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 herGloria 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 ropeEugene 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.
The change in attitude is important because superpowers, such as the British Empire, the Soviet Union in the recent past or the US today, depend on a degree of bluff. They cannot afford to put their all-powerful image to the test too often because they cannot be seen to fail: an exaggerated picture of British strength was shattered by the Suez Crisis in 1956, as was that of the Soviet Union by the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s....
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-coronavirus

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.html

Andrew 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/

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