Month: December 2016

Like that makes a difference

by digby

Your new president, America:

It’s ok that he can’t spell. It isn’t ok that he thinks saying “until the world comes to its senses” somehow moderates his threat to escalate nuclear proliferation.

Can someone take his phone until such time as the United States comes to its senses?

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Happy Hollandaise everyone.

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Reality show divestiture


by digby

So according to this report in the New York Times the Trump family is scrambling to “clean up” any conflicts of interest before the new administration is sworn in next month. They are getting rid of their charitable work which we are supposed to believe means something. And they have settled some legal and labor disputes as well as halted some development deals around the world, using contractual clauses allowing them to back out due to shoddy work (which sounds like a recipe for more lawsuits and other trouble.)

Apparently son Eric is promising that he won’t talk business with his daddy anymore so that’s good. (Nobody cares what Donald Jr does I guess.)  It’s unknown what will happen with Ivanka’s brand and Jared Kushner’s empire. Presumably they’ll cross their hearts and hope to die if their conflicts color their decisions, so that will take care of the problem.

Needless to say, this is totally inadequate. First,  a blind trust doesn’t mean the public has to blindly trust the president and his family. They’re still confused on this. Second, there’s no way to know whether they are fulfilling these promises because Trump refuses to release his tax returns or open his company to a public audit showing what he actually owns and owes.

If he doesn’t destroy the world, he will leave office vastly more wealthy than when he came in. The response will be that the rules will be tightened again for the next Democrat who takes office and it will be supported strongly by the Democrats. The Republicans will know they have no obligation to follow them.

So all of this “activity” is reality show bullshit.

It’s clear that the media is already losing interest in this story. This New York Times article asserts that the “most resonant” issue is the closing of the charity, which is a joke. The charities were always PR for the business and the family and whatever conflicts of interest they represent are nothing compared to the business conflicts both here and abroad. But I’m going to guess that until someone comes up with a direct quid pro quo — which is entirely possible — this story will fade. From what I can gather there seems to be developing a rationale for him using the office for personal gain based on the idea that “we” knew he was a businessman when he voted for him.

He said it himself:

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And a Happy New Year
by Tom Sullivan

When 60 Minutes told Billy Munnerlyn’s story (You’re Under Arrest, Apr. 5, 1992) it was clear both the drug war’s slippery slope and America’s authoritarian bent had become slipperier and steeper. Munnerlyn ran a small air charter service in Las Vegas. One day a “banker” hired Munnerlyn and his Learjet to fly him and several boxes of financial records to the Ontario International Airport, outside Los Angeles. As the 1991 Pittsburgh Press account told it:

His passenger was 74-year-old Albert Wright, a convicted cocaine trafficker. The plastic boxes contained $2,795,685 in cash.

But Munnerlyn says he didn’t know that until three hours after they landed and Drug Enforcement Administration agents handcuffed him and took him to the Cucamonga County Jail. Munnerlyn was charged with drug trafficking and ordered to pay $1 million bail. Seventy-one hours later, he was released without being charged.

When he went to get his plane, a drug agent told him “it belongs to the government now” — a simple statement that launched a devastating legal battle that continues today.

Munnerlyn sued to fight what is known as civil forfeiture, the practice that allows the government to confiscate property involved even in a suspected drug crime. After a jury ruled the plane should be returned, Munnerlyn still had to buy back his own property from the government for $6,500 after $80,000 in legal fees. On top of that, the government kept the $8,500 in airfare.

The story comes to mind because George Will writes today that the practice is still in force:

The Sourovelises’ son, who lived at home, was arrested for selling a small amount of drugs away from home. Soon there was a knock on their door by police who said, “We’re here to take your house” and “You’re going to be living on the street” and “We do this every day.” The Sourovelises’ doors were locked with screws, and their utilities were cut off. They had paid off the mortgage on their $350,000 home, making it a tempting target for policing for profit.

A product of the drug war, civil forfeiture makes state and local law enforcement partners in dividing the booty, or as the government’s extrajudicial confiscation is called in “Orwellian newspeak — “equitable sharing.” According to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, somehow “a crime had been committed by the house.”

It’s not Will’s first attack on this travesty (nor mine). He has written what amounts to an ongoing series about the malpractice. But this time, a prominent member of the incoming Trump administration is slated to be the law’s enforcer:

At a 2015 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on forfeiture abuses, one senator said “taking and seizing and forfeiting, through a government judicial process, illegal gains from criminal enterprises is not wrong,” and neither is law enforcement enriching itself from this. In the manner of the man for whom he soon will work, this senator asserted an unverifiable number: “95 percent” of forfeitures involve people who have “done nothing in their lives but sell dope.” This senator said it should not be more difficult for “government to take money from a drug dealer than it is for a businessperson to defend themselves in a lawsuit.” In seizing property suspected of involvement in a crime, government “should not have a burden of proof higher than in a normal civil case.”

Will teases until revealing in the end that the senator in question is Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions.

So with that, happy Hanukkah and a merry Christmas. Hug the ones you love a little tighter this year.

I’ll have that eggnog now.

Make it a double.

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Happy Hollandaise everyone.

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Christmas Eve Eve soother

by digby

Otters in the snow at the Buffalo zoo:

Fresh powder! ❄️ #ottersledding @2FindYourHome pic.twitter.com/tBCgBPUFIP

— buffalozoo (@buffalozoo) December 17, 2016

More cuteness from our adorable otters! #OttersInTheSnow pic.twitter.com/PlShw6hII7

— buffalozoo (@buffalozoo) December 22, 2016

Wheeee!

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Happy Hollandaise everyone.

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All I want for Christmas

by digby

Time to lighten things up a little for this holiday week-end (if Trump will STFU…)

I’ll miss that guy. More than I ever imagined. I’ll bet 99% of the world’s leaders agree.

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Happy Hollandaise everyone.

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Dipping the bullets

by digby

The terrorist who killed so many people in Germany said just before crime, “by God’s will we will slaughter you pigs, I swear, we will……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2016

slaughter you. This is a purely religious threat, which turned into reality. Such hatred! When will the U.S., and all countries, fight back?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2016

That was today from the guy who’s been telling this sickening, apocryphal story about American general Blackjack Pershing in the Spanish American war for the last 18 months to rapturous crowds:

“They were having terrorism problems, just like we do. And he caught 50 terrorists who did tremendous damage and killed many people. And he took the 50 terrorists, and he took 50 men and he dipped 50 bullets in pigs’ blood — you heard that, right? He took 50 bullets, and he dipped them in pigs’ blood. And he had his men load his rifles, and he lined up the 50 people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the 50th person, he said: You go back to your people, and you tell them what happened. And for 25 years, there wasn’t a problem. Okay? Twenty-five years, there wasn’t a problem.”

Here’s another occasion of him saying it.

If the terrorist said he would slaughter pigs, it’s no more a religious threat than that made by the president-elect of US, dozens of times. Two wrongs don’t make a right of course and the carnage at the market in Berlin is horrifying.

But it doesn’t make anyone safer if our leaders talk like terrorists. This isn’t the WWE and trash talk has serious, dangerous consequences.

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The Trump Doctrine: Get Even

by digby

“Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard.”

I wrote this last spring about The Trump Doctrine. It’s not getting any better:

Donald Trump managed to shock the world once again. Last week, he actually sank so low that he publicly attacked Ted Cruz’s wife Heidi’s looks. Not that anyone thought he wasn’t the type to say such rude things. He’s made a habit of it for many years. But he is running for president and, more importantly, he did this during a period when all eyes were on Europe in the wake of another devastating terrorist attack, and he was simultaneously criticizing the presidentfor continuing on his historic diplomatic mission to Cuba and Argentina. But that wasn’t what shocked the world. What has put every government on the planet on high alert was his alarming interview in the New York Times on the subject of foreign policy.

We already had some inkling of his general incomprehension in this regard throughout the campaign as he cavalierly talked about torture, the banning of Muslims, and “bombing the shit out of” our supposed enemies. I wrote previously about his bizarre trek to the the capitol to speak with the Washington Post and AIPAC earlier last week. But as MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell said on his show Monday night, the interview in the Times over the weekend was “like taking a world tour of Donald Trumps ignorance.”

Trump spoke with reporters David Sanger and Maggie Habermann on the telephone for over 90 minutes and on virtually every question they asked he was clearly vamping like a 12 year old giving the book report on a book he hadn’t read. Romney spokesman Kevin Madden characterized the transcript of the interview as being “just full of tautological nonsense.”

He complains incessantly about the money the U.S. is spending on security, which is fair enough, but his solution is to put a gun to the whole world’s head and demand they pay up or the U.S. will let the world burn. Trump is calling for the U.S. to stop being the world’s policeman and start being the world’s mobster extortionist: nice little country you’ve got here, be a shame if anything happened to it.After all, he’s calling for a gigantic increase in military spending, which doesn’t make a lot of sense if he’s believes we should pull back from the world. Indeed, he never says the US should pull back at all. He’s just going to blackmail the world into ponying up the cash for the huge buildup he’s planning and if they don’t agree, they’ll be sorry.

Basically, he thinks of world affairs the same way he thinks of his political opponents. It’s all about whether they’ve been “friendly” to him. When asked if he would be willing to lend humanitarian aid he said:

You know, to help I would be, depending on where and who and what. And, you know, again — generally speaking — I’d have to see the country; I’d have to see what’s going on in the region and you just cannot have a blanket. The one blanket you could say is, “protection of our country.” That’s the one blanket. After that it depends on the country, the region, how friendly they’ve been toward us. You have countries that haven’t been friendly to us that we’re protecting.

Too bad about the humans inside those countries. But then empathy isn’t his strong suit.

He constantly berates George W. Bush for “destabilizing” the Middle East (which is correct) but it never occurs to him that the consequences of say, telling Japan and South Korea to go build their own nukes or putting NATO in mothballs because it costs too much money might just have the effect of “destabilizing” the entire planet.

Like a child, when he can’t think of an answer to a difficult question, he claims he doesn’t want other countries to know his plans so he won’t share them with the press, but he does seem to truly believe that it makes sense for the United States to be “unpredictable.” Nothing could be further from the truth. A nation as powerful as the U.S. has to be as transparent as possible or allies and enemies alike will find it untrustworthy and provocative. We have enough problems with our national security state as it is — caprice is the last element we need to put into the mix.

For 70 years the world has been organized around the idea of collective security backed by the United States. The idea was to prevent another world war and, even more importantly, a nuclear war. There have been huge downsides to that project but withdrawing from that abruptly out of pique or withholding our protection unless they pay up would be disaster. In the eyes of the rest of the world, the U.S. will have become a rogue superpower that has to be stopped.

There are plenty of good reasons for a presidential candidate to question our military commitments and seek new ways to secure the stability of the country and the planet. But sane people should no more turn to this man to do that than they would turn to the Olson twins. It’s very, very dangerous.

Perhaps more telling than any of this, though, is Trump’s equally thoughtless appropriation of the term “America First,” last heard in common usage by anti-semite xenophobe Pat Buchanan, but which originally was the name of an isolationist group that put pressure on President Roosevelt to keep America out of World War II. It was mostly a respectable group of citizens but there were some at the top, notably flying ace Charles Lindberg who had more than a little bit of fondness for Hitler’s Germany. Trump might want to steer clear of any more of those associations. His mass deportation and torture policies are already close enough.

“America First” undoubtedly sounds great to a lot of people and it’s not unreasonable or unusual for a candidate to argue for a foreign policy that puts national interest before global interest. It’s not even unprecedented for a candidate to run as a “Fortress America” isolationist calling for a withdrawal from all global obligations. But if anyone thinks the man who says this is the type of person who will turn the other cheek and refuse to respond unless our shores are directly threatened, I think they do not understand this man’s character:

Look at what China’s doing in the South China Sea. I mean they are totally disregarding our country and yet we have made China a rich country because of our bad trade deals. Our trade deals are so bad. And we have made them – we have rebuilt China and yet they will go in the South China Sea and build a military fortress the likes of which perhaps the world has not seen. Amazing, actually. They do that, and they do that at will because they have no respect for our president and they have no respect for our country.

He went on to blather incoherently about negotiating some trade deal in retaliation and using it as a bargaining chip but in the end he said he wouldn’t want them to know if he was prepared to go to war over these islands. That unpredictability again.

Donald Trump is actually entirely predictable. He has laid it all out many times. He commonly threatens people, telling them to “be careful” or they’d “better watch out.” You can bet money that when he feels disrespected, this is exactly what he will do:

“Get even. When somebody screws you, screw the back in spades. I really mean it. I really mean it. You’ve got to hit people hard and it’s not so much for that person, it’s that other people watch.”

Trump has expressed true admiration for only four leaders: Generals Douglas MacArthur and George S. Patton, both of whom were removed from duty for exceeding their authority, and authoritarian strongmen Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. He says all the time, “We’ve got to be strong,” by which he means dominant.

These foreign policy interviews have not shown us an “America First isolationist” by the historical definition and people would be foolish to see those allusions in any literal way. He wants America to be a gangster protection racket, holding up other countries for money lest they “disrespect us” by refusing. If that happens he’s going to have to “hit hard,” because “other people watch.”

This is all just the tip of the iceberg of the ignorance, incoherence and lunacy on display by the GOP frontrunner and everyone who follows politics should read the transcript of this stunning interview. You can bet that every foreign leader has read it and is already making contingency plans. Secretary of State John Kerry said on “Face the Nation” on Sunday:

Everywhere I go, every leader I meet, they ask about what is happening in America. They cannot believe it. I think it is fair to say that they’re shocked. They don’t know where it’s taking the United States of America. It upsets people’s sense of equilibrium about our steadiness, about our reliability. And to some degree, I must say to you, some of the questions, the way they are posed to me, it’s clear to me that what’s happening is an embarrassment to our country.

It’s not just an embarrassment. It’s dangerous.

Anyone who is putting their faith in this imbecile as some sort of foreign policy savant who is either cleverly deploying the “madman theory” or making a genuinely thoughtful outreach to Vladimir Putin is out of their minds too. It’s possible that he will stumble into some successful rapprochement with someone. But it’s obvious that he is a megalomanic who is also dumb as a rock. Putting any faith in someone like that to tun the most powerful nation in the world is more than a little bit foolish. It’s reckless. Suicidal, even.

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Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers — digby

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He has a good brain

by digby

Here is a Trump quote from 2015 about the Iran deal and nuclear policy:

Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you’re a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.

He genuinely believes that because his uncle was and MIT professor that he’s “inherited” his knowledge because they share genes. I’m not kidding.

Donald Trump boasts about a lot of things, his business acumen, his wealth, his expensive tastes. Now add this: his DNA.

Trump recently has cited a late uncle, John G. Trump, a renowned professor at MIT, as evidence of his excellent breeding.

“I had an uncle went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr. John Trump. A genius,” Trump said in an interview with CNN. “It’s in my blood. I’m smart. Great marks. Like really smart.”

He touted his uncle’s accomplishments again in South Carolina last month.

“Good genes, very good genes. OK, very smart,” Trump declared.
[…]
“My father’s brother was a brilliant man,” Donald Trump said in an interview. “We have very good genetics.”

But, Trump is quick to add, his father — who didn’t got to college but helped financially support his younger brother’s academic pursuits — was just as brilliant as his uncle.

“My father was the same level as my uncle — except the difference is he was working to put my uncle through school,” Trump said.
[…]
“You know, I’m very much involved in discussions on this horrible act that we’re doing on Iran,” Trump said.

“My uncle used to tell me about nuclear before nuclear was nuclear,” said Trump (an impossible feat, since he was born one year after the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945). “He would tell me, ‘There are things that are happening that could be potentially so bad for the world in terms of weaponry.’ He understood, literally, nuclear before it was nuclear.”

“He was a very smart guy.”

Good lord.

I don’t know what he meant when he said “I’m very much involved in discussions on this horrible act that we’re doing on Iran” but it’s likely the same thing he meant when he said the White House sent a delegation to ask him about invading Iraq and he told them not to do it — a delusion, or being less generous, another one of his lies.

I’ve post before about his beliefs in eugenics. He truly does think he has superior genes and he’s proud to have that German blood. But he apparently also thinks that his inherited intellectual superiority also means inherited knowledge. He doesn’t have to learn anything. He shares his MIT professor uncles genes so he knows everything his uncle knows!

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Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers — digby

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James Comey and the Democrats’ outrage gap
by Tom Sullivan

One of the biggest challenges the left faces in opposing a Trump administration is its own lack of message discipline. A second is the finely tuned conservative outrage machine, a tea (party) kettle always simmering and ready to whistle at the finest tweak of a knob. The latter seems to have played a part in FBI Director James Comey’s October surprise.

The Washington Post reports backstory on the release of his letter to Congress that the agency had found new emails that “appear to be pertinent” to the closed Hillary Clinton investigation. Fear of right-wing outrage influenced the decisions of both Comey and Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch. In releasing the his letter about emails associated with Clinton aide Huma Abedin, the Washington Post reports:

Battered by Republican lawmakers during a hearing that summer, Comey feared he would come under further attack if word leaked about the Clinton case picking up again.

And prior to knowing if there was any there there:

He also began wrestling with whether to notify lawmakers. He worried that getting a warrant would alert more people to the probe, increasing the chances of a leak to the media. He feared a huge outcry if anyone learned the FBI was again investigating Clinton’s emails without informing Congress. Comey would later privately tell lawmakers that he was “stuck in a really bad place.”

FBI officials contacted career prosecutors who had worked the Clinton email case to ask what they thought about sending the letter. Don’t do it, they advised.

Paul Waldman picks up there:

So why did Comey do it? “Battered by Republican lawmakers during a hearing that summer, Comey feared he would come under further attack if word leaked about the Clinton case picking up again.” He was afraid of the Republican outrage machine. What would they accuse him of? What names would they call him? What vitriol would he have to endure? Whatever he imagined, the thought was too much to bear.

And Loretta Lynch, who is Comey’s boss, could have ordered him to adhere to departmental policy and refrain from injecting himself into the presidential campaign in such an inflammatory way. But she didn’t. Why? “Lynch and her advisers were nervous about how it would look if people found out that she, a Democratic presidential appointee, told Comey to keep secret from Congress a new development in the Clinton investigation.” In other words, she too feared the outrage machine. And the result was that Donald Trump will be president of the United States.

Leading Democrats have broken into tears from actual right-wing hissy fits. Leaders of the Justice Department now shy at the thought of them. Thank you, Mr. Skinner. This is not what voters think leaders of a super power look like.

Lynch had been damaged by the appearance of impropriety of her tarmac tête-à-tête in Phoenix with former president Clinton. She weathered the concomitant right-wing outrage, but had not formally recused herself from the investigation into his wife’s emails. Bill Clinton, a lawyer, should have known better. Donald Trump, a real estate developer, won’t, and his advisers won’t tell him otherwise. When appearances of impropriety occur during a Trump administration, there will be no outrage. (You heard it here first.)

Waldman turns up the contrast:

Try to imagine something like Benghazi happening during a Republican administration with a Democratic Congress. Would Democrats have had the single-mindedness to undertake not one, not two, but eight separate congressional investigations of it, long after everyone understood that though the events were tragic, there was no official malfeasance? Not on your life. And when Republicans give them cause for outrage, with cases like their refusal to allow President Obama to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat, Democrats express their disapproval, complain that norms are being violated, and then pretty soon move on to other things.

I shouted at the computer Wednesday night during NC governor-elect Roy Cooper’s press conference held after a special legislative session called to repeal HB2 failed to do so. Cooper kept saying he was “disappointed.” No, you’re angry. BE. ANGRY.

After Wednesday’s legislative debacle in North Carolina, a left-coast friend expressed frustration at the NCGOP’s insistence that “They (Dems) just can’t be trusted.” With poker faces Republican spokespersons insist it was Democrats who scuttled the repeal deal (the one Republicans reneged on). There is little pushback from the left and none is forthcoming. The Republican narrative will fix itself in the public consciousness. Until Democrats can generate, sustain, and channel a little outrage of their own, or else develop a disciplined approach to thwarting the right’s, they will be outmaneuvered. It’s asymmetric warfare. The left is unprepared to win it.

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Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers — digby

The War on Christmas is over (if you want it)

by digby

It’s hard to keep your sense of humor right now. This may be the most disorienting and frightening holiday season I can remember and I’ve got quite a few under my belt.  But I am trying to keep it together and summon up my zen “this too shall pass” attitude about all of it. Indeed, I’m fervently hoping that my worries are overblown.

But whatever happens, with your help, we’ll be keeping it real here as long as they let us keep the internet lights on. All of us here at Hullabaloo will be paying attention, even when it hurts, and we’ll share with you our impressions and observations of how it’s going.

So thanks again for your generosity in supporting the fundraiser this year. If you would still like to put a little something in the stocking, you can do so with the buttons to your left or use the snail mail address right underneath.

Meanwhile, I wrote this little ditty in the hopes of giving you a chuckle or two:

The holiday season is usually a joyful time when most of us get together with family, eat a lot of fattening food, watch football, take some time off work and celebrate the religious ceremonies of our choice. This year promises to be a little bit less enjoyable for many of us, due to the recent “unpleasantness” I probably don’t need to spell out. There are good reasons to be depressed but I won’t go into that now because there is good news to share that will make the season a little bit brighter. The “War on Christmas” is finally over.

V.C. Day was officially declared this week by Bill “Santa’s General” O’Reilly, the man who led the fight:

You may remember about 10 years ago, “The O’Reilly Factor” began spotlighting companies that refused to say the words “Merry Christmas.” In fact, some of those businesses actually ordered their employees not to say that. Well, that culture war issue ignited.

And we won.

Most companies stopped the nonsense and “Merry Christmas” became a common greeting once again. For me, it was interesting to go through that, because some on the far left actually denied there was any controversy at all and claimed that I fabricated it. More lies from a crew that is incapable of telling the truth.

Commander Newt “Zuzu Petals” Gingrich fought bravely by O’Reilly’s side for years, relentlessly attacking the government forces who were banning all federal employees from saying “Merry Christmas” — well, banning them from using federal money to send their personal Christmas cards anyway, which, of course, is exactly the same thing.

And Sgt. Denny Hastert, the former speaker of the House and current inmate at a Minnesota federal prison, won one of the earliest and most important battles of the war by making it a steadfast rule that the U.S. Capitol tree be referred to only as a Christmas tree, not a “holiday tree.” There are some who say that early victory sustained the troops through the hard years that followed.

Gen. O’Reilly and the rest of the far right fought a trench war for a decade, getting nowhere as the secularists insisted on banning “Merry Christmas” and forcing everyone in America to regurgitate the hated words “Happy holidays” instead. And then a true leader emerged, a man so strong, so powerful, so magical that like a superhero he was able to win the war pretty much single-handedly. That man, of course, is President-elect Donald Trump.

As his former campaign manager, CNN commentator and newly minted lobbyist Corey Lewandowski declared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, “You can say again ‘Merry Christmas’ because Donald Trump is now the president. You can say it again. It’s OK to say.”

Hallelujah.

At a victory rally last week, the man who insists that the country is going to come together (or else) got huge cheers when he said, “So when I started 18 months ago, I told my first crowd in Wisconsin that we are going to come back here someday and we are going to say Merry Christmas again. Merry Christmas. So, Merry Christmas everyone!” And all of Christian Wisconsin was free once more to say the sacred words.

At Trump’s Michigan rally he took it even farther and declared that all those department stores that refuse to celebrate Christmas are going to toe the line from now on:

We’re gonna start saying “Merry Christmas” again. How about all those department stores, they have the bells and they have the red walls and they have the snow, but they don’t have “Merry Christmas”? I think they’re gonna start putting up “Merry Christmas.”

But like those lone Japanese soldiers found still carrying on the fight on islands years after the end of World War II, some grizzled “War on Christmas” veterans are still skirmishing. The Breitbart Brigade is still battling a few stray secularists who they say have moved “beyond opposition to Nativity scenes and Wise Men to denying the very existence of Jesus.” If that catches on, the fragile peace could be broken and everyone will once again be racing through department stores, knocking over Christmas trees, shrieking, “Happy Holidays!” and spitting on Santa. (They never thank him for his service.)

Those holiday haters will be met with fierce resistance if they try. Trump’s Christmas army is prepared to do whatever it takes to secure the right to say, “Merry Christmas” in America again. For instance, there are brave soldiers like the mayor’s chief of staff in Mobile, Alabama, who went the extra mile to honor his leader the way he most wanted to be honored, with a Christmas tree.

But chief of staff knew that just going to a corner tree lot would not suffice. The great Donald Trump would need a yuuuge tree, a beautiful tree, a special tree. So this good man went above and beyond the call of duty and had an old-growth evergreen in one of Mobile’s public parks cut down to use as a prop for Trump’s Christmas victory rally.

Some anti-Christmas crusaders were unhappy, of course, and the good soldier had to offer up an apology. But being the hero he is he made sure that everyone could see that his confession was forced:

I accept full responsibility for having this done. For this, I sincerely apologize. Going forward, I will be more sensitive to the spectrum of concerns regarding trees.

One can imagine him defiantly blinking, “Merry Christmas” in Morse code as he said it.

The good news is that war is over, if you want it, America. Happy Holidays, everyone. And now that we are finally free at last, Merry Christmas, too.

It’s Holiday Fundraiser time. If you’d like to contribute, you can do so below or use the snail mail address at the top of the left column. Thank you!

Happy Hollandaise everyone.

cheers — digby