QOTD -- The *Only* Election Story

 

Brian Klaas writes about the need to amplify the unhinged, dangerous musings of the Malignant Loser, rather than ignore them.  A brief excerpt:

...On Friday night, Donald Trump gave a chillingly dark speech which few Americans know about.

He pledged to get tough on crime by executing people for petty crimes like shoplifting.

He joked about Paul Pelosi, the elderly husband of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who was nearly beaten to death by a MAGA conspiracist who bludgeoned Pelosi’s skull with a hammer. (The baying crowd found Trump’s joke hilarious, laughing with glee at the prospect of an innocent elderly man nearly being assassinated).

Then, showing his intellectual acumen and flashing his firm grip on reality, Trump told the California crowd that he had an ingenious plan for fighting forest fires which involved…watering the forests so that the ground would be damp. (This is an additional strategy beyond his plan to “rake the forests,” which he previously suggested; American forests cover 800 million acres of land)...

He concludes with his reasoning for covering the Malignant Loser's violent rhetoric:

Bombarded by a constant stream of deranged authoritarian extremism from a man who might soon return to the presidency, we’ve lost all sense of scale and perspective. But neither the American press nor the public can afford to be lulled. The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.

It's beyond the point now when ignoring the Malignant Loser will diminish him.  Whether or not his violent, addled rhetoric is covered, there will be MAGAts out there who will act on it.  That genie has been out of the bottle for some time.  The important thing now is to not be "lulled," but to be demonstrating over and over again what an unfit, damaged, existential danger the Malignant Loser poses to all of us.  That really is the only story of the 2024 election.

BONUS:  Check out these clips.

QOTD: "Failure Of Trumpian Mismanagement"

"As the rest of the world battles the coronavirus, President Trump is battling scientists. He is now taking aim at Anthony S. Fauci, who recently said: 'When you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not.'

Trump is angry because Fauci is describing reality. And the reality is this: Trump’s response to the pandemic, measured against the efforts of other developed countries, has been an unmitigated disaster. [snip]

On Sunday, Britain recorded 650 new cases of covid-19. Japan recorded 373. Germany had 138. And South Korea, a model in handling the outbreak, identified just 44. Add those four numbers up and you get 1,205 new confirmed cases. The populations of those countries put together is roughly identical to the population of the United States.

And yet, Sunday, the United States recorded 58,349 new cases — by far the highest number in the world. Compared with those peer countries with a similar combined population, the new caseload in the United States is roughly 50 times worse. [snip]

America is a rich country with low population density. While South Koreans are packed together with 529 people per square kilometer and Britain has 275, the United States has just 36. Arizona, which has one of the worst state outbreaks, has just 23 people per square kilometer. Those differences make physical distancing easier. Moreover, the dominance of car culture in the United States makes it easier to avoid crowded public transportation. And yet, due to an epic failure of Trumpian mismanagement, those advantages were squandered."  (our emphasis)  -- Brian Klaas, writing today in the Washington Post.

Klass gives a detailed comparison / contrast of the U.S. response to the pandemic with other developed nations, and the devastating contrast points to one conclusion: that mentally unstable con man Donald "COVID Donnie" Trump, in placing his political fortunes above the nation's health, has created an avoidable public health disaster.