Day 100

It has been only a hundred days since Li Wenliang tried to tell the world about a new and terrible plague.  Nearly 1,400,000 cases that we know about, over 79,000 dead.  The emotional toll is beyond imagining.  The economic cost cannot now be calculated.  No one who survives will be unchanged.

I don't know how to write about it except to list the day's outrages and delusions.  If you Google "Brexit bus lie" you get dozens of references to the 350 million pounds they claimed would reach the National Health Service every week if not for those greedy Europeans.  As he completes a second day in intensive care (no doubt in a well-funded private hospital), Boris Johnson will have had plenty of time to think about it.  He went to Oxford, he probably knows what "irony" means.  In a little more than a week, the government built a hospital called NHS Nightingale.  I'd love to know how many Polish and Serbian builders worked on it.

The other coiffed fool is hard at work firing people.  Last week it was the intelligence inspector general, today it was Glenn Fine who is no longer needed on the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee.  Next up, most likely Christi Grimm, Health and Human Services inspector general.  She dared to criticize his supply and testing achievements, which are of course perfect.  These independent-minded bureaucrats will be missed, unlike Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly.  His insult to Captain Brett Crozier played badly on the Theodore Roosevelt and worse back here, so he "resigned" lest blame attach to Trump (where it certainly belongs).  

You could say that Crozier and Modly sacrificed their careers over something they considered more important.  I'll be curious to see if Trump's economist Peter Navarro does the same.  Two memos have now "surfaced" (i.e., been leaked) in which he warned of half a million lives and six trillion dollars being lost to coronavirus.  Somebody read them to Trump because he happily accepted the recommendation to stop travel from China, while continuing to insist that the virus would disappear "like a miracle."   More recently, Navarro covered his ass by promoting hydroxychloroquine, the lupus and malaria drug Trump has pronounced a "game changer" and in which he may have a modest financial stake, on the advice of experts like Laura Ingraham and the ShamWow guy.  Anthony Fauci, an actual epidemiologist, keeps using big words like "anecdotal" and warning of drastic side effects, but he's obviously Deep State.   Larry Kudlow, the other genius behind the Trump economy, can't wait to get everybody out of the ICU and back to work.  "THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL!" tweeted the Leader.  

It's hardly surprising that Martin Shkreli, the "pharma bro" who can smell the money from his cell, is crazy to get back in business.  Give him a three-month "furlough" and he'll kick COVID's ass, he promises.  For the record, federal prisoner 87850-053 is a hedge-fund manager and not a pharmacologist.  But then Theodore Kaczynski is a math genius -- why not make use of his talents, too? 

And always, a leader keeps his eye on the ball.  "A lot of people are tired of looking at games that are five years old," he groused to yesterday's reluctant audience.  That's right, ESPN has been reduced to showing used football.  Meanwhile, Major League Baseball has a cockamamie scheme to sequester all the teams in Arizona and have them play in ten spring training parks with no spectators.  I've watched a few horse races before empty stands and there is no more depressing reminder that people are dying everywhere.  It's better than reruns of the Axe Throwing League, but not much.  I think the owners and the players can just suck it up this year, as the Olympic athletes are doing.  Their thing only comes around every four years.   

This would have been my father's 98th birthday.  You didn't miss much, Dad, but I miss you.