If I Were the President Elect…

Posted on December 16, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 16, 2020

President Elect Joe Biden has not called to ask my advice. Neither has anyone else for that matter. But that won’t deter me from offering some.

First, and most important, Mr. President Elect, do everything you can to stem the spread of COVID. Wear your mask whenever you’re in public. Find bigger ones, so you can make self-deprecating jokes about having the largest mask anyone has ever seen. Arrange regular public service announcements by Drs. Anthony Fauci and Michael Osterholm to repeatedly drive the message home that masks and distancing are as effective as a vaccine on a day-to-day basis. Every responsible media outlet should be happy to make daily time slots available. Make sure everyone in your administration follows the medical experts’ guidance at all times.

If Congress doesn’t act quickly to assure sufficient funding to complete the distribution of the COVID vaccines, find a way to use your military appropriation to mount a full court press supporting National Guard troops and even active-duty military, if necessary, to make sure the job is done without a hitch.

Go ahead with your plans for a virtual inauguration. Issue an Executive Order, if necessary, prohibiting any large public gatherings, and brag about having the smallest inaugural crowd in the nation’s history. Declare Memorial Day a day of remembrance for everyone who died of COVID and the friends and families they left behind. If conditions permit, reschedule your inaugural celebration for the Fourth of July, and open up the capital to everyone who wishes to attend.

Immediately halt the redeployment of American troops until your Joint Chiefs can re-evaluate the situation. Don’t make any drastic moves without offering our allies who have dogs in those fights to chime in, but don’t hesitate to go your own way in the final decisions. Americans need to see you as thoughtful and decisive.

As soon as possible, schedule a series of high-level international meetings, most of which can be virtual. Publicly re-commit to NATO, the Paris Climate Accords, and the Iran Nuclear Agreement, establishing venues in which they can be tweaked and re-negotiated. Engage with our traditional allies concerning tariffs and trade policies. Put an immediate end to the nativist isolationism of the current administration, and let the world know, loud and clear, that America is back to being a leader.

With respect to Congress, do what you do best. Forge new alliances in the Senate. Even in the unlikely event that Democrats win both Senate seats in Georgia next month, you’d rather pass clearly bipartisan agreements than ram through legislation by slim majorities. I have no doubt that you can form a coalition to fix the flaws in Obamacare and assure that it thrives.

I’m sure this doesn’t need to be said, but … stay the hell off Twitter unless you’re congratulating someone on a birthday or the arrival of a new grandchild. If you have negative messages to deliver, do so privately. Continue, as you have always done, to treat everyone else in the power structure with respect. Above all, end the pattern of personal insults and slander that has characterized the current administration.

Concerning your predecessor, (I’m conditioning myself not to speak his name unless I am forced to,) ignore him and his cult of rabid supporters whenever possible. Don’t let yourself be baited. Don’t engage with them at all unless they create conditions that require intervention. If they do, announce a zero-tolerance policy on political violence and acts of insurrection. Use the power of your properly formulated Justice Department to take swift punitive action against anyone who threatens the security of Americans.

At the earliest possible date, re-engage personally with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, assuring every American that you will not tolerate hacking or any other actions that threaten to undermine or disrupt American life. Re-engage with Kim Jong Un and Hassan Rouhani at the diplomatic level. Find your own version of Henry Kissinger, perhaps adding to John Kerry’s portfolio, and let those adversaries know who their main point of contact is. Avoid “love affairs” with murderous dictators, but I’m sure that’s already near the top of your how-not-to-behave-as-President list.

Finally, just continue to be the genuine article. You are exactly who this country needs to lead it now. Be the gaffe machine you’ve always been – that’s never been a fair criticism. Keep telling us the truth and be the moral and ethical man of faith you are. At 78, you didn’t need to do this. I believe without reservation that you ran for President solely to restore America’s soul.

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Wall of Infamy

Posted on December 15, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 15, 2020

Today, Washington Post journalist Ruth Marcus published the list of the Republican members of the House of Representatives who signed on to the bogus Texas lawsuit that asked the U. S, Supreme Court to overturn the election in the four battleground states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia,) that decided the election in favor of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I could struggle to find something creative to say, but the list pretty much speaks for itself, so I will simply reproduce it here, with the question: if these people aren’t guilty of sedition, can someone can explain why not?

Regardless of their political leanings, every voter should be disgusted by these shameless individuals. For no reason other than to suck up to a would-be tyrant, they were willing to disenfranchise millions of voters. Remember them when you vote in the 2022 midterm elections.

Here is the list, exactly as Ms. Marcus published it. First the Republican House leadership: Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Cal.); Whip Steve Scalise (La.); Jim Jordan (Ohio), ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee; Kevin Brady (Tex.), ranking member of the Ways and Means Committee; Rep. Gary Palmer (Ala.), head of the Republican Policy Committee; and Mike Johnson (La.), who organized this constitutional abomination.

The rest, listed in order of their home state:

Alabama (Robert B. Aderholt, Mo Brooks, Bradley Byrne)

Arizona (Andy Biggs, Debbie Lesko)

Arkansas (Eric A. “Rick” Crawford, Bruce Westerman)

California (Ken Calvert, Doug LaMalfa, Tom McClintock),

Colorado (Ken Buck, Doug Lamborn),

Florida (Gus M. Bilirakis, Mario Diaz-Balart, Neal Dunn, Matt Gaetz, Bill Posey, John Rutherford, Ross Spano, Greg Steube, Michael Waltz, Daniel Webster, Ted Yoho)

Georgia (Rick Allen, Earl L. “Buddy” Carter, Douglas A. Collins, Drew Ferguson, Jody Hice, Barry Loudermilk, Austin Scott)

Idaho (Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson)

Illinois (Mike Bost, Darin LaHood)

Indiana (Jim Baird, Jim Banks, Trey Hollingsworth, Greg Pence, Jackie Walorski)

Iowa (Steve King), Kansas (Ron Estes, Roger Marshall)

Louisiana (Ralph Abraham, Clay Higgins)

Maryland (Andy Harris)

Michigan (Jack Bergman, Bill Huizenga, John Moolenaar, Tim Walberg)

Minnesota (Tom Emmer, Jim Hagedorn, Pete Stauber)

Mississippi (Michael Guest, Trent Kelly, Steven M. Palazzo)

Missouri (Sam Graves, Billy Long, Vicky Hartzler, Blaine Luetkemeyer, Jason T. Smith, Ann Wagner)

Montana (Greg Gianforte)

Nebraska (Jeff Fortenberry, Adrian Smith)

New Jersey (Jeff Van Drew)

New York (Elise Stefanik, Lee Zeldin)

North Carolina (Dan Bishop, Ted Budd, Virginia Foxx, Richard Hudson, Greg Murphy, David Rouzer, Mark Walker)

Ohio (Bob Gibbs, Bill Johnson, Robert E. Latta, Brad Wenstrup)

Oklahoma (Kevin Hern, Markwayne Mullin)

Pennsylvania (John Joyce, Frederick B. Keller, Mike Kelly, Dan Meuser, Scott Perry, Guy Reschenthaler, Glenn Thompson)

South Carolina (Jeff Duncan, Ralph Norman, Tom Rice, William Timmons, Joe Wilson)

Tennessee (Tim Burchett, Scott DesJarlais, Charles J. “Chuck” Fleischmann, Mark Green, David Kustoff, John Rose)

Texas (Jodey Arrington, Brian Babin, Michael C. Burgess, Michael Cloud, K. Michael Conaway, Dan Crenshaw, Bill Flores, Louie Gohmert, Lance Gooden, Kenny Marchant, Randy Weber, Roger Williams, Ron Wright)

Virginia (Ben Cline, H. Morgan Griffith, Rob Wittman, Ron Wright)

Washington (Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Dan Newhouse)

West Virginia (Carol Miller, Alex Mooney)

Wisconsin (Tom Tiffany).

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Thank You, Mr. President

Posted on December 14, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 14, 2020

Yesterday, on CNN’s State of the Union, journalist Jake Tapper thanked President Trump for his service. He noted some real accomplishments, notably, forcing Americans to examine our place in the world and the way our armed forces are deployed in foreign war zones. He also gave him credit for pushing Operation Warp Speed, while noting that he seemed to have little interest in its implementation.

Now that at least one vaccine is approved, Trump’s entire focus is on claiming credit, warning the media not to let President-Elect Biden share it with him. Not surprising, since as usual, everything is all about Donald Trump’s ego gratification. In his pre-approval tweet rant last Friday he attacked FDA Director, Stephen Hahn, telling him to stop playing games and start saving lives. Start saving lives? Really?

Our president has shown no empathy for the 300,000 Americans who have already died from COVID, a number that NIH and the CDC both believe is seriously undercounted. He consistently undermined health professionals who have done their damnedest to help Americans survive the pandemic and continued to set exactly the wrong example of behavior. In the forty-one days since the election, Trump ignored the COVID death rate that skyrocketed to almost 3,000 per day. He has shown little interest in saving lives, other than his own.

As generous as Tapper was in complimenting him, the truth is that all Trump did was urge Congress to authorize funding for vaccine research, something even Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi would have done on their own. The Pfizer vaccine for which Trump demands full credit was largely an impressive accomplishment by BioNTech, the German biotech research firm that partnered with Pfizer. No American tax dollars were used in developing the Pfizer vaccine. If anyone deserves credit for assuring adequate funding, they are Bill and Melinda Gates, whose foundation invested over a billion dollars in it.

The most important part of Tapper’s thank you message to Trump concerned his behavior since he lost the election. Tapper hailed the outrageous, baseless lawsuits that have been angrily rejected by every court that saw them. He especially praised Trump for signing on to the absurd lawsuit penned by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and for intimidating more than half of the Republicans in Congress to sign their names to it. They included the two highest ranking Republicans in the House of Representative, Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise.

Tapper noted that without Trump’s total commitment to undermining the election and disenfrachising millions of Americans, without his sociopathic indifference to the fundamental values of American democracy, we would not now have a list of 126 House Republicans who let their fear of President Trump’s base cause them to support a clownish (Tapper’s word) lawsuit over the Constitution. David Knowles of Yahoo News posed the question of whether signing on to Paxton’s suit would be a scarlet letter or a badge of honor in the future. My money is on the former. It had better be if we expect our republic to survive intact.

In the same vein, Tapper might have, but chose not to thank Trump for raising the horrifying specter of Civil War. Trump never asked far right fascist militias to march, fully armed, on state houses and American cities. He didn’t explicitly encourage those traitorous lunatics to threaten Civil War, either. That’s not his way. As his disgraced attorney, Michael Cohen told Congress, Trump never issues criminal orders overtly, but he understands the cues and winks his audience responds to.

I’ll say it for all of us. Thank you, Mr. Trump for demonstrating how far you are willing to go to gratify your ego. Thank you for showing the country that the rumors and stories about armed whackos waiting to rise up in sedition, like the Confederacy did in 1860, aren’t just conspiracy theories. Those people are real, and there are a lot of them. Not enough for a full-fledged civil war, and surely not enough to overcome the law enforcement entities sworn to defend the Constitution, but easily enough to disrupt normal business and cause Americans great distress on top of what they’ve already suffered.

So far, overt acts of violence have been limited, but these people are like a powder keg. If Trump doesn’t desist from stoking the flames of division, there may yet be blood flowing in American streets. We owe Donald Trump a profound debt of thanks for opening our eyes to a threat most of us didn’t realize existed. This morning, conservative Representative Paul Mitchell (R, MI) announced that he is leaving the Republican Party in protest, saying, “If we can’t conduct an election without threats of violence, we become a third world country. Who are we, Venezuela?”

And lest we forget, the winners when things like this happen can be counted on one hand: Putin, Xi, Kim, Rouhani, none of them friends of America.

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Stress Tests

Posted on December 12, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 12, 2020

Stress tests have been used ever since people have been building and manufacturing things to assure their safety and soundness. Would you get on an airplane if you didn’t know that every piece of the fuselage, engines, and hydraulic systems that keep the plane airborne and stable had been thoroughly tested and inspected? Stress tests evaluate the performance of every part of an aircraft down to the bolts that hold it together under forces that greatly exceed what they have to bear in normal use. That’s why planes don’t come apart seven miles above the ground.

The same is true for our cars and trucks, our phones and computers, our kids’ toys, the containers in which our food is stored and cooked. The point of stress tests is to determine how much abuse a thing can withstand before it breaks or spoils or catches fire. Our doctors administer stress tests to our hearts, our athletic trainers to our muscles and tendons. Without them we would have no confidence that the things we depend on were safe and durable.

We normally don’t think of our political systems in those terms. Designing and performing stress tests on a national or global scale is neither feasible nor practical. Yet, like every other system we depend on, they occasionally get out of whack if we don’t occasionally adjust and correct them. Planners and strategists use computers to simulate reality, but those models can only estimate how things might turn out. No simulation can accurately evaluate the strength of our systems.

Instead, human nature, competing ideologies, economic challenges, and forces beyond our control, like natural disasters and climate change impose the stresses that test our systems’ viability. Our Constitution did not prohibit slavery or define democracy the way we think of it today. It did not distinguish between an oligarchy and a republic directly responsive to the majority of citizens. It did not address the ongoing struggle for racial, economic, and gender equality.

Thus, we endured five years of civil war, a decades-long fight to assure that all Americans could vote and prosper, and a centuries-long debate over human rights and entitlements. All of those things represented ongoing stress tests to our great experiment in democracy, but hyperpartisanship and all-encompassing lust for power turned out to be the greatest threats to our nation. Not since 1860 has our republic been under the potentially back-breaking stress it has under Trumpism.

For many Americans, the struggle between the norms we’ve become accustomed to and the radical populism led by a charismatic, unprincipled leader like Trump has been a terrifying experience. We knew it would end this way from the first day of his administration. What a shock after we naively believed that the election of Barack Obama twelve years ago represented a kind of national maturation, a clear shift toward inclusion and a kinder, gentler future.

Trump, abetted by Roger Ailes and Fox News, revealed that our society was still fragmented by chasms. A shocking number of Americans were angry and mistrustful, feeling abandoned and left out by establishment politics. Trump’s deliberate strategy of divisiveness widened those differences, and the unregulated flow of misinformation and lies through the internet and social media, combined with our national epidemic of intellectual laziness brought us to the breaking point.

It’s happened before. The Civil War, the labor riots of the 1890s and 1920s, the Great Depression, Vietnam and Watergate, nine-eleven, all tested us, but for Americans not old enough to remember or who forgot their history lessons, five years of Trumpism have felt like we were careening toward the edge of a cliff without brakes. It was terrifying, and it was inevitable.

There will always be movements and demagogues who threaten our futures. Our democracy must undergo the stress tests they pose to keep from going off the rails. Without them, we cannot be confident our republic will survive.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court reminded us of the basic wisdom of our founders and reassured us that the integrity of our judicial system, the principal bulwark against the kind of chaos and anarchy fostered by Trump, is alive and well. A Court that many feared might have been polarized and corrupted by Trump proved what John Roberts wrote – there are no Clinton judges, Bush judges, Obama judges, or Trump judges. There are only very talented people of principle who believe in the rule of law, whose loyalty is to the Constitution.

When you step on the treadmill in your doctor’s office, you don’t know if your heart will survive the stress. But without testing it, you can’t have confidence in its strength and durability. When the test is over, you apply the results to lead a healthier life. Now that the Supreme Court has righted the ship of state, temporarily, it’s up to all of us to diagnose and treat the disease that has been eating through our society like a cancer.

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Three Invasions

Posted on December 10, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 10, 2020

Three times in its history, the United States has been the victim of unprovoked attacks on its Homeland that killed and injured thousands of Americans. The first was the Day of Infamy at Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941, Hawaii that killed 2,403 Americans, mostly military personnel, and decimated our Pacific Fleet. That attack triggered the most robust and powerful response in history, as we rebuilt our military almost from scratch, prevented any further incursion within our borders, and provided the impetus to turn the tide and defeat the Axis Powers in World War II. We succeeded in mobilizing both our armed forces and our production capacity because of strong leadership and a suspension of political differences.

The second was the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 that killed 2,997 people, mostly innocent civilians. Ten months after the most contentious presidential election in our history, the nation was once again able to put politics on hold for the common good, at least initially. But once the panic caused by that attack subsided, and those of us who lived near New York or Washington stopped hearing fighter planes scrambling overhead every day, politics reared its ugly head again.

The result was a tsunami of lies and misinformation about weapons of mass destruction, which ensnared us in a war in Iraq and Afghanistan that is still going on today. The longest war in our history, it is now eighteen years old and counting, and by most accounts has been misguided and accomplished little of value, while completely ignoring the real culprits among the Saudi Arabian elite who funded the nine-eleven attack. The lesson we should have learned was that ineffective leadership, partisan politics, foreign bad actors, and misinformation are the enemies we should be most concerned about.

Had we heeded that lesson, the invisible invasion of the COVID-19 virus would not have killed 290,000 Americans and be on track to achieve a death toll of more than 500,000 by Spring. Yesterday alone, the COVID invasion accounted for 3,124 American deaths, more than both Pearl Harbor Day and Nine-eleven. Unlike the latter two invasions, this one affected every country in the world, and the United States owns the worst response of any nation with the technology to count its casualties.

Had a foreign power caused that much death and destruction, they would probably have been met with a swarm of nuclear missiles. Such is the state of divisiveness and malfeasant, incompetent leadership in our country that we have suffered more loss than in any of our wars. And on the day when we saw more deaths than any since the pandemic began, our president was once more asleep at the switch of government. He has not addressed the pain and suffering caused by the virus in weeks.

Rather, he has spent all his time denying the results of the November election and handicapping the new administration before it even begins. As in every other decision he made as president, Donald Trump has ignored everything but his own self-interest and golf. Allowing so much death and so much economic devastation, much of which will never be repaired, cannot simply written off as “Trump being Trump.” Step back and look at all this the way the rest of the world sees it. Have the Castros in Cuba, Maduro in Venezuela, or Kim in North Korea done greater harm to their people than Trump?

Trump is willing to destroy the basis of our democracy to stay in power. He is being driven by his sociopathic narcissism, but an even stronger motivator may be the line of prosecutors who are waiting for him to leave office. They’ve been investigating him for tax evasion, bank fraud, money laundering, and racketeering for years. And now he has added the willful enabling of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans to the list. He hasn’t shot anyone on Fifth Avenue yet, but there is no doubt that he is responsible for 90% of the deaths we suffered from COVID.

On October 16, 1946, ten high-ranking members of the Nazi leadership in Germany were executed for war crimes after being found guilty by the international tribunal at Nuremberg. Try as I might, I cannot see any essential difference between their crimes and the willful neglect still being shown by Donald Trump. None of those Nazi leaders pulled the triggers that murdered innocent civilians, and none of them physically turned the valves that activated the gas chambers. Trump didn’t kill anyone directly, but choosing not to save the lives of a half million Americans was as serious a crime as the acts those Nazis were convicted of. All he needed to do to avert their deaths was heed the advice of his medical experts and wear a f*****g mask.

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The Strength of the American Republic

Posted on December 9, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 9, 2020

For sixty years, when December 7th rolled around, Americans shared remembrances of what was referred to as the most heinous act ever committed against the United States on Pearl Harbor Day. The tributes waned in 2002, as, much to the relief of Japanese Americans, the nine-eleven attacks relegated Pearl Harbor to second place.

I’ve missed those emotional memorials, but this year, on December 8th, we celebrated an occasion that despite its lack of prior notoriety, is equally momentous. Except for a reference most American missed in 2000, no one has paid much attention to Safe Harbor Day since it was established in an 1887 federal law. Until now it was mostly a formality, one of several milestone dates in the peaceful transition of presidential power. But not this year.

The 1887 law prescribed the date by which all presidential electoral votes certified by the governors of the states could not be changed by anyone including the U. S. Congress, which ceremoniously recertifies them two weeks before a new president is inaugurated. That date, which in 2020 is December 14th, must occur six days after every state has certified its results, which imposed a deadline of December 8, 2020 for those certifications to be finalized. The date is known as Safe Harbor Day because it is supposed to mark the end of challenges to the election when Americans can safely assume the electoral process is over.

Though the only transition period date specified in the Constitution is January 20th, the day on which the new president is inaugurated, Safe Harbor Day has quietly been observed in each of the thirty-two presidential elections until 2016. The only time it was mentioned in a significant context was when a Conservative-leaning Supreme Court cited the Safe Harbor deadline as justification to terminate challenges to the election of George W. Bush.

Safe Harbor Day is important this year because it should mark the end of the baseless challenges to an obvious victory by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In the five weeks since the election, the Trump campaign has filed more than fifty law suits in state and federal courts, including State Supreme Courts in battleground states. In every case except one minor procedural challenge, judges have thrown out the suits as lacking any substance. While Safe Harbor Day having passed cannot prevent Trump from continuing to obstruct the presidential transition, it stands as a symbol of how the Founders intended the process to work.

Taken in the context of Trump’s failed challenges, Safe Harbor Day demonstrates the strength of the American system of government. Despite fears that Mitch McConnell packing the courts with conservative judges and Trump shifting the balance of the U. S. Supreme Court far to the right might determine the outcome of the election, that hasn’t happened. The integrity of our judicial system has been challenged this year like never before, and it passed brilliantly. Our judges, regardless of political orientation or ideology, consistently and unanimously followed the law. As historians look back on the Trump presidency, that simple fact will stand out as the last defense of our democracy against a president who would trash the Constitution for his own benefit if he were allowed to.

Ever since Trump began his rise to power, his populist movement and Trump himself have been compared to Adolf Hitler and the rise of Fascism. Writers and historians have noted the striking similarities between them, with the single unknown being whether our republic could survive Trump’s all-out assault on its fundamental principles. What we have seen in the last five weeks assures us that the similarities between Trumpism and Fascism were far less important than the differences between the Weimar Republic in Germany and present-day America.

Fascism succeeded because the German Republic was weak and fragile. Hitler needed only four months in power to neutralize the Reichstag, Germany’s Congress, destroy that nation’s free press, and co-opt its judicial system. But our republic is neither weak nor fragile. And despite permitting open dissent by all parties, despite the administration’s blatant attack on truth, its disrespect for the rule of law and gun nuts threatening civil war, our republic prevails. It does so because our free press was not intimidated and because as our Founders intended by separating the powers of the three branches of government, our Judiciary stood tall.

One of Trump’s goals was to throw the election into the hands of the Supreme Court. He fully expected the three justices he appointed to be loyal to him, because quid quo pro is the only way he knows how to do business. Instead, they were loyal to the Constitution, and that’s why Americans can relax today. We’re not done feeling the pain inflicted by this president, but we can feel assured that on January 20th his tenure will end.

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The Clown Show Continues

Posted on December 4, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 4, 2020

Last evening, CNN aired the first joint interview of President Elect Joe Biden and soon to be Vice President Kamala Harris. It was like seeing the sun pop out from behind the clouds after a forty-day and forty-night rainstorm. After all the lying, ranting, whining, ego gratification, and avoidance of questions of substance that have characterized the Trump administration, the forty-five minute interview was, as Trump would say, perfect. Except it really was.

Biden and Harris put on a clinic of transparent communication, answering every question directly and openly. The only point at which Biden grasped for a response was when journalist Jake Tapper asked him whether Republican leaders have congratulated him on winning the election. Biden hesitated and said, “I need to be tactful,” to which Tapper replied, “No, you don’t.” Biden was not only truthful, but went out of his way to offer olive branches to Republicans, pointing out that they’re all in a tough spot, and he doesn’t hold their silence against them. No resentment, anger, or scores to settle.

Admittedly, the bar for meaningful interviews has been set lower than ever, as Trump’s army of followers has been given free rein to lie through their teeth as long as they stick to the Trump narrative. While Biden and Harris consistently talk about bipartisan discussions and unity, Trump has given no indication that he will stop creating chaos and uncertainty for Americans who are terrified of the corona virus, of losing their jobs, and of how they’re going to pay rent and feed their families. By contrast with Biden and Harris, the Trump administration looks like a clown show.

Yesterday was no different. In the Bizarroland that is Trump country, on the same day that Michael Flynn was slapped down by our senior military leaders for signing on to a petition demanding that Trump declare martial law so he can order a new election supervised by the military, Scott O’Grady, Trump’s new Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense retweeted the same petition. For O’Grady, a big fan of Trump’s conspiracy theories and election challenges, this was no surprise. Apparently, like his boss, he doesn’t consult with the General Chiefs of Staff and has no idea of how the chain of command works.

In ring number two, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani testified before a Republican Michigan legislative committee, attempting to convince them to throw out their election results. He brought with him Melissa Carone, a former IT specialist at Dominion Voting Systems, which Trump has accused of rigging vote counts against him. Carone had been billed as the White House’s star witness who would blow the lid off alleged massive election fraud. The testimony was almost a perfect microcosm of the incompetence of the Trump administration. Like many of Trump’s appointments, Ms. Carone was never vetted by Giuliani or anyone else. Rather than present meaningful evidence, she seemed like she was auditioning for Saturday Night Live. Judging by the laughs she got from the legislators, maybe NBC will hire her.

Over on the far side of the circus tent is the discussion of presidential pardons. Trump is considering preemptive pardons for himself, his children, (Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric,) his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Jared’s father Charles, a convicted felon who served two years in federal prison for income tax evasion. On the issue of a president pardoning himself, Harvard Law Professor Laurence Traub says that would violate the constitutional provision that no one may sit in judgement of himself. The Constitution does not prohibit pardoning friends and family members, though doing so without obvious justification would be more than unusual. If Trump did pardon his family members, their acceptance of pardons would be tacit admissions of guilt according to many legal scholars.

The main event is, of course, the corona virus. With new confirmed cases approaching 200,000 per day, daily deaths approaching 3,000, and new projections that the death count will exceed a half million by April 1st, Trump’s only reference to the pandemic was insisting that he be given full credit for the development of a vaccine. He was quite specific that Biden should not receive any credit, although the new president will be responsible for the monumental task of assuring proper distribution to the states. As Trump was once again tone deaf to the suffering and death of hundreds of thousands of Americans, Biden shed tears when asked about how he would fight the pandemic.

Many people find clowns sinister and frightening, and clown shows creepy. Americans can no longer bear the daily din of viciousness and craziness from the White House. Contrast that with what we saw on CNN last night – a President Elect who behaves with unfailing grace, compassion, and generosity.

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The Time Has Come …

Posted on December 3, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 3, 2020

As the nation counts down the days until Joe Biden’s inauguration as president, we have a tendency to relax. As Trump’s baseless lawsuits continue to be thrown out of court, we want to believe each defeat brings us a step closer to the end. If we had a rational leader who took his oath of office seriously, rather than as a blank check to enrich himself and behave in any manner he wants to, it might be reasonable to believe that.

Whatever Trump is, he is not a rational leader who cares about the American people. He has his own agenda at all times, with the consistent thread that every decision he makes is designed to increase his personal wealth and power. He never stops clawing, fighting, lying, and cheating, with no regard for the collateral damage he causes. To those who still believe he will cease and desist, and accept the will of the voters, I say, “Wake up!” If he has made anything clear during his five-and-a-half-year tenure as a politician it is that he recognizes nothing as excessive. He knows no limits.

In 2016, Republicans continually underestimated the depths to which he would stoop to get what he wanted. Many of them knew what they were dealing with, but they lacked the will and courage to organize an attempt to stop the Trump juggernaut in the 2016 primaries. When he was elected, we were told to wait and see. Trump would surely not govern the way he campaigned. But every time we thought we’d hit bottom with a president who had no respect for the Constitution, who indirectly cheered on right-wing extremists, and who refused to listen to experts when hard decisions had to be made, we were wrong. Trump only got worse.

He will not stop claiming the election was rigged until the Republican Congressional leadership forces him to, and as long as those people we like to refer to as “moderate” Republican Senators are unwilling to break ranks and challenge Mitch McConnell, that will not happen. They’ve been called craven cowards, but there’s a better way to describe them. They are people who crave power and influence whose only priority at every turn during Trump’s administration was assuring their own re-election. Fear of Trump’s base made it game over for any chance of keeping him in line.

Now Trump is playing with a different and far more dangerous kind of fire. He never directly encourages his supporters to take up arms to defend his paranoid reality, but in every indirect way possible he does exactly that. It was only after Republican election officials who received death threats for following the law spoke out publicly that Trump was forced to issue an empty statement condemning violence.

Today, recently pardoned Lt. General Michael Flynn joined forces with the right-wing “We The People Convention” (I hate the perversion of those words) who demanded that Trump declare martial law and order a new election to be supervised by the military. If he refuses, they and General Flynn threaten Civil War. Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley immediately rejected the idea, calling it insane.

If these far-right groups staged an armed insurrection, the army and National Guard would make mincemeat of them. But that’s not the point. These people are capable of causing mayhem and death. They won’t win, but in losing, especially in the middle of a pandemic with a teetering national economy, they can severely damage the nation.

That kind of talk is treason. To the extent that Donald Trump looks away and refuses to specifically condemn these groups and order them to stand down, he too is guilty of treason. In case you forgot, for anyone but the president, treason is a capital crime. In most countries, leaders who advocate insurrection against the established order are removed by coup and either exiled or executed.

We don’t do either here; we have a better way to make this madness stop. Vice President Pence claims to be a moral Christian. He has sucked up to Trump without exception, making many wonder if he has any Christian virtues left. It’s tough for an ambitious politician to navigate the fine line between what is best for himself and his responsibility to his constituents. It’s useless to appeal to Trump’s better nature – he doesn’t have one. If Pence does, now is the time to act. The remedy is right there in the constitution.

Pence has the power, with the support of Trump’s Cabinet, to declare him incapable of serving as president and designating him a clear and present danger to the nation by invoking the 25th Amendment. Trump is out of control, an angry, spiteful child who can wield massive destructive power. Now is the time, Mr. Pence. If you’re worried about your political future, perhaps your best course is showing some balls. The country might even hail you as a hero.

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Quintessential Trump – One Final Massive Scam

Posted on December 2, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, December 2, 2020

Imagine that you’re an intelligent, well-educated Martian who has been receiving radio and TV signals from the next planet inward toward the sun. Like those Vulcans on Star Trek, you interpret everything you see logically. When you strip away emotion, bias, untruth, and hyperbole, what’s left?

After decades of observing us, you’ve mastered English better than we have. You’ve seen so many references to our Constitution that you had to study it in detail, and you found that it’s really a pretty straightforward document, not difficult for your logical mind to process. One of the easiest sections to interpret is the discussion of elections. The founding document that took such great care to avoid the possibility of our republic turning into a monarchy again granted total authority to manage elections to the individual states. The federal government is involved only if criminal charges of voter suppression, discrimination or fraud reach federal courts.

What to make, then, of the antics of Trump and his sycophants’ (you especially like that word) actions post-election? Like any good Martian, you’ve done your research. You examined decades of media and court records, and constructed a detailed profile of this Trump person. You concluded that throughout his life he has displayed a disdain for rules and laws, and cared more about getting what he wanted than dealing in facts and truth. He has always trod the fine line between legality and criminal acts, not always on the right side of it. You particularly note that almost everyone who has worked for or with him described him as a con man and a liar who is not to be trusted.

You’ve seen his lawyers file dozens of suits in state and federal courts challenging the validity of the election. You have also seen every judge at both the state and federal levels dismiss every substantive claim of fraud and vote tampering, often with prejudice, mocking the attorneys who filed them. Why, you ask, would high-priced lawyers with national reputations allow themselves to become the objects of such derision?

You conclude it is not possible that this group of talented people could be so consistently wrong. There must be another explanation for their behavior, or more accurately, for the actions Trump directed them to take. You model all this against what you’ve learned about Trump, and when you consider the massive fund-raising they have done in support of legal actions that were completely without substance, all is suddenly clear. The entire month of agony that this person who is sworn to defend the Constitution put the country through since November 3rd was a fraud.

When you study the fine print in in the funding requests put out by Trump’s PACs, you find that the hundreds of millions of dollars collected to support these actions can be diverted to any purpose Trump chooses. He’s done it again, this time conning his loyal supporters into creating a huge slush fund that he can use to pay off his massive debts, buy favors, and support whatever he chooses to do after he leaves office. There never was any real attempt to change the results of the election. His lawyers all knew that from the start. It was a huge con to enrich Trump and his family, and it worked. Not only did it work, but the entire effort was apparently legal, if morally bankrupt. You wonder how people who contributed to the false front operation will react when they realize they’ve been scammed.

Your logical mind finds closure as all the pieces fit nicely together. You observe, further, that as the reality of this latest con became clear, Trump’s supporters began to abandon ship, most notably his lap dog Attorney General, Bill Barr, who yesterday threw the whole fake scheme under the bus. Barr also revealed that four months ago, a federal grand jury issued a sealed indictment concerning a bribery scheme in which a number of unnamed individuals allegedly attempted to purchase presidential pardons.

And now it is revealed that Trump is considering pre-emptive pardons for himself and all of his family members. Your commitment to logic makes you conclude that Trump must believe they are all in jeopardy of federal criminal prosecution. It’s all quite remarkable, but everything fits an established pattern of behavior.

You can now conclude that Trump has been the most corrupt, immoral president in his nation’s history. Your research has led to grave concern for the future of the 330 million people who live there. But in his defeat, you find hope. Their new leader, this Biden fellow, seems determined to get the nation back on the track it was meant to be on.

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Biden Reaches Out, Trump Lights Fires

Posted on November 26, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, November 26, Thanksgiving Day, 2020

President Elect Joe Biden approached the microphone with a somber, stately bearing. The day before Thanksgiving in this horror show of a year needed his special brand of calm, almost spiritual reassurance. Some will undoubtedly call his remarks a political speech, but what most Americans heard, along with the rest of the world, was a heartfelt plea to re-unite the country under a wide banner of inclusion. It was a low-keyed, optimistic pep talk for a weary nation that has suffered terribly under the mis-administration of its pandemic response by a lame duck president who continued to attack the structure of democracy as Biden began the monumental task of cleaning up the mess of death and disease he will soon inherit.

Biden’s words of hope and encouragement were a combination of a loving patriarch supporting his family through a terrible ordeal, an optimistic message of renewal for a better future, and a sermon from the pulpit. There was no live audience, no sound at all other than Biden’s soothing, emotional voice pleading for calm and determination to stay safe while the government prepares to distribute COVID vaccines. It didn’t require a sound track, but I could easily imagine The Byrds singing Pete Seeger’s timeless Turn, Turn, Turn in the background. I can’t think of anything more fitting than those words from Ecclesiastes:

To everything
There is a season
And a time to every purpose, under heaven
A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time for love, a time for hate
A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.

It’s not too late. Things happen the way they do for a reason. Maybe Biden’s previous runs for President failed because the universe knew they were happening too soon. He is a special kind of leader, someone who should have been saved for the moment we most needed him. That time is now. Biden is the perfect anti-Trump.

As he spoke yesterday, his age, the tiredness we sometimes saw during the brutal election campaign was replaced by a calm, avuncular charm. After two years in which Trump attacked his family, accused him of preparing to lead us in to Communism, and exacerbated the divisiveness that has been his trademark, the was no anger in Biden’s appeal, no rancor in his demeanor. The majority of Americans heard that, as did our traditional allies overseas. In most of the world, people breathed a sigh of relief at the words, “America is back.”

Preventing another quarter million Americans from dying of COVID will be daunting. Trump continues to lay down a mine field of obstacles out of pure spite, heedless that every day that passes without convincing Americans to wear masks and stop gathering in crowds costs thousands of lives. The contrast between Biden’s message and the small-minded, petty Trump, who is willing to extend a fight to overturn an election he cannot possibly win, while businesses fail, Americans depend on food banks and fall behind in rent and mortgage payments, and our children’s education is disrupted, is simply appalling.

Six months, a year, a decade from now, we’ll be looking back at all this wondering how we ever got to such a pass, asking ourselves how the United States could have become the object of pity and concern by the rest of the civilized world. How could the divisions in our country have been so deep and so long ignored that we retreated into an isolationist reality evolving toward fascism, racism, elitism and misogyny?

There will be time for all that later. Today, we can safely focus on famiy and friends, and truly give thanks that the nightmare of Trumpism, if not completely behind us, is at least on hold. In eight weeks we will have a president who cares about people, and treats everyone with dignity regardless of who they are. He cares about our planet, and he will undo the reckless abandonment of environmental regulations. General Motors, once the symbol of American industrial prowess, yesterday rejected Trump’s disdain for the environment, announcing that they were all in on restoring reduced emissions standards and on track to go all-electric with their future vehicles.

Timing is everything. While Trump continues to prove how truly unfit he is to lead, alienating those Republicans who want to see their party return to its core values, we can ignore him today. Celebrating with our families on Zoom isn’t the same as hugging them, but as Joe said, we’ve been through worse, and we only have to hang on a little longer.

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