Saturday, March 28, 2020

Darkness at the edge of town

As the death toll edges toward 2,000 and nurses demonstrate for protective equipment, the Leader calms the populace by focusing on what matters.  Now his campaign has sent a letter to television stations carrying the dreaded Priorities USA ad, threatening that failure to obey "could put your station's license in jeopardy."

Then Trump put in a call to Alex Rodriguez and Jennifer Lopez to see if they rated his work on the coronavirus perfect or merely superb.  Lopez has no medical background, but Rodriguez knows a great deal about steroids, allegedly.  Check the Latino community off the list.

Russia has announced that it is closing its borders so Trump decided it's a great idea.  At least, he wants to isolate New York, although many of its health care professionals and Wall Street brokers live in neighboring states.  Also, New York City is a port and contains two major airports.  Besides, it already has most of the country's diagnosed cases.  What's Russian for "imbecilic"?

Then it was off to Norfolk, where Trump acted like he was launching the hospital ship Comfort and it was completely his idea to send it to New York.  Because like all Republicans, he's filled with compassion.   So why are the signals so mixed this Lenten season?  Trump's evangelicals will look right at you and tell you abortion is murder, and anyone who would consider it is worse than a Nazi.  They knew that Terri Schiavo was just sleeping.  So why are states like Alabama and Tennessee talking about denying scarce ventilators to people with "severe or profound intellectual disabilities"?  Sounds fairly Third Reich to me.  And now the morality MAGAts are calling on older Americans to take one for the economy and get back to work, since they'll probably die soon anyway.  All life is sacred, but apparently some lives are more sacred than others.  And the anti-choice mob are using the pandemic to push the anti-abortion/anti-trans agenda.  What's Russian for "shameless"?

Most of the governors, even Republicans, are out of patience with federal incompetence and inertia, but Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan has been singled out for Hillary-level abuse ("doesn't have a clue," "don't call the woman in Michigan").   Like Cuomo, she should have bought ventilators years ago, even though this is her first year in office.  Why does everyone keep making demands?  It's Saturday. Golf day!  General Motors promises a thousand ventilators in a week.  That's about two percent of what we will need in a week.  "Nobody's done anything like we've been able to do.  Everything I took over was a mess.  It was a broken country."

It sounds more like what we used to call "a broken record."

I haven't found seventeen minutes to listen to "Murder Most Foul," so I can't tell if this is exactly the right moment for Bob Dylan to take up the first Kennedy assassination.  But here is a thrilling talk by Andrew Cuomo to (I think) the New York National Guard.  Some weary countrymen are comparing it to Henry V's Crispin speech.  His dad was pretty good with words, too.




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