Patrick Cockburn: The US is losing its superpower status and it might not recover // Patrick Wyman: How Do You Know If You’re Living Through the Death of an Empire? // Tom Scocca: This Isn’t Trump’s Katrina. It’s Slow-Motion 9/11
Ignoranus (n): A person who's both stupid and an asshole
Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent
(winning submissions to The Washington Post's yearly neologism contest)
My favorite line belongs to an old Irish woman taxi driver in Boston. Flo Kennedy and I were in the backseat talking about Flo’s book, Abortion Rap, and the driver turned around and said, 'Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.' I wish I’d gotten her name so we could attribute it to her - Gloria Steinem
My favorite line belongs to an old Irish woman taxi driver in Boston. Flo Kennedy and I were in the backseat talking about Flo’s book, Abortion Rap, and the driver turned around and said, 'Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.' I wish I’d gotten her name so we could attribute it to her - Gloria Steinem
Nationalism is
an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind - Albert Einstein
Nixon is the
kind of guy who, if you were drowning twenty feet from shore, would throw you a
fifteen-foot rope - Eugene McCarthy [Also applies to Trump]
The coronavirus crisis is the equivalent of Suez and Afghanistan for Trump’s America. Indeed, these crises seem minor compared to the Covid-19 pandemic
The US may be reaching
its “Chernobyl moment” as it fails to lead in combating the coronavirus epidemic.
As with the nuclear accident in the Soviet Union in 1986, a cataclysm is
exposing systemic failings that have already weakened US hegemony in the world.
Whatever the outcome of the pandemic, nobody is today looking to Washington for
a solution to the crisis. The fall in US
influence was visible this week at virtual meetings of world leaders where the
main US diplomatic effort was devoted to an abortive attempt to persuade the
others to sign a statement referring to the “Wuhan virus”, as part of a campaign
to blame China for
the coronavirus epidemic.
Demonising others as a diversion from one’s own shortcomings is a central
feature of President
Trump’s political tactics. Arkansas Republican senator
Tom Cotton took up the same theme, saying that “China unleashed this plague
on the world, and China has to be held accountable”. US failure goes far
beyond Trump’s toxic political style: American supremacy in the world since
the Second
World War has been rooted in its unique capacity to get things done
internationally by persuasion or by the threat or use of force. But the
inability of Washington to respond adequately to Covid-19 shows
that this is no longer the case and crystallises a perception that American
competence is vanishing.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/us-trump-world-decline-coronavirus-brazil-bolsonaro-a9430566.html
Patrick Wyman: How Do You Know If You’re Living Through the Death of an Empire?
All empires think they’re special, but all empires eventually come to an end. The United States won’t be an exception... The popular story version of this particular falling empire might focus on a twice-divorced serial philanderer and bullshit artist and make him the villain, rendering his downfall or ultimate triumph the climax of the narrative.
But it’s far more
likely that the real meat of the issue will be found in a tax code full of
sweetheart deals for the ultra-wealthy, the slashed budgets of county public
health offices, the lead-contaminated water supplies. And that’s to say nothing
of the decades of pointless, self-perpetuating, and almost undiscussed imperial
wars that produce no victories but plenty of expenditures in blood and
treasure, and a great deal of justified ill will....
https://www.motherjones.com/media/2020/03/how-do-you-know-if-youre-living-through-the-death-of-an-empire/The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life
Jonathan Freedland: Trump now has American blood on his hands
“Take the lives of the old and the weak: I want the money”
Trump was rightly derided in 2016 as a “snake-oil salesman”, and the cliche is so well-worn it’s easy to forget what it originally refers to: the 19th century hawkers who sold bogus cures to the gullible. Recall that Trump rushed to tell people a pre-existing drug would cure Covid-19, leading to a shortage of a medication that was needed for other illnesses, and several deaths, as desperate people rushed to buy tablets that, for them, proved lethal...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/27/trump-narcissism-american-blood-coronavirusTrump was rightly derided in 2016 as a “snake-oil salesman”, and the cliche is so well-worn it’s easy to forget what it originally refers to: the 19th century hawkers who sold bogus cures to the gullible. Recall that Trump rushed to tell people a pre-existing drug would cure Covid-19, leading to a shortage of a medication that was needed for other illnesses, and several deaths, as desperate people rushed to buy tablets that, for them, proved lethal...
Tom Scocca: This Isn’t Trump’s Katrina. It’s Stupid, Slow-Motion 9/11
... The media has not
figured out how to convey the enormity of what is happening to its viewers and
readers...We have slid clear out
of the information age into an apocalypse where a greedy ignorance swallows up
knowledge. Trump’s Katrina has come and gone; the pandemic is Trump’s 9/11—an
even stupider 9/11 than the original stupid one, 9/11 if the president’s
security briefing on Sept. 10 had been titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike
in U.S. by Hijacking Commercial Airliners Out of Washington and Boston and
Crashing Them Into Major Buildings in September,” and people had just read it
out on TV for the public to hear, and also camera crews had followed Mohamed
Atta to the Portland, Maine, airport but the government had not bothered to
keep track of him when he entered the terminal. And the security checkpoints
had been shut down as a gesture of spite toward the previous administration.
The country has
already failed, and the cascade of failures still to come would be unimaginable
if so many people hadn’t already very clearly imagined it....
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/trump-coronavirus-response-9-11.htmlAndrew Bacevich: The national security establishment’s decades of staggering failure is finally being exposed
Human activities, ranging from the hubristic reengineering of rivers like the Mississippi to the effects of climate change stemming from the use of fossil fuels, have substantially exacerbated such “natural” catastrophes. And unlike faraway autocrats or terrorist organizations, such phenomena, from extreme weather events to pandemics, directly and immediately threaten the safety and wellbeing of the American people. Don’t tell the Central Intelligence Agency or the Joint Chiefs of Staff but the principal threats to our collective wellbeing are right here where we live.
Apart from modest belated efforts at mitigation, the existing national security state is about as pertinent to addressing such threats as President Trump’s cheery expectations that the coronavirus will simply evaporate once warmer weather appears
https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/the-staggering-failure-of-decades-of-national-security-wisdom-is-finally-being-exposed/