Melting, O, What a World!

 

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

It was 105 minutes of sheer lunacy that even the editors of the Onion wouldn't have dared put out either because it would've been considered too fantastical or too plausible given this lunatic asylum of a White House.

     I'm speaking, of course, of Rudy Giuliani's presser yesterday made up of him and his "Strike Force" of legal eagles, or at least those that were left after the defection of two prestigious law firms. In addition to His Honor, there was Joe diGenova and his wife, Victoria Toensing, fulltime conspiracy theorists who dabble in the law on the side (both had declined, at the outset of this administration, to work for Trump's White House). To balance things out with the alleged voice of reason was Sidney Powell, who's renowned for being more of a QAnon conspiracy theorist than an actual lawyer.

    It put The Onion to shame. It put SNL to shame. It threatened to put on the unemployment line every professional and amateur satirist in the nation. It offered up the usual suspects: George Soros. Hugo Chavez (who's been deceased for seven years). Maduro. One was almost left wondering why the skeletons of Eugene V. Debs and Saul Alinsky were left out of the shuffle. Could they not, too, have engineered Socialist, liberal Democrat electoral fraud on a massive scale from beyond the grave? We all know dead people voted, right? Right?

    It had a re-enactment of My Cousin Vinny! It had food trucks delivering mail in ballots to Detroit! It had unproved, unread affidavits by anonymous sources for whom the GOP otherwise has no use! And, the coup de grace, the now infamous dripping hair dye that was slowly released by Giuliani's ever-present perspiration that brought to mind the black sludge in The Ring.

    Apparently, President-elect Joe Biden committed voter fraud because of Joe Pesci's character."How many fingers am I holding up? She said three. She was too far away and didn't see two fingers!", which referenced the one issue out of 31 tries in which Trump's lawyers were successful- Allowing vote counting observers to get a little closer in Pennsylvania. Oh, wait a minute. Sorry. Make that 0-32.

     These insane legal challenges, in which Mayor Rudy didn't seem to know, remember or understand the three levels of judicial review, cast not only the Trump administration in a bad light, it made lawyers all across the nation look even worse than they've already historically been judged. 

     But the other big takeaway is that the RNC gave its blessing to this press conference that made Four Seasons Total Landscaping look like a statesmanlike address by UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, simply by letting Giuliani hold his legal freak show in its headquarters.

    So it didn't come as any surprise when we learned this afternoon that Giuliani's spawn and professional hangeron, the White House's "sports liaison", tested positive for COVID-19 today, a day after his father's batshit presser yesterday that he'd attended. In other words, Mayor Rudy's kid could've just, theoretically, wiped out Trump's legal team or what's left of it.

Thank You, Mr. President

No, I seriously mean that. We owe Donald Trump a huge debt of gratitude.

    Firstly, we owe Trump our gratitude for educating the American public what a tinpot dictatorship looks like in our nation that, until January 20, 2017, used to be part and even the leader of, the First World. As proof we are now no longer part of the First World and are now, to use Trump parlance, a "shithole country", Doctors Without Borders is sending its physicians, again, to the United States. DWB, as you may know, almost exclusively caters to the medical needs of Third World countries and conflict nations.

    We owe a debt to Trump for educating younger Americans who are too young to remember Watergate on how the impeachment process works (and to Senate  Republicans for showing us how not to conduct an impeachment trial). We're getting a TV and online tutorial as to how the election laws work in this country, a more thorough understanding of how the Electoral College actually works, to what lengths Republican scum may go to subvert the will of the people. We now know about the contested election of 1876 and how it was, and wasn't, similar to this year's election.

     We as a nation of people and laws have learned why Donald Trump's nuisance lawsuits are going to fail and some of the more diligent of us have even learned about the nuances in election laws from state to state and how a massive conspiracy to throw an entire presidential election is well nigh impossible because of a complete lack of a centralized, uniform electoral code of laws ("states' rights" and all that horse shit). Our electoral system is chaotic even in smooth election seasons, if there's any such thing. It's a patchy, crazy quilt version of electoral laws that was its very saving grace.

      For instance, only the state of Maine has ranked choice voting, an electoral system that is otherwise used only to elect college student government positions and offices. 48 of our states award its electoral votes to popular vote winners on a winner take all basis, with, again, Maine and Nebraska being the sole exceptions. And as for that popular vote? Obviously, that doesn't count on a national level, only in awarding electoral votes by states.

     This is why Georgia had a jungle primary that forced two Senate runoff elections this January 5th for the simple reason no candidate won 50% of the vote. In terms of jungle primary races, only Louisiana comes closest to the Georgia model. And don't even try to get me to understand how Mississippi elects its own governors. Ergo, a slightly better understanding of civics is never a bad thing. Maybe Trump should give it a whirl some time.

     Lastly, we've finally learned the true function of the General Services Administration (GSA), a formerly nonpartisan department and how very vital it is in general election years. The director of the GSA must sign a letter of ascertainment that frees up allocations of funds to rent office space to presidential transition teams. It also allows other world leaders access to the president-elect in the interests of the international phase of transition. 

     We largely never knew about this unsung yet vital function of the GSA (That is essentially the WeWork of the federal government, only much more efficient.) because we never had right wing hack Emily Murphy as its Director, who is still stubbornly holding out with that letter of ascertainment. The Biden campaign, still flush with cash, can finance the transition. Yet world leaders have to go through Barack Obama to reach President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris.

     And wading into the middle of what would, in a sane year, with a lucid government, be a no doubter of an election, is one leaky, sweating, shirt-tucking Rudolph W. Giuliani, a man who was once a respected US attorney and politician, now reduced to right wing rodeo clown. He is Anthony Quinn's character in Requiem For a Heavyweight in the final scene, war paint on his face, doing war whoops for the titillation of a peanut-crunching crowd.

     Hey, Rudy, America is showing you a finger. No, not two or three. One. Try to guess which one it is.