Right in the middle of the NCAA tourney, fake life intrudes.
Beau Elliot
In the midst of March Madness, news comes (how dare they interrupt the tournament) that Russian President Vladimir Putin has won re-election with a mere Godzilla-ion percent of the vote.
No word yet on whether Russia will accuse the U.S. of meddling with the election with millions of false ads on Facebook (Russian version: wanted posters) and bot-generated tweets, but that’s probably coming.
Da, the Russian special counsel to the FSB will say, Putin should have had three Godzilla-ion percent of the vote. But nyet, Putin only had one Godzilla-ion. U.S. electronic fingerprints all over this case. America probably responsible for poisoning that dude and daughter in London, too.
Meanwhile, back in the USSA, life has been pretty ordinary. Outside of the NCAA Tournament. Inside the tournament, don’t ask. Millions of Titanics hitting millions of icebergs all over the country. Even in the desert, especially the Arizona desert, which has raised some eyebrows.
Life has been so ordinary that when the Trumpster released a barrage of tweets over the weekend against Special Counsel Robert Mueller, scarcely anyone stirred.
Well, scarcely anyone stirred except for several thousand journalists and pundits, Democrats, more Republicans than you’d expect, political junkies, ex-political junkies in recovery programs, and PostTimes, the Trumpster’s imaginary White House cat. Fake cat, in layperson’s terms.
The Trumpster let loose with the tweets even though the message of the day (Monday), according to the White House, was supposed to be the opioid crisis.
Maybe Grumpy Trumpy believes Mueller is an opioid dealer. Maybe he believes Mueller is an opioid.
Grumpy Trumpy set off the tweetsturm against Mueller probably because he heard something on Fox News that roiled his bunions. Or maybe just because he’s tired of the Russia investigation. Or maybe because his staff wasn’t awake yet and thus couldn’t remind him how presidential he seemed in getting Attorney General Jeff Sessions to ax FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, that miserable hardened Democrat, one day short of pension-eligible.
Never mind that McCabe is actually a Republican. As is James Comey, the FBI director Grumpy Trumpy fired last year. As is Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who hired Mueller and caused all this trouble in the first place. But none of that matters. If you don’t kiss the Trumpster’s frisky feet, you’re a hardened Dem and an enemy of the state. Firing’s too good for you.
Waterboarding’s probably the ticket. Luckily, the Trumpster has nominated Gina Haspel to head the CIA.
Amid all the furor, the intense speculation (Washington invented intense speculation) was, Will he fire Mueller? Stop the Russia probe?
Democrats warned of a constitutional crisis. Some Republicans rose up and said, Whoa, horsey. (We assume they meant it metaphorically.) Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said firing Mueller “would be the beginning of the end of his presidency …”
You know, the more he screams about stopping the Russia probe, the more he tweets in all caps NO COLLUSION (then adds an exclamation point, because all caps aren’t enough), the more he seems guilty.
And then the Cambridge Analytica shoe dropped. Data mining the profiles of 50 million people from Facebook and giving the mining to Trumpster’s presidential campaign, as reported in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
We have seen the future. It occurred in the spring and summer of 1974. Richard Nixon was holed up in Fortress White House. And the Watergate shoes kept dropping.
