The resistance to wearing masks in response to the Covid-19 pandemic starts at the top in America. President Donald Trump refused to wear a mask even in a factory where personal protective equipment is being manufactured. After he left, the company was forced to throw out the entire day’s production. He’s done this stunt more than once, as has his Vice President Mike Pence. That’s how little the President and this administration cares about the personal safety of anyone––or anything––that he encounters. Yet he had the gall to make his Tulsa rally attendees sign a waiver exonerate his campaign from any liability in the that people got sick. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
His example is emboldening his supporters to follow suit and protest wearing masks in public, which they apparently regard as both an inconvenience and a broach of their personal freedoms.
But if masks are such a problem for people to wear, why don’t we just do away with the inconvenience of wearing some as restrictive as pants? So many obese Americans seem to have a problem fitting into them in the first place.
Others simply don’t seem to get the concept of what pants are all about. Take this woman whose garments leave nothing to the imagination. She seems to feel that actual pants would get in the way of her right to express herself in public.
So perhaps we should all follow this woman’s example and ditch the pants as well as the masks in a display of personal freedoms and the right to dispense with social conventions altogether.
You might argue there are morality issues associated with not wearing pants. But that doesn’t stop this woman, does it? If she turned around it is quite certain there would be more to find out about her anatomy when her genital outlines are there for all of us to see. Who’s to say she doesn’t have a right to do show her stuff? It’s her body. Her right.
Or, you could argue that the social convention of wearing pants is a matter of personal and public hygiene. But come on! Flopping our genitals and ass cheeks on public seating isn’t really that much of a problem, is it? Would it really bother you if the man sitting next to you in a restaurant has his junk on display while you have your dinner? This is America, people! Trump wants us to be free!
As it stands, I’m in favor of wearing masks in public for all the right reasons. In the event that I am asymptomatic for the Coronavirus, the mask provides a layer of protection for others. And if there are people walking around spreading the virus in my direction, the mask helps prevent that from reaching me.
I carry my masks around with me in the car. Sometimes I start toward a store and forget to take the mask along. In that case, I go back and fetch it, strap it over my ears and go about the business at hand. Yet somehow this simple routine is too much to ask for millions of Trump supporters who think that the risk of contracting Coronavirus is “fake news” thanks to the President. He’s whipped them into a frenzy of “protest” against the entire concept of masks.
That appeal to selfish ignorance fits the entire mentality of the Trump regime. Recently Trump insisted that the rise in Covid-19 cases is only the product of increased testing. This is precisely what Trump said about the issue. “Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding,” Trump tweeted Tuesday. “With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!”
A June 23 CNBC story reports: “Public health specialists have repeatedly said the data does not indicate that increased testing accounts for the recent surge in daily new cases. 20 states currently have a positivity rate above 5%, according to John Hopkins University data, and that includes Arizona, which reports that 21.15% of all tests are coming back positive.”
The division that Trump creates among Americans and even within his own party is based on the breathtakingly stupid premise that personal freedoms are at risk in being asked to wear a mask in public. In what must be the height of irony, the Trump-driven protestor pictured above essentially steals language from the Pro-Choice movement on women’s reproductive rights to apply them to the idea that wearing a mask is an infringement of liberty and government intrusion on a woman’s body.
Here is the problem: The Trump movement thrives on this brand of cognitive dissonance. For those who don’t grasp exactly what that means, here’s the definition: “the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.”
They’re taking direction from a man who claims to be a truth-teller and authentic, yet paints is face orange everyday and engages in daily vain attempts to cover his balding head with an elaborate combover that blows around in a high wind. This is all significant. His face paint rubs off on his shirt collar. His lies rub off on the Constitution. He’s a fraud from head to toe, evidenced by the settlement of $25M against his own Trump University for bilking students out of money for sham courses that had no value except the shallow premise of the Trump name.
He has no shame. And despite his claims, he has demonstrated even less merit as a CEO or a President or even a dogcatcher. As Mark Twain once wrote, “All it takes is ignorance and confidence, and success is sure.” That is the Trump tactic in a nutshell, and his supporters eat it up. His tactics are clear. He takes no responsibility for all the bad things he causes and yet loves to claim credit for anything that works, including the economy that is a straight-line product of the restorative actions taken by President Obama following the Bush-led recession. These facts are clear to anyone with a soundly functioning brain. But just like Trump, denial and willing ignorance is preferable to his supporters as a means to claim authority and control over society.
And by the way, under the direct influence of Trump’s reign, an employment crash not seen since the Great Depression took place in 2020. If Trump wants credit where credit is due, he need look no further than the job statistics in which another 1.5M new unemployment claims were filed again this last week in June. Trump is a disaster for America by every measure; economy, environment, employment and education, to name just a few. It’s all because he’s a professional con man, and nothing more.
That brings us to his denial of the Coronavirus pandemic that is now directly responsible for more than 121,000 dead Americas. The United States has only 4% of the world’s population and 25% of the known deaths related to this pandemic. This is all Trump’s fault. He caused this with his delays and continuing denial that Covid-19 is a persistent, lethal disease that requires social vigilance to contain. Other countries have managed that. New Zealand wiped out the virus in its nation. Now the European Union is considering a ban on American visitors abroad. This is all Trump’s fault. He has turned the United States of America into a banana republic, complete with a narcissistically fascist dictator who paints his face like a vain clown afraid of showing even his crocodile tears.
But this mess is also the fault of his stubborn, death-defying supporters who can’t separate the least bit of fact from fiction. The real problem now is getting this sociopathic monster out of office. Already he’s propagandizing the upcoming election to put any result into question. This is the type of dog-whistle manipulation of the American public at which Trump most excels. Whether it is media reporting of his many lies or the investigation of Russian involvement in the 2016 election, Trump plays the victim and gins up his supporters because they revel in the notion that what used to make America great was the type of religiously-driven racism and social control that persecuted others for cultural advantage, and when that got boring, it was all done for sport.
Trump is the reason why bloviating bastards and stubborn bitches are waving flags and crying foul over the simple request to wears masks in public. But if masks are an affront, so is wearing pants in public, and we know from where that selfish instinct emanates. The Emperor himself is wearing no clothes, and his worshipful cult cheerleads his waltz down the naked travails of history.
But now his selfishness and bald-faced attempts to protect his petty theft of God and country are having deadly consequences. He spitefully killed the agency established by President Obama to prepare and protect the nation in the event of a pandemic. Then lacking any credible information about the threat to come, Trump also chose to ignore and lie about the deadly nature of Covid-19. Instead, Trump tried to hide the threat from the public and claim that it would disappear “like magic.” All done so that his precious perch on a humming economy (thanks much to President Obama) would not be impacted. As for his equally clueless and tone-deaf First Lady Melania Trump, all she could do during the rising pandemic was tweet about some tennis facility she was proud to christen. But she’s got nice sneakers…
Much of America has been rightly horrified on hearing tales of how Supreme Court Justice nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh likely conducted himself in the presence of women during his high school and college years. If testimony by Christine Blasey Ford holds true, and there is no real reason to doubt her, Kavanaugh once tried to rape her in the presence of a friend. Both of them were laughing at the time.
Oh really? The past behavior and character of a judge nominated to the highest court in the land should not be subject to a higher level of scrutiny?
Apparently this brand of aggressive dominance is an admired personality trait in some Republican circles. “I am digging my heels in, and I’m hoping that a lot of conservatives are determined to vote Republican,” said Sarah Round, age 69, whose defense of Kavanaugh was quoted in the Chicago Tribune article. Her dismissivetake on Kavanaugh’s accuser sounds more like the whisperings of a loyal courtier than a member of the sisterhood of women. “Possibly something happened to her,” Round said of Blasey Ford. “But I think she embellished what happened, or she would have gone to some authority or said something about it years ago.”
A few years back when my daughter was a teenager, she had a problem with a contact lens that had scratched her eye. It was tremendously painful, and it happened late at night, so I took her to the emergency room at our local hospital.
Perhaps we’ll see a dramatic turn of events and Kavanaugh’s name will indeed be cleared. An entire lineup of archly conservative Republicans ranging from Newt Gingrich to the peripatetic Senator Lindsay Graham has classified the progression of accusations as a “character assassination.”
Because we’ve already witnessed the downfall of Good Ole Boy Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the House, whose career went South when legitimate allegations of child sexual abuse were corroborated. Many of those abuses happened long ago and were buried under piles of hush money paid by Hastert to buy the silence of his victims.
Such is the dog-whistle world of conservative politics that the legacy of John Boehner was to preside over the highly prejudiced conservative resistance to America’s first black President, Barack Obama.
And that’s how the Republicans arrived at the likes of Paul Ryan, who didn’t even want the job as Speaker of the House.
It’s all about getting the money and power and keeping it. Hence the activist conservative Supreme Court rulings that favor the “free speech” of hidden political contributions. That’s a thin veneer to cover the cause of political corruption.
