It is what it is

It has come to this.  As the DHS Wolf pack continues to terrorize Portland, a group of about thirty women formed a human barrier to protect protesters, chanting "Feds stay clear, moms are here!"  Of course they were tear-gassed, because that is the standard response to any public activity that does not involve overweight white men with guns threatening Democratic officials.  It was both thrilling and terrifying, depending on one's memories of Buenos Aires under the junta and Berlin under the Nazis.  (Several of the women are pregnant, but I searched in vain for outraged responses from the "right to life" crowd, who can be very selective about the precious babies they kill for.)  They need to recruit a lot more moms and so do other cities, because the goons are not going away.  (They appear to be deploying to Chicago.  Moms?)

In the sweaty Chris Wallace interview Trump continued to insist that the Confederate flag is not racist because "it represents the South" -- the old white South, of course -- and that no military bases (where the sedition flag has now been banned) will lose the names of traitors "on my watch."  The one he keeps bringing up is Fort Bragg, so I got some information together which he apparently does not have:

1.  It is in North Carolina.

2.  It honors Braxton Bragg, a commander so hated that one of his men tried to kill him by rolling a shell under his cot.  In Vietnam this was known as "fragging." 

3.  Information is scanty, but some say his mother went to prison for murdering a free Black man, unlikely in that time.  Anyway, he never talked about her.

4.  Regarded as a lousy general.  I'm no fan of Al Sharpton but he would be an improvement, though I'm still holding out for Thelonious Monk.

There's so much crazy in the Wallace interview, Tina Fey should develop is as a sitcom.  I think my favorite bit came in mid-defense of Bragg:  "We won two world wars, two world wars, beautiful world wars that were vicious and horrible.  And we won them out of Fort Bragg."  That magical name was on every soldier's lips, along with "Betty Grable."  Sweet macademia nuts, who talks like this?

Here comes the money shot, inspired by a question about Joe Biden's mental acuity:  "Let Biden sit through an interview like this.  He'll be on the ground crying for mommy.  He'll say, 'Mommy, mommy, please take me home.'"  Not a mental picture you want to create for the million-plus who have read Mary Trump's book, with its vivid picture of the most dysfunctional family in the tri-state area.

As the death toll mounts, Trump had steadying words for the stricken nation:  "It is what it is."  One day covid will just go away.  All pandemics do.  That, and the glorious WALL to keep out Mexicans, is the end of the problem as far as he's concerned, although for the sake of the base Kellyanne Conway promises the daily "briefings" will resume tomorrow.  The servile governor of Missouri, Mike Parsons, obediently takes up the party line:  The kids will return to school, and "if they do get covid, which they will -- and they will when they go to school -- they're not going to the hospitals...They're going to go home, and they're going to get over it."  And that's an order.  Glad he's not my governor.

My governor has been busy picking a candidate for the seat of John Lewis, not yet buried.  It's reality TV star Angela Stanton-King, an auto thief pardoned earlier this year by Trump.  (It was the same pardon dump as Michael Milken and Rod Blagojevich, so you may have overlooked it.)  When not grand-theft-autoing she likes to express seriously anti-LGBT opinions.  Her only chance in the Fifth is to convince voters she's related to Martin Luther King.

From the where-are-they-now-and-who-went-and-found-them file -- it was a matter of time before John "Nipple-clamps" Yoo joined the Trumpers.  His assignment is to poke around in the recent Supreme Court decision on immigration and find a way to apply it to things like health care, tax policy, and dispatching Sonderkommandos to American cities.  Should be an interesting four months.