Three days to Thanksgiving

Well, now two days to Thanksgiving

Number 45 might have given us a reason to be grateful by allowing his administration, including the GSA, to begin the transition to a Biden administration. Of course, he won't say out loud that he lost. I guess that he thinks that if he doesn't say the words the reality won't exist.

And his rabid followers won't accept the election results. They figure their savior couldn't possibly lose unless the nearly 80 million votes cast against hime were fraudulent and illegal. I was totally disgusted when Giuliani argued in a Pennsylvania court that the remedy for unproven fraud was to throw out all of the mail in ballots. The judge disposed of that brutally. I felt the same about the similar arguments in Michigan that the authorities should just not count the Wayne County (a.k.a., Detroit) votes. I have a niece who lives in Detroit who is white and I am sure she voted by mail (health problems that make voting in person problematic) and who I am sure did not vote for #45. But because she lives in an area that is 75%+ black Giuliani thought her vote shouldn't count. Again the judge dismissed that quickly. The only thing that stops me from telling all those who consider the results of the election a disfranchisement of the 73 million who voted for #45. The argument basically says that all of the almost 80 million who voted for the other guy is so much waste paper or wasted bits in the election computers. As you can probably guess I am one of those 80 million and I resent their attitude. Hell, that crew wouldn't have been happy if #45 had won the election which he said was rife with fraud.

Andrew Bacevich at Tomdispatch tries to make sense of #45's firing of Defense Secretary Esper and stocking various positions with a new set of appointees. Number 45 did promise during his first campaign to get us out of our endless wars. That is something I was and am all for, and I might have voted for him if not for too many other negatives that more than balanced that positive item. However, the Pentagon has been more than a little adroit at deflecting far more determined Presidents. And #45 has the attention span of a gnat. Even though he has said he wants all troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia by Christmas and has a man in place to give the orders, the best they might accomplish is a 50% reduction. We never had any clear, reasonably attainable objectives and no sense of an end point and no idea of how to extricate ourselves. But as much as I think we should have never gone in there, I don't think a willy-nilly withdrawal which leaves our allies in a lurch is the way out either.

I think John Beckett may be expressing what many of us are feeling. My own feelings of thankfulness are also a bit tepid. I think it is the culmination of the last four years of #45 which was a constant irritation relieved only when the returns came in for Biden and he decided to disappear for the most part. He is no longer a 24/7/365 presence for which I am grateful. It seems that he has given up even the pretense of governing. The pandemic, of course, permeates everything. Back in December when we got the first reports (at our level of the socio-economic food chain) I told Mom that it just might be on its way here and by early January we had our first cases. When #45 said that the virus would, "like magic", go away when the weather got warm I laughed and thought it would go south where people would go indoors with the air-conditioning. I agreed with Fauci when he said it would be worse in the fall no matter what #45 said. We have a third wave hitting with unprecedented numbers and I think this wave will continue until February. I don't think people who aren't willing to forego Thanksgiving celebrations will be willing to forego Christmas, or New Years and each will give us another surge within this wave. The experts are saying that we can expect another 250k deaths by February and they have been right so far. Remember when Dr. Birx said that if we did everything right we could keep the death toll to 60-100k? Well a large number of us haven't done anything right. I don't expect that to change. I am glad I am alive, still curious, am as healthy as ever, and that we have enough money coming in to keep us housed, clothed and fed. I hope next year things will have changed and I can feel more deeply grateful.

I am a life long cat person. For those of you who might also be of that persuasion here is a little tidbit I just found.