This president's amazingly incompetent response to the Covid-19 virus pandemic was to be expected because he is simply an ignorant and incompetent con artist who conned conservatives into making him their leader. Why is still quite a mystery to me, but it has something to do with his ability to speak to their rage at liberals. More about that rage in later posts, not here today.
But, it is very clear to me that America's slow response to the pandemic is caused by the stripping of the Center for Disease Control of budget and expertise. (He ridiculously blames Obama of course, he always blames, blames, blames, not a mark of a leader is it?) That gutting of the CDC is part of the systematic passions of the Tea Party - to shrink the government and make it disappear. Sounds nice to some of my conservative friends, but once you find out what shrinking the government means you find out that it means stripping away the expertise that makes America safe and makes America great.
Trump and the Tea Party have gleefully driven scientists and experts of all form out of the government. In Trump's case it is a matter of his own ignorance and stupidity. In the Tea Party's case it is a matter of wrong headed ideology.
One of the terrible outcomes of this tragic pandemic is that we can all see how needed expertise of doctors, scientists, and other experts are for our safety and well being.
I deeply hope and pray that America is able to spread out the incidences of severe virus diseases so that our hospitals and emergency care centers are able to handle the influx that is about to happen - slowly and manageably, I hope. Italy was not able to do that and they are having to Triage patients - i.e. choosing which will have to die and which will be able to live. We do this with plenty of warning ahead of time to inconvenience our normal lives and keep our social distance to try to slow the spread of this disease.
As best as I can read at this point, one of five infected by this disease will need to be hospitalized. I hope that is an alarmist exaggeration, but the countries in the grips of the pandemic now are seeing these kinds of numbers, as I understand it.
The Left Wing authoritarian country of China tried to tell everybody that the disease wasn't all that bad, and then the pandemic hit and proved them tragically wrong.
The Right Wing authoritarian country of Italy tried to tell everybody that the disease wasn't all that bad, and then the pandemic hit and proved them tragically wrong.
The Theocratic authoritarian country of Iran probably did much the same and satellite photos show that they have dug two massive trenches about the size of football fields to dump the bodies taken by this pandemic.
This pandemic has not seemed very real to me, and I think to most Americans, up to now because we just aren't seeing it here, and because this president and his sycophantic right wing media bubble have tried to tell their followers that there is nothing really that bad about this virus. They lie. I hope that about four out of five who get this disease will have fairly mild and manageable symptoms. But one in five will have a real problem. And about 3% or so die.
Back before Trump and the Tea Party, America would have been the leader of the world in responding to this pandemic. Now we have a Chinese billionaire donating a million masks and half a million testing kits to America. Thank you, very gratefully for the help.
It is not just Trump. It is the Tea Party too. They have and are continuing to strip the government of needed expertise. Why? They want lower taxes? Really? Not a lot of foresight, wisdom, or compassion in that ideology, it seems to me.
