Virus thread, the political one.

[gregl]

In this particular pandemic, she can have both Liberty and Death. Two for one deal.

To paraphrase Tom Petty, "a rebel without a clue."

Greg

[theflashunc]

Credit where credit's due, it took the last Republican administration a couple years before stories like this about the run to 9/11 started coming out. These folks have this process down way more efficiently. Also, for the record, this is the second of two Republican administrations this century where the Commander in Chief isn't much of a reader, which is one of the core parts of the job. People have died needlessly as a result both times.

55,000 dead, 26 million unemployed, and all of us living like Hobbits because this guy can't be bothered to read or listen to a daily briefing and friggin' do something about it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...101_story.html

[Sbti]

Dipshit Pence is touring Mayo Clinic. He's the only one NOT wearing a mask. He's going around like a big man doing elbow bumps to show he knows what to do. WTF. What would mother think?

[GeneK]

Dipshit Pence is touring Mayo Clinic. He's the only one NOT wearing a mask. He's going around like a big man doing elbow bumps to show he knows what to do. WTF. What would mother think?

And he's heading up the coronavirus task force?
At the entrance to our medical office building there is someone checking everyone entering for face covering. He wouldn't be allowed in without a mask.

[snotrockets]

1. Pence was already tasked with stopping one pandemic, and did all he can to fail completely. Why does someone even assumes competence once he showed utter disregard to other humans lives is beyond me.

2. The face covering checks person is no match to the Secret Service. But even without them, the issues here is that one expects people to follow norms, and here we have an example of someone who is certain rules don't apply to them. Consider that most cars don't get broken into not because of an effective police force, but because most people don't break into cars.

[j44ke]

Perhaps Pence has already had Covid19.

[Sbti]

I'm sure he was just being sarcastic.

He didn't follow the rules at NASA either.

[j44ke]

He also wanted to look workers and researchers “in the eye and say thank you,” he said, although surgical masks do not cover eyes.

- from NYTimes.

Sounds like he might have been a little confused.

[Sbti]

Perhaps Pence has already had Covid19.

I'm pretty sure the patient shown there DID have it and is donating his plasma. He's wearing a mask.

Probably orders from Captain Bleachheart since he said he would never wear a mask. Remember a while back at some table, trump put his water bottle on the floor. Without blinking pence grabbed his water bottle and put it on the floor. Monkey see, monkey do.

[BBB]

Dipshit Pence is touring Mayo Clinic. He's the only one NOT wearing a mask. He's going around like a big man doing elbow bumps to show he knows what to do. WTF. What would mother think?

The Mayo Clinic should not have admitted him. They are just as hopeless. Sure Pence has the secret service, but that does not give him or entitle him to unfettered access.

[robin3mj]

- from NYTimes.

Sounds like he might have been a little confused.

Just don't tell Mother we're descended from monkeys.

[ides1056]

The Stop and Shop in Northampton, MA has a cop at the door enforcing the rules: no entry without a mask.

[guido]

The Irish Times (newspaper)
April 25, 2020
By Fintan O’Toole
THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT
Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.
Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.
As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.
Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?
It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.
Abject surrender
What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.
Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.
In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.
Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
Fertile ground
But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.
There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.
Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.
That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.
And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.
As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.
Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

[thollandpe]

Mike Pence is absolutely expert at working for and managing a malignant narcissist boss. It's a textbook-worthy example.

[Walter Sobchak]

Mike Pence is absolutely expert at working for and managing a malignant narcissist boss. It's a textbook-worthy example.

Is that a nice way to say that he's gargling his boss's balls?

[WFSTEKL]

It seems that Sweden's decision to use blunt force trauma to achieve expedited herd immunity is paying dividends. They currently have 2,500 reported deaths, and are approaching the top of the per capita death-rate leader board.

[theflashunc]

Meanwhile the Moron Dauphine wants thanks for all they've done. Bodies are stuffed in refrigerator trucks and this guy wants a thank you.

[Sbti]

Mother Pence goes on StateTV to say her husband didn't know about Mayo's mask policy until after he left. Ummm, he's being interviewed why he's still THERE and they asked. He said he's been tested, wanted to look people in the eye, etc. blah, blah, and chose not to. Ummm, oh pious mother, isn't lying one of those thingys, the seven somethings the ten whatevers? Fake Xtian, but the base will eat it up.

[davids]

It seems that Sweden's decision to use blunt force trauma to achieve expedited herd immunity is paying dividends. They currently have 2,500 reported deaths, and are approaching the top of the per capita death-rate leader board.

But they all look so happy and smug in the photos!

[Matthew Strongin]

Mother Pence goes on StateTV to say her husband didn't know about Mayo's mask policy until after he left. Ummm, he's being interviewed why he's still THERE and they asked. He said he's been tested, wanted to look people in the eye, etc. blah, blah, and chose not to. Ummm, oh pious mother, isn't lying one of those thingys, the seven somethings the ten whatevers? Fake Xtian, but the base will eat it up.

I'm always amazed at how effortlessly these people try to rewrite history as if there were no photos or videos of what they have said and done.