One thing we can say about Covid-19, it is helping to expose the shallow thinking of quite a number of world leaders, with Trump and Johnson leading the charge. Your President and my Prime Minister are just not anywhere near robust enough to be able to cope with the job in a time of national crisis. They lack substance and leadership capability. It's easy enough to bluff and bullshit your way through when things are on an even keel, but it is (another) dreadful mishap of this history we are living through, that we have these two fuckwits in charge, when the world is facing such a huge period of instability, both in public health terms and the economy. The two of them are walking, talking proof that meritocracy is unequivocal ginormous nonsense: wealth and privilege gets you access to more wealth and privilege and power no matter how evidently, belligerently thick as shit you are.

Sometimes an idiot that has been over promoted, is at least canny enough to surround themselves with intelligent, well-educated advisers. Luckily, in the UK BoJo is being led by actual experts (just on this though) and for once we are actually getting data driven, fact-based decision making out of the government. Rather novel I must say, even though they seem to have taken a rather relaxed approach to containing the virus. What do you do, though, when the chap in charge, who is allergic to facts, when they opt to surround themselves with people as inherently stupid and ignorant as they themselves are? Trump can’t bullshit his way out of what is coming down the line. He is horribly exposed and shockingly out of his depth and this is going to be felt in every community. The more visible his incompetence becomes, the more he will unravel, leading to ever increasing exposure of his ineptitude. While this is not reassuring with how the country will cope during this crisis – what it means for November is another story entirely. Hopefully.

Graphic mine

This is the thing. If they just stopped enabling him. Just said no. Stop. It would be over. Trump would still be a hideous human being, but he would be an irrelevance. They empower him. Everyone of them need to be forced everyday to face the facts about what they are doing because power is seemingly more important than everything, including democracy, to those who facilitate the horror of the Trump presidency.
As John Fowles wrote in The Magus
"I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self."
"You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.”

As Huxley said...

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

Heh. Hhhhmmm.

Trump is being given a pass on covid-19 by swing voters who only see it as a financial issue


[link:https://www.axios.com/focus-group-minnesota-coronavirus-05d3b5a2-559d-4178-9044-69d2d8866229.html|

How can anyone who is not a member of the cult look at how he has handled this crisis and still think - yeah that is the guy I am going to vote for in November. How is it possible that people so not see that level of incompetence?

[link:https://www.rawstory.com/2020/03/america-needs-to-plan-now-in-case-trump-loses-in-november-but-refuses-to-leave-the-white-house/|]

This makes for sober reading. I tend to think the way he is fucking up right now will be too much even for the soulless devils in the republican party and they will not try something like this. But, it is right to ask this question cause Trump is likely to try and squat when the electorate waves bye bye in November.

I read two things today that struck as pertinent as we witness the rapid degeneration of Trump in front of the worlds eyes.

Firstly there was a quote:
‘Hitler will remain a cautionary example for all time. If his life and career teach us anything, it is how quickly democracy can be prised from its hinges when political institutions fail and civilising forces in society are too weak to combat the lure of authoritarianism.
How thin the mantle separating civilisation and barbarism actually is; and what human beings are capable of when the rule of law and ethical norms are suspended, and some people are granted unlimited power over the lives of others.’ Volker Ullrich

I was pondering the fact that maybe we were close to passing that tipping point, or passed it altogether. I then read an article, by Peter Wehner, in the Spectator (not my normal fodder, but a link to a link etc) which said in part:

The Trump Presidency Is Over

[link:https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/peter-wehner-trump-presidency-over/607969/|]

The whole piece is worth reading. But this is thing, we all pray that Covid-19 will pass over the homes of our communities, those we love and those we care for, and some of us will be affected. That is without doubt. But if it kills off Trumpism in the course of its journey through our lives, one malignant and deadly virus killing off anther seems more than a tad appropriate to me. Every cloud has a silver lining. In this case, democracy saved! Yay.

PS. I wrote the other day that he was playing a numbers game with the virus to manipulate the election. I still think that is true. But this is a high stakes game and he has (hopefully) lost. I just hope the number of people damaged by his power play of nasty can be limited by community and state interventions.

Harsh. Stark. And oh so very true.

It is so true though... in the face of a pandemic the obsession that has taken hold over loo roll is a wonder to behold. Don't know about anyone else but the shelves in my local shop are cleared of all toilet paper by about 9 am every day. Where on earth do they put it all?

This would be correct. Of course it would require them to take the big fat racist plank out of their eye and that is rather unlikely to happen!

https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1238337071544258561



Exactly this.