We’ve been through pandemic viruses before. Most recently it was in 2014 when Fox News relentlessly beat the drums declaring that we were all going to die of the much more lethal Ebola virus. And Fox & Friends regular guest Donald Trump was one of the loudest leaders of the opposition. He declared without evidence that Barack Obama was “a psycho,” and one of his reasons for making this proclamation was because Obama designated Ronald Klain to be his Ebola czar to oversee the US endeavors to combat it.
Why Klain? He wasn’t a doctor, so why make him czar? Trump loudly proclaimed his lack of medical knowledge as being one of the main proofs of Obama’s psychotic break. The reason was that Klain was an experienced political operative who Obama felt would have to skill to negotiate strategies with intransigent Republicans who saw the Ebola outbreak as something they could gain for political advantage. The very same Republicans who are currently falling over each other to voice support for Trump’s incompetence and stupidity (the Coronavirus is going to go away in the spring when the weather warms up? Seriously?) didn’t hesitate to trash Obama for every decision he made, despite the fact that under Obama’s watch the disease never made it to the United States to any major degree. Furthermore Obama had Doctor Thomas Frieden heading up the CDC, a top doctor with indisputable credentials. So Klain used his skills to coordinate everyone working together, and it all turned out fine.
And Trump, who apparently completely forgot about his remonstrating Obama in 2014 for putting a non-scientist in charge, didn’t hesitate to go Obama one better and put not only a non-scientist, but an anti-scientist in charge: Mike Pence.
Pence certainly has experience with communicable diseases. His sluggish response to the urge to institute a needle exchange program resulted in an HIV outbreak in Indiana in 2015. He eventually signed off on it but if he’d acted earlier, far fewer people would have contracted it. It gets better. Several years earlier when he was in Congress, he stripped funding from Planned Parenthood and consequently the last Planned Parenthood in Scott County, Indiana went out of business…and by interesting coincidence, they also provided free testing for HIV. So when that went away, it spread the way for HIV.
He also joins Trump in believing that climate change isn’t real. Furthermore he asserts that cigarette smoking doesn’t lead to cancer, that evolution isn’t real (God created everything, full stop), and that one’s tendency toward gayness can be pounded out of them by—I dunno—beating them repeatedly on a rock by the river. So when it comes to matters of science, Pence actively flies in the face of people who have dedicated their entire lives to studying these things, not to mention things we know because common sense tells us so.
Yet this yahoo was put in charge of the endeavors to try and curb a disease that experts say is only a matter of when, not if, it will come to the United States. Why? Because according to Trump, Pence has nothing better to do.
Apparently neither does Trump. He doesn’t care about what the coronavirus is doing to average Americans. He cares about one thing and one thing only: what it’s doing to the stock market. He firmly believes that if the economy tanks, it will jeopardize his chances for reelection. And considering the only thing keeping him out of jail is the fact that he’s in the Oval Office, that’s certainly a matter of concern for him. Figuring his only chance is to have the stock market problems reflect on his enemies, he was insane enough to state that the Democratic debate, which happened on Tuesday, was responsible for the first 1000 point drop in the Dow Jones that occurred on Monday.
The Democrats really have to stop beating up on each other. If things continue as they are, they could put a pet rock up for the office and it would beat Trump.
PAD
• 
Recent Comments