FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

It's like 70's detective show music -- but good!

•   Sorry to be so light in posting lately -- things are out of hand at the Cott Damn Job. Mind, I do appreciate having one at all, since Tubby's on a rule-or-ruin rampage and his co-saboteur Mitch McConnell is killing the stimulus. (I'm not a Nancy Pelosi fan, but let's be clear about whose mess this is.) Still, this dull shit is making my eyes cross and it's true what they say about getting old -- one gets much less tolerant of tedium than one was in even the last blush of youth. 

But I lament leaving you guys high and dry, so tell you what I'm gonna do: You can have have a crack at no fewer than three (3) free installments of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, that rare Substack newsletter with more laffs than cancel culture crybaby crap! Yours for the clicking:

• A consideration of the difference between how Democrats deal with election conspiracy theories and how Republicans do;
• Another White House scene, this one starring Tubby and Rudy Giuliani;
• In anticipation of Fincher's Mank, an essay on the Biblical angle in Citizen Kane.  

Don't thank me! Were I you, though, I'd consider a subscription. Five days a week for $7 a month -- it's like throwing money away if you don't subscribe. 

•   A month after the election, and sone of the brethren are still only grudgingly starting to acknowledge the results. A. Ridiculous Pseudonym at RedState clearly hopes readers will be attracted by hopeful headline -- "Justice Alito Has Asked Pennsylvania to Respond to Kelly Request for Emergency Injunction -- by December 9" -- and too dumb to realize they're being had when they read through reams of copy to this:

It has now been posted on the Supreme Court’s docket for the case that Justice Alito has directed the attorneys for Pennsylvania to file a response to GOP Congressman Kelly’s Emergency Application for an Injunction to prevent the naming of Electors for Joe Biden by December 9. That date is meaningful.

The “Safe Harbor” provision for naming Electors is December 8.  What that means is that Congress must accept as valid — without allowing any challenge — the Electors named by a State on or before December 8 if those Electors were chosen in the manner prescribed by state law.  The Pennsylvania state officials are not, at this time, prevented by any court order from naming Electors for Joe Biden...

This is how a dollar-a-word man tells his suckers "we lose." Later Ridic Pseud does try to keep hope alive -- "the fact that [Alito] has ordered Pennsylvania to respond does suggest that there may be some sentiment in the Court to take up the case," ha ha -- but when he senses the crowd turning ugly (probably a few thrown tomatoes late) Pseud goes for the more au courant alternative, A Plea for Electoral Integrity:

The bigger problem we have as a nation is that we are acquiescing to voting processes that are not capable of being verified and tested in a meaningful fashion during the time period available under the statutes and Constitutional provisions that determine how Presidents are selected.  

If you interpret this as "Republican state legislatures kept election officials from counting mail-in votes till the last minute so they could scream fraud later," congratulations, you've been paying attention. Hope everyone else has been, too! Meanwhile for the slower members of the RedState congregation, another genius works the Let Me Explain How This Footage of Nothing Is Actually Vote-Stealing grift. You sheeple may think it's been "debunked," but Nick Arams sees the Truth:

It’s important to note that we cannot identify what exactly has been passed, we cannot say for sure that it was a usb and it’s not clear that anyone did anything improper. 

The plot thickens!

You see them looking around and the man’s body partially blocks the camera. The older woman hands something to her daughter. Then some speculated that she hands that thing to the man, that’s not clear. But if you saw action like this on a casino camera in Las Vegas it would certainly perk up the eyes of the security. 

I've been amusing myself imaging Kevin Costner reading these lines in his "back and to the left" voice from JFK, but Tom Waits as Renfield in Bram Stoker's Dracula works too. 

UPDATE, 12/6: Alito has moved the response date up to December 8. The smart people say don't worry, it makes no difference, which is something I'm awfully tired of having to be told. 

THANKS FOR NOT BEING A PSYCHO.

[This Thanksgiving post is mirrored at my newsletter, Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, in a spirit of comity and mutual respect and laziness. Please, subscriber and non-subscriber alike, enjoy, and don't expect too much of me on Friday.]

The thing that is supposed to be ruining Thanksgiving for all True Sons of Liberty is not bothering me any more than it usually does. But the people it’s bothering the most are certainly making it worse.

I haven’t had a big “family” Thanksgiving in years and while I cherish my childhood memories of a warm, bustling, sage-scented house, I do not miss the traditional Thanksgiving travel chaos I’d have to face to get to such a feast. (I understand travel is vastly lighter this year than before, though this Thanksgiving travel flight animation still makes my skin crawl; it looks like one of those microscopic films of teeming human blood cells.) I wouldn’t mind seeing a few friends, but the missus and I can keep the holiday happily enough ourselves without playing COVID roulette with a bunch of people, at least for this year.

I confess part of my phlegmatism — is that a word? Well, if not, then part of my phlegm — is a reaction to conservative rage over Thanksgiving COVID-19 restrictions, real and imagined.

Conservatives been nuts on this subject from the beginning, of course — at first in total Trumpian “This Is Their New Hoax” denial, then trying to blame the spread of the virus on protesters, then asking why liberals won’t let them shoot grandma up with hydroxychloroquine and/or disinfectant as The Leader prescribed.

Now, thanks in part to their stupidity, we’ve got the explosive third-wave COVID spread across the country that health officials were trying to head off. State officials are, very sensibly, trying to get people to give up Party Size Thanksgiving just this once. (Look, there are vaccines just around the corner! For fuck’s sale show some impulse control!)

But conservatives, in response, are proving that their allegedly serious philosophy is basically all about being a fucking asshole. At the New York Post, Roger Klein:

Not long ago, Americans wouldn’t have even considered the possibility of government agents entering their homes to cancel their Thanksgiving. Then came COVID-19. Gov. Cuomo has imposed a 10-person cap on New Yorkers’ Thanksgiving tables. Three-thousand miles away, the California Department of Public Health imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on millions of Golden Staters. Across the country, other politicians have mandated similar restrictions.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released an extensive list of holiday recommendations, as well: no large gatherings, no singing, no loud music, no drinking alcohol, no in-person shopping.

This is a tyranny of the joyless and the ­irrational.

You smart readers have no doubt spotted Klein’s crackpot party trick of conflating actual, mild government restrictions such as Cuomo’s 10-person rule with CDC recommendations that do not have the force of law, and then going SEE, LIBTARDS SAY YOU CAN’T HAVE A BEER! MOLSON LABE! This is typical bad-faith conservative argumentation, and also typical modern conservatism in general, which sees any concession to the public good as an intolerable check on Muh Liberty.

And it’s also alarmingly dangerous, as you can be sure it encourages other wingnut assholes, who might have been at least a little observant of social distancing rules heretofore, to take Thanksgiving as an inspiration for a greater show of patriotism — which, again, in the conservative imagination means being more of an antisocial dick. (Whole studies could be written, I’m sure, on the transformation among conservatives of the idea of patriotism from being about sacrifice to being about selfishness.)

You can see the more intellectual-like, conservatives-with-good-taste version of this at National Review, where Michael Brendan Dougherty complains that some of his relatives may not make it to his big Thanksgiving bash because of “a freaking doorknob” at his brother-in-law’s workplace that revealed the presence of COVID:

This doesn’t mean the doorknob was necessarily a source of great danger — more that someone in the company likely brought the virus in with them recently, and because it was a common area, it was impossible to narrow down the potentially sick workers from the rest of the group.

And so the mandatory human testing began. But, there’s a catch. There is a major pre-holiday rush on COVID-19 tests, and so, we may not know the results until Friday.

Well, gee, that’s too bad, but so what? If his brother-in-law may or may not be infected, can’t we trust him and Dougherty to make a sensible decision about their gathering? Last I heard troopers were not pulling cars over on the New York State Thruway and demanding proof of non-infection.

If the doorknob holds back my brother-in-law and his wife, the only guests we’ll have are the vegan in-laws. I love them dearly. We have roughly the same risk tolerance. I already spent a weekend making turkey stock, and preparing for the big roast turkey.

The turkey is the best part of Thanksgiving. I get up early, butter it up, and coat it inside and out with paprika, salt, and pepper...

Uh, yeah — again, too bad, buddy, but you do know the virus is, like, contagious, right?

Really, family is everything this year. I haven’t seen a co-worker outside of Zoom since March. I haven’t seen friends since summer. The kids wear masks to school, which I think is unnecessary, even objectionable. But they’ve needed their friends more than they need my interference on this matter...

Dude, focus. This is a pandemic. I know you’re a ruff tuff Constitutionamalist, and I’m sure you give the other parents at your kids’ school who seem comfortable and accepting of their masks the stink-eye a patriot owes to collaborationists, but as of Wednesday America has seen 2.8 million infections and 262,020 deaths. I realize you’re a conservative, but can’t you think about someone other than yourself even for just a minute?

Apparently not:

Back on April 1, I wrote that this COVID-19 purgatory was no way to live. That we should try never to get used to it. Politicians and average people were becoming nastier and weirder, and accepting infringements on human life that were unthinkable. A British human-rights lawyer suggested Prime Minister Boris Johnson move Christmas to February...

She’s wrong, Christmas is not an arbitrary date. And although she has the debility of coming from a culture used to dictatorial interference in religion, the liturgical calendar is not subject to even the British parliament...

Welp: We can see Dougherty is gone, well past even that Water The Tree of Liberty thing and deep into Faith of Our Fathers Holy Faith. He wails that he’d have his brother-in-law “at the table even if he was dying of leprosy” and nothing you heathens whom bro-in-law or Dougherty or any of the others at his feast might later infect at the toll booth or the grocery store or handing off the kids at school has anything to say about it.

Horrible as it is to have to share a country with these psychopaths, I also share it with good people such as yourselves — and, as was recently demonstrated, we outnumber those guys. For that and for you I am truly grateful. However you celebrate or don’t, I hope you find plenty to be thankful for, and if it doesn’t seem like enough this year, I hope the days ahead bring blessings enough to more than make up the shortfall.

UPDATE: Looks like the Handmaid did superspreaders a solid:

The Supreme Court late Wednesday night barred restrictions on religious services in New York that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had imposed to combat the coronavirus.

The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal members in dissent. The order was the first in which the court’s newest member, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, played a decisive role.

The court’s ruling was at odds with earlier ones concerning churches in California and Nevada. In those cases, decided in May and July, the court allowed the states’ governors to restrict attendance at religious services.

Stare decisis my Holy Roman ass, we gotta give Opus Dei some of what they paid for! Jesus loves you and wants you (and anyone you come in contact with) to join him as soon as possible. I bet Dougherty called his brother-in-law first thing and told him to bring the infected doorknob to Thanksgiving, so that he might later bring it to Mass for veneration as a Holy Object. 

John Roberts played Mr. Reasonable in this decision, a role I'm sure he'll fill henceforth with Susan Collins aplomb as SCOTUS' rightwing wackos run riot. Happy Holidays/Pack The Court! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 Dunno if the '68 Catch My Soul was any good (anyone see it?)
but Jerry Lee is always worth a listen

•   Hey, don't you wish you knew what Tubby was up to behind the fortifications? Here are some White House scenes from my newsletter, unlocked for non-subscribers: Trump with the vaccine team, and Trump giving Mike Pence some news. Plenty more where that came from, so subscribe: It's one of the few Substacks that aren't about how cancelled the author is! 

•   Conservatives continue their Edgeplay of Trump's attempted coup. At the Examiner Edgelord Byron York explains what's really bad about this straight-up assault on democracy:

Thursday's news conference by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis marked a turning point of sorts in the way some Republicans view the president's challenge to election results around the country. Among those Republicans -- Trump supporters all -- there is concern that the attorneys' sensational theories of election fraud are hurting the president's cause rather than helping it. [Emphasis added]

I mean, it's like Seven Days in May meets the "It's a Good Life" episode of The Twilight Zone, but the main thing for York is, how does this get us to 270+1? The rest of the cabal are only slightly further along the road to "Donald Who?" Rod Dreher feels compelled to tell readers, "if Team Trump can produce meaningful evidence, then we have to take it seriously, no matter how much that ticks off Democrats," before admitting -- convinced, apparently, by his hero Tucker Carlson -- that the Giuliani-Powell stuff is Looney Tunes and Trump lost. But no need for too much soul-searching because bothsides:  

I talk about the Left and its crazy beliefs about the founding of America (e.g., The 1619 Project). But we are seeing the same kind of thing on the Right with this post-election psychodrama. 

Leftists have opinions about historical events; Republicans try to overthrow the will of the people. Same diff! At the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan laments what might have been if only Trump had "acted even remotely normal in his first term, if he’d had the intellectual, emotional and spiritual resources to moderate himself, to act respectably." And if my uncle had tits he'd be my aunt. Clearly these guys are hoping everyone will pull themselves together and get back to electing duller, less volatile authoritarians such as Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton -- unless they won't and choose to stick with Trump, in which case they'll get back to forgetting what was dangerous about him in the first place. 

EDGE PLAY.

You've no doubt heard about the Giuliani clown show today, and you may have even heard some smart people observe that, clownish or no, it's still entirely sinister for the Trumpkins to continue pushing these outlandish conspiracy theories two weeks after the election. 

But I'm not sure enough people have caught on to how much other prominent Republicans are enabling this fiasco -- even as they seem to be demurring due to the outrageousness of the con. 

For example, note what Giuliani's associate clown Jenna Ellis responded when asked where the team's evidence of election fraud was: 

Your question is fundamentally flawed, when you're asking, "where's the evidence?" You clearly don't understand the legal process. What we have asked for in the court is to not have the certification of false results. And so to say, "Hold on a minute, we have evidence that we will present to the court." We haven't had the opportunity yet to present that to the court. We're given you an overview and a preview of what we've discovered. But no court yet has had that opportunity. 

You may have caught that Ellis is saying they have evidence but also that it can only be revealed after state election certification dates have passed -- which would mean delaying or possibly invalidating those certifications of the votes (or, as Ellis puts it, "false results"). And this request to upend the traditional election process comes cloaked in a profession of good faith: That they only want to reveal the truth, but can't do it until the system makes the highly unusual and dangerous concession to their cause (which thus far judges have not been willing to do because they've shown no evidence).

Now consider how the mainstream press is treating the Republican reaction. Here's a tweet by Marc Caputo of Politico about GOP operative Karl Rove's Fox News analysis of the Giuliani conference, which Caputo characterizes, "Karl Rove stops just short of calling the conspiracy theories espoused by Giuliani and Powell crazy." In my view he stopped well short. Below, my transcription of Rove's remarks, with some some sections italicized:

Mayor Giuliani said there was a centralized plot involving widespread voter fraud in big cities controlled by Democrats. 

Sidney Powell said the plot was communist in origin, that it had come from Venezuela, it involved Hugo Chavez, and that George Soros and the Clinton Foundation were key participants in the plot. 

These are serious, somewhat strange accusations -- but serious, and now Mr. Giuliani and Ms. [Sidney] Powell have an obligation to go to court and prove them. Because these are question of fundamental fairness of our presidential election, and alleging that there are conspirators who worked in major cities in an organized effort to engage in widespread voter fraud, and then foreign agents and powerful Americans, namely Soros and the Clinton Foundation, were involved. 

So they've got an obligation to go to court and prove these, or the American people will have every reason to question their credibility.

So I'm not gonna say that they don't have proof, but they better come up with proof and go to court, because these are serious allegations that basically say our election was manipulated by a combination of foreign and domestic actors and stolen and that cannot be left just simply out there, it needs to be either proved or withdrawn, and the only way to do that is to take these accusations and go to court. Major Giuliani may be right that people who signed those affidavits don't want their names exposed. But by God you cannot make an accusation like that without following it through by going to court and trying to prove it. If it's left out there, it will be both unfair to the President if it's true and unfair to the American people if it's false.

I italicized the section where Rove repeated the Trump team's crazy accusations. You don't have to be an NLP guru to realize that for the careless viewer -- at Fox News, a solid majority -- this is just confirmation that the fantasy is real. 

But notice also that Rove is pushing something very close to what Ellis is pushing: The necessity of getting that "evidence" out there. Rove very weakly alludes to the possibility that they won't be able to produce it, but he portrays the "evidence" of this Soros-Clinton conspiracy as so important that he can't  just dismiss this epically failing legal crusade before they've had a chance to really present it -- which they can't do unless we start to overturn the election process.

So why is Caputo being so chill about it, portraying Rove's carefully titrated, don't-piss-off-the-Leader response as a win for truth and sanity? Maybe for the same reason the rest of us don't want to take this attempted coup seriously -- because it's insane. But not taking their fantasy seriously doesn't mean ignoring it, or pretending it isn't real and telling other people as much.

Unless you're a major media figure with a hard line in consensus reality, I guess. Check out Sahil Kapur of NBC News: 

Republican senators are mostly standing by Trump as he refuses to concede defeat and pursues litigation. But there are growing signs that they see the writing on the wall… and inch toward acceptance.

"Growing signs" that they "inch toward acceptance," eh? Read the story and you find it's not so much as an inch and maybe not even a millimeter -- there's Mitch McConnell saying "We’re going to have an orderly transfer from this administration to the next one," which could easily mean from the First Trump to the Second Trump administration; Senator Tillis saying "that Biden is 'probably' the president-elect," big concession; and Lindsey Graham fist-bumping Kamala Harris on the Senate floor!  

You never see one of these Republicans saying "Trump should concede," but you see plenty of headlines like "GOP increasingly accepts Trump's defeat -- but not in public." A cynic might conclude they're by no means committed to the obvious, and if the miracle comes they want it known that they never did commit -- but if it doesn't come, they're just as invested as the newsmen in pretending they did. 

THE GRIFT THAT KEEPS ON GRIFTING.

Back on November 10, days after rational people accepted the election results, the Washington Examiner's Eddie Scarry was not quite ready to concede them -- but he was willing to consider (just for the sake of argument, mind) whether Trump's litigation was actually something less than a noble crusade:

There are really only two possible reasons President Trump's reelection campaign is now throwing itself into legal fights over the election. Either the president truly believes there were enough invalid ballots counted to cost him the election, or he simply doesn't want to concede defeat until every avenue has been exhausted.

In the former case, the Trump campaign is right to head to the courts — you know, the place where liberals were most at home these past four years chasing the president's tax returns and stopping or slowing every part of his policy agenda.

Had to get that in there, because the next part, mild as it is, might offend his readers:

If it's the second reason, the lasting impact of Trump simply delaying the inevitable with a bunch of baseless charges of fraud and cheating is only going to depress his supporters and puncture a Republican Party otherwise set up for political success in the near future.

Not that Trump's trying to enrage his rubes with a new Lost Cause for future grifts -- no, he's just misguided; he doesn't know what damage he's doing to his beloved Republican Party! 

Well, Tubby's trail of laughable suits seems to have proven out Option B -- but Scarry hasn't admitted that, at least not in his columns; instead, he has counseled Republicans to be of good cheer because though they lost the election, they're really all winners:

Trump came out of nowhere, exposed a lot of our country's problems, and was even good enough to fix a few of them. His presidency was a success. Now it's time to move on.

"Fix a few of them," Scarry's link to another of his own columns reveals, refers to immigration -- though on what grounds he counts this fixed (or plural) is unclear; lines like "Immigration came up in neither of the presidential debates" and "No one has talked about the wall since last year" seems to lean toward a "you can't pin that on him" defense. 

Now, with approximately 99.9% of top Republicans still refusing to admit defeat, Scarry's got another column today, and guess what it's about:

The Left's post-election spite

It's fascinating to see how spiteful liberals can be, even when they win...

I'll mostly spare you -- since their (still unacknowledged by most Republicans!) Presidential victory, liberals were mean to Jared and Ivanka -- "literally, his children," weeps Scarry, as if they were Romanoff toddlers -- and think the people who helped Trump carry out his policies should not be rehired. But here's the howler:

Conservatives generally accept electoral defeat and wait for the next time when, hopefully, the results will be in their favor.

Generally, huh?  Meanwhile Lindsey Graham is still trying to rig the election results and Giuliani is trying to do his legal Rip Taylor routine in a Pennsylvania federal court. Conservatives are accustomed to having it both ways, so it's no shock to see some of them denouncing the victorious Biden supporters while others refuse to acknowledge they've been victorious at all. I assume this'll be the shtick -- "So-called 'President' Biden signs bill -- but is it legal?" -- for a good long while, maybe four years. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Love that dirty sound.

Rightwing yahoos are still screaming they were robbed, and their claims just get wilder -- here's a genius who seems to believe (insofar as meaning can be discerned in the morass) that Massachusetts really voted for Trump, and claims footage that is almost certainly from 2016 is of UMass kids protesting Biden.

Meanwhile good-taste conservatives, who are more sensitive to self-ownage, are sloooowly backing off that position  -- but they're not all the way there yet. Byron York, for example, has been feeding the faint hope of diehards for days at the Washington Examiner. Two days after the election he was telling 'em, "There are plenty of anecdotal reports of things that look fishy, but it is up to Trump to present some evidence of irregularities." A week after the election he was telling them about "The election lawsuit Trump should win." He was talking about the one against the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision to allow ballots received after Election Day to be counted. But those late Pennsylvania ballots were segregated from the others by court order, and total about 10,000 -- Biden won Pennsylvania by 60,000 votes. Maybe York didn't know that when he filed -- whatever the case, he sure didn't share with his readers, though he allowed in the last graf of his column that "In the end, the case might have no effect on the presidential election results in Pennsylvania. But that's not the issue at hand." 

York got a little closer to the reality the rest of us had acknowledged on Thursday, admitting the GOP "has not filed any challenge that appears likely to overturn the results in any state." He even pulled the traditional move of beaten conservatives -- crying about how mean liberals cancel-culture them out of everything they deserve:

Indeed, rather than focus on mail-in ballots or election observers in Michigan, it makes more sense to look at Trump's loss as the result of that daily beating -- a media establishment, an entertainment industry, academia, the government's permanent bureaucracy, and a massive special counsel investigation all trying to bring Trump down every single moment of his presidency. It took a toll. It had too [sic].

With the cause lost, York may have wanted to completely unstick himself from the humiliation before the weekend. But he scored an interview with Trump, which seems to have affected his exit strategy. Trump babbles on to York about how irregularities cost him "millions of votes" in Michigan and Pennsylvania;  York glumly observes, "It was definitely an optimistic scenario and one at odds with the current state of the race." 

You almost feel sorry for the guy. But then you remember that all this bellyaching is in the service of yet another Trumpkin distraction. Because fucking with elections is self-evidently the Republicans' stock in trade.  Trump flunky DeJoy’s USPS smash-up mishandled tens if not hundreds or thousands of mail ballots and the GOP pulled out all the voter-suppression stops, including the drive-through fuckery in Texas -- not to speak of the GOP's years-long gerrymandering and disenfranchisement drives. 

It seems Democrats have found some ways to fight back, particularly under Stacey Abrams in Georgia, and Republicans are scared to death by it. So while the screaming fits of the dead-enders are probably more chemical imbalance issues than anything else, the Republicans' extended indulgence of this "voter fraud" bullshit is at least partially motivated by a desire to get people thinking once again that their opponents are actually guilty of the crimes that they themselves got caught committing.

TAKE IT EASY, BUT TAKE IT.

It was great to gather in Black Lives Matter Plaza after Tubby's defeat on Saturday and hear the cheers and shouts and car horns of celebration. Of course, dark cloud that he is, Trump is harshing our good time with his bullshit fraud accusations, enabled in courts by the creeps at the Jones Day and Porter Wright law firms. (Jones Day in particular got pissy about being called out. Fuck 'em. Next time I go to small claims court see if I call them!) 

These charges haven't achieved shit, legally; in the most recent collapse in New Mexico, Trump's lawyers didn't even wait for the judge to tell them GTFO and withdrew their own complaint. But Trump's minions, including not only rightwing TV and internet clowns but also elected officials, insist on treating the election as unsettled (or as settled with Trump as the winner!) even as Biden's winning margins continue to pile up. 

That's creepy -- and so are the usual media stooges inevitably bothsiding this, like Howard Kurtz:

Yogi Berra famously said “it ain’t over till it’s over,” and while the world is acting like Joe Biden is the 46th president, Donald Trump is still filing lawsuits and complaining about a stolen election. It doesn’t feel like it’s over.

On one side, we have Whoopi Goldberg scolding Trump voters for questioning the election, telling them to “suck it up.”

On the other, we have Mike Pompeo dismissing as “ridiculous” a question about the transition, saying: “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.”

A President impeding a lawful transition of power while his cabinet officials support him, a comedian making a wisecrack -- same diff, right?

I'm a little pissed about all this intransigent bluster, as the resulting anxiety over how far this goon and his minions are willing (and, more to the point, able) to take this fash fantasy has rather eaten into my good time. But I think Elie Mystal has the right idea. His whole Q&A at The Nation outlining the impossibility of Trump prevailing on legal grounds is worth reading, but this -- about what to do if Trump nonetheless is able to get enough state legislatures on board to get the election to SCOTUS where The Rummy and The Handmaid can fix it -- is the key part:

Well, what’s our plan for that?

My dude, I don’t have a plan for “nothing matters anymore.” The end of democratic self-government is not a thing one has a legal plan for. That’s like asking what my plan is for closing a demonic hell mouth that opens in my backyard. Die. My plan would be to die. I’m not Keanu Reeves.

What if Trump fires FBI Director Chris Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel and gets the “deep state” to keep him in power indefinitely?

I’m not Kiefer Sutherland either. I cannot find the mole.

What if Trump launches a full-scale coup d’état and uses the military to keep him in power?

Then we’re at war. Honestly, what do you want from me? 

I'm with him. In the event of Code Red I expect to get in the streets, but beyond that I'm not thinking about it. Meanwhile we have a change of administration scheduled in 70 days, and then the daunting tasks of unfucking everything Trump fucked up. That's enough worry! I'll watch the court cases and the vote certifications and the Electoral College vote and all that a little more closely than usual, but life is for the living and right now both I and American democracy are both very much alive and that, my friends, is the main thing.