Schadenfreude Saturday

Tim Walters is a co-founder of Reopen Maryland who led demonstrators to Annapolis last April to demand an end to coronavirus tyranny.  Yesterday he bragged to the Capital Gazette that he has been coughing since March and was finally diagnosed with the Trump flu.  "I got it because Satan deemed to get it.  Because he wanted to quiet my work."  That's why he won't take part in contact tracing, because the maybe hundreds of people he encountered in four months are either fine or not fine, depending on Satan.

Now we know why Trump accused Obama of "treason" this week.  The word was freshly implanted in his woeful brain by a report in the New York Times that Russia is paying cash bounties for coalition forces killed in Afghanistan.  If this doesn't get Putin invited to the next G8 cookout, I can't imagine what will.  "Getting along with Russia is a great thing," Trump is actually supposed to have said.

It seems only yesterday that Mike Pence was assuring astonished reporters that he and his "task force" have a good handle on this pandemic thing.  But as Florida breaks its own record for new cases day after day, Pence is "postponing" a bus tour of the Sunshine State.  Since he's not allowed to wear a mask or socially distance on pain of Trump-tantrum, it's probably best.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies reports that most terrorist violence in the US comes from the far right, and has for the last twenty-five years.  The Justice Department continues to keep a close watch on Black Lives Matter and "Antifa," because that might change any time now.

There are more protests against racism in Washington, so Trump promised to stay close to his couch desk "to make sure law and order is enforced."  But it was sunny, so he decided to enforce from his golf club in Virginia.  Close enough.

For news that doesn't make you want to turn in your Human Race membership card we turn to Aceh, Indonesia.  People defied the covid lockdown to save a hundred Rohingya refugees fleeing persecution in Myanmar in a small boat.  Authorities in that part of the world have used covid as an excuse to turn away refugees and even put them back to sea in the boats they came in.  People who stepped up for Aung San Suu Kyi during her long confinement may want to ask The Lady why she isn't stepping up for these Muslims, but as Anatole France put it, "Dreyfus n'est pas un dreyfusard."

Trump knows nothing of history, but he's already finding a place in it.  Noam Chomsky told Jacobin magazine, "Trump is the worst criminal in history, undeniably.  There has never been a figure in political history who was so passionately dedicated to destroying the projects for organized human life on earth in the near future.  That is not an exaggeration."  Well, maybe just a small one.  Trump acts out of pure self-gratification and stupidity; he has no theoretical program like Stalin or Mao.  Does that make him worse?  I think I'll go with Charlie Pierce, who calls him "a world-historical barbarian motherfucker...His response to the worst public health crisis in a century is of a different order of magnitude.  Historians of the future are going to rank him in this regard with Genghis Khan in Persia, King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo, Stalin's engineered famines in Ukraine, and Charles Trevelyan's supervision of the Great Famine in Ireland.  Deliberately and for his own tawdry political purposes, he has failed utterly in his duty and north of 100,000 Americans already have died."

What a time to be alive.