Cannons to the Right of Them Volleyed and Thundered

Why is it that virtually all the people in our country protesting quarantine orders that protect us from the Covid-19 pandemic are right-wing Republicans? Just thought I’d ask. I haven’t seen a single report of left-wing Democrats doing it.

It’s clear that President Schlumpf is more concerned about being re-elected than he is about protecting our health.

Gun-toting idiots in Wisconsin, Missouri, Tennessee and elsewhere protested against quarantine orders this week, along with God-fearing alleged Christians in other states, who claim to believe that God will hear their prayers if delivered from church, but not if they fall on their knees at home.

Give me a break. Devout Muslims, who fall to their knees to pray five times a day, know, or assume, that God will hear their prayers wherever they are. Some Southern Baptists don’t believe it. They seem to believe that God will hear their prayers only from a church. As if God is a Realtor.

Missouri’s attorney general this week had the imagined glory to sue China for being the source of the Covid-19 pandemic. Need I add that he is a Republican? This moron in a high place might as well have sued mosquitoes, rats, spiny anteaters and all the mammals in the world, for it. And most of the beetles.

Pardon me for repeating myself, but why is it that all the online liars who spread misinformation about the pandemic are right-wing Republicans?

With more than 22 million Americans out of work — a steeper slide than the Great Depression — the Schlumpf administration seems most concerned about helping rich people.

Many — most? too early to tell — small business loans authorized by Congress actually went to big businesses, such as huge restaurant and hotel chains, which snapped up the lion’s share of the money.

At least 10 class actions filed this week claim that big banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, US Bank, and, of course, Wells Fargo — reshuffled applications from big businesses, rather than first-come, first-served small ones — as required by Congress — because banks make more money more quickly from big loans.

Also this week, a megachurch preacher in Louisiana was criminally charged with aggravated assault for driving a church bus toward a protester outside his Life Tabernacle Church near Baton Rouge. One of his parishioners faces similar charges. The hellfire preacher, Tony Spell, already faced six misdemeanor charges for holding mass gatherings in violation of the governor’s orders, which is what the protesters were protesting.

An AP poll released this week showed that four times as many Republicans as Democrats want businesses to reopen ASAP. Now, this may be because Republicans resist government tyranny while Democrats succumb to it, as the right-wing echo chamber claims, but I don’t believe it.

I think it’s that the Agent Orange in the White House, in three years, has perverted our country from being the most generous and far-seeing in the world to the most stingy and short-sighted one.

Consider the hate messages to the family of a man who died of Covid-19 and had to cancel the live-streaming of his funeral because Republican hatemongers insisted it was a fraud.

Consider Ohio state Sen. Andrew Brenner, who compared the protections recommended by his state’s health director, who is Jewish, to steps “taken by the Nazis during World War II.” Also in Ohio this week, protesters of the state’s stay-at-home order held a sign showing a rat with a Star of David under the words “The real plague.”

I talked this week with a longtime criminal defense attorney, whose name I shall not reveal, for obvious reasons: Retaliation from the Powers That Think They Be.

“I believe in the Comedy of Errors,” he said. “You’d have to be blind and stupid not to feel a little bit stressed. It’s all about money. If it didn’t have to do with money, we wouldn’t give a damn. We’re on a quest for stupidity.”

Well, there it is.

Good luck to you all, especially in the South, whose governors have hitched their fortunes to the most ill-informed, ignorant, venomous, greedy and corrupt president the United States of America ever elected.

Sometimes, as any gambler knows, your luck runs out.

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