Soph0571
Soph0571's JournalYour President and my Prime Minister are just not anywhere near robust enough to be able to cope...
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.
Trump is not the biggest problem
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.”
This is genius: Huxley v Orwell
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.
THE STUPID. It Burns.
Trump is being given a pass on covid-19 by swing voters who only see it as a financial issue-----------
I think he has a limited impact on the economy as a whole, especially in the world economy. So I think coronavirus is a temporary thing. It’s not going to affect anything long term, and it wouldn’t affect my decision of voting for him or not.
At this point I think I’ll put my trust in him that he will get us out of it
[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?
America needs to plan now in case Trump loses in November -- but refuses to leave the White House
It’s keeping historians and constitutional scholars up at night and, based on offline conversations I’ve had with D.C. conservatives I know, is something the GOP and partisans within the Trump administration are already discussing.
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The GOP has done this before, an action that included multiple threats of violence and bloodshed on the floor of Congress, leading Democrats to cave in even though their candidate won the popular vote and had 22 more electoral votes than the Republican (who became president).
Additionally, the Constitution says that if a presidential election really turns into a mess with multiple claims of fraud or some other crisis, the president is selected by the U.S. House of Representatives.
While that sounds like good news, with Democrats controlling the House today, each state’s delegation only gets one vote—50 votes from 50 states determine the president. And a majority of the states are Republican-controlled, so this remedy would put Trump into office regardless of how badly he lost the popular vote, the electoral vote, or both.
[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.
Covid-19 is beyond horrid but I think it is going to do America a solid in one very important way
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
The coronavirus is quite likely to be the Trump presidency’s inflection point, when everything changed, when the bluster and ignorance and shallowness of America’s 45th president became undeniable, an empirical reality, as indisputable as the laws of science or a mathematical equation.
It has taken a good deal longer than it should have, but Americans have now seen the con man behind the curtain. The president, enraged for having been unmasked, will become more desperate, more embittered, more unhinged. He knows nothing will be the same. His administration may stagger on, but it will be only a hollow shell. 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.
Seriously?
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 is logical, so no chance.
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!
Think about how crazy it will look to future historians...
https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/1238337071544258561---
Ilan Goldenberg
“Among the advisers who share the president’s more jaundiced view is his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who considers the problem more about public psychology than a health reality, according to people who have spoken with him.”
Exactly this.
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Gender: FemaleHometown: UK
Home country: UK
Current location: UK
Member since: Fri Oct 13, 2017, 06:59 PM
Number of posts: 9,685
