I’m sorta kinda grateful for General Michael T. Flynn, Comrade Trump’s current National Security Advisor. I mean, yeah, the guy is unfit for the position — but so is just about everybody in Trump’s Cabinet of Nazgûl. But Flynn is doing something that really, truly needs to be done.

He’s resurrecting the Russians Helped Elect Trump story. Which is basically the Trump is an Illegitimate President story. And that’s a story that desperately needs more attention.

How is Flynn doing this? He’s using the traditional all-purpose Comrade Trump approach: incompetence bolstered by lying. There was a time when Gen. Flynn was a big hat in the intelligence community. He spent his entire Army career in intelligence, he’s held dozens of high-ranking intelligence positions, ending up as the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Those are some serious intelligence chops.

Then he got himself fired for being an aggressive conspiracy crank. Well, not actually fired. He was encouraged to retire. His own aides coined the term ‘Flynn Facts’ to describe the crazy shit Flynn believed and would talk about. Also, nobody liked working with him, not just because of the crazy shit but because he was also apparently an annoying dick. Plus they thought Flynn was a tad sloppy with keeping government secrets actually secret. So they invited him to pack his bags and see what it was like to be a civilian again.

So Flynn bought a ticket on the Trump train. It didn’t hurt that Flynn, like Comrade Trump, had a crush on our boy Vlad Putin. That brought Flynn an invitation to visit Moscow and sit at the same table with Putie during an anniversary celebration of RT (which is basically the Russian government’s pet news agency). Shortly thereafter, Flynn began to appear regularly on RT as an analyst.

So here’s a guy who’s spent his entire career dealing with military secrets, who’d become a conspiracy nut, who was known to be lax with secret, now working for a Russian news agency at the same time he’s working for Trump’s presidential campaign at the same time Russia is interfering with the US election process in order to help Trump get elected.

That’s bad. But it gets worse. After it became public knowledge that the Russians helped elect Trump, President Obama booted a whole bunch of Russians out of the country. Every single time there’s been an international dispute resulting in Russian embassy staff getting the boot, Russia has retaliated in kind. Yet in this case, Putie decided to do exactly nothing. Étonnant! Incroyable! 

It was so astonishing and incredible that the U.S. intelligence community got curious, and began doing all that shadowy techno-shit that spy agencies enjoy so much. And hey, they discovered that after the expulsion of Russian diplomats, Gen. Flynn had made contact with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S.

So these folks asked Flynn the obvious question: “Dude, did you and Sergey chat about those sanctions?” To which Flynn replied, “What? Me? No, c’mon.” The intelligence community said, “No, seriously dude — did y’all talk sanctions?” And Flynn was all “What did I just say?” And then big hats in the Republican party also found it necessary to ask those questions. “Dude, we need to know if you chatted about this stuff with the Russkis,” to which Flynn replied “No fucking way would I do that.” The GOP big hats (including Vice President Pence and Reince Preibus) felt the need to ask one more time. “Seriously? You didn’t discuss this at all? We’re asking on account of we have to go on all the Sunday talk shows and we don’t want to be seen as lying.” Flynn reassured them. “Would I lie to you?”

Gen. Michael Flynn, it turns out, would totally lie to them. Of course, he would. And he did. This is the Trump administration, after all. These weasels would lie about how many slices of pepperoni are on the pizza. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post report that multiple sources — multiple sources, you guys — that Flynn is lying his three-star ass off. He did, in fact, discuss the U.S. sanctions.

Not just that, but he apparently told the ambassador that once Comrade Trump was in office, the sanctions would disappear. Think about that. Russia helps Trump get elected by fucking with the election process, the president punishes Russia for fucking with the election process, Comrade Trump’s advisor — the guy is going to become the National Security Advisor — tells Russia the punishment will be lifted. How fucked up is that?

All this comes at the same time we’re learning more information about that Trump ‘dossier’ put together by a former MI6 operative. You know — the dossier with the story of the big bladder Russian hookers. That one. We’re hearing the U.S. intelligence community is pretty much confirming ‘parts’ of that dossier. Not the pissing business, don’t get your hopes up. No, they’re confirming the bits that suggest the Trump campaign colluded with Russian intelligence services to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Got it? After a lifetime of handling U.S. spy stuff, Flynn is pushed into early retirement. He becomes Trump’s baggage handler. He gets a gig with the Russian government’s pet news agency. Russia begins colluding with the Trump campaign to kick Clinton to the curb. Trump gets elected. President Obama punishes Russia. Flynn talks to the Russian ambassador and agrees to remove the punishment after Trump is inaugurated. Flynn lies about doing that. It really leads to one inescapable conclusion.

This motherfucker must go.

Oh, and there’s this: as of right now, Comrade Trump hasn’t addressed the issue of Flynn’s lies. When he does, I suspect Trump will lie about it.

Update: Gen. Flynn has resigned. In his resignation letter he states he “inadvertently” briefed VP Pence with “incomplete information”.

There are still a couple of issues that need to be considered and addressed. First, will Flynn be prosecuted under the Logan Act, which makes it illegal for a citizen to engage in “any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States.”

Second, what did Comrade Trump know about this, and when did he know it?

Some folks are troubled by the pink pussy hats. Some are troubled, others are amused, or curious, or confused. A few are offended — not by the hats themselves, but by the pussy reference.

There’s no point in discussing the pussy hats unless we first talk about the Women’s March. First, it wasn’t a protest against Comrade Trump. It’s true that Trump was the spark that lit this fire and there were plenty of anti-Trump signs, to be sure. But while the anger at Trump is very real and cuts very deep, the Women’s March was not specifically or directly a protest against him. Had it been an actual protest against Trump, there would have been such a storm of righteous rage that the very earth itself would have been scorched. But, for the third time, this wasn’t a protest against Trump.

It was a rally and a march for women.

Now, the pussy hats. No, wait — we’ll come back to those in a bit. Let’s take a look at the people who attended the Women’s March. Or, rather, the Women’s Marches — because there were marches all across the United States. In fact, there were satellite marches on all seven continents. This was a planet-wide event. Aside from sharing the name Women’s March, as far as I can tell, the various marches all also shared a similar eclectic composition.

I can only speak directly of the march I participated in. There were smiling babies, and young parents trying to keep toddlers out of the mud, and grandmothers wearing pussy hats, and people singing, and a small gathering of cheerful grey-haired Wiccans wearing cartoonish witch’s hats, and a guy wearing a faded MOPAR/NASCAR jean jacket over a Stand Up for Standing Rock t-shirt, and a young woman in a wheelchair with a rainbow blanket around her legs, and people of every age and faith and color and a spectrum of gender identities and orientations so broad it required a significant chunk of the alphabet to enumerate them — and all of us talking and laughing and shouting and hugging each other and chanting. You’d probably see many of those same people at an anti-Trump protest; but they wouldn’t be smiling and laughing.

Perhaps the most inspiring thing about the rally — about ALL the rallies and marches across the globe — was the way women took the insults made against them by Comrade Trump (and lawdy, there were a LOT of insults against women) and transformed them into positive symbols of resistance. It’s a sort of socio-political aikido, redirecting the momentum of an act of aggression and using it against the aggressor. He calls Hillary Clinton a nasty woman, they defuse the insult by embracing the title. It’s brilliant, really. It’s a gentle turning aside of an attack meant to wound, and turning it aside without excusing or forgetting or forgiving the attack or the attacker.

And that brings us to the hats. Some folks questioned the use of pink pussy hats. Most of the criticism I’ve seen seems to be grounded in the notion that the hats themselves are supposed to be representative of actual vaginas. Since not all vaginas are pink and since there are a lot of folks who are lacking any sort of vagina at all, the argument is that the pussy hat is an unsuitable symbol. I get that. As a person without a vagina, I get it.

But I disagree.

The pink pussy hat, as I understand it, is a response to Comrade Trump’s cavalier and offensive discussion about grabbing women “by the pussy.” The hats weren’t meant to be taken literally; they aren’t symbolically appropriate for every individual who participated in the marches. But the hats ARE a simple, easily accessible, highly visible, socially elastic device that indicate solidarity for the entire constellation of rights and causes that joined the orbit around the Women’s March on Washington.

Much of the beauty and power of the Women’s March is that it was inclusive. It wasn’t the ‘Stop the Pipeline’ march or the Reproductive Rights march or the Black Lives Matter march or the Save the ACA march or the Immigrant Support march or the ACLU march or the LGBTQIAPK march or the Religious Freedom march or the Climate Change is Real march — but all of those causes were made welcome and encouraged to join.

In my opinion, that makes the pink pussy hat perfectly appropriate. The same arrogance and contempt and ignorance and hostility that allows Comrade Trump to brag about grabbing women by the pussy is also directed at gay folks and scientists and Muslims and water protectors and union members. Trump (and his Cabinet of Nazgûl) assumes he has the right to grab everybody by the pussy, whether they have one or not.

But, again, this wasn’t a protest against Trump. It was an affirmative stand for the dignity of all people. It was an announcement made by a few million people around the world that we’re all going to support each other.

The pussy hat is optional.