Go To Mars Soon?

Not me!  But how can one not be excited by this: a 90-day journey to Mars in 2024.  Less time than it took the Mayflower to reach Cape Cod (all things considered) — and with comforts and luxuries of which the Pilgrims could never have dreamed.  (Thanks, John!)

Back here on Earth . . .

Rex Tillerson has largely destroyed the State Department — a huge win for Vladimir Putin and his fellow murderous autocrats around the world.

But the Republicans in the House and Senate don’t seem to care.

They are making America great again by making health insurance less affordable, higher education less affordable, inequality more pronounced, our National Debt needlessly higher . . . all the while letting our infrastructure crumble.  An almost certain prescription for progress and prosperity.

It’s almost funny.  As president, we have a genuine fake-wrestling hall of fame inductee.  As secretary of state, we have a genuine Russian Order of Friendship Medal recipient.  The latter calls the former “a fucking moron.”  The former calls the latter “an idiot.”

Maybe it’s time to remind you of my fantasy:

My fantasy — and it is only that — is that some crisis a month or three down the road triggers a lawsuit that can only be decided by the Supreme Court.  And that that Court, though captured by the right, somehow finds the fundamental patriotism and fairness to say something like this:

“Seventeen years ago this Court faced a national crisis and — in a ruling it went out of its way to brand as non-precedential — made a tough and widely criticized call that, in effect, gave George W. Bush the Presidency and, as it happened, the opportunity to appoint two of us to this body.  Last year, the Senate made the unprecedented decision not to allow the President to fill a vacancy on this Court, on the grounds that the will of the people as expressed in 2008 and 2012 did not give him that authority — the Senate needed to see how the people leaned in 2016.  As we now know, the people — not the Electoral College, the people — leaned toward the Democratic candidate. 

“Today we face a new crisis.  In developments that have been building all year, it has become clear that the 2016 election results were interfered with by a massive Putin-directed thumb on the electoral scale — a thumb the existence of which the Trump team long denied knowledge of but of which we now know they were well aware.  In that context, we have been called upon to overturn the 2016 result as tainted, and to order a workable mechanism by which the country can move forward and regain its footing. 

“We hereby direct former presidents Obama and Bush, acting in concert, to recommend to this Court, in the shortest time possible, an interim president and vice president to serve out the remainder of this presidential term — or a shorter term if a majority of the House and Senate shall call for an earlier election.”

Or something like that.  And Barack and George, very different people but both sane patriots, would perhaps recommend to the Court Joe Biden and Mitt Romney; the Court would approve; and most of the nation — not having attained anything like great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost — nor remotely to have tired of “winning so much you’ll get tired of winning” — would breathe a huge sigh of relief.  As would the world.

Or they could just give it to Hillary, who did get more votes despite it all; but Putin/Trump have been so effective at getting people to misperceive her (she is wonderful and would have made a great president), it could fail to give the same sense of closure.

Just sayin’.