EndGame

America is becoming one of those 'shithole' countries.

I think it is time to consider that all of this - the election of 2016, the complete incompetence of the administration in every facet of American life that truly matters, the ransacking of the American treasury, the violent rhetoric from the inaugural speech forward (American carnage, anyone?), the dropping of the ball in regards to the pandemic, the unconcern in the wake of that, the coverup that has begun - is the endgame for members of the extremely conservative faction in America. According to Merriam-Webster, endgame refers to the point at which in a chess match you have lost so many of your pieces the end result is a foregone conclusion.

I first heard of and used the term in regards to video game playing.

The endgame was the final matches with the bosses of bosses where, once that has concluded, you have defeated the game.

I think the point is the same point conservatives have been yearning for since Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the New Deal. Conservatives never wanted social security, medicare, medicaid, civil rights, women’s rights, the entire damn social safety net. All of their machinations since that day have been in an effort to undermine all progress.

Grover Norquist famously said, “I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Grover Norquist is “an American political activist and tax reduction advocate who is founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, an organization that opposes all tax increases.” ALL tax increases.

I am going to read between the lines and posit that Mr. Norquist is a man who believes in the saying, “I’ve got mine, Jack. Screw you.”

That is - in a nutshell - the philosophy of conservatives.

And now it is bleeding over into the greatest public health crisis to hit America since the Spanish Flu in 1918.

A couple of days ago I posted a video from a woman who said she’d noticed that, according to the CDC, deaths from the flu in every week in April were considerably higher than previous years. As if - perhaps - our government was attempting to hide deaths from the coronavirus in the death counts from the flu.

I don’t know what the truth is, but none of us are meant to know.

It is a fact that just a few days ago the White House gave this directive, according to a NPR report:

The White House instructed hospitals to report data to the Department of Health and Human Services through a new system created by a Pennsylvania-based company, TeleTracking, instead of sending the information to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as they had been doing.

In addition:

The absence of the data will make it harder for health and public officials, as well as the general public, to understand how the virus is spreading.

I have heard through the internet grapevine that these private services/companies have unethical connections to the usual suspects. What else is new, right?

I think they’re purposely sitting on their hands, muddying the waters and sowing chaos, or allowing chaos to happen. Any other administration - in my lifetime - would have at least made the effort toward verbalizing a national strategy.

Any other administration - in my lifetime - would have made an effort to unify the nation.

Any other administration - in my lifetime - would have welcomed a joint effort in the face of this sort of impending debacle.

As the covidiot-in-chief’s niece, a clinical psychologist by trade, has made clear in her new tell-all book, this guy has been “institutionalized” his whole life. Meaning he has been sheltered from the outside world from birth to this very moment. His heartlessness is attributable to his angry, racist, loveless father and the fact that he is clueless about the real world.

As president, George H.W. Bush was seen marveling over a bar code scanner at a grocery store once. I’ll guarantee you “Agolf Twitler” wouldn’t be able to make it to bringing groceries to the scanner, much less figuring out how to use one.

He, and those like him, the 100 billionaires in New York City, the upper crust throughout the land, figure they’re immune to the virus, to the sure-to-come economic crash, to the social disruption that is sure to follow. They’re going to use all of this to stay in power. They’re already using it to consolidate an even larger portion of the country’s wealth.

November cannot come soon enough.

In the meantime, wear a mask.

###

Alert reader, Steve Laboff, sent me the post that sent me spiraling into this diatribe. The other guy’s post is better. Use one of your three Medium opportunities to read it. His name is Umair Haque and the piece is titled, “America’s Coronapocalypse”.

Also, I’m going to stick with another one of Steve’s offerings. Enjoy!