Eags (Timothy Egan) correctly brands the *ILK (*Impeached But Not Removed) Lyin' King as a homicidal quack and his party as the Party Of Death. This all began in 2019 when COVIC-19 deaths began to reach epidemic levels in China and US intelligence reports warned of this threat. The *ILK ignored the intelligence reports and the epidemic in China became a global pandemic. Even then, two moths after the dire warning, the *ILK poo-poohed concerns about COVE-19 as routine influenza and suggested that illness would go away after a brief period of discomfort. Now the Untied States of America is the most affliicted nation in world with COVID-19 outbreaks in every state in the Union. The result? More people in the US have died of COVID-19 than all of the battle casualties suffered in Vietnam. Instead of "Hey, Hey LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?" We have "Hey, Hey Trump, How Many Many People Did You Dump... Into A Grave Today? " If this is (fair & balanced) horror at the outcome of the 2016 election, so be it.
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
This genius parody has become this blogger's current earworm and Resistance Anthem. So, if this is a (fair & balanced) first step toward doing the right thing, so be it.
[x NY Fishwrap]
How Republicans Became The Party Of Death
By Eags (Timothy Egan)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
I look at the numbers every day, sometimes every hour, sometimes before dawn. China is not to be trusted. Nor is Russia. I’m always curious about the latest death toll out of Sweden, a country with a riskier, more self-regulated approach to keeping people apart. And cheers for long-suffering bell’Italia, finally seeing a drop in active Covid-19 cases.
All of us want the same thing — a road map to the way out. The scientific consensus is clear and not that complicated: We need a significant upgrade of testing, contact tracing to track the infected, nuanced and dutiful social isolation, all to buy time until a vaccine is developed.
But the political way out reveals a stark divide, and some true madness. For Republicans, that pro-life slogan of theirs is just another term for nothing left to lose. They are now the party of death.
When Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick (R) of Texas doubled down this week on prior remarks elevating commerce above life — there are “more important things than living,” he said on Fox News — he was speaking for a significant slice of his party. People are disposable. So is income. But one is more important.
I’m not talking about the trade-offs that governors are making daily, trying to save businesses and countless jobs, while nursing homes and meatpacking plants remain killing fields.
But the lies spread by the crackpot media wing of the GOP led by President Trump’s favorite radio host, Rush Limbaugh, can be lethal. Covid-19 has killed more Americans in a month than the flu kills in a year. Yet Limbaugh has compared it to a common cold or seasonal flu. Those who believe him are likely to sneeze freely or crowd together in a grocery store.
There’s a direct line of responsibility from the Republicans in Wisconsin who forced voters to risk their lives in order to participate in an election to those citizens of the Badger State who have since tested positive after voting — and may die.
For the majority of state leaders, who favor listening to medical authorities rather than political hacks, Attorney General William Barr has threatened legal action if they err too cautiously on the side of public health. His Justice Department may have to intervene, he said, to help businesses that “need more freedom.”
All of this follows Trump’s obsession with money over human life, with markets over medicine. On Wednesday, just as the United States reported its largest daily death toll to that date, Trump tweeted: “States are safely coming back. Our Country is starting to OPEN FOR BUSINESS again.” So much for the departed.
He said this after the number of coronavirus deaths in the nation doubled in little more than a week, giving the United States the horrid distinction of posting the highest body count of any nation on earth by far. We will soon lose more people to the novel Coronavirus than all the Americans killed in the Vietnam War.
Trump’s open-for-business cheerleading will cause many more deaths. Even Robert Redfield, Trump’s whipsawed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that Trump’s tweets about “liberating” states now on medical lockdown were “not helpful.” These are code words for crazy.
Given that Trump is an alpha-male simpleton with no filter, it’s never difficult to find the true motive behind his tactics. As he has said, he wants all the authority and none of the responsibility. If we lose a quarter-million Americans, it’s the fault of governors running their respective shows. If the number is far less, it’s because he took charge.
He’s against vote-by mail, the least life-threatening way to allow Americans to exercise their most basic constitutional right, because “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
He’s encouraged life-threatening demonstrations. What’s particularly galling is using children as props in those protests, endangering their health.
Who wouldn’t love to bring back the buzz and vigor of normal life? I miss everything, from the Neapolitan pizza joint to my perpetually losing baseball team, to hugs and high-fives, even security lines at the airport. I wish we were getting close to herd immunity, when a large enough percentage of the population has contracted the disease that it nearly stops the spread.
I was initially encouraged by the studies out of California that, though flawed, showed through antibody tests that the number of people who may have contracted the coronavirus was far greater than the official tally of confirmed cases. This would indicate that the actual mortality rate is much lower than the body count.
The problem is that even if the higher number were true, more than 95 percent of the population is still vulnerable. The number of people who would die in order to get to herd immunity would be unfathomable.
When I think about how many doctors and nurses, how many cops, firefighters and other first responders, how many grocery store clerks and delivery people, how many parents and grandparents would lose their lives to get to that immunity threshold, I realize there’s only one choice.
That is: to err on the side of life. Lucky for us, most Americans already feel that way. Most Americans expect no quick fix. Most Americans are willing to be patient. And if this holds, most Americans will reject the party of death in November. ###
[Timothy Egan is a contributing opinion writer who covers the environment, the American West, and politics at the NY Fishwrap . Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a BA ( journalism), and was awarded a doctorate of humane letters (honoris causa) by Whitman College (WA) in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is A Pilgrimage to Eternity (2019). See all other books by Eags here.]
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