Vaxxing And Relaxing To Fascism
The Democrats have really messed up by vaxxing and relaxing Joe Biden.
I didn’t watch the presidential debate. I’m not a masochist.
But catching up today, it’s obvious that it went badly for Joe Biden. Very badly. Worst-case-scenario bad. Panic in the streets bad (well panic in the blue corners of the Beltway at least).
First off he had a ‘cold’ we’re told. He was coughing a couple of minutes in. Could very well have been covid. Probably was.
If it was, this would add to his at least two previous confirmed infections.
From the opening salvos, he was badly off. His voice weak and cracked. During Trump’s answers he was standing slack jawed, staring down, his whole appearance like death-warmed-up. Too many of his answers were meandering, failing to land on a meaningful point or conclusion.
Trump by contrast, while full of malignant narcissism and lies, was full of free wheeling and largely lucid malignant narcissism and lies.
The contrast was stark.
Which brings us to covid. And its impact on the brain.
It doesn’t hit everyone equally. We know Biden has had it at least twice. And we know that covid, even mild covid, is bad for brains, whether you are vaccinated or not.
A neuroscientist who spends her career looking through a microscope at the things viruses do to brains says she’s studied HIV, influenza, Zika and has “never seen the type of damage SarsCov2 leaves behind (in the brain) after infection with other viruses."
Yes, Biden is old. But his cognitive decline in the last few years has been marked. This was him in December 2019, just before the arrival of covid. Lucid, sharp and without that haunted-behind-the-eyes look.
Trump of course has had confirmed covid once and likely a few times by now. But the reality is his cognitive decline is not on the same scale as Biden’s. He is mainly still the nasty buffoon he ever was.
The truth is nothing about health outcomes is fair, whether that’s covid or any other illness. The healthiest people get cancer and die. 30-a-day smokers don’t. Some vaccinated people get long covid. Some unvaccinated people don’t. Trends don’t always extrapolate down to the level of the individual.
Luck, genetics, environment all play a role.
Sometimes shit just happens.
And it looks like it has happened to Biden.
The tragedy of course is that if covid has played a part in his obvious cognitive collapse, it will be by his, and his party’s, own hand.
The man who declared the pandemic over in the year with the biggest death toll. The man and his party who encouraged a premature return to normal. Who declared the only public health intervention we needed was the vaccine. The party whose pandemic talking points rapidly overlapped with the anti-vaxxers and anti-public-health figures on the right they had mocked mere months earlier. The party whose governors, from New York to Los Angeles, are now trying to ban face masks.
The Democrats vaxxed and relaxed their man into accelerated cognitive decline and in doing so might have paved the way for the return of Trump and the inevitable horrors a second term would bring.
Incredibly, in an early Trump salvo, he slammed Biden for presiding over more covid deaths than he did. Trump may have spouted a lot of lies in the debate, but this wasn’t one of them.
How is the leader of the anti-vaccine, anti-public-health party able to land such a solid blow against the ‘pro-science’ party who in no small part were elected because of Trump’s covid failures?
It’s incredible.
Incredible failure.
And Biden didn’t bite back on covid, didn’t point to the public health disaster that a second Trump term would bring. Because he couldn’t. Because the Democrats haven’t stood up for public health. On the contrary, they abandoned it for capitalist convenience. And now, by trying to ban masks, they are going to war with it. The words necessary to defend public health have, in less than four years, fallen out of their vocabulary. The spirit to defend it also abandoned, they allowed Trump to land the most meaningful covid line of the debate.
This should not have been possible.
Where does the US go from here?
If it was a functioning democracy, and the Democratic party was a functioning party within that democracy, they’d be ditching Biden asap. They’d find a way, regardless of convention. But knowing the Democrats, knowing their reverence for convention above effective politics, they won’t.
And in doing so, they may just have vaxxed and relaxed the country back into the arms of Donald Trump.
Something I've been angry about for quite a while - beyond the Democrats' enthusiastic support for eugenics and genocide - has been that in terms of the next administration, all the Democrats are offering is the stick. "It is going to be very bad if they win," and no carrot, no promises about their future administration. The most they will do is promise to do things they are NOT doing right now. Last night Biden promised to protect abortion in his second term. You're president NOW, what the fuck will you do next term? Say specifically what you'll do and then explain why you didn't do it yesterday.
After hearing a lot about Project 2025, I went and just did a quick twitter search of the Democratic party's account, Biden's account, Harris's account; these clowns haven't said a word about it. We're supposed to be worried but what are they doing?
Even if Biden wins (he won't), I am completely confident that the wishlist laid out by the fascists who penned Project 2025 will become part of the Democratic party's platform within ten years. The Heritage Foundation provided the template for Obamacare. We didn't get single payer because the Democrats adopted a right-wing proposal. Then the right wing disavowed and began campaigning against it.
Look at Biden going to bat for "Bibi" and Zionism and then immediately being thanked with Netanyahu openly campaigning for Trump. The Democrats are losing this election intentionally so they can blame the left for the collapse of the American experiment, for the fascists' gaining power. And those idiots actually expect they'll receive mercy from the fascist death squads. Proud Boys deputized as federal agents are going to be dragging Democratic members of Congress out into the street to be shot, and it will be shocked pikachu faces all around.
I wish desperately that there could have been just one single country on Earth that successfully resisted the eugenicist policy of "infect everyone, continually, forever, until they all die." I'll learn another language, screw it. I'll learn Flemish if they're still trying to protect people from the pandemic. The only positive I see in all of this mess is just the simple fact that fascism is not going to be our biggest problem in the next few decades; it will be the famines caused by climate change.
In the Fall of 2020, I read Honigsbaum and Krishnan's coverage of the history of the 1895 Russian flu (which was most likely the first outbreak of the "common cold" coronavirus OC43)
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(20)32134-6/fulltext
Various political leaders across Europe were suddenly struck insensate and the continent was plunged into the fin de siècle malaise that set the stage for WW-I. I found the story terrifying in 2020. Watching the horror show of last night's debate reawakened the terror.
I'm a fan of Louis Pasteur's famous quote, "chance favors the prepared mind." We need to prepare ourselves for the highly plausible possibility that Biden and other world leaders have been playing out Honigsbaum's prophecy. Putin's violent coughing fits just before he invaded Ukraine? Did anybody else notice this datapoint? Chance disfavors unprepared minds, I guess.