A recent profile in the New Yorker of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell quoted a staffer as claiming that behind closed doors McConnell has described Trump as "nuts." Democrats should demand to know if the Republican Senate mastermind truly believes that the president is impaired, and force McConnell to choose between yet more lies and the future of his country.
Democrats should also get over their concerns about angering Trump supporters. Anyone who continues to applaud Trump's weird and reckless disregard for humanity at this point is beyond the limit of rational persuasion. Trump supporters live in a hallucinatory dreamscape under the authority of a maniac. Let them have their anti-social distancing rallies, and allow them to believe that Barack Obama invented COVID-19 shortly after he was born in Kenya.
Rational Americans need to stop enabling this abusive and deranged presidency. Declare Donald Trump insane and, at long last, bring an end to our era of malignant normality.
Trump's lies are so brazen that it is now common for politicians and the media to talk about him lying, a word that would not have been used in days gone by but replaced by euphemisms. Is it only a matter of time before they start openly questioning his sanity instead of just whispering it behind closed doors? – Mano Singham/Freethought Blogs
…if we were told (not that they actually would, of course) that all those fragments were on a direct collision course with Earth, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised.
"So, You Never Really Were 'Pro-Life," Were You?" from John Pavlovitz:
Photo by Alyson McClaran/@McClaranAlyson
We can say it now, can't we?
I mean, at this point it isn't really up for debate, is it?
You can come clean now, fess up, and drop the facade:
You never really werepro-life, were you?
It's okay, we suspected as much.
We suspected that you weren't really burdened to protect humanity, as you cheered while families were separated at the border, as you ignored yet another bloody school shooting, as you applauded the dismantling of our healthcare system, as you turned away exhausted refugees, as you laughed during his anti-immigrant rally rants.We figured that outside of gun owners and white embryos, that you really weren't in this to defend the living.
But now, it's all out in the open isn't it, friend?
When you're stopping traffic filled with ambulances and delivery trucks, and protesting wellness protections designed to keep people from getting sick and dying, and standing opposite nurses in face masks who are literally keeping people breathing—you're showing your hand.
For all your wild histrionics and your raw-throated rally cries and your garment-rending sermons and all your impassioned social media posts about the sanctity of life—here you are in the middle of a raging pandemic, packed together like lemmings, ignoring distancing of any kind, harassing essential workers, and demanding to be allowed to infect yourselves and others—while without a trace of irony, screaming "My body, my choice!"
You're complaining about your greying roots and your cabin fever and your bored kids, while 41,000 Americans have died, three quarters of a million are sick, and thousands are currently battling to win a fight for their lives, flanked by the very selfless caregivers whose work you are actively undoing.
Don't you think that's a little ridiculous as a supposed pro-life human being?
I don't suppose you can see it. I guess that's how hypocrisy works. I suppose that's what cults do to people. Honestly, it must be hard keeping up with his mental instability. I imagine you're so confused by your allegiance to a serial liar, that this disconnect is invisible to you.
I'm sure it's exhausting trying to keep up withwhoandwhatyou're supposed to be outraged by.
For weeks it was the Dems for perpetuating an elaborate hoax, then it was the liberal media for exaggerating the threat, then it was at China for supposedly hiding a deadly pandemic that he said he'd warned you about from the beginning, then it was Barack Obama for…well, forsomething.
And now?Now, you're being told to be outraged by the efforts of doctors, scientists, informed governors, and trained professionals—to not make more people gravely ill.Now, you're being prodded by your president to see human beings as acceptable loses in the righteous cause of capitalism.
(I don't suppose you want to hear what Jesus says about all that, do you?No, I wouldn't either.)
You've always claimed to be so burdened because 4 people died in Benghazi.That was your go-to "pro-life" Hillary slur.41,000 Americans have now died, and you're out here yelling at nurses.Donald Trump is a 10,000 Benghazi presidentand you're still full-on MAGA and demanding you be allowed to go to the nail salon and the beach.
I think that's the moral pickle you're in, friend: you want to be pro-Trump and pro-life, and those two things are mutually exclusive—because the former has no regard for the latter.
If he cared about life, he would have spoken the truth back in January or February or March. If he cared about life, he'd have offered words of encouragement to the families of the dead instead of touting his cable TV ratings. If he cared about life, he start using his daily press briefings to actually brief the press; to let experts speak and perpetuate truth, instead of whining about his mistreatment, prescribing medicine, berating journalists, and begging for kudos. If he cared about life, he'd get off Twitter and do some learning and some listening and decide to make decisions for diverse human beings and not his FoxNews poll numbers.
But this isn't about him—this is about you.
You're the supposed pro-life Christian, here.
You're also an adult human being, with a brain and free will, and you are making choices in these days that declare what you value.
772,000 people are sick.I'm pro, their lives. 41,000 have died.I'm pro the lives of their families and loved ones. Hundreds of thousands are immunocompromised, and this illness would likely be a death sentence for them.I'm pro, their lives. Hundreds of thousands could be carrying or exposed to the virus by recklessness now.I'm pro those lives, too.
I'm going to contend that if you are standing in defiant, middle finger opposition to doctors and nurses and science, and protections placed there to keep you and others from being brutalized by a virus and taken too soon—that you're not really fighting for life.
We've been here before, you know, and clearly, we have learned nothing.
Picture it. America, 1918. The first World War was winding down and officials across the country were under enormous pressure to sell war bonds. But how do you attract attention to your bonds? Hold a parade in major cities to rally the public behind the war bond effort.
Trouble is, or was, America was in the throes of a pandemic—the Spanish Flu—and people were dying all over the place; when it was all said and done 675,000 Americans died of the Spanish Flu—50 million people globally—compared to 116,708 Americans killed in World War I.
Doctors were at a loss as to what to recommend to their patients; many urged people to avoid crowded places or simply other people, and also told people to keep their mouths and noses covered in public.
Sounds vaguely familiar, no? That September 1918, in Philadelphia, 600 sailors and 47 civilians had been diagnosed with the flu, and some had already perished. But, hey, there were bonds to sell the fund the war, and on September 28, 1918, Philadelphia held a parade to sell war bonds.
On the 28th, a line of Boy Scouts, marching bands, women's auxiliary groups, and troops 2 miles long wound its way up Broad Street in front of a crowd of over 200,000 people. Within three days, every bed in Philadelphia's 31 hospitals was occupied. Within a week, 45,000 citizens were infected, and the entire city had shut down. By the second week in November, 12,000 Philadelphians were dead, and the phrase "bodies stacked like cordwood" had become commonplace among the survivors. Within six months, 16,000 were dead, and 500,000 Philadelphians had fallen ill with the flu.
Now, I don't wanna bash Philadelphia, because that wasn't the only city to hold a parade or to urge citizens to come out in droves and mingle with one another, but …
Take Milwaukee, for example; they had the lowest death rate of any large city in America during the pandemic, because the city's health commissioner, Dr. George Ruhland, had ordered schools closed, saloons and public spaces shut down, and told people to stay home.
And yet here we are again, in the midst of a pandemic where we are told that social distancing, self-isolating, will stop the spread of COVID-19 and we have not learned one goddamned thing.
What would it look like to approach Saturn in a spacecraft? One doesn't have to just imagine—the Cassini spacecraft did just this in 2004, recording thousands of images along the way, and hundreds of thousands more since entering orbit. Some of Cassini's early images have been digitally tweaked, cropped, and compiled into the featured inspiring video which is part of a larger developing IMAX movie project named In Saturn's Rings. In the concluding sequence, Saturn looms increasingly large on approach as cloudy Titan swoops below. With Saturn whirling around in the background, Cassini is next depicted flying over Mimas, with large Herschel Crater clearly visible. Saturn's majestic rings then take over the show as Cassini crosses Saturn's thin ring plane. Dark shadows of the ring appear on Saturn itself. Finally, the enigmatic ice-geyser moon Enceladus appears in the distance and then is approached just as the video clip ends. After more than a decade of exploration and discovery, the Cassini spacecraft ran low on fuel in 2017 was directed to enter Saturn's atmosphere, where it surely melted.
And I will never see another craft visit Saturn in my lifetime. This was truly a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.
Being a cancer survivor, I'd always believed that I could handle pretty much anything life was going to throw at me after that ordeal. Yes, it completely upended my life in ways that wouldn't be immediately obvious for years, but as I've written several times before, I came through it a better person than I had been going in.
That's why the current COVID-19 pandemic has thrown me for a loop. I'm not handling it well. The quarantine, the lifestyle changes came fast and furious and I was not mentally prepared for this nearly as much as I'd believed I would be when all this started last month.
Yeah, I'm adapting, but it's not pretty. I'm swinging from emotional highs to lows on an almost daily basis; something I most certainly do not remember going through seventeen years ago. Today, after getting up to let the dogs out and feed them, I went back to bed and slept—if you could call it that—until nearly 11. When I finally got moving, Ben and I headed out in search of lunch, settling on take-out from Chili's. We pulled into a shady spot after picking up the food, but it became quickly apparent that eating in the car wasn't going to work. We deemed to take it home, knowing full well the fries would be mush by the time we got there.
This was a minor inconvenience, but it was also one. more. thing. assaulting my already frazzled emotional state. I apologized to Ben for my distance today, and he asked what's wrong. "Everything," I said. "Just everything."
We got home, tossed the fries in the toaster oven, and even though we had selected a conservative time and temp to reheat them, they ended up burning.
I didn't openly cry, but I was stifling the feelings of absolute helplessness welling up inside me, and I realized just how different this is from what I'd gone through while battling cancer.
In 2003, all I had to concern myself with was the cancer; I could focus all my attention on wiping it from my body. Sure, I'd simultaneously lost my job—that ironically allowed me to qualify for Medicaid and have all my medical expenses covered—and was scraping by on unemployment insurance and the kindness of friends and family, but not even that caused the level of anxiety and the helplessness I'm feeling right now.
And that's because I knew my care was in good hands; I had competent people guiding my treatment and recovery.
The US in 2020 has no competent people in charge. As Karen Black famously screamed in Airplane 1975, "There's no one flying the plane!" And if anything, the people in the highest echelons of government seem to be going out of their way to burn the country to the ground. The abject ignorance, selfishness, and insouciance displayed by the Orange Caligula's followers is even more alarming. If they were only going to infect themselves and die off I'd be happy to be rid of them, but their callous, uncaring attitude is going to end up killing a lot more people than just their red-hat wearing bretheren.
AND THIS DIDN'T HAVE TO HAPPEN! If we didn't have a narcissistic sociopath occupying the Oval Office, this would not have happened.
And there's nothing I can do about it until November. The 25th Amendment will never be invoked; the Republican Senate will never impeach the bastard. He literally could stand in the middle of Fidth Avenue and shoot someone and get away with it as he so famously bragged. This is why I'm feeling so helpless right now.
The infection curve was starting to flatten, but because of these knuckle-dragging Trumpsters demanding that the country open back up, we're probably looking at an even longer lockdown that we were facing before. (And BTW, have you noticed how many of these assholes are wearing masks to these protests? If the virus isn't a threat any longer, why do you need masks?)
The level of cognitive dissonance is off the charts.
I'm so thankful that Ben and I are together at this point in history to give each other the distance, or the encouragement, or the hugs we both need when we need them during this insanity.
I take some solace in knowing I'm far from being the only one experiencing these emotions right now, and the optimist in me is telling me we'll make it through this, but it doesn't do much for days like today when I just can't.
UPDATE: After initially posting this I was nodding off at my desk and that, combined with the deep funk I was in lead to an afternoon-long nap with the doggies. While not a perfect cure, it definitely helped on many levels and I'm feeling much better now.
I am so happy you are proud of me, although I don't know what for. I am just surviving.
