COVID-19 Doesn't Give a Shit

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

It doesn't give a shit. Coronavirus and its ultimate incarnation, COVID-19, is the honey badger of influenzas. It doesn't use social media, feel insulted or outraged by puerile insults from umber-faced poseurs. It has no political career or campaigns to worry about, doesn't have any financial interests at stake. It's a disease. A highly communicable, and deadly, disease. It doesn't give a shit about you or Donald Trump or his daily Justice League press conferences. It just is.

     As the old saying goes, tyrants are strong but brittle. Coronoavirus is the hammer that perfectly struck the right fault and shattered into pixie dust the false diamond of Trump's "presidency." Just the other day, Trump invisible-accordioned his hands and helplessly asked, "Who could've known this was coming?" Right before that, Trump bragged he knew coronavirus was a pandemic before anyone knew it would be a pandemic. When a reporter asked him today how he could reconcile the two and if our government's unpreparedness was a result, Trump gave a typically churlish response.

     In fact. Trump seems to think that insulting the virus, his political enemies, Democrats like Jay Inslee, the media and China will make the problem just magically evaporate. I refer you to the lead picture- This was discovered in Trump's notes today. "Corona" was crossed out and replaced with "Chinese," predictably, with a Sharpie. For good measure, Trump channeled a sliver of the boozy ghost of Joe McCarthy and accused the press of "siding with China" as he told an OANN conspiracy theorist posing as a journalist.

     Dear, constant readers, I've said it before and I'll say it again- We have no leadership at the top, especially among the Republican Party who are genetically hostile to the idea of government doing anything for the people and just as friendly to the idea that it should merely deregulate and lower the taxes of corporations. Richard Burr is the poster child for the latter day GOP in that, obviously committing insider trading, he dumped up to $1.5 million in stock after assuring the American people there was nothing to worry about (while saying the exact opposite to a select group of well-heeled North Carolinians.).

     Trump, also, has tried and is no doubt still trying to make a killing off the coronavirus pandemic in trying to buy the German pharmaceutical company tasked with finding a vaccine, kinking the supply chain of testing kits so the exclusive rights would belong to a company in which, at the very least, he'd owned stock if he still doesn't. The Republicans, obviously, are in it for themselves. Those bright little dots you see in the sky are the golden parachutes of people like Richard Burr as they float their bloated carcasses off to a palmy and comfortable quarantine.

     And perhaps we shouldn't be looking to self-absorbed political leadership and should, instead, be listening to medical and crisis management experts who aren't currently in the political grip of one Donald John Trump. As Tip O'Neil once famously said, "All politics is local." The same could be applied to pandemic responses across the globe.