Trump’s Reopening Double Feature: The Fast and The Spurious/The Quick and The Dead
This Weak in Politics, Vol. 234
May 21, 2020
As the nation sped past the 93,000 death mark this week, President Trump has been speeding toward “reopening” the country after the terrific job he and his team have done. Problem is, there seems to be very little evidence to suggest that quickly reopening is the right thing to do, and what there is, seems spurious at best. If by spurious one means “completely made up bullshit.”
That hasn’t stopped Trump’s republican allies like Florida Governor Ron DeSycophantis or Georgia Governor Bryan Kontempt from boldly moving forward so their constituents can get tattoos and Chili’s baby back ribs.
Admit, you just started singing the “I want my baby back baby back baby back” jingle didn’t you? If you don’t know the tune, it can be found here.
Georgia was even so kind as to put out a graph showing the slope of cases.
Pretty convincing, except for the fact that the x-axis — the one showing time, isn’t in, well, you know… order.
Trump doesn’t think measuring the number of cases and deaths is the best metric at this time for two reasons. First, he doesn’t understand metrics, and second, 93,000 PEOPLE HAVE DIED.
So, just how dire is the situation in the United States? So dire that Doctors Without Borders has at least two crews working in the continental United States, which is both uplifting and sad. The organization’s mission is to bring medical humanitarian assistance to victims of conflict, natural disasters, epidemics or healthcare exclusion. In addition their name is literally Doctors “WITHOUT BORDERS.” Okay, technically it is Médecins Sans Frontièrs, but the principle applies. Point is, we are ostensibly a developed nation, and we definitely are avec frontiers. How do we know? Because the administration this week awarded a Trump sycophant a $1.3b contract to build a fucking wall to mark it.
Well, mark it and keep brown people out.
In addition to the problem with the illness itself, Trump now seems opposed to the idea of broad-scale testing. He believes testing is problematic because the more tests you perform, the more cases you get. That’s sort of the same logic as hiding your dirty clothes in the closet so you don’t have any laundry to do. Or eating the remaining 1/4 of a cake you had in one sitting so you don’t have cake lying around the house that you would be tempted to eat.
Not that we’ve done either of those things, of course.
The point is, Trump is out of control and inept — a dangerous combination. And, no one with any power in his party is willing to stand up to him and say, “we can’t open too fast, Mr. President.”
Senate Majority “Leader” Mitch MacComplice sure as hell isn’t going to. (Yes, we have nasty, nasty names for all the senators. Names like: Rand Small, Chuck Assley, Mike Crappo, and Lindsey Graham.)
In fact, in his own rush to open, McComplice called the Senate back to order — not to work diligently to find additional ways to help American families weather the health and financial crises caused by the coronavirus — but to quickly confirm unqualified judges for lifetime appointments.
Sure there were other things on the agenda as well, such as confirming John Ratcliffe as Trump’s Director of National Intelligence. That title is ironic considering on an intelligence scale Ratcliffe is somewhere between Louie Gohmert and Doug Collins, both of whom are well below Sarah Palin. But we digress.
Ratcliffe had been nominated last summer by Trump, but there were rumors that he had exaggerated his qualifications for the job, and he withdrew. When the rumors were finally confirmed that Ratcliffe was indeed unqualified, it was only a matter of time before the Senate confirmed him.
Speaking of the senate and being unqualified, Senator Kelly Loeffler continued to make news this week. Already under an inquiry into whether she engaged in insider trading, her husband just made a $1m contribution to a pro-Trump Super PAC. So she defended herself in a way that broke ranks with Republicans. She started screaming things about Chinagate rather than Obamagate.
Oops. We apologize. We have since been told that is NOT Kelly Loeffler. It is Martha Stewart. Totally unplanned accident.
Here is the real Senator Loeffler shown leaving a classified Senate Health Committee briefing on COVID-19 but definitely NOT calling her broker:
Prior to this, Loeffler was, perhaps, most famous for having once been the first runner-up in an Ann Coulter look-alike competition in Marietta, Ga.
Note: In preparing that it occurred to us that, if Ann Coulter married Willie Geist and took his name, her name would be: A. Coulter-Geist.
Finally, just when you thought the president’s rhetoric couldn’t get any more bizarre, he pulls out the big guns. Potato guns, to be specific. At a White House briefing this week, the president warned Virginians that Gov. Ralph Northam was coming after their second amendment, and that there will be no one guarding the potatoes. In other words, he officially declared Northam his starch nemesis.
In the president’s defense, he made those comments after disclosing that he’s been tinkering around in the medicine cabinet a bit.
And that’s the way the weak spent the week in a nation where the presumptive Democratic nominee is offering a vision for America in which we choose hope over fear. Science over fiction. Truth over lies.
His opponent is offering… coloring books.
The race is a toss-up. We’re doomed.
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