My New Year resolutions:
I refuse to join Prozac Progressives (formerly Brie and Chablis Liberals) for a limousine ride-along in their post-election funk.
I won’t embrace the inexplicable anger of the Alt-Right (formerly GOP) despite its imminent ownership of the Oval Office, Congress, Supreme Court and most state governments.
And I can’t share the White House Press Corps’ anger at having the press room moved to the nearby Trump International Hotel.
Instead, I’ve eschewed Beltway conventional wisdom to dig out credulity-challenging stories you won’t find at Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck, Breitbart, Infowars or national dailies’ factchecking:
• MOSCOW – Russian intelligence agencies won’t confirm or deny reports that then-aspirant Donald Trump spent 36 hours in their “company” during a business trip.
Informed sources say those hours were devoted to an intense, 21st-century equivalent of brainwashing and Trump was an “apt” subject.
His admiration of bare-chested Russian President Vladimir Putin opened him to deeply embedded suggestions that an FSB Controller hopes to activate.
Some time after Jan. 20, Trump will be invited to play Mir y Druzhba, a card game based on Russian Roulette in which the deeply embedded instructions will be triggered by the Queen of Diamonds.
If it works, that “trial run” will involve something seemingly benign. It could be negotiations for Trump golf courses in occupied Crimea or Estonia after the Russian army reoccupies the Baltic countries.
“I’m too smart for anyone to use me,” President-Elect Trump responded when asked about those unaccountable hours in Russia. “My brain can resist any influence.”
• WASHINGTON – Ivanka Trump has been named to design the new White House gift shops.
“I’m delighted in my father’s confidence in me,” the younger Trump said. “It fits perfectly into his understanding of ways the nation and our family can serve each other.”
A White House spokeswoman said the gift shop would have two locations. One would serve public visitors waiting in line for tours. The other would serve them as they leave the building. “That way, all of our guests will have a chance to take home something patriotic,” the spokeswoman said.
The president-elect said the shops would display his daughter’s imported clothing and jewelry as “typical of American creativity.”
Ivanka Trump said less expensive souvenirs would include lumps of coal from reopened West Virginia and Kentucky mines, plaques with the Trump name cut from “old growth” redwoods, keychains with polar bear claws and hourglasses using sand from newly privatized federal lands in the West.
• MIAMI – President-Elect Donald Trump reportedly is liquidating oceanside properties around the world, saying a liberal climate change conspiracy has frightened away affluent clientele. “Science is bunk,” Trump said. “My only problem is salt water gushing from holes in my golf course greens.”
Florida Republican Marco Rubio said that’s not the only challenge. He’s even taken Trump to see rising saltwater blow open Miami manhole covers.
“It’s something we hope will ease with Fidel’s death,” Rubio said.
However, Rubio said he had little hope of changing Trump’s mind about Florida golf courses. “I worry about the size of a man’s brain when he has such small hands.”
• DHAKA – Asian manufacturers are complaining about new, high U.S. duties placed on imports of their bedding products.
“We’ve supplied white sheets to Americans for generations,” one Bangladeshi factory owner said. “They wear them with pride.”
He said his factory and competitors throughout the region can meet “the rising demand since Mr. Trump’s election but this import duty is very discouraging. It’s nothing short of a ban on our popular white sheets. We will have to find new markets in Russia and Europe.”
A White House spokeswoman said the import duties will speed “repatriation” of this industry to long-closed factories in the Carolinas and help redeem Trump’s pledge to “bring jobs home.”
Alt-right websites praised the decision as proof that Southerners can produce white sheets at Asian salaries.
“We’re not worried about recruiting workers,” the White House spokeswoman said. “White sheets are a product with deep roots in the South and they resonate with regional and historic pride.”
A spokesman for the vice-president-elect and Indiana’s former governor Mike Pence said some of those new jobs belong to Hoosiers with their historic passion for white sheets.
• TRUMP TOWER – President-Elect Trump said he will order changes to the National Anthem at sporting and other public events.
He wants to end the custom for uniformed personnel to salute and civilians to place right hands over their hearts. “There’s no way to tell who’s doing what,” Trump complained. “I’m ordering a new salute.”
He said it will be the same straight-arm gesture he used on the campaign trail that “thrilled” his followers. “It was yuuuuuge,” he recalled, “and it was more natural. We were pointing to a great future.”
Trump said he was undaunted by his gesture’s similarity to the salute — done when pledging allegiance to the flag — which Americans abandoned when fascists and Nazis adopted it after World War I.
“History is bunk and we can’t always be looking back. That’s for losers. I want winners.”
An advantage of his new salute, the president-elect said, is that “We’ll be able to see who isn’t doing it and real Americans know what to do with people like that in any crowd.”
• SILICON VALLEY – Venture capitalists are complaining that any roundup of illegal immigrants would catch Indian computer and software engineers on whom their investments rely.
“If Trump deports all of them, companies will shut down or turn to engineers in China,” a rare Trump donor griped. “Worse, we might have to retrain old white American engineers to do the work and they’ll cost a shitload compared to the Indians.”
Most threatened Indians overstayed special or student visas. Deporting them would redeem Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign promises. It also would remind Silicon Valley and Wall Street investors — who spent heavily to elect Clinton — that elections have consequences.
The billionaire investors said they weren’t ready to embrace Trump’s advice to hire the Indians’ American-born kids who are at least as computer-savvy as their parents.
“They get all the perfect ACT and SAT scores and always win the Scripps spelling bee,” Trump said. “You don’t have to wait until they’re 18 because it won’t be anything called child labor under our new regulations.
“Actually, child labor will be history when we’ve deregulated most industries. They’ll be unpaid interns or low-wage workers like the fast food outlets. My choice for Labor Secretary is drafting the required legislation.
“Take a page from companies that will be making white sheets again in the Deep South,” Trump told investors. “Kids love working the looms. It’s no different if their families had electricity and they’re familiar with computers.”
• SELMA – Homeland Security is refurbishing camps built in 1980 to hold Iranians.
Now, the camps can be used to house Muslims regardless of nationality, a Homeland Security official said.
“We won’t discriminate. We’ll detain and deport Sunnis, Shias and all of their splinter sects. Dearborn will be emptied.”
It was unclear whether Muslim green card holders or naturalized Muslim U.S. citizens would be exempt. Barracks, guard towers and electrified fences were built after Iranians occupied the U.S. Embassy in 1979. Roundups of Iranians in this country were canceled when Muslim oil-producing countries threatened an embargo.
Following 9/11, there was a push to reopen the detention camps after most of the terrorists who flew jetliners into the World Trade Centers, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field were identified as Saudis. That plan died when the Saudi government again threatened to trigger a world shortage of fuel.
Today, that’s no issue, a senior Homeland Security official said. “We’re producing so much oil and natural gas that no one can threaten us, Saudis can suck sand.”
A White House spokesman said the detention and deportation of millions of Muslims will be legal. “Mr. Trump found a former Bush administration lawyer who said he’d issue an opinion to that effect,” the White House spokesman said.
A tweet suggesting the lawyer was being considered for a federal judgeship played no role in the choice, the spokesman added.
“Even that suggestion is a typical liberal media conspiracy calumny. Every request for a real American to aid our government is a deal of some kind. Actually, the lawyer said he’d brush off opinions from World War II when we legally detained Japanese-heritage American citizens in remote concentration camps.
“As the lawyer told the president-elect, the U.S. Supreme Court never said that was illegal and with our new five-justice majority, there should be no problem if someone should challenge our plan.”
CONTACT BEN L. KAUFMAN: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Jan 4-11, 2017.
