Trump and Trumpism are quite literally killing us
I just blocked a guy on Facebook who ran an item asking us to "let it sink in" that "only" a few thousand Americans had died in a matter of a few weeks from COVID. But first, I reported him for terrorism.
Yes, terrorism. The irresponsible downplaying of this virus by the Administration and its supporters have already killed plenty of people, and every time somebody encourages people to risk their lives or the lives of others because they somehow still believe what President Trump has been telling us for so long even though even he has now come to his senses I have trouble keeping my temper. I'm a big believer in free speech, but as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it so well, "Freedom of speech does not include the right to falsely shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre."
The legal doctrine under which the limits of free speech are generally drawn is the "clear and present danger" standard. The First Amendment does not protect reckless and irresponsible speech in a situation in which it creates a clear and present danger that somebody will act on it in such a manner as to endanger lives or property. This clearly does.
Almost as appalling is the insanity of the rabid libertarians who complain that in protecting the lives and health not simply of the people directly affected but also of those with whom they might subsequently come into contact through stay-at-home orders and other such actions governments are acting in an "authoritarian" and allegedly "unconstitutional" manner. The notion that to impose quarantines in the face of a deadly and rampant pandemic somehow violates people's rights isn't simply absurd. It's insane. It's stark, raving mad.
The election of Donald Trump brought every crazed right-wing nutjob in the land out of the woodwork and even invested them with a certain degree of respectability, just as I and a great many others feared it might. You do not elect a crackpot who insinuated that Ted Cruz's father conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate President Kennedy without legitimizing rampant paranoia and irrational slander and libel by the crazy among us. Yet that is what we did, and that is what electing Donald Trump as president has done.
This item from the Associated Press details how this president not only created and enabled all this COVID "trutherism," a blight which has even spread to hitherto respectable conservative publications like The Federalist, which seems to have degenerated into the same sort of rag as Alex Jones's InfoWars where the pandemic is concerned. The Federalist and other publications and public figures who have drunk the "it's just the flu" Kool-Aid and remain intoxicated even after Mr. Trump himself has sobered up bear direct responsibility for the suicidal and homicidal insanity of the extremists who promote COVID denialism. Of course, the president's change of heart doesn't buy us back the precious months when he should have been preparing us all for the trial and stockpiling ventilators and masks and other equipment against an emergency the experts were telling him all along was inevitable and instead was telling us that it was only the flu and questioning whether it would kill any significant number of us.
Now he and those close to him insist that he always knew how serious the virus was and was warning us about it all along. Those among us with much in the way of working memory realize just how huge a whopper that is. But predictably, the members of the Trump Cult simply nod their heads and accept his word that something they saw with their own eyes and heard with their own ears simply did not happen.
And our incompetent president continues to mismanage the crisis even now. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is even pushing the insane narrative that the Federal stockpile which Mr. Trump failed to restock despite plenty of warning and whose inadequacy he is trying to blame on his predecessor was never meant for the use of the states, but only for the Federal government! The Administration insists that the states, some of the largest of which are struggling to even keep their financial heads above water despite crippling taxes and whose financial resources are a drop in the bucket compared to those of the Federal government, should have been stockpiling this stuff on their own.
How is the Federal government supposed to use this stuff? Good grief, how do Trump and Kushner expect people to benefit from the stuff that the Federal government does have in stock if they don't distribute it through the states? Does the government plan to hold an auction? Sorry California, you may have the most people, but you're broke, so you don't get the ventilators and your people are just going to have to die. Tough luck, Illinois. You're close to being bankrupt, so you can't buy what you need from us. Sucks to be you. And Chicago is a garbage pit anyway. Do we have to travel to Washington if we come down with COVID-19 to use what the Federal government has stockpiled?
The Boston Globe is right: this unfit, incompetent president cannot avoid a large share of the responsibility for the deaths from this pandemic. There is no way to avoid the fact that Donald Trump's bad leadership, mismanagement, and simple incompetence have already cost Americans their lives and will continue to do so as long as he is mismanaging the Federal government's resources in this crisis. And he is directly responsible for the prevailing opinion on the crazy right even now that COVID is a phony crisis, and nothing but another Democratic plot to bring down the Dear Leader!
And as I write this, Mr. Trump talking up an untested antimalarial drug as a treatment for COVID even though according to Dr. Fauci there is absolutely no evidence that it's at all helpful in treating the disease! And yet, the Federal government is being pressured by Trump to promote its use anyway!
This Fall's election will be something more than a choice of who will lead us through the four years ahead, four years which thanks to Donald Trump will be much tougher than they had to be. It will be a referendum on whether or not the American people are brain dead. If we re-elect this joker it will prove conclusively that we are no longer capable of governing ourselves.
Yes, terrorism. The irresponsible downplaying of this virus by the Administration and its supporters have already killed plenty of people, and every time somebody encourages people to risk their lives or the lives of others because they somehow still believe what President Trump has been telling us for so long even though even he has now come to his senses I have trouble keeping my temper. I'm a big believer in free speech, but as Oliver Wendell Holmes put it so well, "Freedom of speech does not include the right to falsely shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theatre."
The legal doctrine under which the limits of free speech are generally drawn is the "clear and present danger" standard. The First Amendment does not protect reckless and irresponsible speech in a situation in which it creates a clear and present danger that somebody will act on it in such a manner as to endanger lives or property. This clearly does.
Almost as appalling is the insanity of the rabid libertarians who complain that in protecting the lives and health not simply of the people directly affected but also of those with whom they might subsequently come into contact through stay-at-home orders and other such actions governments are acting in an "authoritarian" and allegedly "unconstitutional" manner. The notion that to impose quarantines in the face of a deadly and rampant pandemic somehow violates people's rights isn't simply absurd. It's insane. It's stark, raving mad.
The election of Donald Trump brought every crazed right-wing nutjob in the land out of the woodwork and even invested them with a certain degree of respectability, just as I and a great many others feared it might. You do not elect a crackpot who insinuated that Ted Cruz's father conspired with Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate President Kennedy without legitimizing rampant paranoia and irrational slander and libel by the crazy among us. Yet that is what we did, and that is what electing Donald Trump as president has done.
This item from the Associated Press details how this president not only created and enabled all this COVID "trutherism," a blight which has even spread to hitherto respectable conservative publications like The Federalist, which seems to have degenerated into the same sort of rag as Alex Jones's InfoWars where the pandemic is concerned. The Federalist and other publications and public figures who have drunk the "it's just the flu" Kool-Aid and remain intoxicated even after Mr. Trump himself has sobered up bear direct responsibility for the suicidal and homicidal insanity of the extremists who promote COVID denialism. Of course, the president's change of heart doesn't buy us back the precious months when he should have been preparing us all for the trial and stockpiling ventilators and masks and other equipment against an emergency the experts were telling him all along was inevitable and instead was telling us that it was only the flu and questioning whether it would kill any significant number of us.
Now he and those close to him insist that he always knew how serious the virus was and was warning us about it all along. Those among us with much in the way of working memory realize just how huge a whopper that is. But predictably, the members of the Trump Cult simply nod their heads and accept his word that something they saw with their own eyes and heard with their own ears simply did not happen.
And our incompetent president continues to mismanage the crisis even now. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is even pushing the insane narrative that the Federal stockpile which Mr. Trump failed to restock despite plenty of warning and whose inadequacy he is trying to blame on his predecessor was never meant for the use of the states, but only for the Federal government! The Administration insists that the states, some of the largest of which are struggling to even keep their financial heads above water despite crippling taxes and whose financial resources are a drop in the bucket compared to those of the Federal government, should have been stockpiling this stuff on their own.
How is the Federal government supposed to use this stuff? Good grief, how do Trump and Kushner expect people to benefit from the stuff that the Federal government does have in stock if they don't distribute it through the states? Does the government plan to hold an auction? Sorry California, you may have the most people, but you're broke, so you don't get the ventilators and your people are just going to have to die. Tough luck, Illinois. You're close to being bankrupt, so you can't buy what you need from us. Sucks to be you. And Chicago is a garbage pit anyway. Do we have to travel to Washington if we come down with COVID-19 to use what the Federal government has stockpiled?
The Boston Globe is right: this unfit, incompetent president cannot avoid a large share of the responsibility for the deaths from this pandemic. There is no way to avoid the fact that Donald Trump's bad leadership, mismanagement, and simple incompetence have already cost Americans their lives and will continue to do so as long as he is mismanaging the Federal government's resources in this crisis. And he is directly responsible for the prevailing opinion on the crazy right even now that COVID is a phony crisis, and nothing but another Democratic plot to bring down the Dear Leader!
And as I write this, Mr. Trump talking up an untested antimalarial drug as a treatment for COVID even though according to Dr. Fauci there is absolutely no evidence that it's at all helpful in treating the disease! And yet, the Federal government is being pressured by Trump to promote its use anyway!
This Fall's election will be something more than a choice of who will lead us through the four years ahead, four years which thanks to Donald Trump will be much tougher than they had to be. It will be a referendum on whether or not the American people are brain dead. If we re-elect this joker it will prove conclusively that we are no longer capable of governing ourselves.
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