a smaller audience and less money than I have now, which is VERY LITTLE!

Melania Trump decided to cosplay Fidel Castro for unknown reasons, and seems to have also had her eyes surgically re-widened for the festivities. FLOTUS got on board her own version of the GOP norm-violating trend by not giving the same speech Michelle Obama gave last week. My favorite part was where she bragged about how “Aw-ten-tic” her husband is. I’m not making fun of her accent, I’m just pointing out she came to America on a questionable Visa, married an American citizen she barely knew, had an anchor baby with him and got her parents into the country through chain migration. She spoke with such moving compassion about the victims of COVID-19 you could almost forget that her husband finds that mountain of the dead so boring he has to play golf every weekend, and whatever platitudes she may have mouthed, she’s still the woman who went to visit immigrant children at a border detention facility wearing a coat with the words “I really don’t care, do you?” on the back and she was an enthusiastic supporter of birtherism because she’s a venomous, opportunistic, human-shaped leather sack of fetid garbage. See? I managed to express my distaste for her without even mentioning that she used to make a living doing weird, slightly harder than softcore porn modelling, which I have no problem with and would do myself in a heartbeat, but no one is offering, for obvious reasons. Unless that’s your thing, in which case contact me.

And because, one assumes, Ol’ Fat Donny Two-Scoops doesn’t believe four hours of prime time a night for four days offers enough opportunity to foist buffoonish, ridiculous shit on the American people, Trump gave an interview to the Washington Examiner, in which he demanded Joe Biden take a drug test before they debate. Now, he did say they’d both be drug tested, but no one believes he’d ever consent to that, since at this point the parts of him not made of KFC, Diet Coke or bile are Adderall, fat cells and Airforce-grade methamphetamines, AND we haven’t even gotten to the REALLY funny part of this yet. See, he’s certain Biden is doing the drugs because his debating abilities improved so much between when he debated ALL the Democrats vying for the nomination and when he debated just Bernie Sanders… the only possible explanation, according to Trump,  is drugs. You know, the kind of performance enhancing drugs that… make you… all… better at… debating? Those ones?

“I don’t know how he could have been so incompetent in his debate performances and then all of a sudden be OK against Bernie,” Trump tambled incoherently like an old man whose been doing a lot of drugs for decades. “My point is, if you go back and watch some of those numerous debates, he was so bad. He wasn’t even coherent. And against Bernie, he was. And we’re calling for a drug test.”

I’m pretty sure this is the first time in American history a nominee for president has ever publicly accused his opponent of abusing drugs. And it’s an awesome move, because it’s been observed over and over that Trump rarely accuses anyone of doing a bad thing unless he’s ALREADY DOING IT HIMSELF. Everybody knows this, it’s his damn TELL. So Trumpty Dumpty is basically saying to the whole world, “Whenever you see me appearing marginally functional, it’s because I’m doing drugs” and the whole world wants to go, “Donny, seriously, we know. We all know, no one doesn’t think you do a lot of drugs, if you look up the phrase “Common Knowledge” on dictionary.com, it says, “Something everyone knows, for example, that Donald Trump can’t perform even the most basic tasks without snorting a billiard ball-sized mound of crushed Adderall.”

As I write this, RNC Day Three is actively happening, so tune in tomorrow and we can chat about whatever nonsensical, grovelling, deeply humiliating Bullshit Mike Pence is up to right now and whether he’s wearing a gimp mask while doing it, or if it just only seems like he is.

My CoviDiary: 08/25/2020: Wasn’t Jerry Falwell Jr. Going to Speak at the RNC?

BY MAX BURBANK | SO much to write about today, I’m glad last night’s opening episode of The Republican National Convention Show! requires almost no coverage at all. Short version? A bunch of people yelled awfully loud, considering most of them were alone in  the room they broadcast from. Slightly longer version? The barefoot, gun-wielding, mansion-owning, personal injury lawyer couple warned us that what happened to them could happen to anyone, and that the Democrats were hellbent on taking away your right to brandish lethal weapons on your front lawn if you see a lot of black people in your neighborhood. They didn’t tell us why they could find their guns, but not their shoes, and that’s the sum total of what I want to learn from them, so they wasted my time, and if I ever see them I’ll “pop” a “cap” in them for inconveniencing me, as is my constitutionally protected right.

Kimberley Guilfoyle, who is paid almost as much by the Trump administration to sleep with Jr. as Sr. paid Stormy Daniels to sleep for the privilege, did a not-too-shabby Hitler impression while introducing Jr. I can’t recall a single specific of what his speech, but I think it was something about how great cocaine is and how if you’re going to do it, you should do a whole lot at a time, otherwise why bother, and if that didn’t finally make his dad love him, nothing would, that’s a funny joke, right, it’s FUNNY, c’mon LAUGH WITH ME, WHY AREN’T YOU LAUGHING, OH CHRIST, I’M SCREAMING, IN AN EMPTY ROOM, TALK QUIETER, TALK QUIETER, OH SHIT I CAN’T, I’M JUST GETTING LOUDER, THAT WAS WAY TOO MUCH COCAINE, MAYBE IF I SMILE BIGGER IT WILL SEEM NATURAL and then huge, teardrop-shaped gobs of sweat flew out from his temples like he was an anime schoolboy who had just done something very embarrassing.

And that’s it. I guess Nikki Hailey tried to explain why she spent her entire career working really hard to establish credibility and then suddenly just crammed all of it into the crapper, climbed into the bowl on top of it and made like Lucy crushing grapes while periodically flushing continuously for the last four years, and yet somehow Mike Pence is still on the ticket, but I’d just be guessing. I didn’t watch her speech live. Or look at it online since. Because she’s irrelevant. I mean, she’s really gone all-in on irrelevant, and I feel like I should honor her choice.

Oh, and Trumpo the Clown sat in a nice room with some people but I couldn’t pay any attention ‘cause of how weird he sits? Like he’s having a poo? No matter what kind of chair it is or who’s there with him? To be fair, he also has a difficult time just standing anywhere.

In other news, It has been widely reported that Jerry Falwell Jr. (Man, it’s been a rough few days for Jr.’s!) has resigned as president of Liberty University, though he says he has not. He’s been on leave for a little while now, owing to some discomfort on the part of the board of directors over his posting a photo of himself on a yacht with his fly undone, his pants slightly lowered so you could see his undies, his hairy, mayonnaise belly hanging out and his arm around a bare-midriffed  woman who is not his wife, and yes I did say he posted it himself, because in addition to assuming the lord has placed him beyond comeuppance, he is also something of a moron.  His status has allegedly changed from “It’s complicated” to “Unemployed” over developments in what has become known over the last year or so as “That whole poolboy thing.” See, Falwell and his wife bought a Miami youth hostel with a young pool attendant and personal trainer even though he didn’t put up any money. Nothing hinky was going on, the Falwells just admired what a fine young man Giancarlo Granda was and wanted to encourage his budding entrepreneurial dreams in an entirely wholesome Christian way in the form of valuable real estate, a normal thing that married Christian couples will often do when encountering a handsome young man who demonstrates drive.

Well! It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that. It’s evolved into a whole “He said, he said” type of deal, since Ms. Falwell, like any good Evangelical Christian woman, speaks only when spoken to and even then she sometimes has to plead the Fifth.

According to Mr. Falwell, his wife Becki had engaged in an inappropriate Fatal Attraction-type affair with Granda. He did not assign a cute, naughty movie nickname to whatever his own involvement with Granda had been, because obviously beyond being the victim (or “cuck: as they are commonly known in your wittier right wing circles), he had none. The whole thing had been very traumatic for him, he suffered depression, through Jesus he forgave his wife and they forgave Granda who apparently had not been in touch with Jesus since far from forgiving, he threatened to blackmail them, or at least that’s Jerry’s version.

Long ago I was in a touring comedy group with a young lady named Betsy Salkind, who coined the joke “He took it like a man and blamed it on his wife.” I thought it was hilarious, and not only did I not steal the joke from her, whenever I did use it, (as I did just now), I made sure to credit her by name (as I did just now). Why? Because I am an ally, something that as a man in comedy I will happily explain the importance of at great length to any ladies, whether they are in comedy or not, and they don’t even have to ask because I have a forthcoming nature. And this was back in the eighties, before it was cool for any man comedian to even secretly admit in confidence to close friends that it might be theoretically possible that on statistically rare occasions, a very small sampling of ladies were genetically capable of being funny! And there were GAY comedians in that comedy troupe, too, and one comic who had an unborn twin poking out of his abdomen which they were forced to conceal with an ingenious assemblage of elastic belts and trusses, because HELLO?  INTOLERANCE?  I let you know all of this in order to avoid even the chance possibility that you might miss the FACT that I have ALWAYS been just about as WOKE AS FUCK!

Digression aside, Mr. Granda tells a rather different story. He says that for several years he had frequent sexual encounters with Ms. Falwell while Mr. Falwell sat in a corner and watched, that the whole arrangement started when he was very young and they were a good deal less young, and that while it seemed fun at the time, in retrospect (and perhaps considering that Falwell Jr. was arguably the most powerful Evangelical Christian in the country and very fond of telling people that things they enjoyed doing would get them sent to hell where they would burn in a lake of literal fire for all eternity), it looked less fun and just a weensy bit icky and coercive.

I want to be clear that I do not object to or judge in any way what the three of them were up to shenanigans-wise. I think I have established (and you thought I didn’t have a legitimate literary reason for my lengthy side story) I am very woke, indeed, woke AF. I won’t say I don’t enjoy the odd bit of salacious celebrity gossip, but I mostly brought up the entire fiasco because of its political ramifications.

No, thank you, I am not kidding, and also, how dare you? Must I present my punditry bona fides? Attend.

In 2016, Jerry Falwell Jr did a rather large favor for Donald Trump by endorsing his candidacy, thereby lending his imprimatur for any Evangelicals concerned that a thrice divorced, casino owning serial adulterer, who had unashamedly and on more than one occasion publicly expressed  an unwholesome interest in his own daughter, might lack the moral character to be worthy of the presidency. The endorsement was something of a surprise, as Falwell had been widely expected to endorse Ted Cruz, whose only moral failing was being a gigantic obnoxious asshole with a face that begged to be punched. Why, one has to wonder, would Falwell have done something that could have destroyed the credibility of his faith, upon which his vast fortune was predicated? I mean, it worked out fine, as it turns out the vast majority of the Evangelical community was way more afraid of non-whites than they were of God and all his silly old “Thou shalt nots,” but that’s beside the point.

The answer is photographs. It seems there were more than a few that revealed specifics of what the Falwells and young Mr. Granda did in their free time (Pictures like the ones Granda has now shown to Reuters, making his version of the story somewhat more credible than Falwell’s), Trump’s personal bag man and fixer, Michael Cohen, is on record as having said he made them disappear. Coincidentally, Cohen also brokered the endorsement deal between Falwell and Trump. It certainly seems a lot like Granda didn’t blackmail Falwell, but Trump did. A little art of the quid pro quo, know what I mean? Just one more shoe dropping from Trump’s seemingly endless supply of precariously balanced shoes poised to drop one after another from the soaring heights of his inexplicably placed penthouse roof Shoe Storage Facility.

And I haven’t even had time to write about how the GOP decided to have no platform for 2020 and replace it with a North Korean-style Dear Leader oath of fealty!

Oh well, maybe tomorrow.

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My CoviDiary: 08/24/2020: Au Revoir, Kellyanne

BY MAX BURBANK | Tonight is the opening salvo of the Republican National convention, which I will watch bits and pieces of in a purely professional capacity, but won’t be writing about tonight as I imagine I will find it exhausting. Instead, let me offer a few brief words on the resignation of presidential advisor and literal Harpy, Kellyanne Conway, those words being bullshit, bullshit, and bullshit.

This is not a resignation, it’s a strategic hiatus. It appears to have been spurred on by Claudia Conway’s Twitter announcement that she was “pushing for emancipation,” which, by the way, as of today she is still apparently intent on doing according to TMZ, the most reliable media platform there is. I do not think “spurred” is the right word, it’s more like the announcement presented an opportunity for the Conways. I’m sure that sounds cynical, but ask yourself, have you ever seen an iota of evidence that Kellyanne Conway experiences any human-like emotions and is anything but resolutely amoral? I have not. It’s a little late in the game to be “Less drama, more Mama” as she so charmingly puts it in her statement, what with her resignation not coming until the end of this month, after she speaks at the RNC, and only about a month before the election.

George Conway is also “stepping back” from social media and the Lincoln Project. They are now positioned to have a seat at the table whoever comes out on top when the election is over, which I believe has been the goal of their prolonged dog and pony show all along. I do not believe either of them have a single principle or belief except for a desire to stay in close proximity to power, and with one conway deeply embedded on either side of the fence, they probably will.

I assure you, if Trump either wins or manages to seize power by contesting the election and weaponizing the Justice Department and it’s stitched-together Keystone Gestapo, Kellyanne will waltz back into the fold come January, family be damned. If Trump goes down in flames, George has positioned himself to be a major player in whatever Republican party rises from Trumpism ashes, and should Trump fall, I’d give excellent odds that Kellyanne will reveal herself to have been the “Anonymous” who wrote the famous op-ed. I’m not saying she is, just that she’ll claim to be and call anyone who says otherwise an opportunistic liar. If Trump is soundly defeated there will be a veritable cabinet stampede to claim the mantle of “Anonymous,” but Kellyanne will be first out the gate and she’s my odds on favorite.

Isn’t it curious that both Conways are retreating from their public allegiances just prior to the election? And by “curious” I mean “suspect.” I want to go on record as saying that despite the effective work of the Lincoln project, I have never trusted or believed George Conway, even for an instant. Fine, he thinks Trump is a dangerous idiot, I’m more than willing to believe that. With the exception of dedicated chuckleheads like Matt Gaetz and Louis “Gorsh, ah din’t even knowed I wuz sick” Gohmert, all the Republicans in power think the same thing. They just also think if Trump goes down he’ll take them with him, and they’re probably right. George Conway is a gambling man, and he’s got an ace up his leave if he’s wrong, the reptilian human female approximation, Kellyanne Conway. George may legitimately hate Trump, but that doesn’t change the fact he thinks power belongs exclusively in the hands of  a tiny group of grotesquely wealthy white men and that The Handmaid’s Tale is a feel-good romcom. He is not your friend.

And think about this: Except for one instance, Trump’s response to George’s provocations has been tepid to non-existent. Are we to believe this is because of his loyalty to Kellyanne? Come on! Trump expects loyalty but he does not engage in it. He’s slammed Rosie O’Donnell more frequently than Conway, and don’t tell me it’s because of his admirable self-control. Ask yourself, does that seem like Trump? I think he’s been an inside player in their absurd political/marital performance art piece from the outset. I just checked Twitter, and Trump, who Kellyanne supposedly told of her decision Sunday, hasn’t tweeted about it once. He hasn’t wished her well, he hasn’t slammed her husband or blamed her daughter, nothing. That doesn’t track. It’s a con, and all of Washington is the mark. What’s in it for Trump? I think he got caught up in the game Kellyanne told him was a win for him and is just to bone stupid to figure out he’s not the logical beneficiary.

My heart goes out to Claudia. They’ve made the public announcement that they won’t make her part of their game a big part of their game. My guess is that she already realizes that. And if she learned anything from her folks, she’s the one who updated TMZ.

My CoviDiary: 08/23/2020: My Predictions for the 2020 RNC

BY MAX BURBANK | I was all cued up to write about the virtual DNC, but I realized I don’t need to. There were some pretty momentous speeches, a few that I’m sure will be widely referenced in history books of the period if there turns out to be a future period where people still write things instead of lurching out of burned out cars and hurling radioactive, plague-infested debris at each other. Biden gave the speech of his life, which I know because I have now seen that phrase in print an excess of fourteen million times.

None of these things should be overlooked, but it’s been covered and I was too slow and also here’s the thing; No matter how good the content, delivery, and specifics, what it boils down to is very simple. It was sane, it was coherent and it was human. All the speakers appeared to be actual people who could at very least fake a complete set of functional emotions a person might have, they were able to speak in complete sentences, any lies were garden variety spin and not mind boggling, violent assaults on objective fact, and many of them offered actual policies. The intended objective is to offer a vivid contrast, and I’d wager in a little less than a week it will be clear it was accomplished.

Contrary to what one might expect based on past experience, here’s what the “Washington Post” says The GOP is planning:

Convention organizers say the president and his surrogate speakers will showcase optimism and inspire hope in a time of worldwide despair, with programming planned around themes of “promise,” “opportunity” and “greatness” for the United States in a second Trump term.

“The big contrast you’ll see between the Democrats’ doom-and-gloom, Donald Trump-obsessed convention will be a convention focused on real people, their stories, how the policies of the Trump administration have lifted their lives, and then an aspirational vision toward the next four years,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said in an interview Saturday.

These are improbable goals, given that Trump himself has announced he plans to defy tradition and speak on all four nights of the RNC, and the only language in which he is fluent is grievance. This is the man who says he’s been treated more unfairly than Lincoln and recently told Chris Cuomo “Nobody likes me.” He’s been asked at least four times on live television what he wants to do with a second term and has yet to even take a swing at an answer, so an “aspirational vision toward the next four years” (and I don’t think “toward” is the word the former Ronna Romney-MacDonald wants here, or that it is even slightly grammatical in this sentence) seems… unlikely?

My guess is that the next four nights are going to be what political scientists call “Straight-up bugshit-bongo coo-coo bananas,” but no one can say what will actually happen.

People are allowed to guess, though, so here are

MY PREDICTIONS FOR THE  2020 RNC

Trump will use the phrase “China Virus” on all four nights for a total count north of 500 times, at least 368 of which will take place during his acceptance speech.

Tuesday night’s theme will be changed on the fly from “Opportunity” to “Showerheads and how they don’t work good like they used to.”

Trump will run overtime every single night, bumping Scott Baio to the following day. On the last night when it becomes clear Baio will never go one, the director will accidentally cut to a shot of him in the wings openly weeping while eating a large tuna hoagie with extra mayo.

Eric Trump will be assigned the important role of making hand and arm gestures to where he thinks available parking spaces might be in the garage.

Melania Trump will either do her best impression of one of the Gabor sisters plagiarizing Michelle Obama’s DNC convention speech from last week, or simply lip sync the audiobook version of Becoming. In either case she will wear a larger version of Ms. Obama’s “vote” necklace, but the word “vote” will be preceded by the words “Please don’t” and followed by the words “if you’re not a white man.”

Diamond and Silk will address all 27 members of the “Blacks for Trump” coalition, 23 of whom will be white. Donald Trump will make a scheduled surprise appearance and Diamond and Silk will hoist him onto their shoulder and parade through the cheering audience of unmasked attendees who will be packed tightly together in hopes the unit director will remember not to do a wide shot revealing hundreds of empty seats, something he will do repeatedly. This will go on until Diamond suffers a massive coronary and dies. For the remainder of the convention, either Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle will Weekend at Bernie’s her corpse, or Candace Owens will wear her dress and wig.

Jarred Kushner will sign language interpret all four of Trump’s speeches, a thing he has no idea how to do, which makes this task a perfect fit with everything else in his portfolio, and allows him to remain silent, as multiple focus groups have determined the even among hard core supporters, his approval rating drops significantly once people hear his voice. 75% agree it sounds like fingernails on a blackboard but worse, with the remaining 25% saying it’s like if every time Kermit the Frog spoke, the puppeteer was tightening a vice on his wee little frog nuts.

Donald Trump Jr. will do everything he can think of to make his dad love him and try super hard to believe that his beard hides the fact he was born without a chin while grinning like the Jared Leto Joker, sweating profusely and wetting himself in desperate shame behind the podium he will grip so fiercely during his speech it will later be discovered he has broken a finger and split three knuckles.

Rudy Giulliani.

That racist, barefoot lawyer couple who stood on the porch of their tasteless mansion and pointed guns at peaceful African American protesters will say a bunch of thinly veiled racist shit followed by some racist shit that has no veil in front of it of any kind.

The president of a police Union will shove his buzz cut, bulging vein laced head inhumanly far forward on a thick, ropy, sunburned neck and bray like a donkey being castrated with bolt cutters for forty-two straight minutes without taking an observable breath or uttering a single intelligible word, causing Tucker Carlson to have an out-of-body bliss explosion.

The honorable Ivanka Trump will do that thing where she’s Ivanka Trump and a little bit of everybody’s soul will die.

On the crest of a massive wave of trending social media chatter that the actual Q of QAnon will at last reveal their true identity and announce the beginning of mass arrests of deep state pedophiles during his introduction of Donald Trump’s fourth and final RNC speech, none of that will happen.

Trump will Tweet that the RNC not only had way higher ratings than the DNC, but the highest ratings of all time for any TV show ever in the entire history of television. At his next press availability a female reporter will point out to him that this is a demonstrable lie and he will immediately lumber off stage like a concussed, geriatric bison that was super angry for a moment before it forgot where it was.

Listen. Four days from now, you’re going to be amazed at just how much of this I got right.

-END-

My CoviDiary: 08/20/2020: Steve Bannon Finally Joins the Trump 2016 Campaign Managers Who’ve Been Arrested Club

BY MAX BURBANK | I promise I’m going to write about the DNC, tomorrow or Saturday. I’m waiting to hear candidate Biden’s speech and when it’s over, I’m going to bed, not writing.

Tonight, I’ll keep it brief in addressing a subject I’ve been fairly certain I’d get to sooner or later, unless one of us just keeled over dead first. Steve Bannon, the second chairman of Trump’s campaign in 2016, has been arrested, and while I’m sure there’s a zillion things it could have been for, and while I wasn’t always certain he’d get caught for this particular crime, I was sure from the moment I heard he was raising private money to “pay for the wall,” I was immediately and absolutely certain he was running a con. I think I even made a Facebook post about it, but I don’t have the skills, the time or the need to go back and check, because as I’ve said before, ever since Trump’s election, the only things I make predictions about are certanties any moron could see.

Will he be found guilty? I’d like to say yes, but with Bullfrog Richelieu helming the Justice Department, it’s hardly a given. And if he does get convicted, as Trump’s third campaign chairman  did (Trump’s first campaign chair got arrested too, but the charges were later dropped), Trump will almost certainly pardon him. So it’s cold comfort at best, but you know what? I’ll take it.

To sketch it out real quickly: Bannon, the guy who came up with the whole, “Mexico is gonna pay for the wall” scam (and that’s true, it was his idea, because his core belief is that the Republican base is barely sentient and will believe anything, no matter how ridiculous) got the ball going, but while it certainly gained him points with his boss, he’s smart enough to know that points don’t mean shit with Trump. So he had to find some way to monetize the deal before Trump inevitably shafted him. So he set up a nonprofit to raise money to help pay for the wall that he’d just said we’d never have to pay for because Mexico was going to pay for.

You’d think at this point at least some of the base would have said, “Hey, now, wait a sec,  Steve! Why do you need to raise money for the wall when Mexico is going to pay for it?” But the base, as Bannon has always known, is barely sentient and will believe anything, even if you shove their noses right in the lie while you personally do shit that contradicts it.

Bannon swore publicly he would not take one red cent of the 25 million or so he helped raise from chuckleheads so astoundly dumb-ass you just can’t feel sorry for them, and he sort of kept his word. His fake Wall charity didn’t pay Bannon. It paid a second fake charity he’d set up, and then that charity paid him, so he could go buy boats and shit. And you know he was laughing the whole time.

Well, I’m laughing now, even if I know he’ll never face any real comeuppance unless Trump really gets his knickers in a twist and decides to let Bannon swing in the wind like he did Cohen. You never know. Ol’ Double-wide Don is a capricious bastard and he loves to shit on people who helped him out, so… fingers crossed. But right now it’s good enough for me that he got caught, because I’m sure he thought he was way too smooth for that, and now he has to face the fact that he’s a sloppy, disgusting, drunken, racist old frat boy who wears multiple shirts in a vain attempt to hide that he’s been a walking corpse for the last five years, and that being smarter than assholes like Trump doesn’t mean you’re smart.

Here’s my favorite line from the Washington Post story on his arrest:

“Bannon, a law enforcement official said, was taken into custody off the coast of Westbrook, Conn., while aboard a 150-foot yacht owned by his friend, Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui—who is wanted by authorities in Beijing on charges of fraud, blackmail and bribery.”

I don’t get to enjoy the news much these days, but this is a good one. Now I’m gonna go listen to Joe Biden accept the nomination and pretend like hell his election is a certainty and moron could see.

-END-

My CoviDiary 08/18/2020: Bitch With Me About the Great Unmasked

BY MAX BURBANK | I’ve been trying not to write this entry for a long time. Mostly because it’s dynamite fishing, which is rarely insightful or funny, but also because I have nothing to say about people who refuse to mask that will be anything you haven’t already thought of yourself. I am not bringing a unique dish to this table and I’d like to say that’s because there’s no unique dish to bring, but it’s not like I know that. Just suggesting it is back-door brag. Let’s be honest and  admit I have nothing new to offer. And yet here I am writing it, because you know, it builds up, and eventually you have to bleed a little steam or you blow.

I’m not talking about Sturgis-type gatherings, or any given sunny summer weekend at Lake of the Ozarks, where thousands gather for water based entertainment activities to press their purulent, wet, sunburning, unmasked bodies together like a gyrating mass of mindless, human-sized tadpoles, or any one of the multiple, self proclaimed redneck festivals where the shirtless compare their latest Nazi tattoos while four wheeling  in knee deep mudpits like some thunder dome version of the hapless space liner passengers in “WALL-E”. There’s no point in discussing what a Nation of Lemmings we’ve become, because there’s not one blessed thing to be done about it except pray, if you are so inclined, that they do not end up killing us all before a vaccine is developed.

And yes, yes, yes I KNOW that those are all sweeping, uncharitable generalizations and that I need to try to understand the economic anxiety that drives their mayonnaise Tsunami of death, I need to listen with an open heart to the strains of their Hillbilly elegy, because  no one’s mind has ever been changed by informing them they are knuckle dragging, white supremacist morons; Just as, THANK YOU, I am fully aware that Lemmings do not in fact commit mass suicide, that is a myth, they do not jump off cliffs in large groups to thin an overpopulated herd or because they are peculiarly vulnerable to enui, they do it to swim to new locations to further propagate their species and it just so happens that the fall into the ocean kills a rather large number of them. I am unkind, I am guilty of the exact set of sins I am accusing them of, they are not a homogeneous, undifferentiated cohort, I am sure some of them are delightful college professors and painters with whom I would have a great deal in common if I only let go of my preconceptions and just listened, and whatever else they may all be, they are certainly my fellow human beings, with the exact same needs, wants and feelings as me.

But it doesn’t matter, because I’m not even talking about them. Like a tornado, they scare me, but they don’t make me angry.  What would be the point?

So who does make me angry? Let me put things in context.

For those of you reading who do not know me personally, I have lived almost all my life in Massachusetts, specifically in Salem Mass, which has been my home town for almost thirty years. I am deep inside a liberal elite bubble I have rarely ventured out of and I like it that way. I recognize that my life experience is not the life experience of the vast majority of my fellow Americans, I am naive and a snob and I have been known to say “Film” or even “Cinema” when I am talking about movies. On the other hand, I have seen people throw full cups of Dunks ice coffee at passing cars as a means of free expression. This is who I am, where I’m from. Love me, love my dog, know what I mean?

My town has a mask ordinance. Everyone is encouraged to wear a mask in public and in several parts of the city, the downtown and the parks, it is required. There are signs and banners and stenciled warnings on the street, “This is a mask required zone.”

Sadly, that phrase is not strictly defined on the signage. It seems fairly obvious it means when in the designated areas you must wear a mask at all times, right? You’d think the signs were self-explanatory. You’d be wrong.

Now we have arrived at the meat of what I feel compelled to write about. Here is what I have observed on my near daily walks into, around, and out of the mask-required zones.

SIDEWALKS | The mask statute for Salem states that you must  wear a mask when outdoors if you cannot maintain six feet of distance between yourself and other people. While it’s true that you might travel large stretches of sidewalk without encountering people walking in the opposite direction, it is highly unlikely you will go any significant distance without that happening. If you plan to be using sidewalks, take a moment and consider this fact: Sidewalks are generally LESS THAN SIX FEET WIDE! What does this mean? It means that if you have no mask and you are coming toward me, if I want to maintain a safe, six foot or more distance from you, if I’m very lucky I can run up on someone’s lawn, but more often than not I have to STEP OUT INTO THE STREET!  I’ve done both those things to cut a wide berth around the maskless, and in the most pleasant scenarios I am ignored, like rushing up on someone’s lawn or stepping out into traffic is PERFECTLY NORMAL. I assure you it is not. Most of the time I get the hairy eyeball. Once I was asked “What’s your problem, retard?” and once someone spat at me.

CONSTRUCTION | As the sidewalk approaches town, just before you reach the “Mask Required Zone” of downtown Salem, you will pass a very ugly hotel nearing the completion of its construction. It features between nine and eleven different types of siding depending on what you think counts. My personal theory is that the design in use was the winner of some architectural competition for most sidings used on a single building without regard to any known aesthetic concerns, though I’ve heard people speculate the chain that built it saved a great deal of money by using construction materials left over from other projects. All of that is beside the point, which is: None of the people working on the building ever wear masks. I pass it five days a week. I have never seen anyone on the construction crew wear a mask, ever. They are frequently in close proximity with each other, and on breaks often congregate along the Jersey barriers between the building and the busiest street in town, providing a four foot wide pedestrian way. Unless you plan to leap the barrier into traffic, it is 100% impossible to maintain a six-foot distance from the maskless construction workers taking their break. You could just stop and wait for their break to end, however long that might be, or you could back up to the cross street and walk around the block, but they are not going to move and they are not going to put on masks.

THE POLICE | Depending on what sort of construction machinery the crew is currently employing, there is often  police detail with them. The Police have determined that the nose is not legally part of the human breathing apparatus, and thus is not included in Salem’s mask policy. To be fair, many people seem to believe that whatever job a mask is doing to prevent the spread of the novel Coronavirus, it does not involve the nose. Perhaps they believe that the Coronavirus can infect all parts of the respiratory system except the nose, and that the world’s greatest scientific minds are, even as we speak, researching ways to transform humans into giant ambulatory noses. I am honestly afraid to inquire.

EATING | Salem has allowed for quite a bit of outdoor restaurant dining, and a great deal of creativity has gone into creating space for it using bits of sidewalk and cordoning off portions of streets. It’s perfectly obvious you can’t consume food with a mask on, and so there is an exception to the mask requirement for diners. It is my observation that the vast majority of diners feel this means they do not need to wear a mask from the moment they sit down at their table until the moment they leave. I am not suggesting that patrons lower their masks only to put food in their mouths (although to be honest, I’d prefer it) but you don’t need your mask off to wait for your menu. You don’t need it off to make a food choice or wait for that food to be delivered to your table by masked wait staff who will spend quite a bit of their shift less than six feet from unmasked people who will often tip them less than twenty percent, and you do not need your mask off to linger at your table for forty-five minutes loudly discussing how much you hate this stupid ass tourist town’s mask requirement. In addition, it is very often IMPOSSIBLE to get six feet of distance between you and unmasked diners without STEPPING OUT INTO THE STREET where there are often moving cars whose drivers who will remind you with their horns that they would very much prefer you NOT DO THAT!

SEMANTICS | Walking through town, it becomes clear that there are many different opinions on what the words “Mask Required” means. It certainly means you have to have a mask, and the sweet little cartoon people on the sign are wearing theirs over their cartoon noses and mouths, but does it say you need to do that? Doesn’t “required” really just mean you have to have one? We’ve already discussed the exposed nose optional thing, but if you wear it under your chin, you still have it, right? And isn’t carrying your mask in your hand complying with the requirement?  What if you have it in your pocket? Or back in your car, or at home? Isn’t owning a mask at all, really, when you think about it, complying with the requirement?

PEOPLE WHO JUST AREN’T WEARING MASKS | Because who is going to do anything about it? Officer Nose Out? Who has the authority to question someone about his or her lack of mask compliance? Maybe they have a medical exception, are you going to ask for a doctor’s note? Are you going to say, “Oh, OK, but hey, listen, whatever your medical thing is, did someone who went to med school tell you that, or did you look it up on Web MD? Or did you just self diagnose? ‘Cause I don’t think you’re allowed to self diagnose, otherwise no one would have to wear a mask. And listen, I don’t mean to be rude, but are you just lying to me about the whole thing?” And what if they’re virulent anti-maskers? They might kill you. That’s a thing that’s happened, and I have always dreamed of dying a less stupid way, like in a bear fight.

I get it. People don’t actively enjoy wearing a mask. This is America and it says right in our constitution we never, ever have to do a single thing we don’t actively enjoy, even if it might save someone’s life. That’s why we all enjoy the constitutionally protected right to drive drunk any time we want and to discharge weapons in any direction as long as we are blindfolded so there’s no way we could have known for sure there were people in front of us. And don’t forget, maybe the whole idea of science could be just a libtard hoax anyway. No one really knows that masks help reduce the spread of COVID-19, or if they do, I don’t believe them, which comes to the same thing.

But even allowing for all that, is it really such a big ask? Wearing a mask? If there’s any possibility it might help? I mean, it wasn’t that long ago where there was a draft, and if your number came up you had to go to a foreign country where people were literally trying to kill you while you literally tried to kill them, and if you refused, you went to jail! Talk about taking away your freedom! Is wearing something over your nose and mouth that big a sacrifice on the off chance that it might work?

And why does this get my blood boiling? Why does it make me SO MAD? Because the casual anti-maskers in my bubble might get me sick, but the Nation of Lemmings is what’s going to keep the virus in play unless and until there’s a vaccine.

I get mad at the maskless dude coming toward me on the sidewalk in my bubble community in my bubble state where most people are trying their best to protect each other because I can. Because that dude is right there and I can wrap my head around wanting to scream at him. It’s a way to feel rage at how everything is when I feel helpless because as a country we don’t seem to  actually want to fight the pandemic if it means changing our lives in any way. It’s a close, focused, level of anger I can experience without confronting despair. And I’ll take it because in some weird ass way it makes it possible for me to keep going instead of just lying facedown on the sidewalk and crying.

So thanks I guess, random maskless dude coming toward me on the sidewalk. Thanks for letting me hate you, even though I have absolutely no idea what’s up with you and how you manage to navigate everything that’s going on. Thanks for helping me keep things small, ‘cause when they get big I feel as if I could really lose my shit, like, completely.

I mean, we’re all in this together, right? Really? Literally? Inescapably?

The only thing that’s truly “required” is being here.

-END-

My CoviDiary 08/17/2020: One. Two. Three: Life in a Time of Nerd Ropes 

BY MAX BURBANK | ONE: At some point in the writing process, I began starting all of my first drafts by Googling the phrase “What day is it today?” I do it because I don’t know. I seem to have lost the ability to know what day of the month it is. I could do it at the end, I suppose, right before posting, but it’s my way of getting grounded. I like to imagine that “What day is today?” is one of the most frequent search terms in use these days, because it makes me feel better about myself and less alone.

TWO: I just re-read all of my entries from March, which was when I started writing My CoviDiary, and I’ve come to the conclusion I was a better writer back then. I’m not fishing, read them yourself and see if you don’t agree. They are pithy, funny, poignant and full of unusual and pleasing similes, as opposed to my more recent entries, which seem to be large bags of wiggly random words in no particular order. To be fair to myself, I have to admit any time I re-read anything I’ve recently written it just seems like… you know that candy, Nerd Ropes? (described by Amazon.com as “A tasty rope, packed with crunchy, sweet NERDS!”, and yes, it is unsettling that they don’t tell you what the “rope” part is made out of or if you are making a mistake in assuming it’s edible, and I would not say that the rope is so much “packed” with NERDS! as it is encrusted, like barnacles clinging to an anchor chain.) Anything I’ve recently written seems like a NERD rope, except instead of crunchy, sweet NERDS! There are those little black magnetic tiles with words on them from a refrigerator poetry set. And while I fervently hope that is an unusual and pleasing simile, I’m pretty sure if I go back and read it, it’s just going to be a fucking NERD! Rope. And here’s the rub, I will HAVE to go back and reread it when I do the second draft before I post it, something I always do, although I’m aware it often doesn’t seem that way, especially in terms of spelling, typos and grammar. So I guess what I’m saying is I have no idea whether the March entries are superior to the rest or if NERD! Ropes just taste better after you’ve let them sit for a few months.

THREE: At approximately 4:45 this afternoon, our Grand National Withered Kumquat, His most Imperial Excellency, Donaldo “Double-Wide” Trumpalinius Obeseticus, blessed be his wee, stumpy, baby carrot fingers, Tweeted:

“Great division between the Bernie Sanders crowd and the other Radical Lefties. Our Country would be destroyed!”

Great division? An odd thing to say after expending so much time painting Joe Biden as being entirely in the thrall of the Bernie Sanders “crowd”. And what of the second sentence? Our country would be destroyed… by? Our country would be destroyed… if? By what, if what? If Biden is elected president? Because of the great division between Biden and Sanders? A man who at this point entirely endorses Biden; when Trump himself professes to see no daylight between Biden and Sanders? It’s unparsable, though it’s clear Trump thinks you know what he’s getting at. He’s got a train of thought going and he’s certain you’re on that train and you know what he means. There’s three types of people that believe that everyone is privy to their personal interior monologue, creating a context that allows partial, incomplete statements to make sense. Lunatics, drunks and toddlers.

Shortly thereafter, the Mirror Universe Great Pumpkin tweeted:

“Why is Congress scheduled to meet (on Post Office) next Monday, during the Republican Convention, rather than now, while the Dems are having their Convention. They are always playing games. GET TOUGH REPUBLICANS!!!”

Should a person occupying the August office of the presidency of the United States of America end a sentence with more than one punctuation mark? Am I being stuffy if I say no, as I’d say no to the question “is it alright for the president to give the State of the Union wearing only an adult diaper and a lobster bib?” Never mind, set that aside, that’s not really the point. Obviously Congress is going to meet next Monday because the Democrats are the ones forcing the issue, it’s a matter of some urgency and they are going to be tied up this week because it’s their convention. Also, if they do it next week, it creates a dramatic contrast to the Republican’s convention If that seems a little rude, a little unsportsmanlike, well… someone who shall remain nameless but is dangerously overweight, stands like he the front half of a two person centaur costume and loves golf more than his wife, took every political norm in American politics, shoved it all in a corner and spent almost four years continuously shitting on them. Payback, it is said, is a bitch.

Also, is this ridiculous tweet in some way implying that Trump doesn’t plan to pull absurd, meaningless, three-ring circus level bullshit out of his leathery old ass every single day of the DNC? That would certainly be a refreshing surprise, but it seems unlikely.

And then, because, I don’t know, maybe the Amateurishly Shaved  Orangutan in Chief might have been concerned that for a few seconds it might have slipped the collective national mind that he is absolutely batshit-bongo-bananas INSANE, Trump’s very next Tweet read, I shit you not:

“SAVE THE POST OFFICE!”

I’m sorry, WHAT?!?

WHAT?!?

WHAT?!?

Save the WHAT, NOW?!?

Excuse me, I just want to take a moment to say, and pardon my French here, excuse my sailor talk, but WHAT THE FUCK, TRUMP?!? Seriously, what the bedazzled Jesus on a nuclear pogo stick, maniacally rat-tastic, deep fried BULLSHIT CORNDOG ON A STICK is THAT supposed to MEAN?!?

No. Uh-uh.

No, no, no, no, no, no, NO! You are the one endangering the post office, there is not a single person in the United States who doesn’t know that, even people on  your side know it because you’ve been on national television more than once SAYING that is what you are doing and that you are doing it on purpose! Why don’t you just Tweet  “I’M A LOONY OLD, LUMPY-ASS SWEET POTATO BASTARD WITH GOOGLY EYES AND A GLUED ON CORN SILK COMB OVER, and I am BARKING at the MOON!!!”

I’m sorry. Maybe it’s me. But I just really hate the idea of watching everything I ever loved get destroyed and then dying at the hands of an Adderall-fueled, deranged, raving live action Baby Huey.

And I tell you what: If I hold it together ‘till November? This entry is gonna look like Genius Grant gold compared to what I’m writing by then.

-END-

My CoviDiary 08/11/2020: Something Instead of What I Didn’t Finish

BY MAX BURBANK | So the big news today is that Biden picked Kamala Harris to be his VP, but I’m not ready to write about that yet. An interesting sidebar though is that now Trump will either dump Pence for Nikki Hailey (which would mean Pence spent four years smiling and fawning while Trump publicly humiliated him every chance he got, for nothing) or he won’t (which would mean Nikki Hailey stuffed all the credibility she spent almost her entire career working for right down the crapper for nothing). That seems like the rarest of all things in this world right now, a win/win situation, and I’ll take it.

I’m halfway through a piece I meant to finish this evening, but I’m putting it aside as it’s already far too late at night to write the other half and then proof the whole damn thing and change every fifth word for something I like better, which is, sadly, how I do it. Somehow I had imagined the collapse of Western Civilization would provide more time for writing, which it did at first, but the more this version of life becomes the one we are accustomed to, the more my time is taken up with other things.

So rather than leave you with nothing–and at what point did this become about writing for you, whoever you are, when it was supposed to be about writing for me? I’m certain I resent you for it.–here is a poem I wrote a number of years ago. I’ve written quite a bit of poetry over the years, since I was about 15, much of it egregious, but if you really keep at something you’ll get OK at it eventually. Though It has nothing thematically to do with the ALL THIS that’s going on, I like it. It’s a fine example of ignoring the dictum “write what you know,” so here it is.

Don’t say I never did anything for you.

Popeye’s Lament

I knew this

Merchant Marine one time,

Retired I suppose,

Living down the “Y.”

 

Tattoos On his

Ropy old arms so faded

Could’ve been anything;

An anchor, a hula girl

Maybe someone’s name.
He had an old

Tin coffee pot,

Plug it in a wall;

Used to boil hotdogs in it,

Make Joe in the same damn water

Stir it with a dog

Eat the red/gray meat

Out of his own fist.
Not

A particular fella.
Says to me,

“Kids today do not

Know dick.

Ink and metal hanging off ’em,

Twice as much

As this old Cannibal

I used to crew with

Outta Zimbabwe,

Name of Brutal Pete.

I saw that bastard

Bite a man’s pinky off

One time as a

Joke.

We all Laughed! Safest thing.

 

Think one of these

Decorated Johnny Shitcakes

Got the stones to

Eat a finger?

Used to be you earned

The pictures and the scars.

I hear these A-holes

Put earrings in their nuts!

Christ!

That’s not

what your Rig

is for!

 

Call me Popeye

If you have to,

What the hell, everybody else does,

Like I give a shit.
In my mind

I shrink him down

And make a dignified home

For him in an

Old “Super-Friends” lunch box

I acquired at a yard sale.

Five bucks,

They had no damn idea.
I nail it to a wall

In the attic, kit it

Out with plastic

Furniture I kiped from

My kid’s dollhouse

And a hammock

Meticulously woven

Out of dental floss and

spider’s webs.
He’ll have to get along

Without the thermos.

They were lined with glass

And fell to ruin easily.

It would have taken up

Too much damn space

Anyway.

-END-

My CoviDiary 08/08/2020: It Golfs

BY MAX BURBANK | It golfed again today, as it golfed yesterday, as it will surely golf again tomorrow. A presidential three-day golf weekend, and why not? It’s not as if there are pressing matters that require its attention, if attention is what you’d call whatever it’s doing when whim and impulse briefly focus its thoughts on some object of greed or malice, some matter worth slathering self-pity upon, something to whine and pule about.

Why would it need to be in Washington, do they not have Trump TVs in the Trump suites at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster, named by The Trump for The Trump? Does its phone only work in the nation’s capital, can it not stab the keys with its pudgy little, baby carrot digits? Is the Rose Garden the only place it could have a press conference? Clearly not.

Listen; Golf is good. Golf is a fun game, and it’s understandable you don’t know that because golf is not for you, it’s expensive as fuck, and there’s a reason for that, which is to keep people like you from playing, people, if you can even call them that, who don’t deserve the gift of golf, people God hates. Of course He hates you! If he loved you, He would have shaped your lives so that you could afford to play golf!

Why shouldn’t it play? Because 162,000 of its “fellow Americans” (as if they are its fellow anythings) are dead? They’re dying. It is what it is. They. They. They are dying, do you see the difference? It is not dying, the dead do not play golf, it is golfing. It is squeezing itself into the tiny little cart, why are they making them smaller and smaller, it’s like water pressure, you have to push the button five times, drip, drip, drip in the shower, flush, you have to flush and flush! It will cause a new cart to be built, a big, beautiful cart, gigantic, luxurious! It will be in the stimulus Executive Order between the new FBI building and the F-35s, and Mexico will pay for it.

It likes golf! Is it a crime to like golf?! Is it a crime to say nothing, to do nothing while the Russians pay the Taliban to kill US soldiers in Afghanistan? Are soldiers it? No, no, soldiers are other, live soldiers are other, dead soldiers are other, there’s no difference, why are we even talking about it? When it stubs its toe, it feels pain, but when some “soldier” dies, does it feel it? Do you feel it? Of course not! Because the TOE is PART of it and the soldier is NOT! Why are you so stupid?

And listen, this golf? Its golf? It’s the best golf, president golf is better than not-president golf, listen, LISTEN! When it was not yet president? In the before time? Golf was good. You could never afford it, but its golf was free! It owned the course, it owned many courses, it could play whenever it wanted and it COST NOTHING! Those who aspired to its golf had to PAY, Pay for golf that was FREE for it! And that was BEFORE!!

Now? NOW? You pay it to golf. You, you, you horde of seething, sweating, mindless, others! It plays golf, it brings its friends to play with it, it brings its Secret Service, its staff, its toads, its flunkies, its school of interchangeable, replaceable, human remora clinging to the vast bounty of its pale white belly and it CHARGES EVERY ONE OF THEM! For the rooms they sleep in, for the fresh sheets on their beds each day, for the mints upon their pillows, for their well-done steak and their beautiful chocolate cake, for the endless bounty of their mini-bars, for their golf cart rental, FOR THEIR GOLF, and where once it had all this for free because it owned it? It charges even itself. And then it bundles all those bills together into one great bill and sends it  to you. And you pay.

And every time it golfs, which it loves the way it loved sex when it could still sex, the way it loved sex even after it required ridiculous levels of perversion and medical devices and pills, every time it golfs… it gets richer. Which is the one thing it loves more than golf as it was the one thing it loved more than sex when sex was still on the table.

And it brags about how donating its salary because it’s a funny joke to make, since three days of golf pays him more than the bullshit cab fare you’d have given it to president for  a year and you stupids don’t even bat an eye. You insects. You germs. You they. You dying they, just dying because you don’t know how to do anything else, because you can’t afford a choice, because it is what it is.

It knows you don’t like it. Nobody likes it. You like Fauci. You like Obama, you like Hillary so much three million more of you voted for her than for it, oh, it won’t ever say it, but IT KNOWS and it does not forgive, and you will pay, you will pay and pay, first you will pay for its golf and then you will pay for what you’ve done and you will keep paying until all your empty pockets are turned out and then you will pay with the only thing you have left until there is no one left to pay anymore.

And you will cry out to it, asking, “Why, sir, why, why, how can you do this to us, how is it  that every day you can be worse, every day you lessen us and degrade us and increase our suffering, yet you feel nothing, you are utterly without remorse? How can you be capable of such abject monstrosity?”

And it will say it has already told you. It does because it can.

And it can, because It is… what it is.

My CoviDiary 08/06/2020: Li’l Donny and the Big Boy Question

BY MAX BURBANK | So this morning someone from Fox New asked the president what his priorities for a second term would be.

It’s not exactly a curveball. If you’re the incumbent president, you have to know you’ll be asked what you’d want to achieve in a second term. It’s a given. It’s so obvious it would be beyond weird if you didn’t have to answer it. It would be like reporters were saying “There’s absolutely no chance in hell this guy could win again, it’s a violation of the laws of physics he won the first time, lets just let the poor old bastard alone.” It’d be an insult not to ask him. Any incumbent president has a whole little speech lined up and ready to go in response, right? I mean, they’d have to.

It couldn’t have been a surprise the first time a reporter asked him. And this wasn’t the first time. It was the FOURTH time a reporter has asked him a question any idiot already knows he’s going to be asked! It’s a gift, a softball, an engraved invitation to knock it out of the park!

“Mr. President,” The reporter asked, “ what is your second term agenda? What are your top priorities?”

And Trump responded…

“I want to take where we left, we had the greatest economy in the history of the world, we were better than any other country, we were better than we were ever—we—we never had anything like it in this country…. What I want to do is take it from that point and then build it even better.”

Take a moment to savor that shit. I’m happy to wait. He begins five separate sentences and does not finish any of them before finally coughing up his answer to a question he had to know he was going to be asked, that he had already been asked on THREE PREVIOUS OCCASIONS, and answer he has had SIX WEEKS since the first time he was asked it to prepare… and he says…

“What I want to do is…  take it from that point… and then… build it even better.”

It’s a stunner. It’s defining. Because I don’t think any presidential aspirant before him has ever wanted to achieve economic growth in his second term. It’s an answer that really creates dramatic historical contrast with previous presidents who to a man have said “One thing not on my list is economic growth. It’s just not a subject that holds any particular interest for me.”

JESUS CHRIST! Has ever a man in human history put less effort into ANY job, let alone leading the free world? It would be better and WAY less painful if he’d be honest, listen politely to the question “What is your second term agenda?” and say “Fuck you, I’m going to play golf. And no, that isn’t my second term agenda per se, although I will definitely play every time I feel like it in a second term, but I mean now. I’m going to play golf now, instead of answering your question which interests me so little I already don’t remember it. I can remember Person, Man, Woman, Camera, TV, but I can’t remember what you just asked me because there is not one iota of me that cares enough to even concoct a transparent lie in response. I don’t care, I don’t care what you said, it already takes as much energy as I’m willing to expend on you just pretending I think you exist, and I resent you for even that! All you are is a meat pillar forcing me to walk around you to get to my golf, and the only reason I won’t have you killed for that is because the moment you are out of my field of vision you will cease to have ever existed, and when another reporter asks me the EXACT… SAME… QUESTION, I won’t do any better, because I won’t remember I’ve ever been asked it before, because nothing… let me be as clear about this as I can be… nothing any of you do or say MATTERS TO ME AT ALL!!”

Only a pact with Satan could possibly explain how this ridiculous, lumbering, child’s drawing of an allegedly human man has spent his entire life failing upward. It’s as if we are being led by the most clinically moronic boy in our fifth grade class, somehow magically transposed into an adult beef golem;  As if Billy Batson said “SHAZAM!” and the magic lightning turned him into a six-foot-five shit sculpture of Captain Marvel that could  sort of talk.

It’s punishment. It has to be punishment, for the sins and hubris of our national historic shame, for writing all those pretty words we clearly never had any intention of even trying to live up to. It’s like if in 1776, right after Jefferson presented Adams and Franklin with that first draft of the Declaration of Independence, there was a long, drawn-out beat of silence…  and then they all busted out laughing, just heaving back and forth crying, screaming, laughing, and then 244 years later, God… who exists in an entirely different frame of space/time, for whom human lives are astonishingly brief… presented us with Trump and said, “Here you go America. This is you. This is what you look like to me, so this is what you get. It’s like the great flood in the form of a fat guy with weird hair who stands funny, except there’s no rainbow after the devestation, because, fuck you guys.”

We’re going to have to make our own rainbow, folks. And we get one shot at it. But there’s one thing that gives me hope. A man who resolutely refuses to prepare any kind of answer to a question he knows he’s going to be asked because he’s literally incapable of putting effort into anything can’t be invincible. He just can’t.

I hang on to that. And every time he gets asked that question and whiffs? My grip feels a tiny bit stronger.

My CoviDiary 08/04/2020: A Little Old Fashioned

BY MAX BURBANK | I’ll tell you what, if either of my daughters had been born during this pandemic instead of over 20 years ago, I’d have been honor bound to name her “Riesling”, because that’s what’s gotten me through this so far. I know fuck all about wine, and have little to no idea what I am revealing about myself by telling you that as of this summer I am a committed Riesling drunk, but first I’ll say a quick Google revealed that Alan Rickman swore by it, so if you are judging me, screw you, and then I’ll tell you a little story.

A year ago, my family and I were on vacation exploring the western edge of Massachusetts. After a day of exploring, we were on our way back to our modest Air B&B. My bride enjoys Riesling too, as does my eldest daughter, and my other daughter is below drinking age, so what drinking she does or doesn’t do takes place in the privacy of college and she kindly does not keep me informed. We pulled over at a gas station next to a liquor store. I went in, took a look around, could not find what I was looking for, and asked the young man behind the counter if they had any Riesling.

“Yes.” He replied.

I looked at him. He looked at me. The moment spun out as he pursed his lips in a smug little grin and I thought about his pony tail and his round, rimless glasses and how very much I hated him at that moment. It was understood by both of us that if I spoke next I had lost some sort of battle I did not understand, but my options were capitulation or leaving wineless, and my priorities felt clear. Pride is subjective and largely an illusion. A very cold glass of Riesling on a summer night is neither.

“Where,” I asked, “would that be?”

“Well,” He replied, gesturing vaguely toward a corner with his wrist, “It’s a little old fashioned, but whatever.”

Let me share some hard won wisdom with you; Life provides ample and frequent opportunities to fly into a rage. It is almost always best to pass them by. I comfort myself by supposing that when at last I burst my bud of calm, the pent up energy released will utterly vaporize it’s unlucky target. The entire quote from which that phrase is lifted, “One day I shall burst my bud of calm and blossom into hysteria” is from a play by Christopher Fry, The Lady’s Not for Burning. I read it years ago and must admit I do not remember even slightly what it’s about. But I remember that quote, because it’s useful to describe moments like this. I could have let you think it was mine, but some of you are well read and might have known. I’m not above stealing a good line, but I’d like to be sure I’d get away with it.

My point is, and I think it’s quite likely universal in these difficult times, I’m drinking more than I used to. Perhaps universal is a bit strong. Many people do not drink at all, and more power to them. And my “more” isn’t “much” by anybody’s standards, since I drank sparingly to begin with. I’m not that good at it. For me, the line between feeling pleasant and ill is a fine one, and it must be carefully curated. I very rarely drink hard liquor, and as for beer and wine, my ceiling is two. Through experimentation I discovered that a third drink lowers the barrier between what I hear in my head and what everyone else hears coming out my mouth. Once at a party (something I am even worse at than drinking), a lady I had never met confided that she rarely went to parties, as they made her nervous. I said I sympathized, and that she probably suffered, as I did, from social anxiety. I then went on to quote, in its entirety, the text of the side-effects warning segment of a commercial for Paxil that was in frequent rotation on late night television at the time. Over the unfortunate woman’s shoulder I could see my bride mouthing the words “What the HELL are you doing?!” I was in mid-recitation and could not mouth back, but I believe my eyes conveyed the message “I have no idea.”

I am currently having one drink a day, quite a bit more than had been my custom. I’d been toying with the idea since Trump became president, but the pandemic decided me.  Six months ago, I mixed it up. I might have a beer, a cider, a Cabernet Sauvignon, but since it got hot,  it’s strictly ice cold Riesling. Sometimes during the day if things have been particularly fraught I might open the refrigerator and gaze upon the large, cheap bottles I buy. The glow, a lovely honey-gold diffused through the fog of condensation on the glass is… soothing. Is this what standing at the top of the slippery slope looks like? Does anyone ever know until their velocity reaches the point where slowing down risks a violent, prolonged tumble? Probably not. Maybe this leads to risking COVID-19 as my gentleman hobo chums and I lower our masks and share a can of sterno and some cheesecloth, but I doubt it. If you don’t know the joys to be derived from Sterno and cheesecloth, or an old sock if you’re not fancy, Google it. You’ll either be charmed or you won’t, depending upon your personal constitution.

Those lovely golden bottles are large, but they empty faster than I would have imagined. It’s probably a poor idea to seek their solace every night and I could save the money. I’d like to tell you Riesling doesn’t really make anything better, but that would be a lie. It does, a little, for a little while. It’s really quite lovely, and I feel like I need a little of that at the moment.

There’s a lot of pleasurable things we can’t have right now, and we don’t know when we can have them again. Some of them will not be available for quite some time, even after things get better, whenever that is. It would be foolish not to take a moment for the things we can have, even if they are a little old fashioned. And who knows, maybe on the other side of this, I’ll track that liquor store guy down and tell him what I think about the cut of his jib. I’ll say it real judgemental and then turn my back and walk away. It will be hilarious because I can almost guarantee you he’ll have no idea who I am.

My CoviDiary 08/02/2020: Delay the Election???

BY MAX BURBANK | So begins the 6th month of My CoviDiary, a project I never imagined would run this long. A little less than half a year, and where once I had thought I might be trying my best to make daily entries for a month, now there is no end in sight. Hence the current space between entries. A lengthy way of saying, “I don’t take any responsibility” for the news I’ll be talking about tonight being four days old. I’m in luck, though. This story is big enough, and has made enough ripples to be that rarest of things, a Trump dick move that hasn’t been overshadowed by larger Trump dick moves within 24 hours.

On July 30’th, America’s Creamsicle Czar tweeted:

“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???”

This is, on its face, absurd. The date of the election is set by law and would require an act of Congress to change. Right now the Republicans couldn’t come to a mutual agreement to stop, drop and roll if they were on fire, so it seems unlikely that in less than a hundred days they could get the votes in place to change the law, especially since even Mitch McConnell is refusing to catch that particular hot potato. So what’s the game here?

Trump has always had a fragile understanding of what presidents can and can’t do and he leans heavily toward the idea that as president he has “absolute authority. “It never hurts to keep in mind that Trump is both extremely ignorant and incredibly arrogant, a condition that leads him to believe if he thinks something, it’s true. The president is the head boss of America, right?  The CEO of the company, and the only company he’s ever known anything about is a private company, his own. The president is basically King of America, and kings can do anything they want. Certainly William Barr says that’s the case, and he’s the Attorney General, so he’d know, right? Plus, he wears glasses, and that means smart.

So maybe Trump actually believes he can delay the election. But read the tweet carefully. Trump may not be very good at any of the things he frequently claims to be the best at, but he’s undeniably cagey. He almost never says anything that is 100% definitive. There’s always wiggle room and deniability, no matter how flimsy. He didn’t say he was going to postpone the election. He didn’t even threaten to do it. All he did was pose the question. And he made sure you knew it was just a question by using THREE QUESTION MARKS!!!

(Sidebar: I am reasonably certain Trump is the first president in U.S. history to use more than one punctuation mark at the end of a sentence in a written communication, though there are some who would argue William Howard Taft implied that usage when he famously shrieked, “Can someone fetch a crowbar, a jar of goose grease and an array of sturdy harnesses and pulleys so that I might be extracted from this FUCKING BATHTUB?!?”)

It’s a particularly irritating rhetorical gambit, the written equivalent of a poke in the eye. You know he isn’t honestly posing a question, he knows it, he knows you know and that’s the whole point. It’s an elaborate way of saying, “suck it.”

It’s hardly the first time he used this trick, it sure as hell isn’t going to be the last, and the rest of the team is always reliably in place to play their part. If tomorrow Trump tweets

“Every single “protester” is a professional ANTIFA anarchist terrorist possibly paid by George Soros. Unacceptable threat to LAW & ORDER! Open fire with flame throwers until threat to Suburban Lifestyle Dream is incinerated???”

Pence would go on the Sunday shows and say how sad it was that the left insisted on treating an obvious tongue in cheek joke seriously just to score political points. Various GOP Congressmen would say they hadn’t read the tweet and had more important things to do than be the president’s personal Twitter police. Pompeo would say it was up to the President and AG Barr to determine if incinerating rioters was something they were going to do. AG Barr would say it was not an action there were currently any plans to carry out, but the president had complete authority to carry out such an action if at some future point it should prove necessary. Kayleigh McNinny would be outraged, OUTRAGED that the so-called tolerant left now felt the president of the United States should not be allowed to exercise his first amendment right to put questions before the American people. And if Kaitlin Collins asked him about at his next press availability, he’d tell her it was a terrible question and lumber off stage like a bear with an ass-full of porcupine quills pretending real hard that right now was always the moment when it was going to leave anyway.

I’ve said ever since Trump became president that while predicting what he’ll say is often possible, guessing what he’ll actually do is a losing game. So allow me to predict what he’ll actually do. Or in this case not do.

Trump isn’t going to make any real attempt to delay the election. He’s playing a game. Now despite what some people say, I’ll never believe that Trump is playing three-dimensional Chess, a game I’d argue is simply too subtle for a fucking moron.  He’s not even up to Checkers. Trump is a Three-Card-Monte guy. And in Three-Card-Monte, it’s never the card you think it is. Depending on how the game is played, the card you’re looking for might not even be on the table anymore.

Trump has no desire to move the election. All that’s important is that he suggested it. He’s going to flog the idea that mail in voting, which is very, VERY different in every way from absentee voting even though they are indistinguishable in practice, the key difference being it is RIPE FOR MASSIVE FRAUD, and when something is that ripe, that means it’s going to happen for sure. And he warned us there would be massive fraud, he begged us to delay that election until we could all vote as safely in person as if we were school children this September, but we would not listen and NOW look! Billions of illegal alien votes, foreign intervention on Biden’s behalf, Hunter Biden himself personally gathering up millions of mail in ballots that through some nefarious means he was able to determine were votes for Trump and swapping them to Burisma for those drugs he’s so fond of taking. And we have solid proof the election was stolen in that Trump didn’t win when everyone knows the only way that could happen was if the election was stolen, so now Trump has no choice but to stay president until all of this is sorted out which is going to take a very, very long time so maybe we should arrange for familial succession just in case.

He’s putting delaying the election on the table knowing you won’t take it so that when he claims the election was an absolute disaster, remember he tried to avoid but you wouldn’t let him. It’s not his fault he’s president for life now, it’s yours. That’s my take.

Curiously, it’s already playing worse than I think Trump imagined. My guess is this was supposed to be just brassy and outrageous enough to garner a day’s worth of attention, distract from the dismal economy and the COVID-19 death toll passing 150,000, and lay some groundwork for refusing to accept the election results.

Instead, Steven Calebresi, co-founder of the Federalist Society, up until now a staunch defender of all things Trump, the guy who wrote the list of Supreme Court nominees the president dutifully works from, wrote:

“Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist, but this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.”

When you’ve lost the Federalist Society? That’s very bad. Because those are the kind of rats so committed to their chosen ship, they don’t generally leave until it’s already under several feet of very cold water.