This dumbfuck nation has no idea about how deep the post-traumatic stress disorder it's going to have to deal with for the foreseeable future is going to be. As we shift back to whatever normalcy is, we are going to bear the scars of the miserable last year and more. Every human interaction will be burdened with a sense of unease, an anxiety that will remain even as we know that we're vaccinated, that the virus is gone or under control. We will have been rewired by this brief but scarring period, and that goes even for those who act like it's all back to how things were pre-COVID. Resistance to the trauma is an active effect of it.
And then there's the mountain of the dead to contend with. Over a half-million people who lived in the goddamned United States are no longer here, and that's another scar on our exhausted, marked-up bodies. We cannot allow that loss to simply be absorbed into our collective propensity to repress, to forget the quotidian horrors of 21st-century existence. We need to keep that pain and grief present. And we need to lay those corpses down where they belong: piled like fleshy cordwood right in front of the Republicans.
We live in the world that they fucked up. No, the GOP didn't start the coronavirus, but they sure as hell made it into a catastrophe through their unending support for Donald Trump, who saw COVID not as a crisis but as a turd in the punchbowl at his gaudy party that he wasn't going to fish out. And they can't ever be allowed to forget it. What I fear is that the Republican Party is already changing the narrative, shifting blame for the high death count to states, to federal medical officials like Anthony Fauci, and, when it doesn't seem completely insane, eventually to the Biden administration, sweeping their own guilt away.
You can see it happen in real time with their refusal to deal honestly in any way with the insurrection and riot at the Capitol on January 6. You can see it in the party's refusal to censure, formally or informally, their members who profess to believe that the 2020 election was so filled with fraud and illegalities that Donald Trump actually beat Joe Biden. In fact, when you get to the level of the state GOP, they've gone completely nutzoid in their adherence to what we now call "the Big Lie" about the election, using it as an excuse to fuck over the voters with bullshit, useless restrictions that seek to turn Democratic voters into criminals. They are gaslighting and then building their agenda on how they've gaslit everyone.
In her scathing piece titled "Trump Is Guilty of Pandemicide" in Foreign Policy, Laurie Garrett damningly lays out how Trump completely checked out on any decisions at all on COVID efforts between the election and the inauguration. He was essentially telling us all to go fuck ourselves and die if he wasn't installed back in office. And it's not as if he did much of anything before, other than not blocking funding to get a vaccine. He made masks and social distancing and lockdowns into a political battleground. He perversely refused to acknowledge the dead and sick, offering virtually no words of comfort or sympathy. He lied about his own bout of coronavirus. He supported the sick fucks who protested maskless against restrictions, even to the point of violence, even to the point of an attempted kidnap/murder of the governor of Michigan. He held rallies and events with no masking and no social distancing that were superspreader events. He pointedly declined to use the Defense Production Act until too far into the pandemic and even then on a limited basis. He didn't give a single rat shit about having a national plan on testing and mitigation, and, at the end, we lost two months of vaccine distribution because, as I said, we could all go fuck ourselves, as far as he was concerned. So many lives could have been saved. So many jobs and businesses could have been saved. As Garrett puts it, prior to Trump, "no sitting U.S. president...has willfully allowed such preventable carnage to unfold on the American people."
And sitting there, almost to a person, aiding and abetting and supporting and comforting Trump was the Republican Party. They didn't kill people with weapons, but they sure as hell caused hundreds of thousands more to die than needed to. They're counting on the short attention span of American voters to forget that complicity or to believe the lies they are telling now. Democrats can't allow that to happen. The corpses of COVID victims ought to be tied to each one of them, weighing them down like Jacob Marley's chains.
Democrats are losing the moment. They are losing the chance to tar and feather Republicans with their failure, much like they did in 2009. They are losing the momentum and the plot on the COVID relief package as they try to get Republicans to buy into it (even if President Biden has said that he doesn't have a problem passing it without them). Hell, in 2009, by this point, the Recovery Act had been signed into law by Barack Obama to deal with the economic crisis. Meanwhile, Republicans have been given a chance to regroup post-insurrection and get their cocks hard for obstruction while Democrats keep finding ways to step on their dicks every time they move, even as the bill is supported by a huge majority of Americans, including a majority of Republicans. Just pass the goddamn thing.
But it's not just a problem with the legislation. Democrats are also dropping the ball on making sure that everyone fucking knows that the reason vaccine distribution is going so well now is because of the Democrats running the federal government now. Donald Trump is a moronic piece of shit, but he's a savant when it comes to marketing himself. He fucking dreads the idea of not getting credit for the vaccine rollout. It's not that he deserves any credit, but that never stopped him from claiming it. He knows that Democrats could easily plant their flag on the vaccine's success.
And, frankly, I don't know what the fuck they're waiting for. Get those ads out there. That's where you draw the separation between the parties in stark terms: They're the disease; we're the cure. (Not to go all Cobra on you.) There should be a commission on the COVID incompetence like what's being done with the 1/6 coup attempt. And, in general, we should have more moments like Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly absolutely tearing Republican Jim Jordan a new asshole, as he did today over the election fuckery.
I know we say all the time that Democrats are unmatched in their ability to fuck up golden opportunities to put a goddamn stake in the heart of the GOP vampires. But this shit isn't even that hard. Every terrible allegation you can make against Republicans is fucking real, unlike the fantasy crap they pin on Democrats. And it would suck to lose the chance to secure a narrative that paints the GOP as the criminals and extremists they are, all in the name of some worthless fucking illusion of unity.
See, Democrats can explain, the problem with unity, the problem with bipartisanship is that one of the parties is filled with murderers. Look at all the dead people piled in front of them.
