I originally wanted to post this
Family Guy Youtube podcast on the coronavirus in light of MP-Ryan's post on Youtube posting parameters because it's (
mostly) apolitical and it's funny as hell.
But after General Battuta's post summing up the situation here...:
What matters, right now, is that thousands of people are dying.
What matters, right now, is that the USA's response has been incompetent and ineffective, and that this failure has enormously magnified the number of deaths.
What does not matter is who said what on cable TV on which day. It does not matter whether some national office declared that everything would be fine (it was manifestly not fine). It does not even matter that Donald Trump is president. What matters is that those in power have failed. Whoever they are, they failed to identify and act against a terrible threat.
Was there something specific about Trump and his government to blame for this failure? Maybe. You can argue about that. But you cannot do so by denying that a terrible failure has occurred at all.
Why would people call Trump supporters a death cult? Why would they be so unfair, so irrational, so emotional as to use that language?
Maybe because support for Trump seems more important to you than six hundred thousand sick people and counting. Maybe because it seems like support for Trump obliges you to disavow the scale and severity of this disease.
Maybe you should even consider whether partisan affiliation has blinded you to other major threats coming our way. Threats whose consequences will care as little for cable TV talking points, Twitter screenshots, and retrospective 'we couldn't have known' assessments as this disease.
Yeah. This. 1,000 times this. There's no question that the Trump administration does not have
any (or no longer has) competent people who know how the government functions in order to mitigate the effects of a global pandemic, especially Trump himself. But this can't possibly be a surprise to anyone with at least two brain cells to rub together because it has been plainly obvious for years but
especially since 2016 that taking a narcissistic game show host and failed businessman (he went bankrupt 6 times, remember?) who inherited most of his fortune from his father and who
never once held elected office before being put in charge of the
American freakin' government might not be the best idea when a true global crisis comes along.
Y'know, duh.I mean it, if a guy tries to claim to your face that he's a "very stable genius" (who the hell ever calls themselves that?) or that "[he] alone can fix" what's wrong with the entire country (sorry but
any country populated with millions of people, never mind a population of 328 million, is too big for any one man to "fix"), your Bullsh!t Detector should be going off the scale. If it's not, then there's something seriously wrong with you. It's friggin'
dangerous to be that gullible.
It still boggles my mind that many voters vote as if the US presidential election is nothing more than a popularity contest. It still boggles my mind that they vote for the president of the US based on nothing more on whether they'd like to have a beer with him (I still remember people saying this about voting for GWB back in 2000 and I wouldn't be surprised to learn if some people voted for Trump for this reason too). It still boggles my mind that some people vote without taking the time to consider the serious, life-threatening issues facing our country that require sober and careful consideration and vote instead on who will most "trigger the libs." It used to (but no longer does) boggle my mind that they would rather
die than see the nation's resources spent to alleviate the suffering of other Americans who are not like them. (Well, now they just might get that chance since the coronavirus is spreading to rural areas. The only question is how many others, both in the US and around the world, they're going to take with them.)
Then a global crisis like a worldwide pandemic comes along and puts millions of lives at risk. When that sort of thing happens, you, me, and everyone else
needs someone competent at the head of the US government to manage and mitigate and resolve that crisis,
because only that will save lives that would otherwise be lost. If nothing else, at least hopefully this crisis will remind
all American voters to vote in November as if their lives depend on it.
Because they do.