The country is shutting down. Not all at once but gradually as the virus intensifies in each region. The key is always the number of deaths. As they rise, people and governments become more and more frightened and the world clamps down around us. The key question; how far can we go on, removing the activities of life before the public begins to crack. We have already seen evidence of non-compliance in places like the Florida beaches. Is this defiance or just stupidity? In the end it all comes back to leadership. Most human beings are followers; most want someone to tell them what to do. Those who speak of uprisings by the people just don’t understand that those simultaneous uprisings could never happen if it weren’t for leaders who rise above the masses and tell them what to do. Hitler was such a leader. So were Ghandi in India and Mandela in South Africa. So were Jesus and Hannibal.
What have we got? Donald Trump, a lying, egomaniacal, racist sociopath. A man who made fun of the crisis because he didn’t want it to be true, didn’t want it to hurt his chances of re-election, didn’t want it to panic the stock market. Unfortunately he was too dumb to know how to pull his little con off, so he actually inspired all three of those catastrophes and will ultimately be responsible for thousands of deaths.
Yes, he has backtracked somewhat on his original positions, only because they have been so thoroughly exposed as blatant, deadly lies. Now he stands before the nation and unapologetically tells us that we are in the midst of a pandemic, but because of his incompetence he is unable to find a way to function on any but a baboon level.
Meanwhile, those of us who are able to get NY-1 can watch a real leader every day when Andrew Cuomo holds forth for an hour of information and questioning. New York is the American epicenter of the plague at this moment. But Cuomo has seen the situation for what it is and realizing that Trump has neither the will nor the competence to do the work that needs to be done to slow the plague, has shown us what real leadership looks like. Nothing is solved yet, but almost completely without any help from the Federal government Cuomo has the ball rolling on supplies, beds and even treatment that will be needed in enormous multiples as the disease progresses. In this, the recently disgraced Bill DeBlasio, who amazingly, is beginning to look like some kind of leader, is helping him.
These two, and others like Gavin Newsome, stand in sharp contrast to The President, who continues to lie to the American public with his only goal seeming to be his own re-election along with his ludicrous puppet sidekick, VP Mike Pence who despite having his head all the way up Trump’s ass, still manages to kiss it in every speech.
Last night Fox news was most worried about how we planned to make China pay for their treatment of the virus. China? How about Trump? Sure he had a moment of semi-intelligent reflection yesterday but what about the damage he and Fox have done in their dismissal of the facts about this pandemic. The deniers will be responsible for thousands of deaths before this thing is over.
I keep coming back to the fact that our government turned down an offer from the World Health Organization of a million tests when we had none and none were on the horizon. Having lived with this administration for three years I see their reasons, all of them venal, for the turndown. Now a couple of our own health administrators are trying to sell the ridiculous concept that they were not accepted because they were not up to FDA standards. Really? That’s like saying a man dying of dehydration in the middle of a desert won’t accept a cup of water because it has some sand in it. That’s going to be a tough sell. It’s okay for the FDA to be a little PC when there’s no emergency, but in this case they were well out of line. South Korea and Singapore used those same tests and they had no problem with them. Now they are over the hump with the virus while we’re just getting into the hot zone.
And while Cuomo leads NY State’s fight against the virus Trump continues to lag behind in his ability to even follow Cuomo.
This Sunday, Cuomo explained in clear, uncertain terms that there are greedy manufacturers all over the country that are trying to take advantage of the crisis by overcharging for medically necessary products. This blatant price gouging is helping to deplete financial resources that the states desperately need to handle all the problems brought about by the spread of this disease. All Cuomo needs our idiot in the Oval Office to do is to invoke The Defense Production Act that prohibits such behavior, but instead Trump is conducting pseudo rallies from the briefing podium.
This blog will continue to research the companies that are participating in this price gouging and attempt to publish a list in the near future. On the other side of the coin, companies that are going out of their way to help in the crisis should be congratulated, companies like Absolute Vodka that have switched production to hand sanitizer or Hanes, which is now making hospital gowns and masks. This for those of you too young to remember, and that means most of you, is how we won WWII. Yes, we had greedy pigs who ignored Pearl Harbor then, but we also had American heroes that switched what they were doing overnight, to jump into a war effort that overcame an evil that represented the same kind of bigotry, racial hatred, greed and general evil that exist in our White House now.
Hitler wanted to be a dictator and so does Trump and it’s Trump’s search for the path to that dictatorship that led to the foot dragging that has allowed this pandemic to establish a firm foothold in our country before we were able to do anything about it. If Trump hadn’t lied and deceived we would be better equipped today to fight Covid-19 on an equal basis. As it is, because of Donald Trump we will be playing catch-up for a long time and we will lose thousands more Americans than we would have as a reesult of his stupidity.
And it’s not like the disaster in the White House has learned any kind of lesson. He’s still dragging his feet, still making horrible decisions, still blabbering blatantly false statements to the American people about things that his cringing supporters have to then correct. But what about the simple stuff? Why hasn’t he given FEMA the go ahead to jump in and start functioning? NY State is ready for FEMA to bring in ready built hospital units. It’s all set up for them but they fail to move. On Sunday we saw the all but useless FEMA Administrator, Pete Gaynor, stumble and stutter about the absence of tests, protective equipment and everything else that his organization is supposed to be handling. He was basically unable to identify any amounts under order, any goals or their current status or when and where anything we need might be delivered. This clown is just a useless piece of garbage.
In a matter of a couple of days Andrew Cuomo has gotten New York ready to put up temporary hospitals, test thousands and even begin research on a possible cure but now he must wait on a crumbling FEMA that seems frozen in aspic. Where the hell is our Federal Government? It now seems very clear why Republicans have always wanted small government. They knew that a Republican administration had no ability to function in any of the areas that demand big competent government. They have been fighting to keep from getting exposed.
This Sunday, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer came down on this problem with both feet when Martha Raddatz, who just doesn’t get it, asked the dumbest question of all time. “Why aren’t you trying to get ahead of this?”
The answer as clearly stated by Whitmer was, they are trying but they are stymied at every turn by the incompetence and deliberate lies of Trump and his administration.
Just as a side note, Raddatz is one of the best Global Affairs correspondents in the business but she has a terrible habit of asking dumb questions when she appears as host on This Week.
And in what is quite possibly the most ironic development of the year; the man who has fought any effort to help those affected by Covid-19 has been diagnosed to have it. That, Rand Paul, is truly God’s way of laughing his ass off.