{"id":20247,"date":"2017-03-21T13:25:53","date_gmt":"2017-03-21T20:25:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=20247"},"modified":"2017-03-21T13:25:53","modified_gmt":"2017-03-21T20:25:53","slug":"tuesday-whiff-o-putin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=20247","title":{"rendered":"Tuesday Whiff o’ Putin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"25365537839_1c9f80851e_z\"<\/a>From a blog post<\/a> I wrote on November 15th, one week after the election:<\/p>\n

“To the conspiracy theorists: I never thought I\u2019d join you, but something about this election stinks. Along with GOP redistricting, gerrymandering, and voter suppression, there\u2019s more than a whiff of Russian manipulation of electronic vote results in a few key states. I\u2019m not saying Putin had his thumb on the scale, but I can\u2019t help thinking he might have. I\u2019ll just leave that there for now.”<\/p>\n

Okay, I was\u00a0wrong about\u00a0electronic vote manipulation, but I was right about Putin. Russian involvement has grown from a worrisome whiff to an overpowering stench.<\/p>\n

With confirmation that the FBI is investigating collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians<\/a>\u00a0(and has been since at least last summer), this election is irrevocably\u00a0tainted. Trump will never be a real president. At best, he’s the wrongfully-elected and temporary occupant of the White House … the more temporary the better. At worst, he’s a traitor.<\/p>\n

And the people who knew better but voted for him anyway? I’m still struggling with the fact that people I care about voted for this\u00a0smirking Elmer Gantry, this\u00a0utter fraud.<\/p>\n

Speaking of the FBI and Director James Comey’s testimony, I watched some of it on the news last night and was struck by the similarity between Comey’s smile and and that of the Stan Beeman character on The Americans, also an FBI man. This is not good, because it makes me want to like Comey, a snake in the grass if ever there was one, the man who torpedoed Hillary Clinton a few days before the election (while saying nothing about the ongoing and far more serious investigation of her\u00a0rival).<\/p>\n

\"IMG_2981\"Here’s another selfie for you, taken yesterday at Pima Air & Space Museum<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The backdrop is a postage stamp commemorating the US Air Force’s 50th anniversary in 1997. For that anniversary,\u00a0rather than have several base open houses and air shows around the country, the USAF decided to have one big blowout at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas, where I was then stationed. One of my last active duty assignments was to help organize the event; I retired a couple of weeks after it was over.<\/p>\n

And damn, I turn around and here it is 2017, and the USAF will soon be celebrating its 70th. Another sobering\u00a0thought: the entire lifetime of the Air Force fits inside mine: I’m one year older. We all can rest assured, though, that it’ll still be around after I’m gone.<\/p>\n

Let’s hope\u00a0the current occupant of the White House is not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From a blog post I wrote on November 15th, one week after the election: “To the conspiracy theorists: I never thought I\u2019d join you, but something about this election stinks. Along with GOP redistricting, gerrymandering, and voter suppression, there\u2019s more than a whiff of Russian manipulation of electronic vote results in a few key states. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,14,2,8],"tags":[2265,2244,2024,797],"class_list":["post-20247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-military","category-personal","category-politics","tag-comey","tag-putin","tag-trump","tag-usaf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20247"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20255,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20247\/revisions\/20255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}