Health Care/Joan Retsinas

Where are Republicans’ Spines?

Where are Republican senators’ spines? We have an anatomical anomaly: a slew of white men who roam the Senate — all without spines. It is like Movie of the Living Dead, where androids, with hunkered vision, ignore the idocy of our idiotic Commander-in-Chief.

This Commander has zapped them. Whatever he throws at them (or the country), they don’t flinch. Let the tweets fly; let the lies spew forth; let the journalists expose the scandals: the spineless ones don’t flinch.

They could fire him, exile him to his gated golf club served by poorly-paid immigrants who would, if they could, exile him to their home countries, the ones he dubbed hell holes. But these Senators remain inert, paralyzed.

Maybe they fear that this Commander, who rules with an iron hand, will ridicule them, throw his support to opponents. He has cavalierly fired employees — a skill he honed on “The Apprentice,” the staged (a.k.a. “fake”) interview contest on television.

But if the Republican Senators awoke out of their paralysis, they could “Fire Him” not on ideological grounds, but simply because as a CEO, this Commander has failed abysmally. In the war against COVID, we need, if not a great leader, at least a sane one.

So let’s judge him of the long-ago bone spur as a Commander in this war that we are not winning.

On team-building: F. He recruited a slew of inexperienced “great” people, friends of honchos, into his administration, even when they knew little of the domains they were to oversee. He dismissed the pandemic control experts within the government — disparaging them as useless legacies of President Obama, even though other epidemics, if not pandemics, loomed. When Dr. Fauci urged “masks,” he ignored the urgings. When Governors urged “slow,” he urged “open.” When experts called for more tests, he called for fewer. When staff hesitated to carry out his orders, he dismissed them as incompetent, stupid, losers - though the burning question remained: why hire people he saw as losers?

On uniting the nation: F. The virus has been fiercest in black and Hispanic communities, in large measure because these people live in close-quarters, in poverty, with no country homes as refuges, no options to work from home (they may not even have computers). The virus spreads in the petri-dishes of this nation: nursing homes, supermarkets, prisons, meat packing plants. (OSHA has fewer inspectors than ever). Police brutality has added to the outrage; the nation feels the injustice as protestors scream “ Black Lives Matter.” This President, deaf to the injustice, ignoring the chants, has used the bully pulpit not to calm, but to exacerbate tensions. In pitting white police against black Americans, conservative states against liberal states, Democratic Governors against Republican Governors, he has rent the nation. He sees “Divide and conquer” as an election-strategy.

On problem-solving: F. Executives — the leader he professed to be, though the string of bankruptcies puts the lie to that — think creatively. Imagine Bill Gates or Steve Jobs in charge of this nation’s response to the pandemic. We needed to distribute personal protective gear, testing equipiment, ventilators. We still need those, especially as the virus spreads. Instead, we had scandals and snafus with our haphazard response. He put money and time into testing a drug that the WHO (a force he scorns) as well as this country’s scientists (more belittling) said will not work. He ridicules testing, the basis for other countries’ successful response to COVID. As the number of cases rose, he blamed China, Europe, the World Health Organization, the Democrats. A great leader is introspective, accepts personal responsibility for failing. He doesn’t.

On intelligence: sub-par. Does any senator, especially the septuagenarian ones, want to mingle with mask-less crowds in crowded indoor auditoriums? Because this President does, he has given a green light to everybody who thinks the virus is a hoax, that ignoring the data will make the virus vanish. He has joined forces with the people who deny science. Trusting him is akin to trusting necromancy.

The virus will continue to wreak economic havoc: expect rising unemployment, rising bankruptcies, rising government deficits.

Is our President mean? racist? misogynist? xenophobic (except for Russia and Slovenia)? Absolutely. But judge him as a leader, the “absolute worst” we have ever had; and find your spines: Fire him.

Joan Retsinas is a sociologist who writes about health care in Providence, R.I. Email retsinas@verizon.net.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2020

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