Tag: Resistance

Those Were the Days

Facing the “new normal” is the perfect time for an Old Fashioned

What a difference a year makes. At this time last year, I was days away from my vaccination appointment. Then, the vaccinations looked like the ticket back to a more normal life, going out to bars and restaurants, and seeing people you didn’t live with. But that was before the Delta and Omicron variants.

The lack of a fully vaccinated population was also a problem. Today, there are once again hopeful signs the pandemic may be ending. There are also ominous clouds on the horizon with the BA.2 Omicron variant looming. Even without a new COVID wave, however, America is not going back to the way things were.

That unvaccinated segment of the population may pose a problem for ending the pandemic, but they seem to be an even greater risk of disease to American Democracy. These MAGA Trumplicans are enthralled by authoritarian power, typically siding with Vladimir Putin in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. As annoying as the phrase “new Normal” is, I’m afraid we’re stuck with it until more Americans can reclaim some traditional values. Values that can be found in an earlier version of Americans. Not in the ill-defined Trumpy Make America Great Again way. But in a specific Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe sort of way. A Humphrey Bogart fast-talking-hustler style. America will be greater (again, or otherwise) when more Americans can identify with Rick Blaine than Major Heinrich Strasser.

The portrayal of Americans in the movies some 80 years ago were people with an inherent sense of fairplay, an idealism joined with skepticism. Despite the racism and barely acknowledged class issues of the day, these idealized Americans were united, and if you’re an American, you’re one of the good guys and not falling for anyone’s bullshit.

Today, that earlier, healthy skepticism has been replaced by an unhealthy cynicism. This cynical tribalism has elevated power over fairness. You can see this in the fight over voting rights. The movie version of an “American hero” has shifted from Casablanca’s Rick Blaine to Dirty Harry.

Being a skeptic means calling bullshit on Trump’s bullshit. Being a cynic means believing everyone is a liar, but at least Trump is your liar. This cynicism is the path to fascism. It is time to rediscover old-fashioned American values and fight the creeping fascism that is threatening American democracy, so begin some beautiful friendships and get all those friends out to vote, and get their shots. If we all do that, we can get past the pandemic and reverse the typical mid-term election trend and overwhelm GOP voter suppression efforts to clean things up in Washington.

While you may not have a foggy airfield to walk across when forming those beautiful friendships, perhaps an Old-fashioned cocktail will help. From Sother Teague’s I’m Just Here for the Drinks, the classic Old-fashioned is:

1 dash Angostura Bitters

2 oz Rye

1 Spoon Demerara or cane syrup

lemon twist

Add the first three ingredients to an old-fashioned glass, add a large lump of ice and stir to combine. Garnish with the lemon twist.

Cheers!

Weird Scenes Inside The Goldmine

We’re not done with Trump yet, but The End Is Nigh is the cocktail to help get to january 20

I do not identify as a Baby Boomer, though some demographers do put me there. But I definitely arrived at the transition from Baby Boomers to Gen X. For more than a week now, however, Jim Morrison singing The End has been playing on continuous loop in my head. For much of that time it was unclear if the Lizard King was signing about The End of Trump or the end of American Democracy. Still, with the election of Joe Biden as President, we can see light at the end of the tunnel.

We are truly at the End of an Error, but like the old joke, it is still not clear if that light is the exit or an oncoming train. The long-term outlook is good, but from now until January 20, we may be in for a bumpy ride.

Last night, after Biden was confirmed to have won the election, Jim Morrison began to fade from my mind as the spontaneous celebrations around the world as street parties and church bells signaled the rejoicing that America rejected a fascist dictatorship. From there, things got weird.

The scary weird happened in Harrisburg, Penn. where some 2,000 heavily armed Trump Brown Shirts showed up to whine about the loss. If Y’all Qaeda and Meal Team Six is going to continue this behavior, then each state’s National Guard should have very clear rules of engagement around when to take prisoners and when to use deadly force to protect institutions of American government from armed anti-American terrorist groups. The weird, weird also happened in Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, where Rudy Giuliani proved the Hunter Thompson maxim that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. When Rudy’s obituary is written, right next to his 9/11 performance there will be a few lines about his press conference yesterday at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Over the next two months we can only hope this Administration continues to be The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight. With looming criminal indictments and creditors demanding payment, Trump will be a cornered rat who feels the walls closing in every day closer to Jan. 20 we get. The End is coming for Bunker Boy, but it is likely going to take us a few cocktails to make it to January.

As you make your plans for getting to Inauguration Day, have a The End Is Nigh cocktail. From Neal Bodenheimer at The Cure New Orleans, The End Is Nigh is:

1.5 oz Rittenhouse Bonded Rye (Old Overholt Bonded Rye)

1 oz Bonal

.25 oz Amaro Sibilla

2 dashes Angostura bitters

Combine ingredients in a mixing glass. Stir 40 revolutions and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange peel.

Cheers!

end-is-nighDownload

A Moment’s Hesitation for the GOP

Hesitation

For a brief moment this morning it appeared Republicans might be growing a spine in response to Trump’s over-the-top racist comments about four Democratic House members. Trump himself even seemed to be walking things back by disavowing the “send her back” chant at his North Carolina rally.

Writing in The Washington Post, Greg Sargent’s article “New GOP Panic About Trump’s Racicism Reveals an Ugly Truth,” noting: “You can locate a zone of plausible deniability, in which one can claim support for such policies on pragmatic, economic or “cultural” grounds, and not out of any desire to make the United States whiter. It’s precisely this zone that Republicans now seek to inhabit.”

Even while this was happening, some GOPers had already been trying to twist the racism into some kind of Love it or Leave it approach. This now seems to be the official party line as Cheeto Mussolini himself has now come out and said “that while he’s president any criticism of the United States is unacceptable and they ‘can’t get away with’ it.”

This of course stands a fundamental principle and value of the United States on its head; the right of free speech and the ability to criticize the government.

The Republican Party gave us a glimpse that maybe there is still a glimmer of GOP life in this Trump possessed shell of  a Party. Those racist attacks gave the GOP pause despite the infiltration of white supremecists. Now we’ll see if there are enough so-called Libertarian elements left in the Republican Party to push back on an assault on free speech.

There can be no impeachment of Trump without at least some portion of the GOP holding on to the principles they say they once believed in. As we wait to see if Trump’s latest outrage causes any hesitation in Republicans, or do they just keep going along, have a Hesitation cocktail. From an old blog post from Doug Ford (that I found via Kindred Cocktails), the Hesitation cocktail is:

2 oz Rittenhouse 100 Rye

1 oz Swedish Punsch (Kronan)

.25-.5 oz lemon juice

Shake over ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass, garnish with a lemon twist.

Cheers!

Demolition Man

Wreck

Trump and his GOP minions are once again working to end the Affordable Care Act. This continues to be one of the overriding goals of the Trump presidency. Since his installation as president, Trump has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement and pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement. This is all part of Trump’s attempt to erase the legacy of President Obama (in fact, it is now being reported that Trump did indeed scrap the Iran deal to spite Obama), but to say this is simply part of his white supremicist fantasy belittles his role in Putin’s grand vision to dismantle the post-World War II Order established by the U.S. and Western Europe. Trump’s attacks on NATO are well documented. But his TradeWars are aimed squarely at the economic order that was being formed 75 years ago right now. The Bretton Woods Agreement that laid the foundation for global economic cooperation was negotiated in July 1944 in New Hampshire.

Trump’s racism was on full display over the weekend, from telling several U.S. Congresswomen to go back where they came from, to his Deportation Force raids targeting overnight action against immigrant communities from Latin America. (I’m sure there are no people from Russia in Brooklyn who overstayed their visas.) These raids are much less about law enforcement than fear. Not that there was any doubt, but it must be abundantly clear even to the thickest skulled “journalist” trying to “understand” Trump supporters that MAGA is about the racism, not economic anxiety.

For a Republican who wants to “Make America Great Again” and has the economy on their mind, it would be hard not to look back at the Post-War period, when the U.S. was the economic engine of the Free World, and the rules governing the international economic order where largely prepared by America, as a Golden Age, but it’s precisely this order that Trump has taken a wrecking ball to. While Cheeto Mussolini separates families to fill his for-profit concentration camps with contracts held by his buddies and his unAmerican fixation on tariffs keeps new appliances like washers and dryers too expensive for most Americans, have a Home Wrecker Cocktail and make your plan to vote against Trump and everyone who supports him. Via Cocktail Virgin, the Home Wrecker is:

1 1/2 oz Old Overholt Rye
1/2 oz Punt e Mes
1/2 oz St. Germain
1/2 oz Lemon Juice

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass.

Cheers

The Madness & Airpower of King George

PLANE

Trump’s big 4th of July Soviet style military parade turned out to be more Chernobyl than Red Square, melting down as the crowds stayed away and the torrential rains came. After his mail-order escort won the annual D.C. wet t-shirt contest Cheeto Mussolini got up behind his rain drenched bullet-proof shields to read his TelePrompTer and went full retard. Mostly the speech was labeled “inoffensive” as Vox put it with others providing similar characterizations. Slate credited the speech as “not a complete authoritarian nightmare.” But then Trump tried to give a history lesson that bizarrely noted how Americans took over the airports during the Revolutionary War. That produced some of the best Twitter memes in years as the snark got flowing. Trump has also been criticized for not following the standard Independence day script that ties the birth of the United States to immigration. Despite the heavy rains, Trump likely would have spontaneously combusted if he had to talk about America’s greatness deriving from being a nation of immigrants. Trump and his Republican enablers have been very good at projection for years, attributing every nefarious idea they have to democrats or their adversary du jour. I would not be surprised if Trump’s airport comment doesn’t stem from the reaction to his attempted immigrant ban when the Resistance took over the airports when he came to power.

Trumps inability to articulate ideas about the nature of America, let alone long accepted platitudes is just another exhibit in the case that Trump is not a real president. As a reminder that he is no more a real president than those Revolutionary War airports, I suggest a Paper Plane cocktail. Probably my favorite”new classic cocktail” created at Milk and Honey in NYC, via Sasha Petraske’s Regarding Cocktails the Paper Plane is:

.75 oz bourbon (Buffalo Trace)

.75 oz lemon juice

.75 oz Aperol

.75 oz Amaro Nonino

Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Cheers!

American Value

Treasure

Notwithstanding the inhumane detention of refugees at the southern border, or Trump’s Soviet-style military parade usurpation of Independence Day, perhaps one of the most unAmerican developments of this era has been the complete rejection of democracy by the Republican party.

As the oldest democracy in the world, how the U.S. conducted its democratic politics was once a model, and the standard against which other democracies were judged. But today, one party, the Republicans, are actively working against the operation of democracy by suppressing the vote. Adding a citizenship question to the census is just one tactic. Despite a court order to remove the question, Trump is now looking to reinstate it as part of the census, in just another show of his disregard for the rule of law. The court order against Trump’s desire comes even as Republicans do everything they can to remove independence from the Judiciary by picking judges to pack the courts with those synpathetic to GOP policies. One place that has worked for them is in their ability to keep picking their voters through Gerrymandering.

The ridiculously partisan Gerrymandering has damaged the structure of our democracy, to the point where votes cast in a legislative election can clearly give a majority to the democrats but Republicans still gain a majority of seats. In a show of force better than Trump’s military parade, both Mother Jones and The Washington Monthly profiled groups fighting back against the GOP Gerrymandering machine this week.

The undermining of our representative democracy is not new, and I have written about it here, here, and here. If we can rebuild representation in our government, then we can rebuild our democracy, restoring the value we once brought to the world. Removing the stain of Trump won’t be easy, but rebuilding our democratic institutions will help. On this Independence day, have a National Treasure cocktail and remember what we have always treasured as Americans (and it’s not tanks on parade). Via Frederic Yarm @cocktailvirgin the national Treasure is:

.75 oz Wild Turkey Rye Whiskey (Rittenhouse Bonded)
.5 oz Laird’s Bonded Apple Brandy
.5 oz Carpano Antica Sweet Vermouth (Martini Gran Lusso)
.5 oz Campari
,25 oz Cynar

Cheers!

Paper Chase

Paper Chase

In the current battle between Congress and Trump on the question of oversight, Trump just blinked.

It was reported earlier today that former White House personnel security director, Carl Kline, would answer questions for a Congressional investigation of security clearance issues next week. The White House has blocked, or said it would block, the appearance of administration officials before Congress since the Mueller Report became public, setting the stage for a (another) Constitutional crisis.

One key witness is former White House Counsel Don McGahn, who features in the Mueller Report around a potential charge of Obstruction of Justice. The Washington Post reported, when the report came out that McGahn’s “ubiquity in the report’s footnotes laid bare his extensive cooperation in chronicling the president’s actions,” prompting Trump to dispute McGahn’s assertions and talk of blocking his appearance before Congress. In particular, the Mueller Report points to Trump’s dislike of note taking, as the Post reported:

“Some of the report’s most derogatory scenes were attributed not only to the recollections of McGahn and other witnesses but also to the contemporaneous notes kept by several senior administration officials — the kind of paper trail that Trump has long sought to avoid leaving.”

Another part of the paper trail that is escalating the fight with Congress is the request for Trump’s tax returns. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has refused to turn them over to Congress, as required by law, and the deadline has passed. This action (or inaction) could put Mnuchin in jail for 5 years.

On several fronts, Congress is now engaged in a paper chase with the administration, so join the pursuit with a Paper Chase cocktail. Via Kindred Cocktails, this is a very tasty riff on the Paper Trail cocktail I wrote about a year ago.

1.5 oz Bulleit Rye

1 oz Aperol

.75 oz Bonal Gentiane Quina

Stir with ice, strain onto a large cube and garnish with a lemon twist

Cheers!

The Mueller Aperitif

Premiere

Despite Attorney General Barr’s best impression of Kevin Bacon in Animal House today, all is not well in Trumplandia®.

Barr cannot move everyone along past the Mueller report because its contents — even redacted as they are — will not be easily dismissed.

As details of the investigation filter out, one thing above all is clear: the report is certainly not the end of the Trump/Russia matter. If it signifies the end of anything, it is the end of the beginning in getting to the bottom of what happened in 2016.

There are more questions today than there were yesterday. A key question has always been how so many Republicans could skip their patriotic duty and protect Trump. Some clarity is coming to that (looking at you Sen. Grassley) and bringing new questions.

The revelations of the report will spill out for a couple of days. Then the analyses and interpretations and speculation of what has been redacted will take center stage for a while. Then the hearings — Mueller, Cohen, others — will consume countless hours of air time (before, during and after the hearings).

Since we are just getting started, it is time for an apéritif. I suggest La Première from Rebekah Peppler’s book Apéritif. La Première is, according to Peppler, like taking the Italian aperitivo Americano and dropping it in the middle of France. Bonal replaces the Campari and Italian (sweet) vermouth is replaced by French (blanc, in this case) vermouth. It is:

1.5 oz Bonal

1.5 oz blanc vermouth

2 or 3 dashes of Angostura bitters (I used Orinoco bitters)

soda water

lemon peel

In an ice filled lowball glass, combine the Bonal, vermouth and bitters. Top with a splash of soda water, stir gently, finish with the lemon peel

Cheers!

King of the Trolls

Storm King

Nominating Herman Cain to the Federal Reserve Board is what you get when the president is the King of the Internet Trolls.

At this point, Trump has simply said he plans to nominate the certifiable nut-job former Republican presidential candidate Cain. Nevertheless, it has had the desired effect as a storm of distraction has blown up around the idea, displacing stories of leaks from the Mueller investigation team unhappy with Attorney General Barr’s summary of the report.

Is there anybody who still doubts that Trump is basically trolling America? Dominating news cycles is the only consistent policy objective he has. In addition to the Twitter bots, he can rely on the help of Congressional troll minions in the GOP — from the annoying likes of Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz and Devin Nunes to the truly dangerous impacts of Mitch McConnell — to wear us all down with a flood of nonsense.

Because a good portion of that nonsense is damaging to the US and democracy in general, it gets harder and harder to stay focused on what is important. This may be why MSNBC ratings went down in the immediate wake of Barr’s letter on the Mueller report. Many of us saw it for the BS it was and were too weary to put up with all the pointless talk around it, knowing we’d get to where we are now with confirmation of the trolling.

To deal with Trump’s trolling and frequent tweet storms, sometimes you have to come in out of his Kingdom of Rain. To help dry off, have a Storm King cocktail.

The Storm King is a Rob Roy variant from Damon Boelte (Grand Army, Brooklyn). A good break from the political is also to listen to Damon and @CreativeDrink Sother Teague on Wednesdays for The Speakeasy podcast. The Storm King is:

2 oz Blended Scotch (Black Bottle, which I got from listening to The Speakeasy)

.5 oz Nocino (Nux Alpina)

.25 oz Bénédictine

3 dashes Angostura Bitters

Stir, strain into a chilled cocktail glass, cherry garnish

Cheers!

Working Around the Clock

Midnight Shift

The work to save our democracy and the rule of law in America from Donald Trump and his GOP enablers is not a 9 to 5 job.

The letter summarizing the Mueller investigation from Trump’s hand-picked Attorney General William Barr is a ridiculous whitewash of things we know and an overreach of his authority that is obvious without having seen the report. It is a reminder of all the invasive tentacles we’ll have to remove.

The anti-democratic, authoritarian forces — along with their gang of traitors, grifters and careerists — will not be defeated easily. Although we still need to see his report, the Mueller investigation has become — for this generation and this fight — the “it’ll be over by Christmas” mantra of the World War II era. But this is still the early days.

Clearly, the authoritarians are well dug in and better entrenched by the day. This battle has a long way to go, but for those of us in for the duration, perhaps more people will now realize the task ahead.

There is no Mueller silver bullet coming to save our democracy. The sleeping giant of the American people need to awaken again. It will take all three shifts working against the voter suppression, the Gerrymandering, and the propaganda machine to restore America. Mobilizing the vote needs to be our weapon of choice.

Before you punch the clock, have a Midnight Shift cocktail.

The drink is the creation of Jacob Grier that I got from an old 2012 post from Frederic Yarm. The Midnight Shift is:

1 1/2 oz Novo Fogo Gold Cachaça (I only had silver)
3/4 oz Cynar
3/4 oz Sweet Vermouth
1/4 oz Galliano
2 dash Mole Bitters
1 dash Absinthe

Stir with ice and strain into a rocks glass filled with fresh ice. Garnish with an orange twist and add a straw (although I skipped the straw).

Cheers!