It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.
-Ayn Rand
Monday, Viceroy Donald Trump had another one of his press briefings, which are clearly less a means of informing the public on coronavirus and more a weak substitute for the redcap rallies where he gets to chew out the press and other cosmopolitans who want to destroy Real America. It doesn’t work as well, because he doesn’t have a crowd, and while the press themselves are allowed to practice social distancing (which means less reporters in the scrum, which I’m sure Trump thinks is a feature and not a bug) Trump has Mike Pence, Deborah Birx, Anthony Fauci and whoever else he can rope in standing with him on the same stage, against the rules of social distancing, which kind of undermines the idea that he takes it seriously.
And what I saw on Monday makes it that much more clear how Donald Trump bankrupted at least four Atlantic City casinos: he would be a TERRIBLE poker player. The transcript reveals several tells: “I want Americans to know that we will get through this challenge, the hardship will end, it will end soon, normal life will return and our economy will rebound very, very strongly”,
“We also have a large team working on what the next steps will be once the medical community gives a region the okay — meaning the okay to get going, to get back; let’s go to work. Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this. It was not built to be shut down.”
“This was a medical problem. We are not going to let it turn into a long-lasting financial problem. It started out as a purely medical problem, and it’s not going to go beyond that. We’re just not going to allow that to happen.”
And, “Our country was at its strongest financial point. We’ve never had an economy like we had just a few weeks ago, and then it got hit with something that nobody could have ever thought possible. And we are fixing it. We’re fixing it quickly. And I want to just thank the American people for what they’ve been through and what they’re doing. Our country will be stronger than ever before, and we fully anticipate that. And it won’t be that long.”
The tells are that much more obvious in the video, but I won’t ask anyone else to subject themselves to Trump and his Whiny Mafioso With Sleep Apnea voice. But the point is, that wonderful economy Trumpniks have been crowing about makes him invincible (as far as they’re concerned), and without it, he is going through actual physical withdrawal.
I saw an entry on Quora asking what Trump’s real coronavirus notes would be if he’d written them in Sharpie, and I responded “PLEASE BRING THE ECONOMY BACK PLEASE RE-ELECT ME PLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEASE I’M TOO PRETTY FOR JAIL”.
So now the plan – if “plan” can be used in association with Donald Trump – is for the economy to be restarted by Easter. This makes sense. Easter is when we celebrate a man coming back from the dead through faith. And since Trump is (for the sake of his job) a professional Christian, he is asking America to test that theory.
In the meantime, the joint Congress managed to pass an $8 billion dollar aid package (no thanks to one Senator – see below), and everyone’s time in Washington has been taken up with trying to create a large-scale “stimulus” plan that is less about stimulating the economy than about keeping people (and businesses) afloat while they’re not allowed to work. And as desperate as they are, Republicans still wanted to gum up the works. Before the Senate passed the stimulus on Wednesday night with a unanimous vote, the Senate defeated an amendment by Sen. Ben Sasse (BR-Nebraska) that would have limited unemployment benefits. At the same time they complained of the features that Democrats wanted to insert, such as providing stronger unemployment benefits than are otherwise available, considering it isn’t the workers’ or even employers’ fault that people are unemployed. There were plenty of Facebook conservatives wailing over real (riders for increased environmental standards for airlines) and fake (funding of abortion) obstacles that Democrats had created to stop passage of the Senate bill, including Nancy Pelosi’s announcement of a separate House bill against the Senate one. As it turned out, much of Democrats’ objection was to a $500 billion “Exchange Stabilization Fund” that the Republican majority had written into the Senate bill, which is totally at the discretion of Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin. Despite everyone (including Trump) being publicly against bailed-out companies being able to use their money for stock buybacks (like they did in the last financial crisis), the language also allows Mnuchin to withhold the names of the companies who do get money for up to six months. And when asked who would be the oversight, especially since his own companies would be eligible, Trump said, “I’ll be the oversight” – which made exactly one person in the room feel better.
As a New Republic article points out,
“In its design, and in the panicky desperation to pass it without argument, the bill resembled a repeat of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, crafted by people who thought the problem with the original TARP was that it included far too much oversight and transparency.”
The Democrats let the Bush Republicans buffalo them with a lot of shit after 9-11, because “In this national crisis, we must all put aside our differences and work together in support of Our President”. It would seem that even Democrats can learn from experience, although again this remains to be seen.
The fact of the matter is, it doesn’t matter if you love the Democrats, you hate the Democrats, or you’re a leftist who thinks that Democrats ought to have put Mitch McConnell’s head on a pike, collectivized the farms, nationalized McDonald’s and turned it vegan. The fact is, the Democrats can only do so much because Mitch McConnell knows the Senate rules and he has the majority. And the reason that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer can actually twist his arm, why Democrats have forced more than one vote since Sunday, why Bernie Sanders was able to push Wednesday to re-insert jobless benefits and why McConnell can’t just pull his usual Fuck You maneuver of forcing a party-line vote that he will always win, is because he no longer really has a majority.
And that is because some of the Republican Senators could not be present on the floor. Why was that? Well, mostly because Senator Rand Paul (BR.-Kentucky) found out he was positive for coronavirus after having himself tested last week. But between getting tested and getting the diagnosis on Sunday, Paul refused to practice social distancing and continued to use the Senate gym and pool. He did say “I believe we need more testing immediately, even among those without symptoms. … The nature of COVID-19 put me – and us all – in a Catch-22 situation. … For those who want to criticize me for lack of quarantine, realize that if the rules on testing had been followed to a tee, I would never have been tested and would still be walking around the halls of the Capitol.” And he topped off by saying, “Perhaps it is too much to ask that we simply have compassion for our fellow Americans who are sick or fearful of becoming so.” And yet before this weekend, Rand Paul was the only Senator to vote against the initial aid package that has since been agreed to in both Houses and signed by Trump.
Thing is, because of Paul’s behavior between testing and diagnosis, other Republican Senators, including Mike Lee of Utah and Mitt Romney of Utah felt obliged to enter self-quarantine (despite being asymptomatic themselves) to avoid further spread. By Tuesday there were four Republicans missing the Senate for this reason – so Mitch no longer has his floor majority.
So now, even Republicans are saying: Fuck You, Rand Paul.
That’s what happens when you pretend this shit isn’t real. It has consequences. And Rand Paul is going to have to practice social distancing from his fellow Republicans for the forseeable future.
As in, AFTER he recovers from the virus.
But like it matters, because it is still easier for Republicans to find consensus with Democrats on an economic package than for non-Republicans to agree with the new foist that we can declare the crsis over with by presidential decree. There are two factors here that Banana Republicans don’t want to address. One, based on the exposure we’ve seen thus far, if we lift the state-by-state restrictions we do have, the virus WILL recur or spread to areas where it has not already. We need a serious nationwide regimen of testing to see who’s got the virus, and we don’t have that right now, because SOMEBODY didn’t think it was important. So we’ve got to make up for time that we don’t have.
The second issue is that because the virus did come from outside this country, and ravaged China, Iran and Europe before us, even if we lift restrictions and even IF we had testing and treatments available (which we don’t), the other parts of the world are still trying to contain the virus. So even if King Donnie, The First of His Name could wave his royal scepter and decree that the coronavirus crisis is over in America, the global economy is still fucked.
I mean, all the professional Christians have told us that playing Dungeons & Dragons is corrupting and destroys your sense of reality, but they’re the ones living in a fantasy world. We’re living in the real world. And in the real world, Clerics don’t have cure disease spells.
And this is the other reason Trump is so desperate and scared, because it’s becoming clear that the magic power of bullshit doesn’t work on coronavirus. You cannot bullshit or bully a virus. You cannot hand your lawyer a check and tell him to give the check to the virus so it will go away and not testify against you. Reality exists, regardless of human perception. Who knew?
And yet, if reality doesn’t conform to their fantasy, Trumpniks will do what Trumpniks do and carry on regardless. It has now made national news that “pro-life” Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has endorsed old folks dying from exposure to the coronavirus if that’s what it takes to get the economy back, telling Tucker Carlson on Fox News, “Those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country”. This line has since been pushed by other Fox people, such as Brit Hume, commenting on Patrick’s remarks saying “The utter collapse of the country’s economy — which many think will happen if this goes on much longer — is an intolerable result”. And this might just be a coincidence, but Trump’s stance on virus control changed from working with Dr. Fauci to pushing for a return to normal by Easter after he realized how much money he was going to lose by keeping his resorts closed.
I have a Facebook friend who works (or did work) at one of the Strip casinos, and he talked to me on Wednesday about how pissed he was at his Mom and her new husband because they’re both Trump fanatics going along with the new politically correct dogma, and he said basically “Its just insulting thinking I need to keep making shit money while legit risking my health… (Mom’s) husband thinks we are a bunch of pussies. My mom hopes everyone goes back to work on Easter. They have no authority, that isn’t my point, my point is their shit opinions (are) making me dislike them cause they don’t give a fuck about our health”.
We’re getting to that scene in Jojo Rabbit where the Nazis are drafting 12-year olds and senior citizens and giving them hunting rifles and Panzerfausts to stop the Allies, cause there’s no more Jews or Communists for the government to blame.
Because just as Germany (sort of) survived the death of Nazism, the threat that Trump and his people care about is not the death of individuals. It’s the death of their system.
It goes back to what I’ve said about being a libertarian as opposed to a collectivist: A government is a creation of individuals. It is an empty set without its constituents. A government cannot exist without people. The people CAN exist without a government. Yes, they would exist on the level of cavemen and wolves, but they would exist. And if the liberals need to be told that their favorite system of government is not a priori and inherent, that it is the product of consensus agreement and subject to change, then libertarians and “conservatives” need to understand that what we’re calling capitalism is likewise not an inherent condition but is an agreed-to situation and subject to change.
And while libertarians are pointing out that a lot of our budgeting and regulations are largely makework for bureaucrats, and that if we need to dispense with these things in an emergency, we probably never needed them in the first place, liberals and socialists are pointing out that our lack of health care and sick leave is inadequate for emergencies, because they were inadequate for everyday needs in the first place.
Isn’t the common thread that THE WHOLE FUCKING SYSTEM IS BULLSHIT and is not working for everybody?
Isn’t it true that so much of what we think of as “normal” is written up to serve the priorities of administrative classes, in both the public and private sectors, and now that we have (however haphazardly) been obliged to go without “normal”, we are starting to discover that we can survive without it?
And isn’t it obvious that the people squealing most loudly for “normal” to come back are the political-media complex that now controls both Big Business and Big Government? And that public health is NOT their first priority?
The elites aren’t afraid of the Constitution, or elections, because they’ve got that system sewn up on both ends. But they’re relying on capitalism to save them, and the irony is that it will save the public, because that is the last area where we have serious choices that affect the Powers That Be.
Right now, negative action – not participating in the economy – is causing more of a scare to the donor class than voting for Democrats. Those people are learning that WE are learning that they need us more than we need them. The people who are engaging in social distancing have a potential to create real change and have their demands heard, especially since the people who insist that this is no big deal are the most likely to take themselves out through exposure to the virus. And the fewer of them there are, the weaker they will be politically. To survive, they have to participate in the same safety measures as everyone else. And if they want to go out shopping again – why force them not to? Where are they going to shop? If they want us to go back to our workplaces when even our own bosses say it’s a bad idea – how do they force us?
Suppose they brought back the economy and nobody came?
Stay the course. And flatten the curve.