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Op-Ed

Chinese Flu With Xi Jinping Characteristics

February 21, 2020

COVID-19 is a lousy name for the virus that has killed more than 2,000 people and infected 70,000 so far in China alone. I suggest we rename it Chinese Flu With Xi Jinping Characteristics.

Robert Kahn

By Robert Kahn

Deputy editor emeritus, Courthouse News

COVID-19 is a lousy name for the virus that has killed more than 2,000 people and infected 70,000 so far in China alone. I suggest we rename it Chinese Flu With Xi Jinping Characteristics.

And while we’re at it, let’s rename our country the Disunited States with Characteristics of don the john.

Let’s Make America Great Again by putting 130,000 stars on the flag of Old Glory — one for each dollar littlejohn don had to pay to get laid one time.

I bet his wife charges him for just a little taste … then jogs sidewise, protected by the Secret Service, in her alleged campaign against bully boys.

Xi and don with the little johnson would be soul brothers if either of them had a soul.

Xi, an atheist, denies that he has a soul.

Little don the john demonstrates his lack of it.

These Two Big Important Cowards have many things in common.

Our crybaby is weaker than their bully.

He ain’t as smart as Xi, either.

Xi is not trampling on anything: That’s the way it’s always worked over there.

But here in our country there once was a noble tradition against nobles: that no one should be trampled upon, no matter how humble their station in life.

Then came the Reagan Republicans with their muddy boots.

To quote some old gangster and WWII movies: “Perhaps this will refresh your memory.”

After Dr. Li Wenliang notified other doctors in late December 2019 that a new virus had appeared in Wuhan, Xi Jinping had him hauled in and reprimanded for “spreading rumors.”

Dr. Li died of the virus on Feb. 7. He was 33.

The director of a Wuhan hospital, Liu Zhiming, died of the coronavirus this week, at 51.

Yet Xi, the most powerful Chinese leader since the illustrious mass murderer Mao Zedong, does not face any real challenge to his rule — so far as we know. He controls virtually everything in China — which, let us admit, has made great strides in improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people under his rule.

Still, if you claim credit for everything that happens in a nation you rule with an iron hand under other people’s bent backbones, it’s reasonable to ask whether you might have had a dirty hand in things that go wrong.

Here’s where Xi and don the john are cowardly brothers under their thin skins.

Trump wishes he had Xi’s powers — and is grabbing them, under a pathetic, cowed, cowardly and faithless Republican Senate: watching him trundle out the door of Congress, shoplifting our Constitution.

The late, great J.J. Cale wrote a song about this. It’s called “Lies, Lies, Lies.”

(Here’s an interesting thing. The first time I dialed it up, I got a 5-second political ad for Mike Bloomberg. I have nothing to do with him. The next time I tapped it, it was a political ad for another guy. The third time I tapped it, it was a political ad for somebody else.)

Man, those politicians have lots o’ money to spend.

Xi is running an anti-corruption campaign that has snared some high-ranking Communist Party bosses — so long as they’re not in Xi’s family.

Trump, meanwhile, is fulfilling his campaign promise to Be The Swamp, firing and humiliating anyone who dares lift her head from licking his loathsome shoes — including the brother of an army officer who testified to the House of Representatives — not the guy himself, his brother.

Fired him for what? For being a brother?

Then this week our weak president — what’s his name, Schlumpf? — posing as a strongman, fired the government official who certified that Ukraine had cleaned up its corruption enough to deserve the $391 million in military aid that Trump withheld to extort President Volodymyr Zelensky. Then he canned the acting director of national intelligence, who had the presumption to talk to the House Intelligence Committee about Russia’s desire to keep its Manchurian candidate in office.

Damn — can’t lift up your head up here anymore. Not while extortion is legal.

Listen, my fellow Americans, whom I love dearly, despite my acerbic comments about you: Trump and his crew are just a gang like MS-13.

They just white is all. White Men in Suits.

Then the poisonous atmosphere that permeates our country.

I am sad to report that we have become a country with don the john characteristics.

We have become what Winston Churchill called Nazi Germany: a nation of carnivorous sheep.

And the world we once actually did lead is throwing us out of office.

It doesn’t need to impeach us. It just stares in horror.

(Courthouse News editor Robert Kahn is an incredibly stable genius. And this is a perfect column.)

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