Thursday, April 23, 2020

Just Disinfect Them



Sometimes listening to Trump takes on a kind of surreal, trippy feeling, as if one weren't watching the actual elected president of the United States, but instead watching a very bad, very overt satire of one. I know I harp on the subject of his manifest density a lot, but it is deeply worrying to me that he performs stupidity fairly publicly and the people who surround him mostly either defend his stupidity or lie about what he actually said.

I mean, really. Windmill cancer. Buying Greenland. Nuking hurricanes. Injecting disinfectants or hitting people with a little UV radiation feels like it's all of a piece with his general lack of understanding of how things work. It's that thing he has (he thinks) called "common sense" after all. The people are infected, right? So just disinfect them. That's just science.

The rub is, even if it's explained to him it isn't good science, he'll double down on the product of his "very good brain." We're probably days away from him explaining "You can just take a little Lysol, or as I like to call it, lung sanitizer, and boom! It kills germs on contact. They're getting smarter, the germs, but not smarter than me." And his fiercest defenders will be onboard. After all, some of them are already taking a little bleach for the 'rona, anyways. After all, people bought and even ingested aquarium cleaner because Trump suggested a similar-sounding chemical could be effective (not proven, and recent studies do cast some doubt on it). Even though Trump is obviously not qualified to recommend a medical treatment, because he is both a) not a doctor and b) kind of godawful stupid.

The alliance of stupidity, fraud and bad faith never fail to shock me. And while I try to understand how people working with and within this Administration try to somewhat ameliorate things, and that given all we know of Trump's basic mode of operation, he does not stand for contradiction, maybe it might be healthier if people were a bit more direct about admitting, that, sweet jumping criminy, this guy is dangerously stupid.

UPDATE: In a tweet, The New York Times managed to bothsides drinking bleach:

by posting "At a White House briefing, President Trump theorized--dangerously, in the view of some experts--about the powers of sunlight, ultraviolet light and household disinfectants to kill the coronavirus", giving the disturbing impression that maybe, out there, exist experts who are like "Shoot, gargle battery acid, anything's worth a try."

That's not helping, people.

3 comments:

Ten Bears said...

What's the difference... Twixt experimenting on a captive population, veterans; injecting, killing them with fish tank cleanser, Lysol, or bleach, and Menegele experimenting on Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals? Encouraging the spread of the Trump Virus and handing out smallpox and measles laced blankets to the natives? The “Department of the Interior, Bureau of ‘Indian’ Affairs” sterilizing native women well into the nineteen sixties? The three hundred year breeding records of what would become the American Kennel Association?

They’re not trying to kill all of us.

Vixen Strangely said...

I don't know enough about the VA study to say whether the people given hydroxychloroquine even had the informed consent to be experimented on with an untested drug, and suspect they were basically "drafted" into it. Too many people suppose human experimentation is some kind of relic from their idea of "bad old days", but when I think about the risks companies take with populations and pollution in water and air (usually dumped on poor and minority communities)--what would I call that? I remember being stunned when I found out the Tuskegee syphillis experiment was only ended in 1972, long after we had penicillin, but people for years were kept away from a standard treatment. The bad days have never left, and seem to happen to the same people year after year.

bluzdude said...

His apologists will do anything to keep the gravy train rolling. They know the Federal coffers are wide open to anyone that's "on the team." The longer they prop this idiot up, the longer they feed off our tax dollars.

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