Just Like Witches at Black Masses
Tag Archives: Trump
COVID-19: The New Smoking
Only in a Trump America would curing a disease widen ts spread.
I call it a Trump America because his presidency, like herpes, was apparently a permanent infection that could return at any time. His slackwittery continues to echo in the halls of Congress and the backwaters of the nation’s collective intellect.
Need proof? Just look at the country’s COVID numbers. Despite a vaccine, conservatives treat the cure like the metric system: ‘Not in my school or home, smartass college boy.”
This is what that thinking looks like.
The reaction to four million dead worldwide (two-thirds to legit genocide!) has given news outlets the vapors. Fox News suggests wrapping yourself in a flag and punching a tree for symptoms of a pandemic. CNN and MSNBC recommend fucking a celebrity.
I propose something simpler: treating COVID for what it has become, America’s new smoking.
Need proof? That, too, is in the numbers. According to the CDC, 480,000 Americans still die from smoking every year. Another 42,000 die annually from second-hand smoke.
Yet, is there an American alive today who does not know that smoking is a deadly behavior? This despite the advent of vaping, which has led to a total of 60 deaths since its creation. It suggests that people are addicted to the ritual of smoking, not the nicotine.
We are choosing to die.
It’s what this country is great at. Suicides outpace homicides every year three-to-one (about 45,000 suicides a year compared to about 15,000 murders). Approximately 100,000 people die annually in drunk driving crashes. One in 10 Americans has adult-onset diabetes.
Welcome to the Actuarial Club, COVID. You join some heavy hitters.
So let’s start treating the pandemic like other American killers: as a matter of choice, a macabre decision exacerbated by political charlatans and medical hucksters who know the cash in conspiracy. Those who roundly reject the vaccine — and the science behind it — are telling us clearly they’d rather live in flavor country.
You got it. You have that right, just as you have the right to smoke in the car with your infant strapped down. And, like your smoking, you’ll have to practice breathing in your own space. Just as we bar smokers from theaters, hospitals and nursery schools, we’ll have to separate the unvaccinated from the vaccinated.
And that couldn’t be easier. It won’t require banning a soul, castigating a fool, or suffering a moron.
Simply treat vaccinations like organ donation. Just as you can indicate that you want to be an organ donor on your driver’s license, we need the option to indicate we’ve taken the vaccine. The government needs to formally recognize vaccinations beyond the record you received that somehow is not wallet sized. Corporate America would welcome and enforce it: Unless you’re a gun shop, lethal stupidity is bad for business.
To placate critics, you’d have an opt-out choice identical to organ donation: do nothing. That’s what you’re doing anyway.
More importantly, there is an opt-in clause, which is really the only option for clarity in a Trump America, where you have the god-given right to be wrong.
So don’t worry, Gov. Ron DeSantis. No one is going to Fauci your Florida.
We have a new medical expert for you. One even Dr. Fauci would admit is more qualified to speak on the pandemic.
Say hello Dr. Charles Darwin.
Not My Party: Trump’s August Reinstatement Delusion
(From The Bulwark, which is fast becoming a must-read site, essentially a Lincoln Project of news outlets.)
Donald Trump is telling people he might be reinstated by August? Why do I have to do this? I thought we were rid of him. Can’t he just go away?
People love to say that we Never-Trumpers are obsessed with Donald.
And yeah, maybe I do spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how a racist game show host almost ended our democracy. Ya got me. But honestly I would give anything, anything for him to just go the fuck away. That way you and me, we could talk about something else. Like UFO’s. (Spooky.) Or Jokić. (MVP.) Or Olivia. (It’s a bop.) Or the infrastructure package. (Substantial.) But we can’t, because this asshole won’t let go of the ghost like every other normal, responsible political loser in history.
Look at our other recent one-term presidents. After Jimmy Carter lost, he built Habitat for Humanity houses, and started a nonprofit that basically eliminated the Guinea worm disease. Bet you didn’t know that. George H. W. Bush went skydiving and teamed up with the guy who beat him to help tsunami victims in Asia and earthquake victims in Haiti.
But helping others, not really our carrot-skinnned caudillo’s cup of tea. According to the New York Times And the conservative National Review, Trump’s been telling allies that he’s gonna be “reinstated” in August. Now this is a back bat-guano theory that he got from the seditious pillow man which is impossible unconstitutional, and frankly psychotic. He alluded to this crazy theory in a video he did for the National Republican Senate Committee. Which means that even the normal Republicans are letting him float it. Watch.
“We’re gonna take back the White House and sooner than you think.” [Trump]
Let me just be crystal clear: This is not happening. Donald Trump lost. He’s advancing this lie, the very same lie that led a mob to storm the Capitol, to make himself feel better.
“There’s a million of us out there. And we are listening to Trump. Your boss.” [Capitol rioter]
But just because Trump won’t be back in the White House soon, doesn’t mean that he won’t be tainting our politics. On Saturday in North Carolina, he put on what looked to be a diaper, and gave a rambly, boring speech re-litigating all the things he’s mad about from the past five years. The only actual pieces of news from the speech were: 1) implying he’s gonna run in 2024; and 2) revealing his endorsement in the North Carolina Senate primary. Choosing a pro-insurrection Congressman named Ted Budd—Lasso’s evil doppelgänger.
Look, the people that are actually obsessed with Trump are the Republicans running for office. They’re falling all over themselves to show their loyalty and flying to his gaudy golf clubs to beg for his support.
Ahead of this week’s New Jersey governor primary, one GOP candidate tweeted out a picture of himself in a “Trump Won” hat.
And down in Texas, my former boss’s son, George P. Bush, announced he was running for attorney general without mentioning his own dad or uncle. But the campaign did make this humiliating coozie, with a picture of George P. shaking Trump’s hand, and the quote, “the only Bush that likes me. This is the Bush that got it right.” So George P. is going all-in with a man who sent racist tweet insulting his own mother just so he can get the moniker ‘Trump’s Bush.’ . . .
Until shit like that stops, and the Republicans no longer let a twice-impeached loser who cost the party the White House and Congress dictate everything they do, the rest of us can’t just wish Trump away. Whether we like it or not.
I don’t.
