Rush Limbaugh's Viral Memes
So I hit this real quick on Monday on Twitter.
I suggest clicking through and reading the thread. It's short by my standards. Since then, far from backing off, Rush and co have doubled down:
You can see how it’s almost inevitable that we’d come to this point, when the party in power is being guided by cronyism and nepotism and also trying to cover its crimes up with projection and deflection. Washington’s no small town but it’s not a huge city. Civically-minded families have civically-minded children and where one sibling goes into government work, so might another.
Rod Rosenstein also covered quite a bit for Trump and was in many respects a team player, but like James Comey, he refused to go 100% all-in. Frankly, a lot of people who would otherwise be GOP partisans or even specifically Team Trump would fail the kind of loyalty test that the Tan Who Would Be King demands, because the old rubric of “Dear boy, how would this look? We must think about appearances.” reads to Donald as weak and unreliable.
He wants people who are more afraid of how things will look to him than how they will look to the referees and the general public.
The deeper problem here has been evident since the early days of the Trump regime, when Donald required that the economic figures be cooked for his benefit. In his mind, being president means he's the boss of the country, of all of us, which means the media are supposed to carry water for him and everybody in the government, especially under the executive branch, is supposed to be working for his benefit and his benefit only.
In Trump's mind, and in the minds or at least the mouths of those willing to go to bat for him, the only function in a government official speaking to the public is public relations. They're supposed to be hyping him, they're supposed to be helping him, they're supposed to be advancing his narrative. It doesn't matter if you work for the FDA, the CIA, or the CDC. In Trumpland, your job when you're facing a camera or microphone is to dance like Sean Spicer or Kellyanne Conway. Your job is to spin, to distract, and score points. That's it.
Now, while the Coronavirus is being mishandled at the federal level and while it does have pandemic potential, I'd like to call attention to a thread that shares some newer information and which points out that while we're right to be concerned, COVID-19 need not be a cause for panic as long as we're all taking reasonable precautions.
"Reasonable precautions" here being things like washing our hands and being mindful about touching our faces (something I'm bad at), not "boycotting Chinese-American restaurants" and "being racist to Asian people." I have a feeling that around the time Rush and his ilk pivot to acknowledging the Coronavirus being a real serious threat, their solutions will involve more segregation than sanitation.
Still, while individual efforts can do a lot, it would be great to have some real leadership from the top, especially to coordinate messaging on those individual actions and give clear information about the risks we face.
Wouldn't it be great if we had a president who showed up to work bright and early in the morning with solid plans about how to make the country run better for all of us instead of trying to figure out how he can make the government work more for him? I've been saying since November of 2016 that our best chance of getting Donald out of office is going to be November of 2020, and now that we're through the sham of an impeachment trial it's more clear than ever that this is the case.
So wash your hands, get your shots up to date, and lay in some extra pet food, because it's time once again to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of civic participation.
