Welcome to the Halloween week’s newsletter, which the Supreme Court has not yet arbitrarily ruled to be a violation of Republicans’ right to win every election ever held.

IF HE APPOINTS ONE MORE RIGHT-WING REACTIONARY TO SCOTUS, TRUMP WINS A FREE SET OF STEAK KNIVES

I suppose there was a time when America could assume the justices of the Supreme Court were not rank partisans or blithering idiots (or both). Perhaps it was all the myth-making surrounding some of the progressive decisions of the Court in Earl Warren’s heyday that blinded us to its general record as a reactionary redoubt over the much longer timeline that encompasses all of American history. (This is when I regret majoring in film in college instead of history. What can I say, I wanted to have fun.)

Republicans recognized this mythological reverence for the electoral shortcut it was decades ago, which is why conservatives have invested so much energy and resources into capturing the judiciary. Even if it meant setting the Senate on fire and elevating utter mediocrities to the highest courts.

This week was Exhibit A for this strategy as Brett Kavanaugh, in ruling that the state of Wisconsin’s own Supreme Court could not extend a deadline for voters to return absentee ballots, proved my two-year-old observation about him. Namely that he seems to have the judicial intellect of a zucchini.

From Slate:

Kavanaugh’s opinion was an assault on the integrity of America’s upcoming election; it was also extraordinarily sloppy, riddled with errors that would make even a traffic court judge blush. It’s worth highlighting these mistakes, not just to set the record straight but also to show how Kavanaugh uses falsehoods to twist the law against voting rights.

Kavanaugh’s opinion was in fact so sloppy that the Secretary of State of Vermont published an open letter the next day demanding he correct an error in which he claimed the state had not changed any of its election rules to accommodate voting during the pandemic. (In fact, it had.)

Seriously, a journalism outlet that published a story that error-riddled would have to add a whole bunch of editor’s notes to correct them, if not flat-out retract the piece. Kavanaugh not only gets away with it, but his writing will then be used by lower courts to justify all sorts of shenanigans around voting for the indefinite future. So it’s a bit more impactful.

Whether Kavanaugh and his law clerks who probably drafted a great deal of the decision are arrogant partisans who know they can get away with putting a thumb on the electoral scales with no career consequences, or they genuinely have the research skills of an otter with a head injury, is not known. Either option is very bad.

While Kavanaugh was justifying half the political world’s lack of faith in his abilities and intelligence, his newest co-worker, Amy Coney Barrett, was gleefully joining Mandarin Mussolini on a White House balcony for a SCOTUS inauguration that would not have looked out of place in a tinpot Latin America dictatorship:

Of course Trump immediately turned the whole spectacle into a campaign ad. So much for the independent judiciary!

Donald J. Trump@realDonaldTrump

3:41 AM · Oct 27, 2020

---

30.4K Reposts · 149K Likes

For decades there has been debate around whether Supreme Court justices should even attend the annual State of the Union address, lest they be seen as partisans biased in favor of one president or the other. Now here is a justice, confirmed in a rush amid a Category-5 hurricane of anger and controversy, making herself into a prime exhibit for the case that the Court should be expanded to dilute its partisanship. It’s a hell of a thing to watch.

REFORM ‘EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT ‘EM OUT

There are a million legal writers who can get into the nitty-gritty of Thursday night’s Eighth Circuit Court opinion regarding mail-in ballots in Minnesota. But they and at least one of the state’s elected Senators are rightfully in an infinity-alarm fire over it:

Amy Klobuchar@amyklobuchar

BREAKING: Because of LAST MINUTE ruling, Minnesota DO NOT put ballots in mail any more. In the middle of a pandemic, the Republican Party is doing everything to make it hard for you to vote. Stand up for YOUR rights: Vote in-person or take mail-in ballot directly to ballot box https://t.co/rPlAwN8K0q

Brian Bakst @Stowydad

NEW: 8th Circuit Court of Appeals rules in Minnesota's absentee ballot deadline case that absentee ballots must be in by 8pm on Election Day. "There is no pandemic exception to the Constitution." Court holds out possibility of counting later and says late ballots set aside.

10:45 PM · Oct 29, 2020

---

38.1K Reposts · 78.5K Likes

Briefly, a three-judge panel ruled 2-1 that mail-in ballots in Minnesota have to have been received by county registrars by Election Day, not just postmarked. (Previously, there had been a seven-day grace period.) The panel handed this decision down on Thursday night, effectively changing a major rule five days before the election.

So let’s say you are a Minnesota voter. You dropped your ballot in a mailbox on Thursday afternoon, before this decision came down. If the Postal Service, which has notoriously made changes under a Trump appointee in recent months that have caused massive slowdowns in mail delivery, fails to get that ballot to the elections office by Tuesday, as it stands right now, your vote will not be counted.

How is this not disenfranchisement? How is it not disenfranchisement to change a major rule this close to the election in such a way that thousands and thousands of ballots already in the mail might get tossed out?

As of Friday morning, I have not seen any news about the opinion being appealed to either the full Eighth Circuit or the Supreme Court. But even if there is time for a SCOTUS appeal, there is zero reason to believe that the conservative majority on that court won’t uphold this decision, no matter how transparently farcical and outrageous and obvious a threat to voting rights it is.

The GOP is unable to win elections based on the merits, so it has resorted to packing the courts full of rabid partisans who can be confident that their anti-democratic, vote-suppressing decisions will stand. I don’t think it’s alarmist to say that American democracy at the moment is seriously imperiled.

Ugh, we’re going to have to march, and I hated crowds even before there was a risk of catching the plague from one.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY TERRIFYING

Denis Leary had a stand-up bit in the early 1990s where he would holler about the myriad dangers of living in New York:

There are so many ways to die in New York! Race riots, drive-by shootings, subway crashes, construction cranes collapsing on the sidewalks, manhole covers blowing up and asbestos shooting into the sky! […]

You could be walking down the street tomorrow, feeling good about yourself, drink-free, drug-free, looking forward to the future and somebody accidentally nudges their poodle off of a 75th-floor ledge. And he's headed for the ground at a hundred-and-seventy-five thousand miles per hour. And KERCHUNK! He's embedded in your head! You're dead on contact. The headline in the Post the next day reads, “Man killed by best friend.”

I kept thinking about that bit when I read this story of a New Yorker who was swallowed by a sinkhole and fell fifteen feet into a nest of seething rats.

Luckily unlike Leary’s Poodle Man, this guy survived, albeit with some broken bones and presumably enough nightmare fuel to traumatize his great-great-great-great-great grandchildren. But holy crap, as if New York hasn’t had enough going on this year, now its residents have to worry about suddenly turning into a supervillain origin story.

AND FINALLY…

I have no idea what Tuesday will bring. And among the myriad reasons why I have no idea is that I can’t see all the ways in which the GOP has tried to put its thumb on the scale. There are a million potential legal challenges out there, a conscience- and moral-free hack of an Attorney General in William Barr, and entirely too many Trump-appointed loons in the judiciary for anyone to be comfortable even if the returns give Joe Biden an overwhelming numerical lead.

But the major obstacle to predicting anything is Trump himself. I don’t believe there is a limit to the depths to which he will sink to win, but it’s impossible to anticipate every rumor, smear, or slur that he will conjure up from the depths of the pile of wet cardboard and rat poison that he calls his mind.

Could Trump challenge the results in states that he has lost by hundreds of thousands or even millions of votes? Sure, why not. Could his supporters, who live in a right-wing Mordor where leftists are plotting to commit massive voter fraud, run wild and intimidate voters into staying away from the polls, or riot in states and cities where the count is contested? Totally.

Would Trump encourage all of this and more? I wouldn’t put it past him. As far as his re-election is concerned, the world should be preparing for every worst-case scenario. If he winds up being too lazy to do much more than angrily tweet about it even while he’s packing up the Oval Office, I’ll be thrilled. But I’m certainly not counting on it, or on norms and institutions holding. Too many of them have fallen apart in the last four years to believe otherwise.

It’s pretty terrifying. Not much to do except take deep breaths, know hope, and lay in a large supply of alcohol before Tuesday night. Which brings us to…

YOUR BARTENDER’S GUIDE BY TRADER VIC’S NOVELTY COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK

My mom was not much of a drinker. She would maybe have a glass of white wine if she was out at dinner or at a friend’s house, or some champagne on New Year’s or some other celebration. But even that was rare.

The one exception: when I was a kid, she would very, very occasionally indulge in a glass of Kahlua at the end of a hard day. I assume the sweetness of it appealed to her as a general non-drinker and suga addict. In that spirit (no pun intended), this week’s cocktail is…

The Barbara

1 oz. vodka
1/2 oz. creme de cacao
1/2 oz. cream

Shake with cracked ice; strain into chilled cocktail glass

Admittedly, the Barbara (which I should note was not my mom’s name) made a nice change from the harshness of the last few drinks I’ve tried. But it reminded me a lot of the Kahlua she let me taste once or twice: milky, sweet, and barely more alcoholic than a pouch of Capri Sun. I felt as if I could have tossed down a whole bunch of them. So if you like your drinks to taste a bit like swallowing a melted Milky Way, go ahead and make yourself a dozen you can guzzle like water while watching the returns roll in on Tuesday night.

YOUR SHEARWATER SONG OF THE WEEK

Any song with the refrain of “Will you calm down, sir” feels very appropriate this week.

Deep breaths. We’ve made it this far.

THE BIG THING

On Thursday Senate Republicans voted Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court out of the Judiciary Committee, sending it to the Senate floor for a full vote. By this time next week, she will be yanking the court so hard to the right that Kevin Costner will be Zaprudering the videotape.

Democrats at least boycotted the committee vote, which technically meant it violated the committee’s own rule that at least two members of the minority party must be present to pass any business on to the full Senate. In honor of their principled commitment to the doctrine of “Fuck You, That’s Why,” Republicans on the committee spent the morning blaming Democrats going back to the Robert Bork confirmation in 1987 for this sorry pass to which they have brought the republic.

Here, for example, is Lindsey Graham (R-Ham Biscuits), the quite possibly soon-to-be-ex-senator from South Carolina, whose rushed and defiant shepherding of Barrett’s nomination may go down as the career equivalent of a Japanese pilot steering his Zero into an American battleship at Midway:

I remember telling Senator Schumer, you’ll regret this. Today he will regret it…Judge Gorsuch was filibustered two or three times, requiring us to change the rules. They started this. Not me. If it were up to me, there’d be a sixty-vote requirement in the Senate today. Denying Judge Gorsuch the votes to go to the floor was just the beginning of the end of a process that had served the country well.

Yep, Democrats just out of nowhere were very unfair to Neal Gorsuch. Nothing precipitated that, they’re just whiners who will upend the entire institution to get their way. This is the fairytale Republicans tell the public. And who knows, maybe they really believe it.

Just for fun, here is Mike Lee of Utah pretending that the Republican obstructionism of the entire Obama presidency never happened:

Every norm broken, every act of escalation, one party - the Democrats - has been the aggressor, in every single instance. At every step along the way, our side has used our constitutional authority, and the other side has abused its authority.

Lee also had the gall to complain that Democrats made no attempt to “turn down the temperature” on SCOTUS nominations in the Trump era. In other words, he was saying that Republicans have the right to break every norm they want, as they did with their unprecedented obstruction of Obama’s judicial nominees, and Democrats should just lay back and enjoy it.

This leads us to the topic of court expansion, which is what you call it if you’re reasonable, or court packing, which is what you call it if you have sold your souls to stack the federal judiciary with unqualified wingnuts and then realized that holy shit, it’s perfectly constitutional for Democrats to cancel you out by using legislative majorities to expand the courts and put more liberals on them.

In short, these are more or less the same thing, but “court packing” sounds much more sinister and illegitimate.

Over at The Atlantic, Adam Serwer has a banger of a piece exploring the issue. The main thrust of his argument is that conservative courts, having swung right despite being built by legislators representing a minority of Americans, are now working to disenfranchise Democratic-leaning voters so that Republicans will never have to win elections by appealing to majorities ever again:

The logic here is as clear to present-day Trumpists as it was to Democrats decrying “negro rule” in the South: Their inalienable rights can only be preserved as long as the worthy deprive the unworthy of power…Americans who fail to vote Republican are similarly unschooled in the virtues of liberty, and their ability to choose their leaders must be constrained until they are disciplined enough to choose the right ones.

[…]

This political project is authoritarian in nature, as it seeks to win elections by keeping the other side from being able to fully participate.

Part of this project is to portray any Democratic efforts to counter it as some sort of cold-blooded, unprecedented coup d’etat against democracy. When in fact such a counter is intended to shore up democracy by making sure everyone can still participate in it by voting.

The Republican strategy, as Serwer noted, is that they need to hold off the masses while hard-right courts implement conservative political priorities: banning abortion, overturning the right to gay marriage, knocking down any efforts at campaign finance reform, and on and on.

This project can’t happen with a judiciary that has a fairly even ideological balance. Which is why the Republican-controlled Senate held up so many of Barack Obama’s nominees, then rushed to stuff the courts full of ideologues over the last four years, no matter the lack of qualifications of many of them.

There are enough circuit courts, which have over a dozen justices each, that the change to them has not attracted a great deal of public notice. But on the Supreme Court, the margins have been so narrow, particularly on high-profile issues, that every single nomination over the last decade or so has been portrayed as a life-or-death, existential threat to America. The possibility that reproductive rights or gay marriage or even whether the Affordable Care Act will remain a law could hinge on the vote of one ideologue who can justify a decision with an intelligence-insulting argument.

This has turned every SCOTUS nomination into an exhausting, enervating, gut-wrenching rollercoaster ride on which it is possible to say the future of the republic rests. This means passionate protests that raise everyone’s hackles. It means senators and nominees alike turn into frothing balls of rage who threaten retribution on those who oppose them for ideological or moral reasons like some sort of Onion parody made real.

It’s not a sustainable habit. It’s too damaging to the nation’s psyche to go through this war every single time there is a Supreme Court vacancy. But we will if we can’t count on our legislature to even consider nominees who are not unqualified Federalist Society hacks.

Which is why court expansion, especially of SCOTUS, is so utterly necessary at this point to bring some balance back to the judiciary. At some point if we keep down this road, the right will be ruling without the consent of the governed. And that is a dangerous place for a democracy to be.

ONE MORE THING…

If you held a gun to my head to force me to find a positive in Trump’s performance at Thursday night’s debate, the best I could come up with is that he seemed sliiiiightly less manic than he had in the first one.

Of course, I just write this newsletter full of ranting, so I don’t need to pretend to be balanced. So you won’t see headlines like “Trump, Biden Clash in Debate, Show Sharp Differences” like the Washington Post put on its homepage today, or “Trump and Biden Lay Out Starkly Different Visions of America” like the New York Times.

Trump’s “vision” for America is basically a tour through what Twitter wags last night dubbed the Fox News Cinematic Universe, a paranoid freakshow wherein Communist China handed the Bidens $1.5 billion, the country is being overrun by immigrants, the Obama administration committed treason by spying on Trump’s 2016 campaign, and on and on and on and on and on.

It was from deep within this universe that Trump launched most of his attacks on Biden, attacks that grew increasingly weird and incoherent as the night went on. Some commentators noticed this. Others very much did not.

Eleven days. Eleven days. Eleven days.

YOUR TRADER VIC’S BARTENDER GUIDE NOVELTY COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK

No cocktail this week, due to a combination of not having a chance to get over to the ABC store and…well, actually that’s the only reason. Go forth and enjoy sobriety for a week.

YOUR SHEARWATER SONG OF THE WEEK

In honor of the apocalyptic rhetoric about the future of America being on the line that we’re going to hear for the next week and a half — and to be fair, I think that’s right — here is “Rooks,” a song whose lyrics seem to chronicle an apocalypse that takes the planet’s birds first, then the rest of us. Cheery!

Back next week, probably with unintelligible screaming.

There was no email last week due to Dell pushing some sort of update to my laptop that caused it to no longer boot up, which meant I spent most of my Friday unfucking it. I swear, my next computer is going to be a typewriter. Anyway, onward!

THE BIG THING…

In about three weeks, coronavirus will have killed off a number of Americans equal to the population of the midsize city in which I live. Millions of people will remain out of work and sliding hard into poverty. The economy will still be so deep in the toilet that you’d need a drain snake to reach it. The Senate will likely still be sitting on a stimulus package to help those people that passed the House in May, and will have done nothing to help pass the other package that the House of Representatives has been painfully negotiating with the White House for the last few weeks.

Naturally, then, it is a good time for the world’s greatest deliberative body to attack the single most important issue facing the nation: Twitter and Facebook stopping Republicans from spreading a bullshit political hit job written by a Rupert Murdoch-owned rag.

On Wednesday the New York Post revealed that it had come into possession of a hard drive containing salacious material about Hunter Biden, son of Donald Trump’s opponent in the presidential election. The Post said that the drive came from a laptop that Biden dropped off at a Delaware computer repair store and never came back to pick up. The store owner, claiming to be disturbed by some of the images he found on the hard drive, turned it over to…Rudy Giuliani, for some reason.

And hey, what do you know? In addition to some images of Hunter Biden drinking and getting laid, he hard drive also allegedly contained documents furthering the case Giuliani has been chasing for two years: that Joe Biden, while he was vice president, had leaned on the Ukranian government to fire a prosecutor who was investigating corruption at Burisma, a gas company that had put Hunter Biden on its board of directors.

The story is bullshit. But that didn’t stop Trump from trying to strongarm Ukraine’s president into investigating it in order to hurt Biden, who was the favorite to win the Democratic nomination. It was this corruption of American foreign policy for his own personal political gain that led the House of Representatives to impeach the president last year.

It is here that we must take a step back and consider this latest story in the wider context of not just the 2020 election, but 2016 as well. Back then, you may recall the publication of a book called Clinton Cash that claimed to contain all sorts of skullduggery about Hillary Clinton, corruption at her family’s eponymous foundation, her role in giving a Russian mining company the rights to mine uranium on American soil, and who knows what else that I have forgotten, maybe that she kidnapped and ate the Lindbergh baby, who the hell knows.

Also during the campaign, hackers managed to steal emails from both Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee and dump them on the public. The wingnut press started extrapolating all sorts of wild accusations from these fairly benign and innocuous documents.

Much of America’s mainstream political press then spent months running stories boosting the right’s claims, hollering that while the right’s accusations remained unproven, they cast shadows on Clinton’s credibility. Thus did her credibility and fitness for office become a major issue, even while the Republicans were running a sleazy, racist grifter who makes every Jim Thompson character look like a model of moral rectitude.

Clinton Cash was midwifed into existence by Steve Bannon, who later became Trump’s campaign chairman and White House strategist, and who openly told the world he was trying to smear Clinton in any way he could. So who gave the New York Post this Biden laptop story?

Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, told The Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September and Giuliani provided The Post with a copy of it on Sunday.

You don’t say! Does this all sound like the world’s sloppiest rat-fucking? Like, “E. Howard Hunt spinning in his grave at 1,000 rpm” sloppy? Because it basically was, and reporters had solidly debunked the Post story in about ten minutes.

At least some in the mainstream press — though certainly not everyone — have learned their lesson about swallowing Bannon-originated bullshit in the last four years. Just as importantly, Twitter and Facebook have also learned lessons about allowing disinformation to spread far and wide on their platforms. Within hours, both companies had banned links to the Post story and suspended the accounts of people who tried to retweet it to their thousands of followers. (Hilariously, this rash of suspensions on Twitter swept up the account of White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, who opened her tenure a few months ago by unbelievably promising the press corps she would never lie. Which was her first and by no means last lie.)

It was admittedly a pretty ham-handed response. There were less severe restrictions available, which Twitter at least is now scrambling to make policy for future incidents. And cracking down on this one piece opens up lots of questions about why all sorts of other misinformation, some of it related to this very story, is still allowed.

But does this sound like a threat so grave as to draw the immediate actions of the federal government? There is nothing criminal here, at least on the part of the social media companies. There is no threat to anyone’s First Amendment rights, since Facebook and Twitter are not government entities.

Nonetheless, some of America’s worst senators sprang into action, announcing they will subpoena the heads of Facebook and Twitter and drag them into congressional hearings to grill them over this unprecedented infringement on conservatives’ right to deliberately spread libelous horseshit.

Here, for instance, is video of Ted Cruz, a man so unpleasant that his head lice prefer committing suicide, whining about this terrible threat to free speech. He’s followed by Lindsey Graham hollering a bunch about Russia, as if the Mueller report doesn’t exist.

CSPAN@cspan

Sen. @tedcruz: "Twitter is actively blocking, right now this instant, stories from the New York Post...on Tuesday, the Judiciary Committee, the full committee, will be voting on subpoenas to subpoena @jack Dorsey to come before our committee."

3:26 PM · Oct 15, 2020

---

8.48K Reposts · 17K Likes

Then along comes Josh Hawley, perhaps the smuggest senator in a caucus full of so much smug that I’m tempted to blame it for the Dyatlov Pass incident. Hawley has been pushing his hatred of Big Tech for a couple of years, always framing the monopolies of Facebook and Twitter as existential threats to not just the free speech of conservatives, but to every other tenet of American life they hold dear. (Seriously, I’m underselling the apocalyptic visions of Josh Hawley, who looks at the world and seems to see nothing but gay antifa terrorists forcing religious people to undergo mandatory gay marriages and third-trimester abortions if we don’t all vote Republican.)

Hawley announced that he had invited both Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg to come testify to his Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, to which the only possible response is, how in the everloving fuck does this issue fall under the rubric of crime and terrorism? Followed closely by, is it possible no one has ever just told Josh Hawley he’s full of shit and then laughed in his face? Because I will Venmo a hundred bucks to the first person who does that.

In any case, it does not ever seem to have occurred to these Constitution-humpers to ask what is more of a threat to the integrity of the First Amendment: private companies, even monopolies, declining to participate in a propaganda campaign, or the federal government demanding under threat of congressional subpoena that they do the opposite?

Here’s a hint: the First Amendment says that Congress shall make no law “abridging the freedom of speech” of the people. And, since we know from the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, that corporations are also people who cannot have their free speech infringed thanks to the First Amendment, isn’t this action by Hawley and his co-wankers on the Judiciary Committee the very definition of the government trying to repress a constitutional right?

I’m only being half-facetious. Obviously this is not the most sophisticated argument, and I’ll leave the more robust scholarship about social media and the First Amendment and Section 230 to the actual scholars. But what the wingnuts are doing is not just “working the refs.” It looks an awful lot like using government power as a tool of intimidation to stifle speech by a private company. Which is something that conservatives, hilariously and falsely, have long claimed to oppose.

Anyway, coronavirus cases are rising again in over thirty states while unemployment remains high and people become more desperate. So congrats to the GOP’s Senate caucus for keeping its eye on the ball here.

AND FURTHERMORE…

Certainly there are good arguments against tech giants having too much power to censor individuals. On the other hand, we have uncountable examples of the dangers of letting misinformation like this Post story spread unchecked. The people who spread stuff like this count on our squishiness about censorship to inject this obvious bullshit into the discourse.

Why go to the mat for this one example? We do not need to make this a binary choice between censorship and no censorship. We can take these situations on a case-by-case basis. In this case, I come down on the side of it being a social good to take away one of the avenues bad actors have used to game the system. Especially when even Trump flunkies have reportedly been hollering for months behind the scenes that Giuliani was being led around by the nose.

We don’t accept the possibility of gray areas, and next thing you know we have a president who refuses on national TV to denounce the insane belief of his followers that Democrats are Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles. Facebook and Twitter want no part of that? Good for them.

YOUR TRADER VIC NOVELTY COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK

This week I tried something called the Brooklynite. Which sure sounds hip:

2 oz. Jamaican rum
1/2 oz. honey
1/2 tsp. lime juice
1 dash Angostura bitters

Shake well with cracked ice; strain into chilled cocktail glass

What on Earth this could possibly have to do with Brooklyn is beyond me, but since the book was published in 1947, maybe the connection has been lost to the mists of time. Or maybe some New York history buff out there knows. Or maybe it’s just a name.

Anyway, this cocktail sucked.

YOUR SHEARWATER SONG OF THE WEEK

A downer of a song about a love affair gone sour, leaving one partner stuck in a spiral of depression and ruinous nostalgia. Sign me up!

Back next week, assuming full laptop cooperation.

THE MAIN THING…

My list of possible topics this week was so long. The big New York Times story on Trump’s taxes, the clusterfuck of a debate, the president’s former campaign manager being arrested and committed to a hospital after allegedly beating his wife and seemingly having some sort of nervous breakdown, the travesty of rushing Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the discovery that the Breonna Taylor grand jury only returned charges of wanton endangerment against one cop because that’s all that Kentucky’s ambitious Republican attorney general asked for, the evidence that a couple of what were considered safe Republican seats in the Senate are really up for grabs, the Justice Department improperly ginning up an absentee-ballot scandal to support Trump’s efforts to cast doubt on voting by mail, the discovery that Joe Lieberman has a son who is even more of a dick than Joe Lieberman…whew, the list is just endless.

Then President Brainworms and his wife tested positive for the coronavirus, and everything else is right out the window.

As of now, we do not know how the virus spread into Trump’s inner circle. (Given that multiple attendees of Saturday’s Rose Garden event to introduce Barrett have tested positive, one assumes that contact tracing there will be extensive.) But what I keep coming back to, even after all these months of watching Trump and other conservatives sneer at mask-wearing and downplay or outright ignore the advice of medical and health professionals about how to slow the spread of the virus, is the GODDAMN IRRESPONSIBILITY OF THIS DUMBASS PRESIDENT AND HIS FAMILY AND CLOSEST ADVISERS, HOLY FUCKING SHIT WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU IDIOTS???

I mean, this is just absurd:

The Trump family and other members of the administration entered the debate hall, where rules mandated everyone in the room wear masks, without masks. […]

A Cleveland Clinic doctor in a white lab coat started to approach Trump family guests to ask them to put on masks. She offered them one in case they didn’t get one. She never approached any family members but as she got closer to them, someone shook their head and no one she reminded to put on a mask ended up putting one on. 

That was on Tuesday night. We now know that Hope Hicks, one of his closest advisers, tested positive on Wednesday night. Trump was showing symptoms by Thursday afternoon. Give the virus’ incubation period averages five days (though an infected person can show symptoms within two days), Trump and Melania were probably already shedding virus while they were flying on Air Force One to get to Cleveland, and then in the Cleveland Clinic auditorium with who only knows what kind of ventilation.

It is a little too easy to shame people these days, and perhaps it would behoove all of us to be a little forgiving. We don’t know what choices folks have to make between exposure to the virus at work and, say, paying their rent.

This rule should not apply to the Trump family. People have to make the above choice largely because its patriarch and his failson-in-law Slenderman have completely bungled the nation’s response to the pandemic. The Trumps are insulated by their wealth and privilege from having to choose between their lives and rent money.

Yet here they flouted a requirement to wear masks, even though we now know it is well within the realm of the possible one or more of them was an asymptomatic carrier of the virus at the time. In fact, they didn’t just flout it. They made a show of it, wearing their masks for a minute before taking them off when they marched into the auditorium of one of the world’s premier medical clinics. As if to say, “Fuck you, coronavirus, you can’t get us! We’re the Trumps!”

As if the virus cares.

Of course they are not the only ones. Rep. Jim Jordan, who excels at ignoring dangerous situations for other people anyway, is reportedly refusing to quarantine even though he was in close contact without a mask with Hicks and the Trumps this week. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a man who lacks the brains that God gave a turnip, attended a Senate Judiciary committee hearing on Thursday even though he was experiencing symptoms of the virus. This despite the fact that multiple members of that committee are well over the age of 60, and a couple (Chuck Grassley and Dianne Feinstein) are north of 80.

Lee then announced on Friday that he had tested positive, just before footage surfaced from the Rose Garden on Saturday showing him hugging people while holding a surgical mask in his hand. Yo, Senator Turnip, your hand does not contain passageways to your respiratory system.

The arrogance of this behavior would, in a just world, lead to some soul-searching. Because we’re talking about the Trumps and their congressional enablers, it will more likely lead to doubling down and screaming audible enough for Voyager 1 to pick up.

Thirty-two days. Thirty-two days. Thirty-two days.

YOUR BARTENDER’S GUIDE BY TRADER VIC NOVELTY COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK

This was me a week ago on the challenge of finding ingredients for some of the drinks listed in the Trader Vic guide: “[S]o many of the drinks require alcohol that I am unlikely to find outside of my grandparents’ liquor cabinet in 1953. Cherry liquer? Is that still a thing?”

Then I thought maybe I had stuck my foot in my mouth, so I checked the website for Virginia’s ABC stores, and whoa, cherry liquer still exists. Unfortunately it does not exist in any of the stores within a 90-mile radius of my house, but that will teach me to watch the snark. (It will teach me nothing.)

This week’s recipe is something called an Apple Pie cocktail:

1 oz. Cuban rum
1 oz. Italian vermouth
2 dashes grenadine
4 dashes lemon juice

Shake well with ice; strain into chilled cocktail glass

I subbed in dark Jamaican rum, which is all I had, and overdid it a bit with the lemon juice and grenadine, which made this probably harsher than it’s supposed to be. But there was a definite vaguely apple pie-adjacent flavor. Next time I may pour it over a bowl of vanilla ice cream like an alcoholic butterscotch.

YOUR SHEARWATER SONG OF THE WEEK

This song is actually called “Red Sea, Black Sea,” but the mistitled version is the only decent recording I could find on YouTube.

In light of President Pandemic testing positive for the rona, any song that contains the lyrics, “And the walls came down, it was a fucking disaster, the whole thing’s changed in unthinkable ways” feels very apropos.

Back next week, most likely while pointing vaguely in the direction of Washington and chanting “Told ya so” over and over.

THE BIG THING…

During the week I try to jot down possible newsletter ideas on a legal pad. The main problem with this is that the pad always seems to be in some distant corner of the house when I think of something, so I file the thought in my head and then write it down when I’m near the pad again.

This week, however, I was defeated by the sheer volume of targets. Does the casual liberal political observer aim his fury at Republicans for their grotesque haste to confirm a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsberg? At the Supreme Court for the likelihood it is about to overturn the Affordable Care Act? At the conservatives who were quick to scream about anti-Catholic bias over any scrutiny of possible SCOTUS candidate Amy Coney Barrett, as if she is entitled to be seated on the Court for life with no questions asked?

Or does he aim that fury at Robert Mueller over the revelations by Andrew Weissman, one of his main investigators, at the ways he allowed his investigation and report on collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016 to be watered down and manipulated by unscrupulous actors, particularly Attorney General William Barr? At William Barr in general, for being a duplicitous hack and scheming liar who has turned the Justice Department into a law firm with only Donald Trump as its client?

Or does he save it all up for Trump’s trolling about not accepting a peaceful transition of power if he loses to Joe Biden? At the Republicans who refused to categorically state that this is an unacceptable statement for an incumbent president — or anyone else — to make?

It was all too much. Maybe half the potential targets made it onto my legal pad. The other half disappeared from my brain, buried under the avalanche of new horrors that seemed to spray out of the TV or computer screen on an hourly basis. Even as I type this, I keep thinking, Don’t forget Breonna Taylor! The phony Trump ballot story in Pennsylvania! The executive order on healthcare! The new DHS rule on student visas! Rick Scott!

But over all of it hangs the specter of the election, because everything comes back to that. The SCOTUS fight, the Russia investigations and counter-investigations, the departments of the executive branch actively working to exclude foreigners from countries that are mostly non-white from coming to America, the general direction of this nation being turned into an all-white castle with the drawbridges raised and the ramparts manned by a million Stephen Miller clones spewing his hateful rhetoric. We cannot even begin the very hard and long task of mitigating some of the damage done to our collective psyche and our reputation until Trump is out of office, along with as many of his enablers as we can get.

Even then, I fully expect we’re going to be living with Trump for a long time. For one thing, he’s too addicted to the spotlight to go away. He’ll likely spend a great deal of time sniping at Biden from behind his Twitter account, blaming him for anything that goes wrong and telling the world that everything would be great if the Deep State hadn’t stolen the election from him. Or whatever crazy justifications he has to make to live with losing. His followers are still going to be ginned up, primed to follow Dear Leader down whatever rabbit holes he keeps finding in the deepest recesses of his diseased brain.

For another thing, we’re not going to be able to do the whole “look forward, not back” shtick that Barack Obama pushed when his administration didn’t prosecute anyone for the financial collapse in 2008. As deep as the damage from that event was in society, the level of rot from the Trump years is going to make it look like a shallow puddle.

I don’t mean to suggest that there will be criminal prosecutions of all Trump administration officials, though I’m sure one could find all sorts of charges for many of them. What I mean is that there is going to have to be a wholesale shining of sunlight on a lot of dark corners. Everything that, say, Barr has done to politicize the Justice Department? Someone needs to be held accountable. Everything this administration has done to screw up and short-circuit a coordinated response to the coronavirus? Someone needs to be held accountable for that.

Family separation of migrants? Whatever money has been going into Trump family pockets through their hotels and clubs and who knows what else? Even political appointees violating the Hatch Act willy-nilly? All of this needs to be clubbed, dragged into the light, and hung up in full view of society. Even if it takes years.

America won’t be able to move completely forward without some accountability. Otherwise the country will find itself living in a state of suspended animation, mumbling to itself in anger while banging a tin cup from our perch atop a steam grate while the rest of the world gives us a wide berth as it hurries along the sidewalk to somewhere else.

I don’t know what that accountability looks like, exactly. I don’t know if anything even resembling accountability is possible so long as Fox News and the rest of the insane right-wing media exists. But I just don’t see how this country isn’t a wounded animal that can just pick itself back up and lumber off to keep leading the herd.

Well, like they tell addicts, you have to hit bottom first. We probably haven’t, but maybe we can still find a way to avoid it.

SPEAKING OF ALL THAT…

I can’t even begin to express how enraged I was by the absurd Kafka-esque ordeal described in this story from The New Yorker. The shitty government behavior here — by the FBI and ICE, mostly — long predates Donald Trump, of course. But you have to wonder how much of it comes from certain people in these agencies feeling unleashed by his nativism and xenophobia about Iran, and immigrants more broadly. These agencies, ICE especially, need reform that is probably beyond the ability of any one administration. But beyond that, our entire immigration system is such a ridiculous nightmare, we probably need to tear it down as much as possible and rebuild it from scratch.

YOUR BARTENDER’S GUIDE BY TRADER VIC NOVELTY COCKTAIL OF THE WEEK

One thing about the Trader Vic’s guide is that so many of the drinks require alcohol that I am unlikely to find outside of my grandparents’ liquor cabinet in 1953. Cherry liquer? Is that still a thing?

Anyway, this week’s drink is something called a Maple Leaf, which I made mostly because I had the ingredients in the house at 10 P.M. on Thursday:

1 oz. of bourbon (I used Bulleit)
1 tsp. maple syrup
Juice of 1/2 a lemon

Shake with cracked ice; pour into chilled cocktail glass

Somewhere I have a recipe for a similar drink, only with a slightly higher syrup-to-bourbon ration, plus some fresh rosemary in the cocktail shaker. Frankly, I prefer that one. The Maple Leaf wasn’t bad, but the lemon flavor was a bit strong for my taste.

YOUR SHEARWATER SONG OF THE WEEK

No newsletter last Friday, due to my spending most of the day frantically pulling together a couple of Rosh Hashanah meals so my 80-year-old father, who loves the High Holidays, could feel as if he sort of had a traditional Rosh in the middle of the pandemic.

When I was growing up, we used to spend the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah at some relative or other’s house, eating brisket and complaining that the rabbi’s sermon had been too long. Then in the early 1990s, a couple of those families moved away, my brother and I went off to college and then onto our own lives in other cities, and suddenly Rosh Hashanah was just my parents and my grandmother.

So my folks started a tradition, which has been ongoing for probably 25 years, of having a sort of potluck Rosh Hashanah lunch at their house. They invited a raft of friends and acquaintances, generally 15 to 20 people from temple who for one reason or another had no one else with whom they could spend the holiday. It became such a beloved event that even after my mom died in 2015, a couple of the friends insisted to Dad that it continue.

So every year since then, he has opened the house to this motley crew. Two of its members have taken charge of planning and cooking much of the menu. They show up at the house with supplies the night before, then come over after early services the day of, change into comfortable shoes, and get everything ready before the other guests arrive.

Dad loves it. He orders brisket and salmon from a nearby Jewish retirement community and sets the dining room table with the good china days ahead of time. It’s the one day a year that he gets to pull out the good china, much of which my mom inherited from her mother and for which people of my generation and those that have come after me have little to no use. Every year, as per tradition, he sadly remarks that my brother and I probably won’t want this china when it’s his turn to pass it along because people of our generation don’t do fancy entertainment the way his parents did, and the way he and my mom often did in the first couple of decades of their marriage.

Unspoken in all of this is the fact that there likely are not going to be too many more opportunities for this Rosh Hashanah lunch tradition. Dad turned 80 in July. At some point in the next few years he may want to downsize and sell the house. My brother lives 400 miles away. I’m not the hosting type, even if I stay here in my hometown, which is not part of my long-term, or even short- and medium-turn, plan. So this tradition, for my dad and his Rosh Hashanah crew, will either move elsewhere or come to an end.

This year coronavirus robbed us of this confab. There was no reason for me to help Dad put extra leaves in the dining-room table or listen to his lecture about how kids today don’t entertain the way he and his parents did, or his lament that so many of his contemporaries don’t know what to do with all the good china that their kids don’t want.

I found myself weirdly missing all of that these last couple of weeks. Not the lunch itself, which I have mostly grudgingly attended since I moved back here, but the routine of it. The routine of the good china. The routine of Dad’s mournful elegies to past elegance and family. The inevitable comments from the lunch’s attendees about how much they miss my mom.

In the grand scale of everything that has been lost this year, my family’s traditional Rosh Hashanah lunch is certainly a small one. None of the attendees has had the virus. Those who still work still have their jobs, although they are doing them from home. Okay, so we had to watch services on Facebook this year. But we’re alive to enjoy them, we’re alive to eat apples and honey, we’re alive to gripe about having to give up the tradition for a year thanks largely to Donald Trump’s incompetence.

Hell, I’m alive and healthy enough to gripe about the annoyance of putting my limited culinary skills to use pulling together a small Rosh Hashanah lunch for two people, mostly so my dad wouldn’t have to miss the experience for the first time in his eighty years. The fact I’m even complaining about this is a good signal that the stress of the pandemic hasn’t completely sent me into a long skid off the side of a mountain yet. Not everyone has been that lucky.

All that said, this week’s Shearwater song is a cover of Bauhaus’ “Kick in the Eye,” because that is what the last seven months have felt like.

Back next week, probably with tales of nearly starving by proxy on Yom Kippur, when my dad will fast and I will try to only eat when he’s not around.