Trump and Johnson and politics

I started writing this last night (Sunday) and gave up. One reason was that Missy the cat came and joined me on the keyboard and it's quite difficult to keep your ideas together with a cat walking across your writing.

She's a good looking cat, isn't she?

She is back again. Well, she's a cat and cats go where they want, so she's now on my keyboard.  But I've maybe got my ideas more in line than they were last night. A cat in the UK got Covid-19. Social media was at once full of panic: we're all going to die because of cats carrying the virus. Of course, that's not what this is about: the poor cat is the only one of 401 cats in the sample that had Covid-19 and this poor cat got it from his or her owners.

As tv shows say, no cats were harmed in the making of this show, so the cat and her humans are alive and well.

Another day, another scare story.

The afternoon's scary story was that Dr Fauci, the US's top medic/scientist, has been accused of inventing the Covid-19 virus and selling it to China. I'm torn between asking Why did he do that? And how much did the Chinese pay him? But it seems some weirdos in the USA (Sinclair Media) are broadcasting this news round the clock.

If I want anything for my fellow humans it's the ability to look at newspaper headlines and social media announcements and say: Bollocks.

And speaking of bollocks, I've been reading Mary L Trump's book 'Too Much and Never Enough'. I mostly skimmed the first 50 pages of psychobabble but the rest was interesting.

The thing about Donald is: by himself. he's not that dangerous. He's not clever. He has no ideas. There's no ideology at work here. He's spent his whole life being propped up by his father, his father's lawyers, bankers who have got too far in to the Trump lies to pull the plug on him despite his bankruptcies and publishers with a lot of money invested in his success.

The danger with Trump is the clever people around him who see him as an opportunity to make money and finance their own rise to power. When Trump's power as president wanes, those people will still be around. They'll crush him underfoot and move on to the next president. None of that would bother me too much except that, while I know Trump has no agenda (except himself), I don't really know what these guys' agenda is.

Watching "officers' on the streets of Portland, Oregon and other US cities, with no uniforms and no badges, arresting journalists and throwing demonstrators into unmarked cars, I'd be hard-pressed to explain what anyone's agenda is. I just hope Amnesty International is cataloguing all this.

To suggest Boris Johnson is Trump's "mini me" is just laughable.

Boris Johnson doesn't have an idea in his head. Well, actually that's not true: he has loads of ideas in his head and - as we say in Glasgow - they're aw mince. He came to Scotland last week. We're told this should not look like the old-fashioned state visit from Westminster that we're used to. Myself I can only remember Margaret Thatcher coming to the Assembly of the Church of Scotland and comparing herself to Christ, which was a step too far for a few Presbyterians.

The rest of us adhere to the saying: We'll only have independence when the last Church of Scotland Minister is strangled with the last copy of the Sunday Post.

Johnson is going to have to go a bit further if he wants to persuade the Scots to follow him out of the EU. He talked about the bridge to Ireland again, though we're so excited about that that nobody's mentioned it for months.

It would be great if UK politicians could grow up. Maybe stop waving crabs around. I don't see Emmanuel Macron or Angela Merkel doing that.