Quote of the Day posts

“I spent decades working to elect Republicans, including Mr. Romney and four other presidential candidates, and I am here to bear reluctant witness that Mr. Trump didn't hijack the Republican Party. He is the logical conclusion of what the party became over the past 50 or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race-baiting, self-deception and anger that now dominate it. Hold Donald Trump up to a mirror and that bulging, scowling orange face is today's Republican Party.”

--GOP political consultant Stuart Stevens in The New York Times

“You know who's at fault? Donald Trump. Because so many other nations have addressed [the Covid pandemic] properly. And this president, for the first six weeks, refused to acknowledge that this was even a serious thing. ... He has not done the things you need to do.”

— Al Franken on MSNBC today. My favorite part is this dig: “You don't see too many people brag about passing a dementia test.”

“[John] Lewis was too good a man to be praised by Mitch McConnell.”

— Jelani Cobb, “The Essential and Enduring Strength of John Lewis,” The New Yorker

“Donald Trump bears very little in common with any actual woman I know. But, oddly, he has a lot in common with the basest, most unfair stereotypes of femininity. He is ruled by feelings rather than facts. He is fickle, gossipy and easily grossed out. He uses florid language, like ‘beautiful’ and ‘perfect,’ and says he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un ‘fell in love.’ He deals with adversity like a Mean Girl with a burn book, via insults and freeze-outs. For any Neanderthal who has ever feared electing a female president because what if she's too cranky when she's on her period — congratulations. For approximately 1,300 days, you have had a menstruating man in the Oval Office.”

— Monica Hesse, “The weird masculinity of Donald Trump,” Washington Post

We are in the midst of the one of the top 5 crises in America history, and the president of the united states has been watching TV and whining about what he sees for more than an hour. pic.twitter.com/QHWRVW9PKD

— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) June 22, 2020

“We were following the news from China very closely. So we started our preparations long before the first case tested positive here in Iceland. And it was very clear from the beginning that this was something that should be led by experts—by scientific and medical experts.”

— Iceland's Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir in Elizabeth Kolbert's must-read article, “How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus,” on the New Yorker site. The article is an indictment of the Trump administration without once mentioning Trump or his administration. And yes, Iceland is a distant island nation, which helps with this crisis, with a population of only 300,000, which also helps with this crisis. But they were aggressive in contact tracing and their citizens didn't fight common-sense measures. In early April, they were getting 100 confirmed cases a day. By May, that was down to nine ... for the entire month. In the U.S., we‘re still seeing 20,000 cases a day. I fear that number will rise with summer, boredom, protests, and businesses reopenings. 

Iceland’s confirmed daily cases, per Johns Hopkins: 99 on April 2, nine for the entire month of May.

“In life's unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation's domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what? ... May I never crave anything as much as these people crave membership in the world's most risible deliberative body.”

— One-time GOP stalwart George Will going off on House and Senate Republicans, in his Washington Post Op-Ed, “Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers.” It's a fun read. And startling.

Restricting mail in voting during a pandemic is dangerous enough.

But Trump's statements highlight another threat:

He's laying the groundwork to delegitimize millions of votes this fall.

And cast doubt on the result.

This is what tin pot dictators do. Not U.S. Presidents.

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) May 26, 2020

“It's four more years of a guy who can't be criticized. What's more important in a president than you can shit all over them? That's what presidents are for. ... That's the point of the president: To get drunk and blame them for everything. This guy, every time he's criticized, everything stops, and he makes everybody pay.”

— Louis CK on “Conan O‘Brien” in October 2016, a few weeks before the election, and about a year before Louis was blacklisted for revelations of sexual misconduct—which he admitted and apologized for. He just totally nails Trump. He added, about the election, “If you vote for Hillary you’re a grown-up; if you vote for Trump you‘re a sucker; and if you don’t vote for anybody you‘re an asshole.” He was right about all that, too.

Trump still can’t be criticized; and he's making us pay every day. 

Number of US indictments of Trump administration officials in 3 years: 215.
Number of f US indictments of Obama administration officials in 8 years: 0
But @JimDelRey has arrived on the internet with some thoughts and opinions. Or as near that stuff as such a man might conjure. https://t.co/DMfruR9heb

— David Simon (@AoDespair) May 5, 2020

“Sometime in the president's term, you will have a pandemic. Cutting the Centers for Disease Control, I think, leaves you very vulnerable and the American people very vulnerable.” — Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK)

“They‘re making a very radical statement. The big picture is a movement toward suspicion of international programs. The administration is threatening to abandon multilateralism in a big way.” — J. Stephen Morrison, the director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies

“The next weapon of mass destruction may not be a bomb. It may be a tiny pathogen that you can’t see, smell or taste, and by the time we discover it, it‘ll be too late. ... The closed-border, highly nationalistic, America-first vision is not the world’s scientific view of how to keep a population safe and healthy.” — Lawrence O. Gostin, the director of the World Health Organization's Collaborating Center on Public Health Law and Human Rights

All are from the May 2017 New York Times article, “Trump's Proposed Budget Cuts Trouble Bioterrorism Experts.” 

“It was heartbreaking to watch. If someone had been there, public health officials and governments across the world could have moved much faster.”

— Bao-Ping Zhu, a Chinese American, who, from 2007 to 2011, acted as resident adviser to the U.S. Field Epidemiology Training Program in China, a role designed to help detect disease outbreaks in China, and a role which was eliminated last fall by the Trump administration. The last person in the role, Dr. Linda Quick, who trained Chinese field epidemiologists to help track, investigate and contain diseases, left in July because of the Trump budget cuts. Via Reuters. 

Good fucking god. 

So far, I never blamed Trump for the COVID-19 pandemic; I just blamed him for the way he's ignored and mishandled it, and the misinformation he's spread, and how every day he's making it all about himself. But he's such a fuck-up he may actually be responsible for some part of it.

As of today, there are 2 million confirmed cases, 134,000 people have died, and we‘re all sheltering in place amid a certain worldwide Depression. 

Heartbreak is mild compared to how I feel right now.

 ADDENDUM: It’s actually worse than I thought. I assumed this article was recent but it's from ... March 22? And never got traction? How did that happen? How screwed up is everything that this story did not get traction? 

If you need a good laugh or five or 10, check out Michael Schulman's interview with Fran Lebowitz in The New Yorker. What a treasure she is. First question is about how she's spending her time in the Covid era, and she responds, “It depends how much you count the time you spend sulking. Let me put it this way: when they compile a list of the heroes of this era, I will not be on it.” Well, she's on mine. She's my hero: Cynic, wit, grouch, germaphobe. I'm half those things and aspire to the others.

Sample:

Has this crisis shown us anything about Donald Trump that we didn't know before?

No. Every single thing that could be wrong with a human being is wrong with him. But the single most dangerous thing about Donald Trump is how unbelievably stupid he is. It's not the most dangerous thing in someone who has no responsibilities, but in a President it's the most dangerous thing.

His absolute belief in himself, that is something that is not going to ever change. And he doesn't care. When people say he's not showing enough empathy—he doesn't know what it means. Whenever he uses the word “love,” which he does occasionally, I think of the word “algebra,” because I don't know what algebra is. I took Algebra 1 four times, because I failed it four times, and I still don't know what algebra even means. I know the symbols. And that is what love means to Donald Trump.

Yes yes, a thousand times yes. Virtually anyone would make a better president than Trump because most of us know what we don't know—and would rely on experts. Trump not only doesn't know what he doesn't know, he thinks he knows it “better than anybody.” See: list.

You really have a way with words, Donald Jessica. https://t.co/y7C7YfEPy4

— Randy Rainbow (@RandyRainbow) April 8, 2020

I appreciate RR dealing with the horror of this tweet, particularly the almost parenthetical nod to “those that sadly lost a family member or friend,” with humor and grace and humor. 

I mean, the idea of forgetting this? And any lessons we might have learned? About dealing with pandemics which will surely return at some point? That's so on-brand for Trump: screw up, create havoc, cause misery, learn nothing, move on. 

In better news, make sure you watch Randy Rainbow's ode to Gov. Andrew Cuomo to the tune of the most risible song from “Grease.” It's so perfect.

such a finely tuned, well-oiled machine https://t.co/15ceiJQ1Iw

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) April 8, 2020