I take no pleasure in writing this, but it’s about time that those who are so convinced that serious journalism comprises only hacks and liars, just shut up. That includes the president, and all those who have sworn fealty to him.
Last week I blogged about the then coming crisis—coming since January for anyone paying attention. One of those attentive people was not the president, and another was not the person who suggested I get a grip...that “the numbers don't lie......over 69,000 US citizens died of the common flu last year......We are no where (sic) close to that with covid19.......that's why I said 'Get a grip.'"
That suggestion/response evinced a lot of, well, let’s be charitable and call it discussion. As usual criticism makes me go back and rethink my position. And it bothered me because I usually try to avoid ad hominem arguments and stick to the truth as I know it. I can always be wrong. But all this occurred before the president “found religion” and stopped openly avowing that this was the flu and that numbers don’t lie.
Get a grip? Full disclosure, I’ve lost my grip a few times in my life—sometimes playing tennis, sometimes just being. I’m not proud of any of those ungrippings, but I think I pretty much have a grip these days and was surprised to learn I didn’t. The person who advised regripping cited an article in the Capitolist—a news “source” with which I was not familiar, but have come to find out deals primarily with how to make money, how to make more, and then how to make more than that. If you hark back to Trump’s Easter promise, it was all about getting businesses up and running in what would be now a week and a half. That is apparently the Capitolist philosophy in synopsis.
The March 25 article, with the fetching lede "Florida posts fourth straight day of flat COVID-19 case growth. Is the curve already bending?" seemed to give credence to Florida governor Rick DeSantis’s decision not to shut down the state. In fact, the apparent epidemiological expert who penned this piece of investigative journalism, i.e., not a mainstream hack, said this: "The low case numbers have almost certainly underpinned Governor Ron DeSantis‘s steadfast resistance to Democrat demands that he push the panic button and lock down the state."
Really? Steadfast resistance? Panic button? Why don't we agree to call it what it is: murder. And if 70-plus years of television viewing has taught me anything, it’s that you can’t have murder without means, motive, and opportunity. In this case the motive eclipses everything else—an admiration for the president so profound in this governor that it was worth sacrificing what appears to be—in Florida anyway—5,568 citizens dead by early August—136 deaths a day at the pandemic's peak in May. Of course the Capitolist may dispute these figures, and I'd be thrilled to be wrong, but my figures are the ones the White House is now using—at long last and too damn late since we're now talking blithely about more than 100,000 and perhaps as many as a quarter million deaths nationwide.
Yes, more than the flu.
So to my readers who insist on getting their health information from the Capitolist, from Hannity, from Limbaugh, and from Rick DeSantis, time to face facts, and not the alternative kind. The sycophants' blind devotion to their president is costing lives at a frightening rate, and it's just beginning. Moreover, the delays we encountered while these media "truth tellers" spewed their instinctive sagacity and gut wisdom lead the list of reasons why we are where we are. (If you can tolerate their palaver, listen to these media Solomons today, rewriting their own statements as if they were never uttered aloud, blaming Obama, blaming the impeachment, blaming everyone and everything but their own ignorance and their own need to maintain listeners and ingratiate themselves to the president)
Even worse, what is DeSantis's punishment for his crime against humanity? More medical supplies than he asked for, while Massachusetts and New York and other besieged states go begging. But then DeSantis has a friend at the White House, someone as ignorant and callous as he is. Funny though, another of Trump's friends, Patriots owner Robert Kraft, had no trouble circumvcenting the president and getting masks for Massachusetts health care workers.)
Yesterday an editorial writer in the Boston Globe, agonizing over shortages of medical supplies in Massachusetts hospitals, stated bluntly that the president has blood on his hands. It was an opinion piece, but the accused does have the means, motive, and opportunity: he even has accomplices at the state level.
I think—I hope—the truth is beginning to win out. At what cost the delay, we won't know for months.
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