Thanks to the many of you who responded in unprecedented numbers (and with great intensity) to Saturday’s faux Merrick Garland speech.
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Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY!!
Today’s forced, contrived conceit is a Wide World of News “Punt, Pass, and Kick” competition.
For those of you who are familiar with “Punt, Pass, and Kick,” this feature will offer you a pleasant nostalgia-infused trip down memory lane.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, watching this awesome video will do nothing, actually, to explain its deep meaning:
PUNT
PASS
Note the elliptical-to-non-existent sourcing in this item from the very end of the New York Times’ latest Trump/DOJ story:
Shortly before Mr. Garland made the announcement, a person close to Mr. Trump reached out to a Justice Department official to pass along a message from the former president to the attorney general. Mr. Trump wanted Mr. Garland to know that he had been checking in with people around the country and found them to be enraged by the search.
The message Mr. Trump wanted conveyed, according to a person familiar with the exchange, was: “The country is on fire. What can I do to reduce the heat?”
If this really happened, it is like the most uncharacteristic move by Donald J. Trump since…..he (allegedly) apologized to Ted Cruz.
Donald Trump has been called a lot of things, but “heat reducer” is not, to my knowledge, one of them.
More tk….
KICK
Politico, with a quote perfectly capturing the current mood of Biden Democrats:
“Democrats need to get over it. All of this is bullshit,” said Trav Robertson, the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. “We need to solidify around this president whether you supported him or not. We need to pass legislation and quit talking about whether he’s running or not. That type of talk is why we got Donald Trump as president and Roe. v Wade was overturned.”
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ESSENTIAL READING
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* The Washington Post’s brief history of Trump/DOJ includes this normal/abnormal shocking-but-not-surprising stuff:
A Trump adviser said the former president’s reluctance to relinquish the records stems from his belief that many items created during his term — photos, notes, even a model of Air Force One built to show off a new paint job he had commissioned — are now his personal property, despite a law dating to the 1970s that decreed otherwise.
“He gave them what he believed was theirs,” the adviser said.
“He gets his back up every time they asked him for something,” said another Trump adviser. “He didn’t give them the documents because he didn’t want to. He doesn’t like those people. He doesn’t trust those people….”
Advisers said they also regularly saw Trump destroy documents, both in the White House and at Mar-a-Lago….
Trump and his team quickly began speculating that the FBI had been tipped by a disloyal insider, particularly given how many of his advisers have been interviewed by authorities about the document issue. “There were two days of crazy talk in Trump world about who was the mole, who was the informant,” one adviser said. “Fingers were pointed at all sorts of people….”
As the week progressed, Trump grew angrier, at times screaming profanities to advisers about the FBI and how they were out to “get him,” people who were in contact with him said.
* The New York Times on how Democratic candidates are going all in on TV ads focusing on abortion.
* The New York Times piece on the political future of Nancy Pelosi primarily makes the essential reading list because it contains a lunch with Willie Brown (a classic staple of American political journalism) and this photo:
