Leading by example, right into perdition.

The short lived TV show, Designated Survivor, was based on a wild premise: that every member of Congress, the president and vice-president, and every cabinet member was stuffed into the Capitol for the State of the Union Address when a bomb killed everyone inside. Everyone! Well, not quite: one person was left out, sequestered someplace safe to run the country in case, you know, a bomb wiped out…yadda yadda yadda.

Now we have the coronavirus rampaging through the land, and we have experts warning against close contacts and suggesting a three-foot or greater distancing between people, and yet we have this memento of the signing yesterday of the $2 trillion bailout bill:

A "safe distance" is apparently for drivers, not "pedestrians."

That expression "you couldn't make it up" has seen better days, but let me use it once more before I retire it: you couldn't make it up. The president also handed out pens afterwards, taking one from the pile and handing it to each victim, er, participant. Okay more time—you couldn’t make it up.

Trump thought it was funny not to invite Nancy Pelosi or any other Democrat to participate in this momentous event. Thanks for that.

Making this even more ludicrous is that the combined age of the people in that picture is about one million, give or take.

These folks will probably survive, and when they do (and I hope they do) they'll laugh at all of us who self-isolated and maintained safe distances and disinfected door knobs and washed our hands every time a car went by with a coughing passenger inside. And they’ll never thank us for our vigilance, though it was we who followed the rules so that other rule breakers might have a better chance.

Most of my readers are doing their best to follow CDC guidelines. Thank you. Now as a special treat today (it's the weekend!) total up all the lives you may have saved by doing right these past few weeks. Include yourself. Then salute yourself—maybe a toast with your favorite beverage. And please, one toast for all the lives; if you toast each life individually, you'll run out of...um...toasting stuff—and that could create a problem more insurmountable than simple isolation.

Salut!