Donald Trump is trying to build a campaign message around his image as a wartime president. But as a commander in chief, Cadet Bone Spurs is bringing up the rear.
“I would leave it up to the governors,” Trump said Friday, when asked about his government’s sclerotic, chaotic, response. Trouble is, when you leave it to the governors, you have scenes like we did in Florida with the open beaches — not to mention a swath in the middle of the country that, as of Friday night, still had not ordered residents to stay home.
The Los Angeles Times reported that two months before the virus spread through Wuhan, the Trump administration halted a $200 million early-warning program to train scientists in China and elsewhere to deal with a pandemic. The name of the program? “PREDICT.” It wasn’t just them. The CDC predicted. The WHO predicted. The intelligence community predicted and even gave Trump daily coloring book briefings on it. (Which he didn’t read.) Hell even Netflix predicted it. If he’d only watched an episode or two of Pandemic, he’d have been blown away by how much he knew.
It is said that nature abhors a vacuum, but this virus loves it.
Question: What qualifies this little cold-eyed blue dim bulb weenie to stand in front of a desperate nation and say anything, let alone “No.”
4/7
People have suggested it’s unpatriotic to criticize the president in a time of crisis. So to anybody who asks what or who gives me the right to shoot my mouth off, I give you Theodore Rough Rider Roosevelt. This current president, the roughest ride he ever had was when he sat on a pebble in his golf cart.
“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is …warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
I go to bed tonight, symptomatic for one full week. A friend wrote and sent this article about cytokine storms. It scares the shit out of me. This is where sufferers of one week of mild symptoms (like me) wake up in respiratory arrest. This starts, week 2, the dividing line between pulling the covers over my head and sleeping comfortably for the rest of the day versus a trip to the ER with fluid-filled lungs and your immune system in overdrive.
Tomorrow Passover begins. I go to bed with the scariest image from “The Ten Commandments” of the Angel of Death. He is not seen, he is only a shadow, but the wails from the houses he stops at attest to the misery he extracts. Will he brush past our door or will he stop and collect his due? I’ve been in a couple car accidents where I was in a seconds’ peril but this is the first time ever that I go to bed thinking I might wake up dying.
4/8
Got 2 Aleve on board and feeling comfortable. Bed is calling and I’m going to answer that call, even though I slept 14 hours yesterday. My heart is heavy–not for myself, but for John Prine whose music so many of us love.
Parting thought. If you’re going to be quarantined in place with somebody, it sure helps to have a 42 year track record of getting along. With love to my Angel from Massachusetts.
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