The sudden relaxation or abandonment of mask requirements in almost every single Democratic jurisdiction in the country this past week has all the orchestrated spontaneity of the mass Democratic crackdowns on the Occupy camps in 2011.
Just as President Obama was conveniently out of the country at that time to keep his own hands clean, President Biden is conveniently out to lunch (if not yet completely out of his mind) regarding the evidence-free Semi-Official Cancellation of Covid. The White House's position, even as the mostly avoidable US death toll from Covid is hovering near the shameful one million mark, is that the wearing of masks should now be up to local and state officials and individual discretion. The confusing new rules or guidelines are that if you're vaxxed, there is no need to be masked, despite the fact that you can still catch the virus. And if you're unvaxxed, you must still wear the mask. Maybe with a big scarlet UV sign on it?
So hedging his bets, Biden is still recommending the masks be worn by everybody working or learning in public schools. He certainly doesn't want the blood, or rather the infected respiratory droplets, of potentially millions of children, many of whom are not even partially vaxxed. on his hands. When the next outbreak or variant that they never saw coming emerges, his already-tiresome default reaction of co-opting his deceased son Beau as a means of comforting surviving family members of the victims of any number of state-sanctioned or state-enabled cruelties will have lost all its flaccid punch.
What with record inflation and the exhaustion of ginning up enthusiastic fear over the Russian invasion of Ukraine any minute now, Biden already has enough on his plate, even as most of his aspirational social policy proposals have conveniently been swept off the table. His party's contrived dilemma is the same as it ever was. How can they deliver better "messaging" about their accomplishments in lieu of actually delivering accomplishments? If only people weren't so gosh-darn fickle and attention span-deprived, they'd be expressing their gratitude, for example, for Biden's plan to allocate $5 billion in federal infrastructure aid for electric car-charging stations all over this great vast land of ours.
Even if you yourself can't afford one of these $40-50,000 electric cars, you can at least aspire to achieve access to one, despite the onerous student debt that Biden refuses to wipe out just like that, with one fell swoop of his executive pen. Barring that unicorny relief, you can still admire all the lucky electric car owners for having the environmental wokeness so sorely lacking in deplorable gas-guzzling drivers of 20-year-old rust-buckets held together with unsightly electrical tape. Furthermore, just think how much easier it will be to ignore the lack of affordable housing in your neighborhood as you revel in the privilege of gazing upon the shiny charging station on the street where you live. Where you literally live, given the expiration of the eviction moratoriums since we've been informed that "we" have all learned to "live with" Covid.
There are more important things to worry about. Shouldn't we all be joined together in unmasked vaxxed aghastitude at the shocking news that Donald Trump had clogged the White House toilet with incriminating documents? (forget the real shocker that there was apparently not only no working shredder in the place, but apparently only one toilet available to Trump for the flushing of documents in the whole White House).
I mean, if you can't be satiated on Trump-hate as a healthy substitute for that 1.65-lb package of boneless skinless chicken breasts going for a shocking $20 at the local Stop N Shop, then what can you be satiated on? And especially since, now that masks are no longer required in supermarkets, you can even nibble on the free cheese and cracker samples as a meal substitute without even having to discreetly lower your mask to satiate yourself?
The thing we have to remember to remember at all times is that the good things that the Democrats do for us are being kept hidden. We therefore should keep prodding these overly modest and coy Democrats to be more boastful of these good hidden things, like the electric car charging stations that Biden wants to build.
So says Paul Krugman, anyway, in his latest New York Times column celebrating Joe Biden's occult improvements to the Health Care Marketplace. How could we ever have missed his "Hidden Health Care Triumph?" I felt so guilty myself that I almost broke out into a gaslit sweat when I was reading it. Then I remembered to remember that health care is not about the tens of millions of my fellow American citizens who either are uninsured or underinsured, but about the political prospects and fortunes of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
Krugman:
In any case, whatever its intellectual merits, as a practical political matter Medicare for All isn’t coming to America any time soon. What’s actually at stake in the political arena are more incremental policy changes. Yet such changes can still have a huge effect on health care. And the partisan divide on health policy is as wide as ever.
In the opener of his piece, Krugman had poked fun at the usual diseased GOP fish in a barrel. This go-round it was Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) who'd mal-informatively tweeted out that “Over 70% of Americans who died with Covid, died on Medicare, and some people want #MedicareForAll?”
Now, where have we heard that fallacious argument against single payer health care before, falsely equating bad health outcomes with government-paid single payer systems? I soon enough remembered to remember. And wiping the beads of gaslight-sweat from my brow and my brain, I posted the following response:
"With all due respect for Medicare for All, you have a single-payer system in Italy — it doesn’t work there.” What Republican uttered those ridiculous words, which posited a link between the terrible death toll in Italy at the start of the global pandemic and the government paying for the care and treatment of its sick people? The answer is Joe Biden, who was scoffing at his "good friend" Bernie Sanders at the March 2020 presidential debate. Biden is such a good guy that he even called Mitch McConnell a good friend of his at this month's National Prayer Breakfast. He is such a good guy that when M4A activist Ady Barkan, who is dying of ALS, interviewed him later in the campaign prodding him to support single payer, Biden at least promised the next best thing: support for a public option. But once safely elected, Biden never uttered the phrase "public option" again. Granted, it is a good thing that more people are getting subsidies to go shopping for private insurance product before they get sick and try to (heaven forfend!) cheat. Actually, it's their insurance companies that are getting the subsidies, including billions from govt-funded COBRA premiums. As for the venal congress-critter from Kentucky ridiculously blaming Medicare for the higher Covid death rate among Medicare recipients, it was probably to deflect attention from the fact that at least 70% of Americans favor M4A, That includes at least a third of GOP voters, some of them his own constituents.
Speaking of party cults and their hacks, and the media's nauseating regard for Joe Biden's long history of collusion bipartisanship, Times columnist Charles Blow this week purported to be surprised that Biden (he assumed him to be a "good and decent man") had actually bragged about his long friendship with Senate Minority Mitch McConnell, who himself is being praised by more than a few liberals for having the self-preserving courage to disagree with his own party's position that the January Sixth riot was simply "political discourse."
Blow:
Last week at the National Prayer Breakfast, Biden said this of the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell:
“Mitch, I don’t want to hurt your reputation, but we really are friends. And that is not an epiphany we’re having here at the moment. We’ve always — you’ve always done exactly what you’ve said. You’re a man of word — of your word, and you’re a man of honor. Thank you for being my friend.”
Once I got The Golden Girls theme out of my sweaty brain, I submitted this comment:
It's no surprise that President Biden gushed all over McConnell at the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event which is not so much about prayer as it is about influence-peddling and pay-to-play. The only deity that they celebrate as one great big happy capitalistic family is the Market God.
They hide their corruption under the sacrament of bipartisanship. They insist against all reason that what citizens really want is not health care, a debt-free education, climate change reversal and living wages - but just that the movers and shakers in Washington just all get along together. Bonhomie among the elites is hazardous to our health. This is especially true when they agree, every single time, to fund the gruesome forever wars and surveillance state without so much as a pretend debate. Their constant litany of having God on their side as they bow their heads in prayer and wave their flags sounds more profane with every passing minute. Let's do away with the national prayer breakfast and implement a truth and reconciliation commission, run by a panel of citizens. Let's follow Aristotle's advice and select them by lot. They couldn't be any worse than the elected "reps" we're saddled with now.
 |
| Random Panel of Citizens |
Sorrowfully, we all imagine how well Jay-Ottawa would complement Karen Garcia's brilliant, heartfelt, and clear-headed analysis with an astute comment here.
ReplyDeleteAt least, but nonetheless, other notes let us know that we aren't suffering alone, and that maybe, if we can hang together, some ripple will rise and spread.
This entire article is worth reading in full, but here are the concluding two paragraphs:
Chris Hedges: US traditionally solves domestic political crises by waging war —
War is used to divert American public attention from government corruption and incompetence.
https://www.rt.com/news/549363-war-political-crisis-democrats/
14 Feb. 2022
"The belief that the Democratic Party offers an alternative to militarism is, as Samuel Johnson said, the triumph of hope over experience. The disputes with Republicans are largely political theater, often centered around the absurd or the trivial. On the substantive issues there is no difference within the ruling class. The Democrats, like the Republicans, embrace the fantasy that, even as the country stands on the brink of insolvency, a war industry that has orchestrated debacle after debacle, from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, is going to restore lost American global hegemony. Empires, as Reinhold Niebuhr observed, eventually “destroy themselves in the effort to prove that they are indestructible.” The self-delusion of military invincibility is the scourge that brought down the American empire, as it brought down past empires.
"We live in a one-party state. The ideology of national security is sacrosanct. The cult of secrecy, justified in the name of protecting us from our enemies, is a smoke screen to hide from the public the inner workings of power and manipulate public perceptions. The Democratic courtiers and advisers that surround any Democratic presidential candidate – the retired generals and diplomats, the former national security advisers, the Wall Street economists, the lobbyists, and the apparatchiks from past administrations – do not want to curb the power of the imperial presidency. They do not want to restore the system of checks and balances. They do not want to challenge the military or the national security state. They are the system. They want to move back into the White House to wield its awful force. And now, with Joe Biden, that is where they are."
I think governments have simply given up on beating Omicron. Biden, like so many in government leadership, put all his eggs in the vaccine basket. When vaccinated people started getting Omicron, even ending up in the hospital, it gave the anti-vaxxers the ammunition they needed to discredit Biden's approach to dealing with the pandemic. I also think government leadership throughout the world thought Covid would have burned itself out by now - like SARS 1 - not that it would keep evolving. The real issue, of course, is epidemiologists have been warning for years and years that a pandemic would eventually emerge and governments should have a plan in place for dealing with it. Yet, it is clear, no government was prepared. Obviously, not listening to scientific experts is not a new phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteBiden is doing what Bush Jr did. He can't deal with any number of domestic issues – especially Covid and its fallout - so he is looking for a scapegoat of sorts to distract us from our day to day woes. A war with America's traditional enemy is a perfect distraction. And those in Congress who have no skin in the game have no problem going along with the drums of war. It is not their children who will be dying or becoming wounded physically and psychologically. As we know, middle and working class people are expendable.
It is an utter disgrace that after the lies about the threat of universal health care to the U.S. economy and medical system (that it is too expensive and that people will have to compromise quality care) have been disproven, that the U.S. is still holding out. I had a spill on Monday and fell cracking my head on our brick path. After three days of headaches, I went to the doctor who wants me to have a CT scan. In Australia, despite universal health care, we have to pay for our x-rays so I was bracing for the worst. I knew that a CT scan in the U.S. was over $3000. When I called to check - debating whether or not we could afford it - the nurse informed me that in “the city” it could cost as much as $150 but because we were in a rural area, it was completely covered by Medicare. All I could think was how many working poor or middle class Americans would have to struggle to pay for something - probably making payments for a year or more - while it could be so simply dealt with if we could just all share the costs of a universal health system and if those gouging the system were reined in.
It is clear that little improvements like electric car charging stations which only benefit the few who can afford such cars are also distractions. Biden, as he was intended to be, is unable to get any meaningful legislation that benefits the 99% passed in Congress and is incapable of fighting. Only legislation that improves the lot of the Oligarchy manages to get bipartisan approval. Yet, the Democrats I know are clinging to the deflating life raft that is our dying democracy. They maintain that Biden’s hands are tied by nutcase Republicans and Manchin and Sinema. I don’t have the heart to tell them that it is game over and has been since Clinton sold us down the river and Obama, despite a public mandate to get universal health care passed and to severely rein in the bankers, did anything but. Sadly, I don’t see a way out of this terrible mess.
ReplyDeleteEx-U.S. Ambassador to USSR: Ukraine Crisis Stems Directly from Post-Cold War Push to Expand NATO —
https://www.democracynow.org/2022/2/17/jack_matlock_ukraine_russia_nato_us
February 17, 2022
U.S. officials are accusing Russia of sending more forces to the Ukrainian border just days after Moscow announced it was pulling some troops back. This comes as Ukrainian authorities and Russian-backed separatists are both accusing the other side of violating a ceasefire in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine. For more on the history behind the present crisis in Ukraine, we speak with one of the last U.S. ambassadors to the Soviet Union prior to the collapse of the USSR, Ambassador Jack Matlock, who says the U.S.-led expansion of NATO following the end of the Cold War helped lay the groundwork for the current standoff over Ukraine. He argues continued escalation could stoke another nuclear arms race, and lays out some of the parallels with the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
"I was there: NATO and the origins of the Ukraine crisis —
After the fall of the Soviet Union, I told the Senate that expansion would lead us to where we are today."
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/02/15/the-origins-of-the-ukraine-crisis-and-how-conflict-can-be-avoided/
February 15, 2022 ~ by Jack F. Matlock Jr.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2022/02/17/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf
Ukraine? Putin’s Bigger Fear May Lie in Poland.
New U.S. Military Base Is a Mere 100 Miles From Russia.
What You Should Really Know About Ukraine —
https://fair.org/home/what-you-should-really-know-about-ukraine/
January 28, 2022 ~ by Bryce Greene
Chomsky: US Push to “Reign Supreme” Stokes the Ukraine Conflict —
https://truthout.org/articles/chomsky-us-push-to-reign-supreme-stokes-the-ukraine-conflict/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=5cab6a32-d17c-4e19-8dfe-d79b2658a92c
February 16, 2022 ~ by C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout
…
Chomsky:
As many analysts observe, Ukraine is not going to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the foreseeable future. George W. Bush rashly issued an invitation to join, but it was immediately vetoed by France and Germany. Though it remains on the table under U.S. pressure, it is not an option. All sides recognize this. The astute and knowledgeable Central Asia scholar Anatol Lieven comments that “the whole issue of Ukraine’s NATO membership is in fact purely theoretical, so that, in some respects, this whole argument is an argument about nothing — on both sides, it must be said, Russian as well as the West.”
His comment brings to mind [Argentinian writer Jorge Luis] Borges’s description of the Falkland/Malvinas war:
two bald men fighting over a comb.
Eric,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link to the Fair article. Very informative and appropriate information and facts to add to this discussion.