O Say Can You Please Entry 21: We Shall Overcomb

OK, so I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that I’m back. The bad news is that a pandemic has been keeping us at home for months on end. COVID-19 is no laughing matter, so I won’t cover the virus as a whole here. However, I will cover some specific factors as to why America’s response to the pandemic is widely regarded as a fiasco. The three factors are partisan leadership, President Trump’s complete lack of competence and foresight, and Republican politicians in lock-step with him.

Let’s start by explaining the partisan leadership, and this is best exemplified by Congress. The House of Representatives is controlled by the Democrats, while the Senate is led by Republicans. Since the politicians in both parties are becoming increasingly partisan and often one-sided, it leads to Congress being less effective than it could be. A big reason for this is that Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, is sitting on hundreds of bills passed by the House. Many had some Republican support in the house, and notable ones can be found here. Three of these are an election security package, legal protection from various forms of discrimination for LGBTQ Americans, and a re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act. The House is making things happen, and the Senate is still completely dysfunctional because of partisan obstruction and stonewalling. I thought Congress was supposed to be a collective of equal political representatives, but some people suck up to other interests that easily, I guess.

Now, the elephant in the room must be addressed, and that is that President Trump ignored this pandemic until it was way too late for us to stop it. He may not have fired the whole pandemic response team, but he dissolved a critical agency within the National Security Council that would’ve been mighty helpful in this situation. He then proceeded to downplay the whole thing, calling it a hoax for a good long while and then blaming China after that. Then it spread here, and all that was mentioned before suddenly aged about as well as milk in the Sahara. Now, with over 80,000 dead and over a million cases, it can safely be said that America’s government goofed this one up big-time. By the way, restrictions are still begin loosened, but more on that later.

     Oddly enough, such a massive mistake has not ended Trump’s political career up to this point. This is because some Republican politicians have developed a habit of following the President no matter what, and others seem to follow suit. If Angela Merkel or Boris Johnson, the respective Prime Ministers of Germany and the UK, botched this as badly as Trump, their careers would be kaput, and people would be clamoring for their heads. In America, we have to wait until November for anything to change because our system was not designed to work with such a partisan structure. To make matters worse, some states are even reopening. If this is indeed premature like what the experts are saying, this could only deepen and prolong the blows already dealt to us. Our economy is often the stated reason behind these decisions, but if we open too soon, even more lives will be lost, and our economic problems will last longer as a result. Noah didn’t have gaping holes in his Ark, so why should our states punch through ours? As Former President Barack Obama put it, Trump’s response has been a chaotic disaster. To sum it all up…