I don't know what I'm doing up at this hour either but since I am, I might as well write about some topics…like the seeming mess that Rudy Giuliani made last night on Hannity when he began rearranging Donald Trump's legal affairs. I'm thinking his new spins and "facts" will make more sense once we know what Michael Cohen is telling prosecutors or what evidence came out of that raid of his office.
Has Cohen completely flipped? Is he now unloading dirt on Trump to Mueller and Giuliani's trying to get out ahead of some of the revelations? I'm still not sure what the story is now. Trump didn't know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an affair that never happened but he did repay the money to Cohen but he didn't know what it was for? And he fired James Comey because he felt the American public needed to know their president — the one who won't release his tax forms like every other president or tolerate his private businesses being investigated — isn't a crook?
The moment that really made me blink came when Hannity brought up Cohen's assertion that in paying the hush bucks, he acted without Trump's knowledge and Giuliani said that the president "didn't know about the specifics of it, as far as I know." Does anyone think Rudy went on TV and went out of his way to reveal the reimbursement without knowing what his client, Donald J. Trump, did or didn't know about $130,000 of that client's money going to pay off a porn star? "As far as I know" is a phrase you toss into a sentence when you know there's a good chance that statement will be proven false.
Ah, we live in interesting times. And it's going to be like this every single remaining day that Donald Trump is in office and for many years after.
Various organizations are now recalling and undoing honors for Bill Cosby. Yale pulled his honorary degree. The TV Academy has removed him from its Hall of Fame. Any day now, Jell-O will be denying that he ever sold Pudding Pops for them and NBC will be retaping The Cosby Show with Christopher Plummer in the lead.
A small part of me (about the size of my spleen) feels sorry for the guy. I can't help but feel some sadness for anyone who has screwed up their life that badly, especially a guy who was capable of so much good. How difficult would it have been to think, "As much as I'd like to drug this woman and rape her, I should just be content with all the women who want to have sex with me because I'm rich and famous"?
I keep thinking of the stories one hears occasionally about really, really rich people who go into a store and shoplift candy bars or other small items just because it thrills them to know they can get away with that. It's not enough to have fabulous wealth. They also have to feel that the laws that govern the average person don't apply to them.
I'm sticking with my belief that we'll never really know what motivated Bill Cosby to do what he did and I'm not assuming he even understands it. But it had to be something like that…some feeling that he had to prove to himself that he was powerful enough that he could do the most repulsive, illegal things he had even the tiniest urge to do. If you think you were surprised that he was a rapist, imagine how shocked he must still be that he wasn't allowed to be one without penalty
I'm lately getting tired of folks who think if I ask, "How have you been lately?" or even "How are you?" what I'm really saying is "Tell me every single thing in your life that hasn't gone the way you wanted it to for the last five or ten years." Even if I really like you, there's a limit to how much I want to hear every negative you can think of.
And if you want my input on some matter…well, that's fine but remember who you're asking. Like most folks, I have a fair amount of expertise in a few areas and darn near none in most areas. My advice on how to write a comic book script might conceivably have some merit if only because I've done a lot of that. Hearing how I do it might lead you to figuring out how you can do it, even if the path involves doing the exact opposite. But the other day someone asked me about how to swap out the carburetor in a late-model Honda for a new one, which is like asking a poodle how to file for a tax extension.
A writer I often quote, Alan Jay Lerner, once said, "There are people in the world who are brilliant at playing the saxophone and nothing else," meaning that skill in one area does not denote skill in any other. And I can't even play the saxophone. Or explain why I'm up at this hour.