Today is Monday, January 24, 2022. A portentous article appeared in my online edition of RawStory that should be hailed by everyone and that is “Trump’s star is fading as Republicans learn to steal his message and ignore him: columnist,” by Tom Boggioni.

The article references Washington Post political columnist Philip Bump (that’s his name, really!) who has assessed a video clip over the weekend of the ex-dictator saying something like “please clap” to his supporters that was filmed at Mar-a-Largo over the weekend that is indicative of the public rapidly losing interest in the former president as fellow repugnicans adopt his rhetoric and far-right views without the actual baggage of being the twice-impeached president who lost reelection. I haven’t seen that clip and I don’t want to, so I don’t know what it signifies for the rest of us. The only import I can impute from his desperate plea to clap is that no one was actually listening or watching the disgraced and delusional president.

Bump believes the GOP has built a widening lead since Dumpf lost his reelection bid. “Describing the video moment by recalling a similar humiliating clip of former Florida Republican Gov. Jeb Bush in 2016 just before his campaign to be the GOP presidential nominee died a quiet death, Bump wrote that Trump seems to be suffering the same fate, while also noting polls seem to bear that out.” Hooray!

Even with the possibility of Dumpf’s relevance fading as time wears on, it’s still despicable that “Trumpism isn’t going anywhere, clearly,” Bump predicted. The political columnist added, “The question now is the extent to which Trump himself will still get to benefit from it.”

Who heard the latest drivel coming from the mouth of the former House Speaker Newt Gringich (predecessor to Dumpf) who was interviewed on the propaganda station, Fox News, by Maria Bartiromo the other night in which he predicted that if his fellow ugly publicans take over the House in 2022, that members of the House Select Committee investigating the abominable events of January 6 could be arrested? Not only did Gingrich look terrible, his comments should shock anyone into never voting repugnican ever again!!! This is proof of their insanity and the fact that they stand for nothing, nothing, only retribution! They are the party of antiscience and, ultimately, of death! How could anyone take this jerk’s comments seriously.

This is what this screwball said to the Fox host about what will happen to his Democratic colleagues if repugnicans ever win the House in 2022: “I think when you have a Republican Congress, this is all going to come crashing down.” Gingrich absurdly added, “And the wolves are going to find out that they’re now sheep and they’re the ones who are in fact, I think, face a real risk of jail for the kinds of laws they’re breaking.” Here the idiot Bartiromo never asked what laws these Democrats were breaking. Of course, she wouldn’t ask since she’s not a real journalist. This pure trash from a former repugnican Speaker of the House should be totally ignored by the rest of us.

Another story that is mushrooming today is the hornet’s nest of criticism being heaped on Real Time host Bill Maher and one of his guests from his first show last Friday. One of those critics was The View’s Whoopi Goldberg who railed against Bill Maher himself who said that he’s over with COVID-19 who denounced the late-night comedian’s “flippant” attitude and said his remarks were “not funny.” This blowback against the views expressed in Maher’s show on Friday appeared in an online article of the Daily Beast by Justin Baragona.

Weiss herself played into the hands of conservatives and mandate critics when she said that mitigation efforts during the ongoing pandemic would be remembered as a “catastrophic moral crime” in America. Then she said that “I am done with COVID! I’m done, exclaiming also “I think it’s, like, at this point . . .it’s a pandemic of bureaucracy. It’s not real anymore!”

Maher has also criticized the notion of vaccine passports, temperature checks, and mask wearing throughout his show. Here the comic went on, unhinged, with this attack on pandemic safety features: “I don’t want to live in your paranoid world anymore – your masked, paranoid world. You go out, it’s silly now: You have to have a mask, you have to have a card, you have to have a booster. They scan your head, like you’re a cashier and I’m a bunch of bananas. I’m not bananas. You are!”

Goldberg had the perfect retort to Maher and others like him who are “over with the pandemic.” She said, “That’s not really funny to people who have lost their kids. Or to people who lost family members or dear friends to this. Listen: nobody on the planet really wants to go through this. This is not something we’re doing because it’s sexually gratifying. This is what we’re doing to protect our families!”

The View host continued her diatribe against Maher by saying, “This is not – nobody wants this. I don’t want it, and I think he’s forgetting that people are still at risk who cannot get vaccinated, people who can’t. Little kids under the age of five. Or people with health conditions. How dare you be so flippant, man?!”

Liberal cohost Joy Behar concurred with Goldberg’s criticism of the politically incorrect comedian. She even proffered that she doesn’t feel like seeing him anymore.

Another cohost Sara Haines questioned Maher’s remarks on wearing masks by indicating that when it comes to flying and indoor activities, mask wearing may be the norm for many people going forward. She said, “I think some of the things we’ve learned in this pandemic will stay the same. I may never go on a subway anymore without a mask. I may never go indoors to big crowds and feel comfortable without a mask. And that’s up to me to do that.” Take that, Mr. Maher!

I would tend to agree with Maher’s critics here. I think his attitude was too cavalier for my taste. Here is a rich, 66-year-old entertainer who lives by himself in the hills of California who is frustrated with the safety measures that we’ve all had to take for the last two years. As Whoopi said, no one wants to continue doing what we’ve had to do, but we have to because there is a fucking subset of the population that still refuses to get vaccinated and they’ve screwed it up for the rest of us!

These screwballs were on display right here in Washington for an antivaxxer demonstration that drew the likes of Robert Kennedy, Jr. who made disgusting comments about the Holocaust and Anne Frank that would probably have his father turning over in his grave! What is the fuck with these repugnicans and the Holocaust? They love to refer to it over and over again and use the very inappropriate comparisons to their stupid movement of not getting vaccinated. Are they being that patently anti-Semitic here or what? What is the damn connection of their refusing a vaccine that would save their miserable lives to the Holocaust that killed six million innocent lives? They are not so innocent, I would propose, since they are deliberately exposing themselves to vulnerable people who could succumb to the virus. The less said about this unhinged group, the better!

It seems much later, but it’s only about 8:48 here. I had a busy day since we had our new Smart television set delivered and set up in the bedroom. Elliot had a periodontist appointment at 10:30, so I had to stay home and deal with the Best Buy technician who had to come and deliver the set.

Eschewing having breakfast out, I had cereal at home. The estimated time for our delivery was set between 9 and 1, so I was quite elated to get the call from the deliverer around 10:40 to say that he would be around in about 20 minutes. I believe he first buzzed from downstairs around 11.

Earlier, I had dismantled the old Samsung set by myself and brought it into the living room without hitting anything along the way. I took things off the bureau where the new TV would be set up.

I waited for the technician at the door who arrived with this big box and took it into the bedroom. He deftly took out the device from the box and ably put together the pedestal the set would stand on. Then the fun began! In order to set up all of the existing streaming services, I had to provide passwords and the like. I was afraid I wouldn’t have written them down since I’ve only used them once when I set this up years ago with the one television set in the living room. Thank God, what I had written down did work in this case. There was only one snag – and that was setting up our HBO Max account. That took a few iterations, but it was eventually done. The technician showed me some of the features of the new remote and how to sign on to the streaming services. It wasn’t too difficult, but I know I would have to show Elliot the rudiments of this later.

After everything was set up and I registered the television with the company, I decided to take the subway to 14th Street to retrieve my black woolen hat that I had left at Forbidden Broadway on Union Square. I had left it there on Saturday, the day I visited the store in the afternoon. Since I intended to be in Manhattan retrieving my hat, I also decided to try to sell a bag of books that I couldn’t months before. I knew where I could take them this time: to Mercer Street Books, where I had inquired about selling my books that same Saturday as well. I was informed that I could bring books in any time during the week from 1 until 7 or 8.

So after picking up my hat from the register at Forbidden Broadway, I had a bite of lunch at the Hollywood Diner on 6th Avenue and 16th Street. From there, I took the train two stops to Broadway and Lafayette Street and walked to the bookstore.

The portly owner or manager inside looked at my books after examining a customer’s three or four bags of records that he brought in. I had, possibly, 6 to 8 books inside the bag. Guess how many the owner was interested in? If you guessed two, you are correct. He took the horrible J.D. Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, off my hands, and I can’t remember what other book he bought. When I saw that the Vance book was being removed from the bag, I quipped to the owner that I wanted to burn it after learning that the former author announced his ties to Trump in his bid for a senator’s seat in Ohio. I wish he loses, of course.

The offer I received for the two books was a straight $3 or $4.50 in credit. I took the latter offer, so I looked around the neat store hoping to find something approaching that amount. Most of the books, sadly, were $6.50 or more, so I figured I would have to owe something on the deal. I was right: I found a book that was $5.95 and it was a biography of Charles Dickens written by Jane Smiley. I brought it up to the front, gave my extra $1.58, and then exited the store.

Now I walked uptown to the Donut Pub and got myself a cup of java and an old-fashioned donut. I then got the idea to donate my books to a thrift shop, so I called a Salvation Army store on 8th Avenue and 22nd Street. The person who answered said I could donate the books before they close, which was 8 or whenever.

I took the subway once more, this time the R train to 23rd Street and Broadway. I get out of the station and walk toward 8th Avenue. When I arrive at the thrift shop, I realized I was not far from a restaurant that I used to frequent a lot in my “salad days” before COVID-19: the Dish. The restaurant, located across the street, from the Salvation Army site, had its gate down and was irrefutably closed. I wanted to utter a sob over its closing. It had been the site of many a dinner with Elliot and friends when I first came out and explored the West Village on my own. Elliot and I had been inside the Dish in 2009 when we first got word that Michael Jackson had died. That was an indelible moment in my association with this LGBTQ+-friendly eatery. Their menu was extensive and their prices were very reasonable. RIP, Dish!

When I walked inside the thrift shop, I walked right up to the counter and inquired about donating my books. An older gentleman took my bag, and that was that. He gave me a receipt that is of no use to me. Nothing was written on the receipt. I’m happy, though, that I didn’t have to return with the bag of books to Queens.

I walked to the back where books were displayed and looked through the motley selection. I found two books that I purchased, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Moses written by Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker (it’s over 1,000 pages long) and Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City. I think I have the latter, but I’m not sure. These two books put me back a whopping $2.16.

Now it was time to return home after an exhausting day spent in Manhattan and taking more trains than I have taken altogether in a month. Luckily, I could sit all the way home on the E train that I took at 23rd Street.

Tomorrow will be less arduous for me, I’m sure.

Stay safe and be well.