What’s the Republican’s and Trump’s final plan to deal with the pandemic you ask?
- Ignore it, send people back to work, and declare victory.
- Brag about the tremendous job they’ve done.
- Turn it from a public health crisis into a partisan political issue.
- Use it as an excuse to further their agenda on other issues.
- Blame everyone else for it, and attack them.
- Refuse to use the government to do anything effective.
- Hand off the responsibility to others — make them scapegoats.
- Ignore the science.
- Ignore the deaths.
- Attack anyone who tries to hold them to account or asks real questions.
- Reward ‘friends’; punish ‘enemies’.
- Deny bad news; spin it as good news regardless of the truth.
- Lie, lie some more, don’t stop lying.
- Walk away.
- Refuse to admit mistakes or learn from them.
- Change the subject: create new outrages and false scandals.
- Bring up old grievances and whine about being treated unfairly.
- Embrace and encourage the ‘very fine people’.
- Spread CT and miracle cures from the fever swamp.
If this sounds like more of the same-old same-old from Trump, it’s because it’s what he does when he gets into trouble — and what the GOP has been doing for decades. It’s ‘Final’ in the sense that Trump and the GOP have nothing else. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Let it become the new normal.
Let the mainstream media internalize it and accept it, along with everything else they’ve swallowed down whole over the years.
It worked for gun violence, it’s working for the climate crisis. The rich are getting richer, white people are still in charge, the right people are dying, and that’s all that matters to Trump and the GOP.
How’s it working? From Wisconsin, via the NY Times:
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected the extension of a stay-at-home order by Gov. Tony Evers, siding with Republicans in one of most high-profile challenges of its kind to the emergency authority of a statewide official during the pandemic.
Mr. Evers, a Democrat, had extended the prohibition on most travel and operations of nonessential businesses until May 26.
But in a 4-to-3 ruling by the conservative-leaning court, it said that measure had exceeded the authority given to Wisconsin’s top health official under state law….
...Rick Esenberg, the president and general counsel of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which had filed an amicus brief siding with the Republican-held Legislature, commended the ruling.
“The court’s decision ensures that Wisconsin’s response to Covid-19 must involve both the executive and the legislative branch,” Mr. Esenberg said. “Wisconsin will be better for it. The grave nature of the pandemic cannot be used to subvert our very form of government.”
Subversion of government is a GOP monopoly. IOKIYAR.
Charles P. Pierce weighed in on this a few days ago. The Pandemic Has Laid Bare the Moral Chaos at the Heart of Modern Conservative Politics; Cruelty is the point, and the plan is to have no plan.
Long ago, Adam Serwer defined this administration*’s approach to governing perfectly. "The cruelty," Serwer wrote, "is the point." Last week, Jay Rosen added to Serwer’s observation a codicil appropriate to our present moment. The plan, Rosen wrote, is to have no plan. If cruelty is the point, then to have no plan during a public-health crisis is very much to the point. And this astounding lack of humanity has deep roots in modern conservatism. If your political success is based on Othering one slice of the population to energize another, your basic moral ballast drains away by degrees. It is not that much of a stretch from the current administration’s lack of a plan to the Reagan administration’s unforgivably dilatory response to the AIDS epidemic. The through-line is that diseases are killing all the right people…
Pierce has example after example of all this being put to practice, and concludes with this:
...The pandemic has laid bare the moral chaos at the heart of modern conservative politics. They depend, always, on the existence and/or the creation of what epidemiologists call “subject populations.” Except, in this case, the subject populations always are considered in many ways expendable. It’s about ignoring all the right people. Immiserating all the right people. And now, again, as was the case in the 1980s, when AIDS was burning through the subject populations, killing all the right people.
This will last as long as we permit it to go on. Remember in November.
UPDATE: Matt Shuham at Talking Points Memo has been digging through The Federalist, which has started arguing that death isn’t the worst thing that could happen.
This isn’t a fringe blog. The Federalist, though frequently a platform for the off-color and unscientific, is also read by those in power. A spokesperson for Republicans on the House Oversight committee, for example, lauded an article last month on “How Cowardice and Class Privilege Shift Support For Lockdowns.” And members of Congress often publish Federalist op-eds. A five-word blog post from Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) on Friday captures the message of many of them: “We were right about everything,” the congressman wrote. President Donald Trump has boosted that post and several others from the site to his millions of Twitter followers. And popular conservative voices like talk show host Mark Levin regularly spread The Federalist around.
The links in Shuham’s report are alarming. It’s not a big step from this to worse, much worse. “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”