And,
Outbreak in Washington State, and the first death in the US. And community spread is now a fact in Washington.
And that banging on the heels of Trump's briefing and passing us over to the compassionate and health care-experienced Mike Pence, with the admonition to have good luck. Wonder what the poxy stock market will do now!?
The entire environmental uh, anti-environmental-- paradigm of climate change denial, and with it the ugliness of "hoax! Hoax!" must surely now be seen as an existential threat to the health and safety (to say nothing of economic disruption and hardship) of all Americans. It will have to be torn out root and branch, and replanted with real good folks who have been chased away, or budgetarily axed on the whim of the president.
I have the idea that Bernie has his personnel team ready to begin the replanting. Certainly we will rejoin the Paris Accords, though I haven't watched him say so yet.
However, it is something stronger than a shame that it has taken a public health threat of this magnitude to throw into relief the need for scientists to be in position to do jobs that necessarily require scientific expertise, and for the appropriate agencies to be funded adequately.
I don't think I can overestimate the enthusiasm and desire an actual ray of hope, which Bernie Sanders does represent to an as yet indeterminate number of millions of Americans, may generate. Of course, in this post-post-modern world, in which a Kelly Ann Conway can suggest that "alternative facts" are as useful or valid as truth, and terminally bombarded with information living in an endless tidal wave Americans may be to some greater degree election-weary than ever before, decide to sit home and watch it on TV, and we all know the conventional wisdom about low national turnouts.
But I don't think so. Bernie is a pro, and will have his facts and figures together. I just licked my lips thinking about how Bernie has been waiting for just this opportunity, three debates in fact, to take Trump like a terrier worries a rat. Trump can't wave off Bernie Sanders like he did Jeb Bush in an often-showed moment from one of the Republican debates in early 2016.
By November, of course, we will all know how the coronavirus turned out. I expect that if the virus continues to spread to the point that it is called an official pandemic, and is still one of those through the second quarter and into the third, Big Business is going to bail on Trump.
But inevitably, it may take a bad-case scenario in which the virus does not stop spreading, even if the mortality rate remains, uh, "low", to truly ring people's alarms about the danger represented by a reality-show hustler with the nuclear codes, who has shown a willingness for targeted assassinations, such that they will remember his asinine reassurances of February and vote against him and any and all who support him.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).