Boz Scaggs, Café du Monde, and the "if" Factor

“…Nothing you can't handle, nothing you ain't got. Put your money on the table and drive it off the lot. Turn on that old lovelight and turn a maybe to a yes. Same old schoolboy game got you into this mess. Hey son, you better get back to town. Face the sad old truth, the dirty lowdown…” Boz Scaggs’ Lowdown. There’s an adage in homicide investigation that says when you start stringing the word “if” together, and you’ve used “if” twice in the same sentence, be careful. When “if” shows up three times, go outside, smoke a cigarette, and rethink everything. Every morning over Café du Monde coffee, I read national and international news from a variety of sources, both conservative and liberal. I’ve been a current affairs junkie since I was kid, and my latest task is figuring out what goes through Donald Trump’s head (if anything). Is he cagey, a player right out of Lowdown, playing everybody to get what he wants, or a two-bit kamikaze pilot, banging and crashing into everything, and hoping for the best? Trump recently promised a group of oil company and energy “Fat Cats” that if they donated one billion dollars to his re-election campaign that he’s cancel a bunch of Biden’s “Green” initiatives on oil leases and electric cars. My first thought was, is that legal, but in an article in Politico, Bradley Smith, chair of the Institute for Free Speech, and former chair of the Federal Election Commission, said, “…isn’t that what campaigning is?” Certainly, if one is an office holder and one promises a specific federal action like, ‘you’ll get this permit,’ or something like that, you have an issue. But to make a sort of general pledge, ‘you’ve got to give me lots of money because I’m really going to help out your business,’ “it’s fine,” he said. Smith added: “It’s a minor difference of degree from Joe Biden saying, “hey, young people, vote for me, I’m going to forgive your student loans…”  But, using the “if” strategy, Trump still has problems. If he can cobble together enough “swing” voters to go with his MAGA base and get elected, he just has his appointed Attorney General dismiss all his criminal cases or pardons himself. If he does, he’ll get impeached (if the Democrats hold the House and Senate). If Biden wins, he’s a sitting duck and he’s headed to trial-those pesky “ifs” just keep coming up. As for me, I’m outside smoking a cigarette and rethinking everything. If I can’t figure out the Trump puzzle, I’ve got a plan, right out of the Trump playbook, I’m just going to blame it on Café du Monde and Boz Scaggs….