The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

 

The good:

Ontario’s take-no-prisoners Premier Doug Ford is threatening to ban U.S. alcohol in stores and cut power to American homes and businesses close to the border in his war on Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs.

“I’m a street fighter in politics,” Ford, wearing a blue MAGA-type hat reading “Canada is not for sale,” told Politico in an interview earlier this week. “If someone throws a punch at me, I’m going to hit him back twice as hard.”

Ford, 60, said he would like to work with Trump, but that doesn’t look likely now, even though there’s “no one that loves the U.S. up here in Canada more than I do.”

The leader of the center-right Ontario Progressive Conservative Party is talking tough to challenge Trump’s threats to slap stiff 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods on the first of February. Ford has called for early elections in the province Friday, seeking a strengthened majority to “fight with Donald Trump to make sure we stop the tariffs.”

Beyond curtailing American liquor sales in Canada, Ford warned in December he could cut off electricity exports to Michigan, Minnesota and New York.

Being enemies, however, is not the way to go, cautioned Ford, who backed Trump for the presidency...

Ford, as you can tell from that last sentence, is a not- inconsiderable jackass himself.  In his own small way, he's in the FO part of FAFO.  But as a "street fighter" he's not going to let even his pal the Malignant Fascist push him and his constituents around.  "If someone throws a punch at me, I'm going to hit him back twice as hard," words that some Democratic leaders currently in a defensive crouch would do well to mirror.

The bad:

Just days into Donald Trump’s return to the White House, democracy advocates worry that their worst fears are already being confirmed.

Trump has declared immigration and energy “emergencies” to use extraordinary powers, even though illegal border crossings are down and U.S. energy production is at a record high. He has pardoned hundreds of domestic terrorists who assaulted police officers to advance his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt. He has stripped federal security details from former aides who have criticized him, even though the foreign threat against them remains. He even suggested that he might try to prosecute his predecessor, Joe Biden, noting that he had foolishly failed to pardon himself.

All of this, and it hasn’t even been a full week since he took the oath of office last Monday.

“Anybody who’s surprised by these egregious actions, well, shame on them,” said Geoff Duncan, a former lieutenant governor of Georgia who, along with numerous other Republicans, endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris in the November election. “Donald Trump telegraphed them for the better part of two years.”

Trump, after a four-year hiatus, is essentially picking up where he left off in the final weeks of his first term, after he lost the Nov. 3, 2020, election, Duncan and others argue.

In those last days, Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who had months earlier preemptively stated that the military would not get involved in the presidential election. He fired Attorney General Bill Barr after he refused to go along with Trump’s attempts to invalidate the vote in states he had lost. He tried to install loyalist Kash Patel in a top CIA job, but backed off when Director Gina Haspel said she would resign in response. He considered, but ultimately opted against, declaring the Insurrection Act to help him remain in power. He even entertained an Oval Office meeting with advisers who encouraged him to declare martial law.

In that crucial two-month period between Trump’s election loss and his last-gasp attempt to coerce his own vice president, Mike Pence, into simply awarding him a second term at the Jan. 6 congressional certification ceremony, top White House and administration officials refused to carry out Trump’s schemes. When Trump floated the idea of appointing an ally willing to help overturn his election loss as the new attorney general, for example, top DOJ leadership threatened to resign en masse.

This time around, those institutionalists are gone, and Trump is surrounding himself with appointees deeply loyal to him personally, even if it means picking agency heads with dubious credentials...

“Anybody who’s surprised by these egregious actions, well, shame on them."  And anybody who voted for this with eyes wide open, well, fuck you very much!

The ugly: 

Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.) said in a recent interview that retired U.S. Army General Mark Milley and former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin should be court-martialed ― a military legal proceeding typically reserved for serious crimes ― because they made the Department of Defense too “politicized” to win wars.

“We have the most highly educated and powerful military in the history of the world, and we have not won a war in 80 years,” Van Orden lamented during a little-noticed Jan. 15 interview on the Vicki McKenna Show, a right-wing radio show.  [snip]

He said the Department of Defense over the decades “has become politicized,” and it reached its peak when it was run by Lloyd and Milley.

“Those guys need to be recalled to active duty and court-martialed for their disgraceful conduct,” said Van Orden. “It’s been terrible. They’ve broken the military.”  [snip]

There is no evidence that Milley or Austin committed any crimes during their active service, never mind severe crimes like felonies.

Asked why he would propose such an extreme action or on what grounds, Van Orden railed against Milley and Austin but did not offer any evidence of criminal behavior...

Van Orden is typical of the fascist MAGA loons populating the Republican Party/ cult.  Because they have no honor, they're perfectly happy to go after those who do, in service to the most corrupt, incompetent, un-American, felonious, dishonorable person ever to squat in the Oval Office.  This is where we are now, America.