A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Unbelievable. In the same week that Texas' Republican lieutenant governor Dan Patrick suggested that grandparents should sacrifice their lives in order to save the country and President Donald Trump rosily predicted that the war on the novel coronavirus will probably end in time for Easter, Glenn Beck piled on with his own idiocy. According to the Huffington Post and Media Matters, the popular right-wing commentator and author apparently shares Patrick's apocalyptic vision of older Americans going out to the workplace while their children and grandchildren stay at home, even though the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have determined that COVID-19 is more likely to kill older people who become infected. Per Huffington Post's story : “I would rather have my children stay home and all of us who are over 50 go in and keep this economy going and working,” he said in comments posted online by Media Matters. “Even if we all get...

Just when you thought Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, could sink no lower in his levels of incompetence, the Buffoon in Chief is signaling his impatience with the medically-necessary steps to limit the spread of COVID-19 and is making irresponsible predictions that the pandemic will end "before Easter." At a televised"town hall" arranged by Trump's favorite conservative media outlet, Fox News, the man who once said that the coronavirus pandemic would not have a serious impact on the U.S. and that the Democrats were exaggerating the gravity of the situation for political gain during an election year was irritated and, at the same time, making rosy predictions about when America could go back to business as usual. Per the New York Times:   President Trump said on Tuesday that he wanted to reopen the country for business by Easter, on April 12, despite widespread warnings from public health experts that the worst effects of the co...

So now we've come to this. As President Donald Trump questions the wisdom of putting into place medically-necessary measures to protect Americans from the world-wide coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic because they're "doing more harm than good" to the economy, his Republican acolytes are clamoring for an end to quarantines, closures of businesses, and a return to normal activities. It's no secret that the GOP has long had a reputation for being the party of Big Business. The alliance between the Republican Party and what we now call the "One Percenters" began sometime after Reconstruction and was solidified by the time of the 1912 Presidential election, the race that split the party's pro-business wing (led by incumbent William Howard Taft) and its more progressive one (led by ex-President Theodore Roosevelt). In that intramural battle royale, TR and his adherents ended up forming a third party (the Bull Moose Party); as a result, a weakened Taft...