Another reminder of the Iraq war: “We expect to have the insurgency contained within the next six months.” Tom Friedman of the NYT wrote “the next six months will tell” so many times that Atrios started calling “the next six months” a Friedman unit. We’re getting damn close to a Pence unit: “We will have abundant testing by…next week.” This is at least the third week in a row where he has said that.
Jesus. It’s as if the house is burning, and the firefighters are hooked up to the hydrant, but no water’s coming out, and they get on their cell to the city Water office, which tells them “We are so all over that water issue. You’ll have water in the next hour or two, or maybe tomorrow morning at the latest. Could be as late as next week.”
What a bunch of lying sacks of pig shit, every one of 'em who stepped up to the mic.
No one can believe a word out of the mouth of anyone in this fucking badministration. We were told that by last Friday millions of tests would be shipped. On Monday, we were told that 75,000 were ready to go.
To date, less than 20,000 people have been tested in this country and healthcare professionals from all around the country are reporting that their requests for tests are being denied.
In the near future is not fucking good enough but it’s already several weeks past “good enough”.
Trump did, however, say that a public-private partnership with Google would set up a website by Sunday telling every American where they could go for immediate, drive-in testing.
Um, it takes 5 minutes to drop a few pins and annotations on a google maps page. I guess that’s a public-private partnership.
Of course, it’ll take a team of high powered lobbyists to handle the situation when the white house declares the link to the map page to be classified because there’s only 4 locations on it.
It’s been longer than that since I’ve left the house, and I live in a very quiet neighborhood, so all I know is what I see in news reports and places like this. A friend of mine went to a warehouse-type store this afternoon–after stopping by last night and finding the parking lot too crowded even to get a space. He said he’s never been there when the place was even a third full before. Today he found a parking space, went inside, got a cart, started shopping, started noticing abandoned carts, realized that there were over 100 people in the checkout line, gave up, abandoned his cart, left. All that exposure for nothing, he said later. I’ve been seeing the possibility of a serious pandemic coming for weeks and stocking up on provisions over time. No way I’m going into a crowded supermarket at this point.
I have to admit my husband has always shopped like a European - every day. I can’t get him to stop so we’re just being extremely careful with him and what he brings in.
It just occurred to me that perhaps the best way to view Trump, beyond his lack of character, empathy, (relevant) intelligence, knowledge and decency, and his being a sadistic and psychopathic narcissist, is that, at his core, he’s a hack, a bullshit artist, a glib non-entity who’s good at fooling idiots and playing front man for organized crime, be it the Mafia, Deutsche Bank, Saudi Arabia or Putin. He doesn’t take his job seriously because to him it was never about the job, but what it meant to him and his backers. To take him seriously is to miss the point. He is not the problem. The people he’s fronting for are.
My mother and grandmother is/was the same. Instead of buying a week’s worth of produce, they’d buy a day or two’s worth and always be running out of this or that. Who buys just one or two tomatoes at a time, especially now with stocks running low everywhere?
My husband who just stubbornly thinks what he needs will be there. I learned long ago that I can’t disabuse him of some notions so I don’t try.
He takes this very seriously - I don’t mean to leave the wrong impression. He thinks he could survive it but doesn’t think I would and he really isn’t trying to get rid of me.
Everyone’s got a few habits that make no sense and seem almost superstitious or intended to annoy others, a form of passive-aggressive control or reminding others of one’s existence. I suspect that it’s atavistic and inherent to our nature. Animals can be like that too, like the pet who just can’t be trained out of some really annoying habit, who almost seems to enjoy doing it.
One of mine, as you may have noticed, is always needing to get in the last word.
