WHY DOES EVERYTHING HAPPEN AT ONCE?
In my 63 years of toiling in the thankless field of journalism, I’ve seen good days and bad days, big news days and no news days. But I’ve never seen two giant news days in a row, and certainly not two so swollen with proper names and proper nouns (boldfaced here), all worthy of a front-page headline.
Let me write down some of them in case you went to the bowling alley for a fun couple of days and missed them. (Of course you wore your mask.) We’ll start with Donald J. Trump, our lame-duck president who seems reluctant to quit his place as our head of state. Monday the state of Michigan certified his opponent, as winner of its 21 electoral votes; it came the same day as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out another of the president’s fruitless attempts to overturn the state’s election results. But to prove he still had his saber at the ready, an angry Trump cut loose Sidney Powell from her post as a member of his personal legal staff. (There are rumblings in the White House that Rudy “Sweathog” Giuliani will be the next to go.)
Also on Monday President-Elect Joe Biden made public the names of his first cabinet and advisorial appointments, and the general reception has been positive. Most are young, experienced, competent, and of varied ethnic and racial backgrounds, with many veterans of the Obama administration in new posts. Their names, new and old:
Antony Blinken, Secretary of State.
Alejandro Mayorkas, Secretary of Homeland Security.
Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury.
John Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate.
Ron Klain, Chief of Staff.
Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence.
Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, UN Ambassador.
Welcome back Deep State! We sure missed you!
On Monday came the good news that AstraZeneca corporation, relying on research done at Oxford University, had developed a new vaccine to combat the COVID-19 virus. The drugmaker announced that its product—which joins Pfizer and Moderna in the race for a “cure”—had an average of 70% effectiveness, and was much cheaper than the others as well as more easily distributed to the world’s masses. Unfortunately, they backtracked almost immediately when questions were raised about their transparency on conflicting data, including whether the drug worked on older people and why some patients treated with smaller doses seem to fare better than those who got the full dosage. A sad setback in humanity’s battle against the plague of our (present) time. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic rages on unabated, with new records in illnesses and deaths set both days in the U.S.
Yesterday the states of Pennsylvania, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Nevada certified Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election; on the same day the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 30,000 for the first time ever. That economic milestone brought our lame-dick president out of hiding for a suddenly called one-minute-long press conference to claim credit for the market performance. He then turned heel and hurried out, taking no questions from reporters about when he would concede.
Congratulations to Biden continued to pour in from world leaders, including a late-arriving one from China’s Xi Jinping, who hoped the two countries could focus on cooperation rather than their differences. Only one major world leader has yet to be heard from. That was? Yep, you guessed it—Vladimir Putin himself! Is Uncle Vlad just being strategic in going along with his puppet’s refusal to concede? Or does the old flame still burn on in their S&M romance? You decide.
Finally, and rather surprisingly, Rush Limbaugh showed both anger and disappointment in Trump’s legal team’s hour-long dud of new conference that promised to expose widespread voting fraud. “They promised blockbuster stuff and then nothing happened,” he told his Monday radio audience. He was not happy. Do you think he’ll return his Presidential Medal of Freedom? I’m for it.