QUID HAS HEARD that the question Enquirering minds all want to know of Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner is, how on Earth are you going to defeat Hillary if you can’t keep Donald Trump off the GOP ticket? Seems that after Ted Cruz and John Kasich ditched their presidential campaigns this week, that question of Gardner and thousands of other Republicans was answered by the hemming and hawing and a background symphony written by The Crickets. Quid doesn’t want to reveal too many personal details, but your faithful hack must confess that even though the polls don’t look good for whom fellow Republicans have called a “pathological liar …soulless, utterly unprincipled liberal narcissist bent on destruction…” Quid is nervous because with a growing list of qualities Trumpers hate, Quid — like so many millions of Americans — surely will fit nicely into at least one.
AND QUID HAS HEARD this all before. Seems that the hand-wringing has started among city and state types about whether Colorado, and namely Aurora, could lose yet another military installation as the newest Base Realignment And Closure committee comes back from the dead. The dreaded BRAC has successfully attacked and killed two of three of Aurora’s once famously obviously useless military operations. Lowry Air Force Base, which had no runway, was targeted by BRAC in 1991. The same BRAC system shut down the Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in 1995, which had no soldiers. Just before the feds decided to nuke Fitz, state and local hoo-haws were feeling pretty cocky about keeping it alive because the feds had already cruelly shut down Lowry and couldn’t be so nasty as to double down on Aurora’s misery. And more important, thanks to folks like ex-Congresswoman Pat Schroeder, who, yeah, used to represent part of Aurora, the feds had been dumping millions into plans to re-hab the ailing Fitz into a mega-hospital-opolis. Given all that, there’s no way the BRAC would shut down Fitz, folks figured. Aurora types quit believing that when they did shut it down. So now they are whistling loudly as the military graveyard maker begins poking around the country, looking for economies to crush by shutting down bases. All the old arguments are brand new again. BRAC wouldn’t dare kill Aurora’s military mission, and besides, the Pentagon has spent hundreds of millions of dollars for big-time base improvements during the past several years. Quid says, hope for the best, but if the worst happens, yours truly lays claim to the plucky stuffed prairie dog with a telescope glued to his paw that’s long been the mascot for the spooks running the eye in the sky business inside Aurora’s biggest and most famous balls.
AND THAT’S ALL THE NEWS THAT FITS.