Trump Stricken, Vicious Prelude, CDC, Shut Up, MAGA Christians, Comey

This is where I should admit that I am a daily user of a drug I take to boost memory and alertness. Usually I take it with a little hazelnut creamer.

— Julian Sanchez (@normative) September 29, 2020

• National figures, including Trump critics, are wishing my president a successful recovery. Those of us of a religious bent are adding our prayers for him and the First Lady. At The Moderate Voice the cartoon Dr. Fauci tells us what the real Dr. Fauci must be thinking but refuses to articulate, and Brian Geiss carefully points out why folks born during the Truman administration (like Trump and me) must be really, really careful, especially those of us with additional health considerations.
   
• Dave Dubya proposes that when anti-masking militants, virus deniers, virus minimizers like my president, are themselves stricken, perhaps reality is sending us a precautionary message. We should listen.
   
• While many of us offer our prayers, Hackwhackers offers a reminder, that even this tragic COVID-19 episode is accompanied by an instance of vicious last second recklessness.
   
• Frances Langum watches Fox News as Brian Kilmeade thinks about Donald Trump, hospitalized with a non-trivial chance of non-survival, and suggests a bright side for my president. That’s …um… creative, Brian.
   
• Ant Farmer’s Almanac comes up with an appropriate headline to describe the so-so reaction of the White House medical advisor when told of Trump’s startling medical condition.
   
• In Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson reviews the sordid side of how news of Trump’s condition had to be extracted from an unwilling White House.

• So how did intrepid reporters discover that the non-science oriented White House was interfering with CDC science-based warnings? The warnings that could have kept my president healthy? Andy Borowitz got suspicious that Trump had changed what the CDC had posted when the CDC website misspelled CDC. Some satire seems appropriate, even now.
   
• Back to what preoccupied us just a couple of days ago. The debate seemed pretty much unwatchable, although millions of heroic folks tuned in. My president was non-stop interruptus, talking over Biden, and even Wallace as the moderator attempted to moderate. But Scotties Toy Box points out that there were several seconds of dead air in which Trump went into stunned silence. Scottie explains what did it.
   
• Michael John Scott, in MadMikesAmerica, feels pretty good about the Showtime 2-part special The Comey Rule. The show apparently casts Comey as reluctantly torpedoing the Clinton campaign by performing his duty and reopening an old investigation.
   
  I object, your honor.
   
  In fact, Comey tilted the election by breaking established DOJ protocols, offering unwarranted comments on the case just before the election. As I see it, that violation was because he was frightened down to his tippy-toes at how Republican office holders might regard him if he followed the rules. So he broke the rules and was stunned to find that he had placed Trump into the Oval Office.
   
• PZ Myers continues to decry massive voter fraud: “Republicans. Intimidation, gerrymandering, suppressing the vote” and is gleeful at warrants issued for two of the worst lawbreakers.
   
• So young Kyle Rittenhouse shoots some folks in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two. Conservative James Wigderson is disturbed and angry at the reaction of Republicans.
   
• In The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser, Bruce tells Trump supporters that opposition to their toxic views is more than a difference of opinion.
   
• North Carolina pastor John Pavlovitz contemplates those of our brothers and sisters in Christ who support a disfigured MAGA religion – a hollow mimicry of Christianity. Pastor Pavlovitz apologizes for their lack of decency and empathy: their divorce from anything taught by Jesus.
   
• tengrain at Mock Paper Scissors listens to QAnon buzz and survives. Seems the newest traitor to join the New World Order conspiracy that all patriotic Q-ers must battle is Franklin Graham. Franklin…Graham? And for a reason I would not have suspected.
   
• I’m good with both-sides-do-it as a reasoned conclusion. driftglass points out the outlandish paths into which we are led if both-side-ism begins as an unexamined premise.
   
• nojo recounts what we all pretty much know about how US representative government is constructed: A Senate that is wildly disproportionate, for one thing. We care, but we don’t care quite enough. When enough of us get angry enough to rival Vietnam War times, maybe we’ll take it to the streets.
   
  If it ever happens, I’m for BLM level protests with 2 caveats on when and how. Let’s go at it after the pandemic is history. Let’s follow the good example of the 93% of BLM protests that have been entirely peaceful.
   
• Oh my, here we go again. Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara wants to repeal the 17th Amendment, the one that provides for the direct election of US Senators. He wants to go back to the good old days when Senators were chosen by state legislators. I’m okay with gadfly arguments. They sometimes can be kind of fun to relitigate, and are occasionally illuminating. But I do wish conservatives would stand back and stand down from picking on poor James Madison to misrepresent.
   
• Meanwhile, back at the unemployment line, Ted McLaughlin shows us just how crowded it got this week. Ready for numbers? Easy to forget if those desperate for work are not in your social circle.
   
• M. Bouffant at Web of Evil brings us a brief video of demonstrators attacked by the police in Mexico: women protesting lack of enforcement of laws concerning sexual assault.