Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

This is the soundbite that may have set off a reinvigorated #FireFauci smear campaign from deranged sociopath Donald "Moron Vector" Trump and his cult on Sunday.  It's Dr. Anthony Fauci responding to being asked if mitigation efforts to stop the coronavirus had started earlier (rather than being sloughed off by Moron Vector) would have saved lives:

“I mean, obviously you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives,” Fauci told CNN this morning. “Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds of decision is complicated. But you’re right, I mean obviously, if we had right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.”

Meanwhile, the inaction and blundering by Moron Vector in the early stages of the outbreak are being catalogued on a daily basis by many news organizations, including the New York Times and Washington Post.  The evening network news broadcasts are also reporting on the timeline of incompetence, a relatively and welcome recent change.

Neil Young (no, not that one) writes about how Moron Vector's promotion of hydroxychloroquine is an encapsulation of his entire "presidency":

In the end, Trump's obsession with hydroxychloroquine is an encapsulation of his presidency: a mixture of sham and scam fueled by questionable ideas pushed by fringe outlets, all working to undermine scientific expertise and sow chaos. "So what do I know?" Trump shrugged to reporters last Sunday after he was pressed about hydroxychloroquine's potential harm to patients, especially those with heart issues.

Those five words represent the Trump presidency— and Trump himself— in a nutshell. But rather than a gracious expression of intellectual humility, they are a careless admission of the callousness and indifference at the heart of everything this president says. Nothing matters to Donald Trump but himself. And he'll sacrifice truth, expertise, and even the lives of his own people to satisfy his ego. That's a drug Trump will never put down.  (our emphasis)

That's the definition of a narcissistic sociopath.

Michael Stern on Moron Vector's existential need to remain in office:

The deadly rampage of coronavirus across the United States has pitted President Donald Trump’s self-interest in maximizing his chances of winning a second term against the safety of the American public.

When Trump leaves office, the protection that prevents a president from being criminally indicted will be gone. Even before his impeachment, legal experts found ample support for the belief that Trump would be indicted upon departing the White House. The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office has already essentially named Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator in a campaign finance fraud scheme that saw his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, sentenced to three years in prison.

This means Trump is almost certainly working overtime, figuring out how he can avoid indictment after leaving office.  (our emphasis)

Will any prosecutor actually indict?  Would Moron Vector make a deal to leave office peacefully in exchange for immunity?  Will he just load his family on Air Force One and decamp to Russia?  To coin a phrase, "So what do we know?"

Though he incorrectly places the point at which "anti- government conservatism" became ascendant (Ronald Reagan's first inaugural address anyone?), Dana Milbank arrives at the correct conclusion:

... [T]hen came the tea party, the anti-government conservatism that infected the Republican Party in 2010 and triumphed with President Trump’s election. Perhaps the best articulation of its ideology came from the anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, who once said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

They got their wish. What you see today is your government, drowning — a government that couldn’t produce a rudimentary test for coronavirus, that couldn’t contain the pandemic as other countries have done, that couldn’t produce enough ventilators for the sick or even enough face masks and gowns for health-care workers.

Now it is time to drown this disastrous philosophy in the bathtub — and with it the poisonous attitude that the government is a harmful “beast” that must be “starved.” It is not an exaggeration to say that this ideology caused the current debacle with a deliberate strategy to sabotage government.  (our emphasis)

This means defeating the Republican Party -- at every level of government -- that has supported, cosseted and enabled the incompetent, evil shitgibbon in the Oval Office, in November and beyond. We'll drink to that.

Something else we'll drink to -- expanding voting rights:

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam announced Sunday that he has signed new legislation that expands access to voting in the Commonwealth.

The new bill repeals Virginia's voter identification law, makes Election Day a state holiday, and expands access to early voting, according to a release from the office of Gov. Northam.  (our emphasis)

That should help keep Virginia blue for the foreseeable future.  Electing Democrats at the state legislature level is imperative, especially with the impact the 2020 Census will have on redistricting.

As always, we close by recommending you scamper over to Infidel 753's link round- up for a metric ton of links to interesting posts from around the Internet (we found the Michael Stern piece on Moron Vector's self- interest vs. public interest there -- you'll find much more).  What better way to pass the time staying at home?!