Get Back

 C'mon 2021.

Stop the Insanity

Trump wants the GOP and McConnell to lose its Senate majority in Georgia's January run-off elections. He's always played a monomaniacal long game that's solely for his benefit. He now wants an unimpeded, ultra-progressive, socialist Left to force the Biden-Harris administration to legislate their party's worst impulses, leading to an economic and world security armageddon. 

Think a perfect storm of Carter's Misery Index in 1979, critical race theory and social justice academic and workplace mandates, waves of racial violence and crime in urban cities, Mullahs with nukes, China's inexorable militarism, and the explosive chatter of the MSM, Twitter, Facebook, and Parler on steroids. Some real end of days stuff. 

Could a re-emergent center right of the country elect the GOP to House and Senate majorities in the 2022 mid-terms, and reelect Trump to a second term in 2024?

And would that be Make America Great Again again or President Shitshow Part II?

Humor and Partisanship in the Covid-19 Era

This week's New Yorker magazine cover takes yet another kill shot at President Trump with Harry Bliss's – In With the New – homage to Charles Addams. One might also call it a parting shot, but that's unlikely. 

The eye is drawn first to the large coronavirus orb illuminating the scene where a hunch-overed President Trump fans the flames of his burning tax records, assisted by a Lurch-inspired, hair dye-stained Rudy Giuliani. 

Entering from an open doorway on The Left is 2021's New Year's baby – a black baby – watched by 2020's baby, now aged and enfeebled on a Covid IV in a wheelchair, whose time has run out.

Throw in a Zoom meeting with a QAnon troll, Jared dusting cobwebs, rats scurrying to and fro, and a Clorox bottle with glasses on the fireplace mantle under a funereal wreath with an RIP-inscribed ribbon, and the portrait is complete. All the country's ills, if not the world's, encapsulated in a final portrait of the evil and grotesque 45th president on his knees. 

Compare this to Charles Addams' far less vitriolic humor from 1946, where the "Addams Family" poured a vat of hot oil on innocent Christmas carolers, representing the entire country's nascent Cold War fears, not just the president in the White House. This isn't to say Trump's boorish and ego-driven personal style didn't bring much of this upon himself, but the difference and challenge is clear.

When the new administration takes power next month – and all the responsibility, decisions (and blame) shifts – will the NYT and WAPO editorial pages, Steven Colbert and Seth Meyers, Joy Reid and Whoopi Goldberg, and the entire cadre of "Resistance" torch and pitchfork hyper-partisans tear down Joe and Kamala with the same closed-minded animus and relentless zeal? 

Don't hold your breath.

Great Conjunction

Winter Storm Gail

It was a delight to get a foot or more of fine and windswept snow this week. 

The forecast and cold temperatures ahead ensure a white Christmas, the first in recent memory.

Janet Benson

 Born December 15, 1900. 💛

Vermont's Cows Claim Cultural Appropriation

Different Boats for Different Folks

Trump's Psychiatrist

 "No one understands me."

Is Santa Claus a Superspreader?

With Christmas just three weeks away, many Americans are anxiously looking beyond the contested election, the nationwide surge in positive Covid-19 tests, and ahead to the next shoe to drop after all the Thanksgiving holiday travel and gatherings. While a vaccine appears imminent, newspapers and cable news are hyperventilating over how much worse the coming armageddon will get before Joe Biden is inaugurated on January 20.

Fortunately, voices of reason (and science) are still here to assure us that all is not lost. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases and lead member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, has declared that Santa Claus has "innate immunity" and can't spread the virus to anyone this Christmas.

But don't take your kids to the mall to sit on Santa's knee to tell him what they want for Christmas. Santa isn't taking any chances and won't be there.

We'll get to Santa's white male patriarchy issues next.