Right-wingers and Trump’s media loudmouths are howling after the Biden administration ousted 18 Trump appointees from service academy boards, calling the ouster a “power grab” and “politicizing the service academies”.  Well, it’s just the opposite.  What most media is not reporting is that Biden’s move is part of his effort to clean up the open sewer Trump left behind when he finally vacated office on January 20th.

The rest of this story is this – after Trump lost the election, his acting secretary of defense, Christopher Miller (you know, the guy who refused to send the national guard to the Capitol on January 6th), ousted dozens of academy and other board members and replaced them with Trump loyalists.  He packed the boards of at least 3 service academies as well as the Defense Business Board and added HUNDREDS of Trump appointees to boards within the DOD on 42 boards in all.  To contain the damage, new defense secretary Lloyd Austin suspended all board activities to do a “zero based review” of all the boards that Trump polluted with partisan, cronies, and loyalists. Biden’s move to oust 18 Trump appointees is just a part of the massive cleanup underway at DOD and other departments Trump infested.

Now you know the rest of the story.

For time and immemorial, the standard playbook for dealing with a disgraced former leader has been the same. You let them ride off into the sunset and everyone forgets about him or her. This even includes the criminals. I have always been taught and always believed that criminalizing political behavior would lead to bad ends. The last guy has taught those of us in that camp that we shouldn’t politicize criminal behavior.

Polling data indicate that he’s gaining for 2024. No, he would not win an election if it were held today, but it’s certainly close enough to make people nervous. What seems more outrageous historically is that he is in front of the entire GOP pool. What’s more, when someone loses by eight million votes the normal course is for all of the next candidates to fall over themselves convincing us that they aren’t that guy. Except, every blasted one of them is doing the exact opposite.

I’d say things will change once the indictments start rolling in, but I think it will take him actually wearing an orange jumpsuit for there to be a dent. Even then, it would just be a dent. I don’t know how many times I can say the word “normally” before we all realize that normal will just be one of those quaint words we don’t use anymore. They will convince themselves that it’s all a sham like my mother in law who convinced herself that Joe Biden was resigning. This one is going to take a few election cycles to clear.

The post election audit Clown Show of Maricopa County ballots has been a complete disaster from the first moment it was conceived.  Ordered by Senate Republicans in March, said 60 day audit is now going on 6 months and has probably set the state GOP back, oh, say to the Reagan era.  Everyone associated with the “audit” have made fools of themselves in front of the entire nation, and Trump has happily led them down this primrose path dropping hints of “they can’t believe what they’re finding” when in fact they’ve found nothing.  In the process, God knows how much damage they’ve done, and the elections commission for the county has already said they’ll have to replace all the voting machines after they were compromised by the “auditors”.

To pour gasoline on the fire of incompetence, the report of the results of this months long fiasco has been once again delayed because…wait for it…the CEO of Cyber Ninjas and some of his key staff are “quite ill” with COVID.  Dollar to a donut that none of these idiots were vaccinated because, well, they’re idiots, and Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate President didn’t answer the question if they had been vaccinated.

You just can’t make this up.

This photo has been circulating on social media this last week:

This is the cover of the July 1983 Moral Majority Report, a newsletter conceived and published by Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, a Reagan era mouthpiece of what has now morphed into the American Taliban.  At that time, the HIV crisis was arising, and predictably, right-wingers were judgmental about the outbreak, but worse, even then they got the virology wrong, donning masks in an effort to scare the shit out of people about a virus that didn’t transmit through the air, but by bodily fluids.

Back then, the mask was used as a weapon against science and one of their targets, the gay community.  Today, once again masks are being used as a weapon against common sense and science, but in the opposite of the use in 1983.  Back then, right-wingers donned masks to push their message; today they accost people wearing masks and rail against mask mandates to push whatever their message is today. The obvious conclusion is that conservatives are not only totally corrupted; they have been corrupted for decades, moving facts around to fit their narrative.  Add the cancer of Donald Trump, and the corruption is complete, and political conservatism becomes a toxic soup of lies, distortions, disinformation, and cruelty for the pure sake of cruelty.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, but in the case of the American right wing, it gets worse.

The rightwing noise machine, along with the circular firing squad of Team Progressive, are united in criticizing Biden for withdrawing from Afghanistan and sticking to the plan as the government collapses, Afghan politicians flee the country, and the Taliban return to the violent and brutal regime they controlled when we ran them to the mountains in 2002.  As I write this, insurgents are entering Kabul and closing in on the airport where diplomatic personnel and military are trying to evacuate.  It’s without a doubt a total shitshow.

But, it’s not a surprise.  Whether the US withdrew from Afghanistan in 2003, 2013, or 2023, THE RESULT WAS GOING TO BE THE SAME.  Like everything else W and Cheney fucked up, they most certainly fucked up Afghanistan.  The noble chase of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda into the mountains to kill him was botched, and rather than chase him into Pakistan, Bush/Cheney thought it was a really good idea to convert a culture born before the Dark Ages to a liberal democracy.  It was stupid, and anyone who can read a history book knew it.  Afghanistan is a 1st century culture in a 21st century world that has repelled invasions for centuries. At the time of Bush/Cheney’s decision to occupy Afghanistan, some of us predicted exactly what is happening today.  Oh, we were shushed by those who “knew better”, but it didn’t take a diplomatic genius to understand that the US was never going to succeed where the Russians, the Brits, the Greeks, the Mongols, and other empires attempted, and ultimately failed, to accomplish over that last 2,000 years.

Don’t get me wrong; I abhor every death and injury that occurred during the attempted occupation of Afghanistan over the last 20 years, but I said it then and will say it again now that the US incursion into and occupation of Afghanistan was almost as big a blunder as the invasion of Iraq which destabilized the region handing control over to Iran.  As bad a guy as Saddam was, he was better than handing more Middle East power to Iran and Russia.  NOW, not only is Iran dominant in the region, Afghanistan is again in chaos. Add that to chaos in Iraq and Yemen, and that is most certainly a major league shitshow.

This is not Biden’s fault.  This is the fault of over 100 years of terrible Middle East policy compounded by Bush/Cheney’s empire building and Trump’s idiocy.  That is where the blame lay.  Biden’s trying to clean it up.

Before this week I had never heard of Jeffrey Clark.  Who’s Jeffrey Clark, you ask?  Clark is a Trump plant in the DOJ who conspired with him to insert the DOJ into The Big Lie.  Clark wrote the draft letter that he tried to get acting AG Jeffrey Rosen to sign alleging that the DOJ was investigating “various irregularities,” and, “…we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States, including the State of Georgia.”  The letter urges the governor to Georgia to reconvene the state legislature to reconsider the certification of the election for Joe Biden and choose a different set of electors for Trump.  Luckily for democracy, Rosen refused to approve the letter.  After his refusal, Clark then conspired with Trump to fire Rosen and appoint him as acting AG so he could use the DOJ to complete a coup against the duly elected president.

Even as we watched the train wreck of Trump’s attempt to overturn the election with The Big Lie, we didn’t know how close we came to a coup enacted by Trump plants not only at DOJ, but also DOD and other agencies.  And the terrifying thing is that NONE of these officials have paid any price for their treasonous conduct as employees of the US government.  That’s the shameful part.