A November 23 headline at ABC News reads: “Joe Biden’s presidential transition allowed to proceed after 16-day standoff.” The 16 days in question, ABC tells us, are the 16 days since Biden “clinched the presidency.”

“Clinched the presidency” is ABC News-speak for “the media decided he won.” In point of fact, the 2020 presidential election isn’t over yet and won’t be for another three weeks.

No, I’m not referring to Donald Trump’s campaign of vexatious litigation, which is going, and will go, nowhere.

On November 3, American voters chose electors. They’re called “electors,” and constitute the “Electoral College,”  because THEY elect the president.

Those electors are set to meet and vote on December 14, after which Joe Biden will, one assumes, become the “president-elect.”  But that hasn’t happened yet, and while the law is somewhat unclear on the point, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that 270 of them could decide between now and then that they prefer Kanye West and Ted Nugent to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

And regardless of what happens on December 14, Donald Trump’s presidency doesn’t end until January 20.

So, what’s the hurry, Joe?

Well, ABC tells us, officially launching the transition process “unlocks more than $7 million for Biden’s team and allows his top advisers to begin outreach to counterparts with every federal agency preparing for the transfer of power.”

Joe Biden’s spent the last 50 years in national politics, serving in the US Senate, running for president three times, and serving for eight years as vice-president.

Yet he’s spent the last three weeks supposedly in a complex process of mulling over just who he plans to appoint to what position, with media breathlessly announcing each momentous leak about his decisions.

If Biden couldn’t even get his act together enough over the course of half a century to have a cabinet picked before the election, why should we believe that a few weeks, $7 million, and some “outreach” will magically prepare him for the job he’s been seeking that whole time?

Cue scary story time: “Biden and his aides had warned that the delay could endanger the lives of Americans amid the coronavirus pandemic.”

Joe Biden raised more than a billion dollars for his presidential campaign, at least some of which was spent generating and hyping his plan for dealing with the pandemic.

But unless he gets $7 million and his staffers get to spend the next eight weeks holding  college dorm style bull sessions with the people they’ll be replacing, we’re all gonna die, see?

Not buying it, Joe.

The only thing Donald Trump and his administration owe to Joe Biden is to get their stuff packed and have it and themselves out of their offices before noon on January 20, 2021. The rest is just theatrics.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

It’s Thanksgiving week in the United States. Since 1942 by act of Congress, and intermittently before that since the arrival of British settlers in North America, Americans have enjoyed a Thursday holiday around the end of November.

This year, the words of President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation ring especially true: “I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to [God] for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged …”

It’s been a rough year, hasn’t it?

As I write this,  the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports nearly 12 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than a quarter of a million deaths in the US.

Operating on Rahm Emanuel’s “never let a crisis go to waste” principle, politicians in cities and state capitals across the country jumped on the pandemic as the go-to excuse for seizing powers never before contemplated in our nation’s law or history, placing millions of Americans under de facto house arrest without charge or trial and, in the process, cratering the national economy.

We’re also going through a bruiser of a presidential election. No, it’s not over. The electors we chose on November 3 won’t meet and cast their votes until December 14.

The loser in the November 3 contest, in which those electors were chosen, continues to engage in public posturing and vexatious litigation for the purpose of creating an alternate history in which he was robbed of an honestly won victory. We can expect Donald Trump and his party to hype that myth for political gain in coming years, just as his Democratic opponents used the “Russiagate” fairy tale to dispute his own victory in 2016.

So, what’s there to be thankful for?

Well, the pandemic is going to end sooner or later. Sooner if the politicians let it, later if they continue playing their power games. We’re probably not going to “beat” COVID-19. The more likely outcome is that its weaker strains will become endemic. But humanity has survived far worse, and will survive this, and may even hold its Andrew Cuomos and Gretchen Whitmers and Gavin Newsoms legally culpable for their crimes.

And while a Joe Biden administration is nothing to celebrate in advance, the end of the Donald Trump administration is certainly worth being thankful for in retrospect.

Also worthy of thanks: More than one in every one hundred Americans who voted in the November presidential election supported Libertarian nominee Jo Jorgensen instead of either of the two creepy, handsy, senile, corrupt authoritarians put up by “major” parties. Yes, a plurality would have been nicer, but it comforts me to know that in any random crowd of 100 Americans I’ll likely find at least one who’s not a freedom-hating death-cultist.

Maybe “better than nothing” isn’t the most inspiring slogan for Thanksgiving, but it’s what we’ve got.  Selah.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“One day after the state reported a record 92 COVID-19-related deaths,” the Wisconsin State Journal‘s Mitchell Schmidt reports, “Gov. Tony Evers announced Wednesday he plans to extend the state’s emergency declaration and accompanying mask mandate through mid-January. … The current mask mandate was issued in July and extended by Evers in September.”

The first two mask mandates didn’t achieve the desired result! Something must be done! Hey, I’ve got an idea! How about another mask mandate?

At first blush this sounds like the old Alcoholics Anonymous definition of insanity: Repeating the same actions and expecting different results.

But there’s more to it than that. Producing a particular result hardly ever explains or justifies a particular government policy very well. Mask mandates aren’t about masks. They’re about mandates.

Evers’s obsession with issuing orders demonstrates Abraham Kaplan’s Law of the Instrument: “Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”

The voters of Wisconsin handed Tony Evers the hammer of political authority in 2018. Naturally, he’s swinging that hammer repeatedly and with vigor. Whether he’s  hitting nails with it, or just smashing the thumbs of Wisconsin’s people and businesses, is another question.

Keep in mind that the question of whether masks “work” is not the same as the question of whether mask mandates “work,” if by “work” we mean “impede the spread of COVID-19.”

Contrary to the claims of certain bureaucrats wearing lab coats, waving clipboards, and holding themselves out as the spokespersons for “science,” the scientific jury remains very much out on the first question. And those bureaucrats change their stories based on political considerations. Take, for example, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Fauci on masks in March: “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet. But it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is.”

Fauci on mask mandates and other government orders in November: “Now is the time to do what you’re told.”

The moral of the story:

If it makes you feel better to wear a mask, wear a mask.

If wearing a mask seems justified by science, or just by common sense, wear a mask.

If a property owner requires masks and you want to use the property, wear a mask.

If the law requires a mask and you’d rather obey it than fight it, wear a mask.

But don’t assume that Tony Evers or Anthony Fauci are neutrally “listening to the science.” They’re not. They’re just enthusiastically swinging the hammers they’ve been given.

CORRECTION: This op-ed incorrectly dated a 60 Minutes interview in which Dr. Anthony Fauci dismissed the wearing of masks in public. The interview was actually in March, not in May. The date has been corrected in the column text.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY