That time when I was brilliant sooner than Paul Krugman

 Krugman has a tweet up talking about Trumpy Bear and the Plague Year:

"A couple of takeaways from this shocking-but-not-surprising description of Trump's refusal to deal with the pandemic. First, character does matter: he's a terrible president in part because he's a horrible person.

Second, his self-absorption was self-destructive: politicians who took the virus seriously were rewarded even when they weren't that successful."

He's right, of course. The nightmare we're living through - those of us who WILL live through it, and damn near half a million may not, when it's all done with us - is entirely the creation of fucking Tubby and the idiot fucking Republican cult. Those places where the people and the leadership did the things that simple public health suggested would limit the losses due to a pandemic disease are doing fine. 

We're an utter shitshow.

So I just wanted to remind those here that I was on this waaaaay back in April:

"And here's the really infuriating part.

It SO didn't have to be this way.

What's most appalling is that in this horrific disease Donald Trump and his GOP pals were effectively gifted the chance to be fucking heroes.

I mean that sincerely. They could have gone down in American history with the pantheon of men...who have saved the Republic. Washington. Lincoln. FDR.

All Trump had to do was what any sane, decent person would have done. Shut his piehole. Listened to people who knew better. Taken their advice to act quickly and competently. Spoken the words of comfort and care. Acted as Lincoln did in 1861 and FDR did in 1941. Mobilized the nation. Produced the tests, provided the ventilators, coordinated the response.

I know I keep saying this, but this was a fucking no-brainer. We've done this before, only it was Japanese, not viruses; we kick the federal money machine into action, start paying people to stay home instead of build bombers, businesses to stay shut instead of make tanks and helmets.

Freeze the nation in place until treatment, and then vaccine, came on-line.

That's it.

That's ALL.

He does that, and he's flying up there with the Greats. Twenty years after his enormous orange ass gets kicked into the hole his meatface is up there on Rushmore right next to Teddy.

But this goddamn fuckstick and his worthless fucking GOP pals couldn't do that to save their (and our) lives.

HE couldn't do it because he's a fucking rodent, and all his pizza-rat brain can manage is his own cravings; his craving for money, for power, to sate his ginormous ego.

THEY couldn't do it because they're fucking slaves, slaves to their bloated ideology where it's a Hobbesean war of all against all, where cash is king, C.R.E.A.M., baby, and it's all about punishing the darks and the bitches and the libs. They could no more act heroically than a dog could resist licking its ass.

That's just...sad.

Here these sorry bastards like to fap to their image of themselves as the latter-day Three Percent, the heroic fighting rebels who would be the first to jump to pledge their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to the nation in time of trial.

And yet...when the trial arrived, all they could do was snivel, whine, try and grift the pandemic, punish the libs, and then celebrate by dipping their balls in the chocolate to enjoy the creamy texture.

And so here we are, ruled by the very worst among us, without any hope for reprieve."

I'm a fairly smart person, but it's not often that I'm that far ahead of the punditorial power curve, and I wanted to shake my moneymaker briefly to note that in this case I sure as hell was.

And don't mistake me; there's a shit-ton of others outside of Orange Foolius who bite off a piece of this clusterfuck.

The entire government of the PRC, that knew they had a deadly pathogen loose in Wuhan but tried to hide and dissemble about it.

Every knucklehead who had to have their wedding or barbeque or beach party regardless of the risk.

But for us here in the US, it was the goddamn brick-brained Chief Executive who:

1) Knew this was going to be bad way the hell back in the winter of 2020 because Xi himself told him so, but

2) Lied about it and either did nothing or actively worked to ensure the spread would get out of control, and

3) Could have done the exact opposite, but didn't, even though doing the exact opposite was so blatantly the obvious route to heroic re-election that it was blindingly obvious to an elderly blogger in Portland Fucking Oregon way the hell back in the early spring.

Not that it really helps you, me, or anyone else, that I was righter than Cassandra and Krugman and Trump altogether. 

We all know what Cassandra got for her troubles.

So, yeah.

Welcome to 2021

Freshly fresh and newly new

 

I've seen sixty-three of the sonsofbitches, but the Year 2020 was, hands-down, the fucking worst of them all.

Mind you, 1968 and 1969 were pretty bad, but then I was 11 and 12 then and too small to really understand how bad things got. 

In the early Seventies we had another dangerously worthless Republican shitbird in the Oval Office, but the wingnut horde was smaller and less nutty and the news outfits less stenographic of Republican lies, so I could remain confident that said dirtbag would be defenestrated, and so he was.

But this one? Yeesh. Good riddance.

One thing that hasn't changed from yesterday to today is my broad outlook as a sort of "optipess".

On the personal and professional side I and mine are doing fine. A little ragged around the edges from hunkering down under the Plague, but otherwise unharmed, and looking hopefully to the deployment of vaccines and some sort of renewal of something approaching a normal life.

On the larger and general side...well, we're soooooo fucked. 

We - as in "the global industrial North" we - are doing...well, not "nothing" but more-or-less "effectively nothing" to prevent the recurrence of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and while I'd like to thank the fucking wingnuts for that (and they ARE a huge part of the problem) we the human race in general is turning out to be really, really bad at dealing with massively complex global problems. It's almost like we're a pack of over-armed, over-powered apes that have not truly evolved beyond out proto-hominid beginnings. 

Hmmm. 

And on the next level down we - the "We, the People" United States we - have turned out to be a sort of monkeyhouse divided into roughly three tribes of monkeys.

One-third more-or-less sane dwellers of the 21st Century;

One-third a useless lump of fucking ambulatory protoplasm wasting precious oxygen, and;

One-third utterly whack, bellicose, credulous, gormless, meeching, nitwitted feral apes.

That's not really a good thing.

And I have no idea what I can do as an individual to change either of the above. 

Well, I do - I can't. Not as an individual.

I have literally no "influence" even on the tiniest of local scales. Perhaps I can get more involved in local politics, for what that might accomplish. But I'm disheartened by my fellow Portlanders choices this past November. Given a simple, clear-cut choice between a piss-poor past and a chance at future change, a strong plurality of us said "Yes, more piss-poor, please!"

That's...not good. That's...I'm not sure how you move forward from there. We had good people pushing for good things, intelligent, progressive, hopeful ideas. And the People of Portland shot them down. How do I change that?

Well. Damn.

But - and this is the "opti-" part - there's always bad things. The very first thing I saw this new year, other than the dark house and the hopeful coffee, was turning on the television and finding the 1992 flick Body of Evidence on the cable, as if to prove that bad things have happened in Portland all the time.

 (That's Willem Dafoe walking through Lone Fir Cemetery, by the way. It was the most Portlandy image from this dog I could find on the Internet, most of which was Madonna, perhaps the least Portlandy thing about this dog...)

We got through Body of Evidence. 

Perhaps we'll get through this.

Right now, though, what's sort of emblematic is that it doesn't really feel like a "new" year because, like a a bloated orange colossus, Trump still bestrides the narrow world, Twitter whining and bragging, being an asshole, and golfing. We still have three weeks of the fucking idiot and his braindead minions.

It's just a question of survival until then. 

God, I hope so.

Then, perhaps, it'll really feel like a New Year.

Addendum - "But for Wales?"

I won't make a secret out of the fact that I think the idea of taking random eighteen-year-olds and running them through a second-rate engineering school where everybody wears the same clothes in order to produce Army officers is not a particularly good idea.

Far too many kaydets come out imbued with Duty-Honor-Country and very little else of military value. Which is not to say that good soldiers can't come out of West Point. They do, and have. 

But of the officers I served under the very best did not come out of WooPoo, and the very worst did, so that is a small unflattering sample of the place.

But.

If you're going to have an Army officer college, and you're going to make a big fat hairy deal about it as some sort of knightly training school where a brutal and bloody profession is somehow idealized into a noble calling that requires constant harping on some sort of "Code of Honor" as part of that training.

If you're then going to break that honor code for a very prosaic, very grubby outbreak of academic cheating?

You'd impress me a hell of a lot more if all that grubby cheating was for a higher purpose than playing and losing in the...(checks notes)...fucking "Liberty Bowl".

As my old drill sergeant told me once; if you're not cheating you're not trying, but if you cheat and fail?

That's sadder than both the failure AND the cheating themselves.

Welcome to 2021.