"The immense Trump propaganda infrastructure is marshaling these folks for one simple reason: This crisis is Trump's fault, and he desperately needs someone to blame for his failures, which have led to the spread of the virus and the collapse of the economy. So these numbskulls are being organized to protest the governors who are trying to clean up Trump's mess, which is a little like protesting the doctors who are treating patients who got sick because Trump refused to do anything serious to limit the spread of the virus.Oh wait — they did that, too, by blocking ambulances trying to take patients to the hospital." - Amanda Marcotte, 'Michigan Man-Baby Protest- Wait We Thought Conservatives Were Rugged Individuals'
"I admit I am depressed by the idea that we can't even be asked to consider doing without in order to give or leave enough for people who need it, or will need it. Including possibly ourselves. Is the red-blooded, freedom loving American so infantile he has to be promised whatever he wants right now at this moment?" - Author Ursula K. Leguin, 'No Time To Spare', p. 119.
"It does seem counterintuitive that Trump stands a chance of spinning his epic fuck-up into a victory. It's not going to be easy, especially when there are scenes on the news of nurses weeping behind their face-shields, crying out for more masks, more ventilators, more everything. We will be witness to outright chaos on the hospital wards, and someone will get a camera into a room where an expiring coronavirus victim is gasping for air."- Lucian Truscott IV, 'Trump's Performance With His Task Force Is An Act'.
"I am always reminded of my folks' sacrifices during World War II. Did they pout and cry because they had to adhere to gas and food rationing and state rules? Of course not, because they put on their 'big boy' pants and understood they were all in that great moment together, to subdue a common foe. We can do less now. Less thought of "me", much more of "WE"." - Brane Space post, March 23, 'Can Americans Really Be Persuaded To Voluntarily Distance To Avert A Covid-19 Catastrophe?'
"There has never been an American president as spiritually impoverished as Donald Trump. And his spiritual poverty, like an overdrawn checking account that keeps imposing new penalties on a customer already in difficult straits, is draining the last reserves of decency among us at a time when we need it most." - Tom Nichols, The Atlantic, 'With Each Briefing Trump Is Making Us Worse People' E.g.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/each-briefing-trump-making-us-worse-people/609859/
Watching AM Joy this morning I had to agree with her that the faces of the crazed, protesting mutts peering through the Michigan Capitol's office windows, e.g.
"The Michigan protest was organized by the Michigan Freedom Fund, a conservative advocacy group with financial backing from the DeVos family, which includes Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos."
"Grassroots inspired" my ass. When these pawns of DeVos go back and get grandma so sick she has to be rushed to an ER and intubated, maybe then they will wake the hell up. Or not. After all, a Stanford study released Friday revealed the proportion of non-symptomatic infections could be 85 times greater than those with symptoms. If that isn't enough to scare the shit out of these fools to stay home, I don't know what is. But hey, maybe they enjoy being expendable pawns for the wealthy.
Hey, I get it! Everyone is getting weary of this lockdown, going on now for over a month and chomping at the bit to break free. No sports bars to gather at and down beers and pizza while watching March Madness or the NBA, no sports to watch, period. Just the same four walls day after day. Know what? Get over it, whiners in Michigan, Ohio and other states (Brookfield, WI today) . Yeah, the ones sporting pointy Tea Party hats and the same stupid signs as in 2009 when the ACA was introduced. You know who you are.
Oblivious to their own susceptibility to this vicious virus (and spreading it to others) , thousands of nitwits with delusional notions of "liberty" - and stoked by too much Limbaugh and FOX B.S. - jammed the streets around the Capitol Bldg. in Lansing. Many with the red MAGA caps signalling "Morons and Goopers Alliance". Dumb shits who know not what they do or the damage they are going to wreak on tens of thousands in the state with their utter folly.
Michigan wasn't the only shutdown state where episodes of mass idiocy erupted. According to the Post piece we also learned at least 100 went ape shit in Raleigh, NC in opposition to stay at home rule, while dozens screamed down Kentucky governor Andy Bashear in Frankfurt, KY. To show how fast this fake liberty mind virus - fucking so many brains - has spread, we also read:
"More orders against stay at home orders have been planned in other states, including Texas, Oregon and California, even as the health effects of the coronavirus mount across the country" (With Friday one of the worst days, with over 4,000 dead)
We also learned the identity of these would- be firebrands, who are more doing the work for the virus than they are for any perceived liberty. We read, for example:
"At recent rallies in Ohio, New York and Michigan, many organizers and demonstrators - some who came armed- were aligned with anti-government activists on the Right - and libertarian groups."
In other words, the usual suspects, the usual intellectual invalids who can't think their way out of the proverbial paper bag. They buy into the feeble schlock - such as spouted recently by Bill Maher- that "Hey, there are only 30,000 odd deaths here, there are 40,000 die from obesity each year!" Oblivious to the fact that the latter deaths are fixed one-off sets, not susceptible to rapid EXPONENTIAL growth by contact transmission- and overwhelming ERs. The deaths of the obese, then, like the other deaths cited by these nincompoops, tend to be spread out and don't overrun medical supplies in hospitals, ICUs, or ERs.
Then there are the likes of Phil McGraw (who my tenure track psychology niece Shayl calls a "TV quack") who on Thursday spouted: "Look, the fact of the matter is we have people dying — 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes. But we don’t shut the country down for that. But yet we’re doing it for this?”
In a welcome bout of sanity., social media quickly erupted with fury and derision - as it should have - as viewers with higher IQs than Dr. Phil pointed out the hopeless apples-to-orangeness of his argument: Cars and tobacco are not exactly communicable diseases; and both, in fact, have inspired extensive government regulations to limit injuries and death. (The TV shrink was also widely mocked for making a comparison to swimming-pool deaths using a bogus, inflated death stat. Dr. Phil, who had once been followed by Janice, is no more.)
If any of these assholes had half a brain in their forlorn skulls they'd get it, but their brains have been hollowed out by ingesting the crap spewed from talk radio, FOX News and the WSJ (which I've previously written about i.e.
Why Holman Jenkins & His WSJ Wrecking Crew Want T...
And;
Economy Uber Alles Chauvinists Need To Get A Grip...
And we even beheld the Tea Party types taking marching orders from the dumbest fucktard in the nation: Donald J Trump. This was the slime who decided on Friday to stop being a president (as if he ever was) and opted for inciting an insurrection against Blue state governors instead, tweeting at his assembled imbeciles "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” —
Thomas Friedman in a column today lacerated that codswallop:
“Liberate”? Think about the use of that word. We were not in jail! We were not doing something wrong! We were doing what our president, governor, mayor, and national epidemic experts told us to do: behave responsibly and shelter in place to break the transmission of this virus."
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington correctly observed that Trump’s tweets “encourage illegal and dangerous acts” and said the president was “putting millions of people in danger of contracting Covid-19.”
The most bothersome aspect was still to come where we learned:
"The size of the protest in Michigan, and the appetite in other states for more rallies, suggested that anger over the no-end -in sight-lockdowns was not limited to the far right. And that the public's patience has a limit."
Really? The public's patience has a limit? What about a limit on swallowing bullshit from the right wing trolls in QAnon, Infowars and the talk radio dens? Have any of these Milquetoasts who think they are at their limit, seen the medical heroes fighting to save lives in overcrowded ERS, or ICUs? Have they seen the tears of the ER nurses after their struggling patients - intubated for weeks - crashed, coded and died? Have they seen the faces of desperation in the wake of very limited protective equipment - which Trump's FEMA pirates and son-in law Jared continue to plunder? (The Trump pirates - as reported in Barbados - recently stole 20 ventilators destined for ICUs in Bim. These had been purchased by a private philanthropist for the island.)
Have these crackpots seen the weary doctors' faces as they plead for us to at least do OUR part while they do theirs - saving the lives of loved ones? E.g.
And:
What it’s like to be a doctor and a single mother on the front line
Huh? Say what? These clowns fancy themselves latter day patriots like my revolutionary war ancestors, but all I see are limp-dicked cowards and crybabies who can't even tolerate a little self-isolation for the good of the whole country. If my ancestors - the Pennsylvania Brumbaugh brothers, Jacob Jockel and Conrad - were around to see this paper patriot posturing they'd puke. That'd be after unloading a few musket rounds in the protesters' behinds.
Well, fortunately for them the sane segment of the nation is prepared to be a tad more forgiving. We 're not prescribing - like in Barbados with its 24 hour curfew- a $50,000 fine and a year behind bars (10 arrested thus far). But my niece Shayl does support the National Guard firing a few rubber bullets at them if they get too out of hand and try to storm any Blue state governor's locations. There has to be a modicum of law and order, and we can't allow these ratbag renegades to run amuck and endanger thousands of law-abiding citizens.
Anyone who even suggests having reached a "limit" - when this mitigation is finally working - ought to be forced to spend three hours in a COVID -19 combat zone watching the doctors and nurses as they frantically work - often 12-15 hour days. Watch them race from one machine to another, checking oxygen levels in ventilators, as well as kidney function for dialysis machines. THEY are the ones being tested not any person whose only "chore" is to keep his or her ass at home each day - so as not to incur further infections- or spread them. Especially when there is no current testing to adequately show where the virus is, who has it. (Epidemiologists recommend at least 500,000 tests a day before reopening. ) And also especially when some recent studies (as in Iceland) show up to 50 percent of infected persons may be asymptomatic.
Apart from all that, have any of these geniuses with their fake patriot getup considered that recent polls show 2 out of 3 Americans wouldn't venture out even if the entire country opened at once? They realize that without massive testing it's a fool's errand which only invites a massive second wave of disease that could shut the economy down for YEARS - not just months. Am I enraged at what's going on with the minority faction of fools right now - the same grievance-filled, entitled pricks who put Dotard into office, i.e. the Trumpkin assholes. The dolts playing the fool and risking even more deaths and overrun hospitals in a country already at the top of cases, fatalities (in respect to peer nations) ? Let's just say it's a good thing none of them are protesting near where I live.
See also:
AND:
And:
Excerpt:
"Every American should realize: the heavily armed groups – funded and organized by rightwing oligarchs – whom the president is now praising for protesting the lockdowns – WILL be out on the streets, threatening and very possibly killing people if Trump, despite all the GOP vote rigging, loses in November. Yes, that is absolutely where we are now. That's WHY these groups have been funded by the rich, that's why they're being mobilized now.
You can pretend this is not happening; you can go on living in some "West Wing" fantasy of civility and compromise; you can "chip in and get a cool sticker" from old Joe and think everything will be all right in the end. But the rule of law no longer prevails in the land; armed bands of extremists are roaming the streets of the nation, bellowing hatred and waiting for the order to escalate their lawless violence to the next level. You think "it can't happen here"? It's happening right now, in front of your eyes. And worse is coming unless people wake up and stop it from happening."
And:
"On Wednesday, a crowd of right-wing nuts — complete with their oversized but underworked utility vehicles, Confederate flags, guns and other such overcompensation accoutrements — descended on the State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, to whine about the temporary pause to dinners at Applebee's and accidental brushfires at gender-reveal parties. The deep fear of emasculation driving the protest was not particularly subtle at this protest, as the crowd chanted "Lock her up" at Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat who is accused of no other crime other than making deeply insecure men fuss about a woman in power. "
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