America Is In a Downward Spiral. Worse is Still to Come

Like many so-called conservatives and Republicans, George Will - one of the deans of reasoned conservative thought - was an apologist for disastrous GOP policies and Republican shenanigans which harmed the country and laid the groundwork for the rise of Donald Trump.  Unlike those in the GOP who continue to prostitute themselves both to Trump and the white supremacist/religious extremists of the GOP base, Will finally opened his eyes and belatedly has come out strong in condemning the moral bankruptcy of Trump and today's Republican Party. In a column in the Washington Post he admits that America is in decline and lays much of the blame at the feet of Trump and the Republican political whores who have enabled him.   Further, he longs for a massive landslide victory by Joe Biden that will be so stark that even Trump's lies and his mindless, soulless followers will not be able to challenge the repudiation of Trump and all he and the GOP which is now a reflection of him stand for.  Here are column highlights:

Never has a U.S. election come at such a moment of national mortification. In April 1970, President Richard M. Nixon told a national television audience that futility in Vietnam would make the United States appear to the world as “a pitiful, helpless giant.” Half a century later, America, for the first time in its history, is pitied.

Not even during the Civil War, when the country was blood-soaked by a conflict involving enormous issues, was it viewed with disdainful condescension as it now is, and not without reason: Last Sunday, Germany (population 80.2 million) had 159 new cases of covid-19; Florida (population 21.5 million) had 15,300.

Under the most frivolous person ever to hold any great nation’s highest office, this nation is in a downward spiral. This spiral has not reached its nadir, but at least it has reached a point where worse is helpful, and worse can be confidently expected.

The nation’s floundering government is now administered by a gangster regime. It is helpful to have this made obvious as voters contemplate renewing the regime’s lease on the executive branch. Roger Stone adopted the argot of B-grade mobster movies when he said he would not “roll on” Donald Trump. By commuting Stone’s sentence, Stone’s beneficiary played his part in this down-market drama, showing gratitude for Stone’s version of omertà (the Mafia code of silence), which involved lots of speaking but much lying. Because the pandemic prevents both presidential candidates from bouncing around the continent like popcorn in a skillet, the electorate can concentrate on other things, including Trump’s selection of friends such as Stone and Paul Manafort, dregs from the bottom of the Republican barrel.

Today, there is a vast longing for respite from the 21st century, which — before the pandemic, two inconclusive wars and the Great Recession — began with a presidential election that turned on 537 Florida votes and was not decided until a Dec. 12, 2000, Supreme Court decision. Given Trump’s reckless lying and the supine nature of most Republican officeholders, it is imperative that the Nov. 3 result be obvious that evening.

[T]he pandemic will be an accelerant of preexisting trends: There will be a surge of early and mail voting. So, an unambiguous decision by midnight Eastern time Nov. 3 will require (in addition to state requirements that mailed ballots be postmarked, say, no later than Oct. 31) a popular-vote tsunami so large against [Trump] the president that there will be a continentwide guffaw when he makes charges, as surely he will, akin to those he made in 2016.

It is scandalous that in many places casting a ballot requires hours of standing in line. Larry Diamond of the conservative-leaning Hoover Institution at Stanford discerns another scandal: “The hard truth is that there has been a rising tide of voter suppression in recent U.S. elections. These actions — such as overeager purging of electoral registers and reducing early voting — have the appearance of enforcing abstract principles of electoral integrity but the clear effect (and apparent intent) of disproportionately disenfranchising racial minorities.

This nation built the Empire State Building, groundbreaking to official opening, in 410 days during the Depression, and the Pentagon in 16 months during wartime. Today’s less serious nation is unable to competently combat a pandemic, or even reliably conduct elections. This is what national decline looks like.

I hate to say it, but Will is 100% on the money.

America's Stolen Years Thanks to Trump

The Covid-19 pandemic continues to worsen in America even as other parts of the world appear to have contained and defeated the virus.  Yes, there are pockets of positive news - New York is continuing to show huge improvement and while Virginia's numbers have ticked upward they are nothing like those in red states like Florida and Texas.  But overall, some predictions are very grim: it will be summer 2022 before normalcy is achieved across the nation.  Meanwhile, rather than follow the advice of health care experts like countries that have beat the virus, the Trump/Pence regime is attacking medical experts and accusing them - and, of course, the media - being liars. Had America had a science based national response early on, today's grim figures could have been avoided and possibly two lost years could have been saved.  One can only hope that save for Trump cultists, Americans will wake up to the horrific damage done to the nation by Der  Trumpenführer, a/k/a the liar-in-chief.  A column in the New York Times looks at what might have been versus what Trump has wrought on America.  Here are column excerpts:

If you’re lucky enough to live in New Zealand, the coronavirus nightmare has been mostly over since June. After more than two weeks with no new cases, the government lifted almost all restrictions that month. The borders are still shut, but inside the country, normal life returned.

It’s coming back elsewhere too. Taiwan, where most days this month no new cases have been reported, just held the Taipei Film Festival, and a recent baseball game drew 10,000 spectators. Italy was once the epicenter of Europe’s outbreak and remains in a state of emergency, but with just a few hundred new cases a day in the whole country, bars are open and tourists have started returning, though of course Americans remain banned. According to The New York Times’s figures, there were 321 new cases in all of Canada last Friday.

And America? We had 68,241. As of last week, the worst per capita outbreak on the planet was in Arizona, followed by Florida. . . . Lawrence O. Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown, told me he doesn’t expect American life to feel truly normal before summer 2022. Two years of our lives, stolen by Donald Trump.

As our country plunges into a black hole of unchecked illness, death and pariahdom, the administration is waging a PR war on its own top disease expert, Anthony Fauci, trying to convince news outlets that he can’t be trusted. “The move to treat Dr. Fauci as if he were a warring political rival comes as he has grown increasingly vocal in his concerns about the national surge in coronavirus cases,” reported The Times.

Trump has also undercut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, retweeting the conspiratorial ramblings of the former game show host Chuck Woolery: “The most outrageous lies are the ones about Covid-19. Everyone is lying. The C.D.C., media, Democrats, our doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust.” There are now so many stories of Trump fans dying after blithely exposing themselves to the virus that they’ve become a macabre cliché.

[T]he coronavirus, he said, has shown us that “health system capacity alone is almost useless unless you have a government that can unleash that capacity promptly and consistently.”  America has long fancied itself a swaggering colossus. It will likely emerge from this calamity humbled and decrepit.

[W]e know that the C.D.C. forecasts total deaths from Covid-19 to rise to as many as 160,000 just by the end of the month. Many times that number will have long-term medical complications, and a record 5.4 million people lost their health insurance between February and May. A generation of American kids will have their educations derailed, and many parents who don’t lose their jobs due to the economic crisis will see their careers ruined by the demands of child care.

The country’s international humiliation is total; historians may argue about when the American century began, but I doubt they’ll disagree about when it ended.

The psychological fallout alone will be incalculable. Even before the coronavirus, researchers spoke of loneliness as its own epidemic in America. A March article in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry attributed 162,000 deaths a year to the fallout of social isolation.

Yet somehow there’s no drumbeat of calls for [Trump's] the president’s resignation. People seem to feel too helpless. Protesters can make demands of governors and mayors, especially Democratic ones, because at the local level small-d democratic accountability still exists. Nationally such responsiveness is gone; no one expects the president to do his job, or to be held to account when he doesn’t. That’s how you know the country was broken before coronavirus ever arrived.

This suffering, your suffering, wasn’t inevitable. The coronavirus is a natural disaster. The Republican Party’s death-cult fealty to Trump is wholly man-made.

Vote a straigh Democrat ticket in November and punish Trump and the GOP for the harm done to the nation and the thousands of lives needlessly lost.