By Bob Gaydos

Jeanine Pirro … headed for the door?

   What in the world happened to Jeanine Pirro? Did she sober up? Come out of a blackout and realize she was pimping for Donald Trump and didn’t want the job?

    Odds are — literally — that she won’t be U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia much longer. At least those are the betting odds on Kalshi, a prediction platform which is the way many people apparently now react to the news of the day. Not by expressing approval or disapproval of the news, but by betting on the outcome. Orwell was right.

     How you feel about the news really doesn’t matter, apparently, if you can make a few bucks guessing on which side of the bed Trump slept on last night. And the odds in Pirro’s case are that he didn’t sleep at all when she contradicted him on his Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool story.

     In one of the more surprising challenges to Trump’s  view of everything going on around him, Pirro dismissed the case against a former U.S. Olympic athlete who had been charged with carving up the bottom of the no longer reflecting pool with a knife, supposedly causing significant damage. That’s what the court papers filed by Pirro originally said.

    But Pirro last week abruptly dismissed the felony vandalism charges against David Hearn, 67, saying that the damage to the newly renovated pool was caused by the contractor, a friend of Trump’s, who got the renovation contract with no bid. A $14.7 million restoration project to be specific.

    Pirro conceded in court that the damage had actually been done by a rush job by a contractor trying to get the work done for the Fourth of July celebration, not by vandals.

    In response to Pirro’s dropping the charges, Trump posted, “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro. I don’t know what she was thinking?” (Yes, he put a question mark at the end of that declarative statement.)

   The reflecting pool, of course, has been one of Trump’s pet projects in his campaign to destroy virtually everything worth seeing in Washington, D.C. Also, of course, Trump does not react well to being contradicted in public, especially by someone who he has appointed to a job, and especially if she is a woman.

    That’s why the odds on Kalshi of Pirro announcing her resignation or being fired before Sept. 1 were at 97 percent Monday morning. The odds spiked 21 percentage points over 24 hours. There was a 94 percent chance, the site said, that Pirro is gone before January 1, 2027.

    None of this is surprising to me. What I am literally stunned about is that Pirro did it. That she dared to contradict Trump publicly in such a high-profile case. She tried to blame the Interior Department for her change of mind, saying they gave her incomplete information when she first filed the charges against Hearn. They stuck to the Trump story (and probably kept their jobs) and said she got all the information available.

     Maybe Pirro actually read all the news stories saying experts doubted that vandals could’ve done the extensive damage to the pool, but that the contractor rushed the job and used the wrong kind of paint. Maybe she knew from experience that the judge wasn’t going to buy her vandalism argument. Or maybe she didn’t like the bar scene in Washington anymore or she just found it too difficult to keep lying so publicly on a daily basis.

    Or, maybe she’s been offered a seat along with Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, in a cabal of former Trumpers sensing an opportunity to get out before the you-know-what hits the you-know-what. The onetime loyal MAGA trio is trying to form a populist third-party, breaking away from Trump, accusing him of “betraying“ his base.

    Where have I heard that before?

     I still like my coming out of a blackout theory.

By Bob Gaydos

Rep. Liz Cheney … says she doesn’t recognize today’s Republicans.

  While sitting around waiting for the Super Bowl to begin, I stumbled upon this interesting tidbit of news: Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney said in a TV interview, “We are the party of Lincoln, we are not the party of QAnon or anti-Semitism or Holocaust-deniers, or white supremacy or conspiracy theories. That’s not who we are.”

     To which I immediately said to myself, “Umm, yes you are. In fact, that’s precisely who you are.”

     Then I wondered how someone with such an impeccable Republican pedigree could have become so out of touch with her colleagues. After all, her father, Dick, was also a congressman and served key roles in Republican administrations. As George W  Bush‘s vice president, he was a key member of the cast that lied the United States into a war with Iraq. Remember? And, staunch Second Amendment man that he is, her dad also managed to shoot a hunting partner accidentally. Plus they’re from Wyoming. Republican through and through, for Pete’s sake.

       So what has Ms. Cheney been doing the last four, eight, 12, 16, 20 years that she did not notice the GOP morph into the QOP? Methinks, what the rest of her Republican colleagues have been doing — closing their eyes, covering their ears, holding their noses and crossing their fingers as all those people she says aren’t Republicans joined the party in such numbers that, when lumped into one, united, bigoted bunch, they represent a major voting bloc. In fact, a career-threatening voting bloc for those who dare to cross it, as Republican office-holders, including Cheney, are now finding out. Did she really think Tea Party members held traditional, conservative Republican views?

         Desperate to achieve and maintain power, if not necessarily govern, the Republican Party needs numbers because there are more Democrats in this country than Republicans. That should be a message. But instead of trying to adapt their party to represent the changing face of America, Republican leaders took what they must have thought was the easier way out — welcome all the fringy groups who can’t stand those libtard, multi-cultural Democrats.

         Welcome heck, have them run for office as Republicans. Put big money behind them. Re-draw election districts to help them get elected.Tell them to criticize budget deficits and promise tax cuts. And to say that Democrats will take away your guns. Say that a lot. Also, God bless America.

         It kind of worked, but America kept changing. And even elected a black president. All those people Cheney talked about in her TV interview had no one to speak for them politically. So the GOP reconfigured its big tent and said, “Come on in. Turn on Fox News and turn off the rest of the world. Vote for Republicans and we will save you from those  book-reading, God-hating, science-believing, socialist  Democrats. And we’ll let you keep your guns.”

         Cheney is one of the few Republicans in Congress who had the guts to speak the truth, finally, about Trump — that he incited the insurrection at the Capitol and deserved to be impeached. She backed up her words with her vote, being one of only 10 House Republicans to do so. For that, Republicans in her home state voted to censure her and called for her to resign.

        Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, an example of what you get when you let anyone into your house, asked her to tone down the truth-telling. She refused, but still managed to hold onto her third-in-line leadership post among the House GOP. McCarthy also had a talk with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, the Trump-loving Quanon conspiracy queen, who has denied the Parkland school shooting, supported executing Democrats, defended the Capitol attack and said California wildfires were started by a Jewish family with lasers. (Hey! Who let her in?)

       She “apologized” for a whole raft of hateful nonsense she’s been spewing, said she was allowed to believe lies spread by the media and was allowed by McCarthy to keep her committee assignments, until Democrats, who control this House, took them away. (Cheney said McCarthy should have taken Greene’s committee posts from her.)

        Yes, this is definitely where the Republican Party is today: Stuck between members who still believe in a former president who was super-cozy with Russia, robbed Americans blind, lied constantly and tried to stay in power with a coup and a bunch of self-seeking, gutless members of Congress who knew what was going on, but let it happen. See anything Lincolnesque in there?

        When Cheney says of Republicans, it’s “not who we are,” she is really pleading for others to finally show some courage and admit they have been complicit, either through greed or cowardice, in allowing Trump’s transformation of the party into an organization that seeks power above all else and will do whatever is necessary to obtain and keep it.

         To do that, he only needed to tap in to the fears, ignorance and biases of all those anti-Semites, Holocaust-deniers, white supremacists and conspiracy theorists who somehow snuck into the GOP when Cheney and the rest apparently weren’t looking.

rjgaydos@gmail.com

Bob Gaydos is writer-in-residence at zestoforange.com