Canceled

We're on the verge of becoming the Third Reich of the twenty-first century, and Democrats and progressives are more interested in banishing people than reforming them.

Anthony Scaramucci (above) worked for Donald Trump for eleven days in 2017 and had known him casually for many years before.  Having seen Trump and his modus operandi up close and personal, he has made it his life's work to warn people about Trump and help anyone opposed to him - including Kamala Harris, whom he helped prepare for her first and only debate with Trump.   But Democrats made it clear to Harris that they didn't want Scaramucci in the campaign because he had once worked for Trump.

Incredible.

Democrats in general and progressive Democrats in particular don't take seriously or acknowledge at all anyone who has worked for Trump and has since "seen the light" and started speaking out against him.  Indeed, they ridicule anyone's insistence that they have "seen the light" and prefer that the anti-Trump resistance movement be populated by anyone who were against Trump from the start.  Cancel culture, once confined to historical figures and artistic media (Thomas Jefferson, prog rock) that women and people of color deem offensive, has now been extended to living people who misjudged Trump and paid a heavy price for it.

Michael Cohen, Scaramucci's fellow Long Islander and Trump's most devoted sycophant in his pre-presidential years, helped Trump ruin a lot of careers and maybe even a few lives, but he has been repenting every day for it ever since he did time in prison, warning people about Trump.  Many progressives don't want to bother with him, either.  But who better to warn us about Trump than someone who was there with him and witnessed him firsthand?  Heck, I liked the 1978 Sgt. Pepper movie when I saw it in the theaters as a kid - loved it, in fact - but I've since come to see how it misrepresented the Beatles' songs and legacy and how trying to make a rock opera out of so many disparate Beatles tunes was a fool's errand (and I couldn't have picked a bigger fool than Robert Stigwood to prove it), and now I warn neophyte Beatles fans not to see it.  Would fellow Beatles fans cancel me for having liked the movie so much that I even collected the bubble gum cards from it?  No, of course not.  (They did cancel Peter Frampton for being in the movie, and it took him decades to recover from that career misstep, but that's another post.) 

Progressives in the Democratic Party, of course, are so smug and self-righteous that they would have rejected Ebenezer Scrooge after he tried to embrace Christmas.  (Paradoxically, these are usually the same white progressives who demonstrate solidarity with their black counterparts by celebrating Kwanzaa with them in December.)  Many rank-and-file MAGA voters have dug in their heels in response to the refusal of many progressives to at least hear MAGA's grievances, many of which are legitimate, like the hollowing-out of every other industrial town in Ohio.  Bernie Sanders gets it.  He's been reaching out to MAGA voters for years, trying to gain their trust and support and make them see the errors of their ways.  But most progressives would rather refuse support from famous people burned by Trump like Scaramucci and Cohen and also refuse support from not-so-famous people who voted for Trump and got burned by him as well.  Triple Trumpers - those who voted for Trump thrice in each of the general elections in which he was a presidential candidate - are lost forever, and they should obviously be ostracized to the fullest extent.  But progressives would obviously ostracize anyone who voted for Trump even once.

Remember earlier this week, when I disparaged Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan for their hostility toward Roman Catholics as well their hostility against men of both Alpha and Beta leanings - that is, all men in general?  (They both sound like the aging high-school football head cheerleader who never stopped thinking of men as studs or nerds.)  To paraphrase Nick the bartender in the nightmarish segment of It's a Wonderful Life where Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville . . . you know, that's another reason for me not to like them.  Welch and Sullivan recently dismissed Scaramucci and Cohen for being late arrivals to the anti-Trump resistance and went so far as to mock them for saying they had "seen the light."  If those two Okies have such a self-righteous attitude, then they're just as insufferable as the most smug East Coast progressives.   Which is why I canceled them from my YouTube feed. 

50.1%

The United States has now, as of this past weekend, vaccinated 50.1 percent of its citizens against COVID - a bare majority.

Fifty percent plus one-tenth may be enough to win an election, but it's not enough to stop the spread of the delta corona.  It does, however, mean that more Americans are protected against getting sick from COVID, even though it doesn't prevent someone from getting the SARS CoV-2 virus entirely.  With Delta surging in most parts of the country, it means that the Biden administration and private businesses have to step up their efforts to get a majority of the remaining 49.9 percent of Americans vaccinated.  

That looks like it's going to happen.  The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines may be just a few weeks away from full FDA approval, which will allow more companies to mandate vaccines for its workers.  Trump's former White House communications director, Anthony Scaramucci - who famously served in that post a shorter time than William Henry Harrison served as President in 1841 - has already mandated them for employees of his hedge fund.  And President Biden has already moved to require federal workers to get the shot.  What's the difference between a requirement and a mandate, you ask?  A mandate means you have to get the shot or else.  A requirement leaves you the option to get tested regularly.  Either way, this should help prevent further mutations of the virus that could lead to a highly infectious SARS CoV-2 superbug that no virus known to humankind can stop.

Trump's former FDA director, Scott Gottlieb - who left his post in 2019, before the pandemic began - thinks the Delta variant (sounds like I'm talking about a hot-hatch version of a Lancia, no?) will peak early this fall, not because vaccination rates will shoot through the roof as they did this past spring (though that could still happen), but because there are so many unreported Delta cases that there are more infected people than we think and there won't be many more Americans to get infected either way.  It's going to take a combination of vaccination, care for those unfortunate enough to get sick, and strict COVID protocols to get through  this wave.  Me, I'm staying home.  This past weekend, I missed a local jazz-festival event near where I live, but with the spread of the virus possible even in crowded outdoor events like this one, I'm sort of glad I didn't go.  I can wait for the next festival in 2022. 

Communication Gap

Anthony Scaramucci is out of the White House after only eleven days.  William Henry Harrison actually served longer as President in 1841.  His firing is the biggest shakeup in the Trump administration since Friday.

Scaramucci pretty much did himself in with his off-the-record talk with the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza that turned out to be an on-the-record interview because he never actually told Lizza not to report on it.  In that interview, he used foul language, spoke disparagingly of other White House staffers, and displayed a bad attitude.  But even without all that, he went around promoting his own dubious self-worth and tried to make himself the star of this presidential reality show.  Trump was deeply offended by that.  After all, such behavior is . . . his turf!  

So, with John Kelly in as the new White House chief of staff, Scaramucci, who offended Kelly's sensibilities, wasn't going to last very long.  A lot of people believe that Kelly can now get some order established in the administration, and this can only help Trump get his agenda through Congress (watch out, the Republicans are still trying to repeal health care!) and increase his approval ratings.  This sounds very ominous to the opposition until you realize that, at the end of the day, you're still talking about Donald Trump.  

As for Scaramucci, the joke   - and I wish I'd thought of it - is that he was in and out so fast that the cast of "Saturday Night Live," which doesn't come back until the fall, didn't even have a chance to decide who was going to play him.  Scaramucci, though, didn't need a comedian to parody him, because he parodied himself.  Italian-Americans (I'm half-Italian) are now breathing a sigh of relief because of how he played up to every negative stereotype about the ethnic group.   Listening to the foul-mouthed bullying of Scaramucci, people would think that all Americans of Italian origin are, well, foul-mouthed bullies.   

And we'd hate for that to happen.

Bet You Didn't See That Coming

The week gone by in review:

Republican Senators Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) couldn't bear to see any form of repeal of the Affordable Care Act passed, and they couldn't count on at least one Republican to join them in defeating the repeal bill in the Senate.  Then one courageous senator joined them - Arizona's John McCain, just back from brain surgery.  Bet you didn't see that coming.  

After a slew of numerous deaths of black Americans at the hands of trigger-happy police, Donald Trump suggested how police could do a better job of arresting criminal suspects - namely, rough them up and stop worrying about being so brutal with them.  Even for Trump this is beyond the pale.  Bet you didn't see that coming.

Despite having placed himself on the side of gays, lesbians and bisexuals in the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump tried to get transsexuals thrown out of the military, only to be met with resistance - real resistance - by the military and by Republican members of Congress as well as Democratic members of Congress.  Bet you didn't see that coming.

I used the word "transsexuals" instead of "transgender" because "gender" is a literary, not a anthropological, term.  Bet you didn't see that coming.

Anthony Scaramucci, the incoming White House communications director, used vulgar language while talking with Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, and his comments got published because he failed to make clear - he failed to communicate -  to Lizza that his comments were off the record.  Bet you didn't see that coming.

After all the scuttlebutt about Trump possibly forcing Attorney General Jeff Sessions out of his job for failing to back Trump in the Russia investigation and for making it impossible to stop the investigation - and rumors of Trump possibly replacing Sessions with Chris Christie! - Reince Priebus found himself forced out as White House Chief of Staff and replaced by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly.  Bet you didn't see that coming.  

Trump said he would sign the Russia sanctions bill passed by Congress, mainly because it included tough sanctions on Iran.  Now Putin hates him.  Bet you didn't see that coming.

The only senator other than Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky to vote against the Russia sanctions bill was Vermont independent Bernie Sanders, but he did so because of the Iran sanctions that were included, saying that "following Trump's comments that he won't re-certify Iran’s compliance with the nuclear agreement I worry new sanctions could endanger it."  Bet you didn't see that coming.

Also . . . the U.S. men's soccer team won the 2017 Gold Cup, defeating Jamaica 2-1.

Bet you didn't see that coming.   

Failure to Communicate

Commenting on the Trump administration is like multitasking.  Just when you think you know what you're going to talk about, along comes another bombshell of a story to push aside (possibly for good) the story you were going to talk about previously.

This time it's the shakeup in the White House press office.  Anthony Scaramucci, a slick Italian-American Wall Street investment banker from Long Island who seems to live up to every negative stereotype about Italian-Americans from Long Island and Wall Street investment bankers, became the White House communications director in an effort to get Trump's White House on message.  (He can't get it back on message because it never was on message in the first place.)  He's the type of guy who worships Trump and is the consummate yes-man for his, umm, ideas.  Which means that Scaramucci will never have a disagreement with Trump, always assuming that Trump is right even when he's wrong (and he usually is).

This appointment infuriated White House press secretary Sean Spicer, who resigned.  (Sarah Huckabee Sanders, daughter of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and deputy White House press secretary, will replace Spicer.)  White House chief of staff Reince Preibus, also said to be frustrated with the yes-men around Trump, may be the next to go, though he is safe for now.  Indeed, Scaramucci will be less concerned with the staff and more concerned with how to spin the loss of one of Trump's lawyers as the investigation into his business dealings heats up - and Robert Mueller wants some answers about Trump's finances that Trump will likely fire Mueller over before he answers them.

And the Republican health care bill will have to include subsidized antacid for members of Congress.

As if all of this weren't enough, it was reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions - whom Trump excoriated for recusing himself from the Russia investigation rather than showing the sort of loyalty that Trump craves -  is reported by the Washington Post to have discussed campaign-related matters, especially policy issues of concern to the Kremlin, with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak despite earlier insistences from Sessions that he did no such thing.

What we have here is a failure to . . . you know the rest.

I'm ready to give up commenting on Trump.  It's too much goshdarned work, and I'm not getting paid to do this blog.  (You probably figured that out from the typos that have slipped my attention in the past.)