'We've had viruses for years... I want the hotel rooms open' — The mayor of Las Vegas gave this unbelievably alarming interview to Anderson Cooper pic.twitter.com/IW774WIlFJ
— NowThis (@nowthisnews) April 23, 2020
There is so much going on in this video that you really have to take a look at the whole thing. The mayor of Las Vegas, Carolyn Goodman, doesn't seem very well-informed, she's willing to gamble (see what I did there?) that business-owners will figure out how to take precautions to ensure social distancing on their own, she assumes that for some reason, the person-to-person transmission of the virus works differently in China than it would in Las Vegas, and seems out-of-touch and glib about the whole thing.
From offering her city as a control group (note to Mayor Goodman: offering oneself as tribute in the Hunger Games was heroic, offering up the fate of potentially thousands of people not just in your city but from everywhere visitors may hail from is...very much not) to scoffing at the idea she would spend time every night in a casino herself ("I have a family!", as if the people who work in the casinos all hatched out of little plastic eggs or something), she displays a shocking unfitness for understanding that other people have valid safety concerns and that those concerns matter. There's no consideration about what this means for those business' potential liability for becoming a "petri dish" or what that might mean for the longer-term health of the local economy.
What is also stunning, though, I think, is that while she voices this attitude pretty openly, the difference between her and other folks pushing to open up for business is really just that--she said it out loud.
3 comments:
These ... ahhhh, creatures should be held accountable for all the deaths.
Lock her up!
This is what happens to a democracy when enough voters don't take govt very seriously. This mayor, like Trump, won her office because there was a large enough protest vote by folks who thought it would be funny to make the class clown class president. Maybe if the office in question is student council president, a symbolic non-office that doesn't have any real power for good or ill, such a thing might be funny.
Maybe even most of the time mayor of Las Vegas or president of the US could also pretty much be a mere symbolic figurehead, because most of the time neither actually is called on to make real decisions. This is probably pretty easy to see for mayor of Las Vegas, but president of the US might seem to be a position of great power, and the office holder would seemingly be able to make all sorts of weighty decisions all the time. But in actuality, with the great power of the office has come tight constraints. A competent and energetic president, Obama, say, understands that he has to work within such tight constraints that what we get from him is well-meaning but completely inadequate half-measures like the ACA, half-assed stimulus, and DACA -- not because he's an idiot who doesn't know what he's doing, but because even such a smart and energetic person in that office can't really do much outside a very tightly constricted box.
But, every now and then, a crisis arises from outside the political system that so constrinas a mayor of Las Vegas and a president of the US. The latter especially has decisions that he must make, and even failure to decide is often in that situation as disastrous as a really bad decision. That's where we are right now with COVID. We have a bunch of class clowns in positions that require actual competent decision-makers, because too many of us have been lulled into believing that we're just voting for student body president, and it's perfectly harmless to use our vote to blow off some steam, or display a certain attitude, or support our team.
She is the epitome of right wing sociopathy. This is how they think. They don't care if people die as long as it isn't them or their families. Their only goals are money, power, and pissing off the libs.
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