Post 271 - December 7, 2020

Day 271…

Governor Cuomo has restarted his daily briefings. As of now, he is only planning on doing them on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

This morning he called upon retired doctors and nurses who are able to come back into active service to do so.

If we can’t get our hospitalization rate down, then things will start having to shut down again. In five days if there is no change then the 25% indoor dining in the city will be halted. Joe Allen’s the iconic Broadway restaurant hang-out is going to close completely for the winter. They are lucky in that they own the buildings that house their three restaurants.

Other restaurants are not so well positioned. I fear we are going to lose many more permanently before the spring.

Dr. Fauci joined the Governor via Zoom and said that his plan seems, “very sound.”

By the end of the day, or tomorrow morning at the latest, the United States will reach 15 million cases of the virus. There have been over 70 thousand new cases so far today and as of right now, just about 500 people have died. That number will be well over 2000 by nightfall. That’s just today.

This was almost all avoidable.

It is absolutely remarkable to me that we seem to be following the timeline of 1918 almost exactly.

In 1918, the first peak happened in the first week of July or so. The second peak, which was the deadliest and the one that put the pandemic in the history books happened in mid-November and had largely subsided by January. A third peak, lower than the second but still twice as high as the first, occurred at the beginning of March before flattening out by mid-April.

What’s remarkable is that we have apparently learned nothing at all from that history.

Will the people who are denying that there’s a pandemic look back years from now and realize that they were wrong, or will they stubbornly hold on to their alternate facts?

How hard is it to wear a mask? How hard is it to keep your distance from others for just a few weeks? If some of these people could be sent into the future to look at videos of themselves losing their minds in defense of not wearing a mask, would that change anything?

The President has now lost Georgia yet again. The state is about to re-certify the election for President-elect Biden.

On Saturday, the President called Republican Governor Brian Kemp and attempted to pressure him to call a special legislative session. The President was demanding that Kemp overturn the results and appoint 16 electors to the College who would vote for him.

Governor Kemp refused. He has no authority to interfere in a Federal election. In a joint statement with his Lt. Governor yesterday, he said, “Any attempt by the legislature to retroactively change that process for the Nov. 3rd election would be unconstitutional and immediately enjoined by the courts, resulting in a long legal dispute and no short-term resolution.”

A survey by the Washington Post has found that only 27 Republicans in the House and the Senate combined acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election. Two of them, despite all evidence to the contrary, actually believe that the President won. The 220 remaining senators and Congresspeople will not commit.

Treason is defined as, “The crime of betraying one’s country, especially by attempting to kill the sovereign or overthrow the government.” How is denying the results of a fair election not treason?

Not acknowledging a fair election that experts on both sides of the aisles say was safe and untampered with, does nothing except rip the fabric of our fragile Democracy.

Will voters remember this in two years when we are faced with the mid-term elections? Will any of them look back on this with the clear-eyed vision that the future affords and still believe that they were correct?

There is word from White House aides that the President may travel to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home for the holidays and not ever return to Washington. He may be starting to think that if he resigns that his Vice-President might be able to pardon him.

There have been indications that the Administration is finally seeing that they have exhausted their legal challenges.

The President’s personal attorney Rudi Giuliani has contracted COVID-19. There are no reports on his actual condition, but it is serious enough that he has been admitted to a hospital. In recent days, he has been seen on multiple occasions interacting with the general public in close quarters without wearing a mask.

How many people has he made sick? It could be in the hundreds. Will he ever look back on his actions and regret them?

Bill Barr is reportedly considering stepping down as the United States Attorney General. The President is upset with him for saying that the elections were fair and secure. When asked if he was happy with the Attorney General’s job, the President responded after a pause, “…ask me in a few weeks.”

The Attorney General is not likely to stay around only to be fired. He is hardly a victim, however. He has compromised this nation’s ideals many times in subservience to this President.

We are truly seeing rats scrambling to find a way off of this ship. It is taking on water and listing badly.

Steve Blank, a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Business Board has just resigned in protest of the recent replacement of more than half of the board’s members by the President. "My service to the Department of Defense was a service to the country, not to a party. I hereby tender my resignation."

The President fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper on November 9th. He then fired three more top officials and is now targeting the military’s advisory boards. Past Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger have been jettisoned.

All of these people are being replaced with people loyal to the President. These people lack the decades of experience that the people they are replacing are taking with them.

The inmates are taking over the asylum.

The Republican Party is taking all of this in and accepting it. They have thrown their support behind the man in the White House and they are either too corrupt or too scared to change their minds.

We’re not living in the future looking back at all of this, we are right in the middle of it. Maybe those of us not working are seeing this clearly because we aren’t being distracted by busy-ness.

The base is gorged on the President’s lies and will likely never change their minds. Nixon’s supporters never did. They will go to their deaths wearing their red caps and be buried with them.

Governor Cuomo has certainly made some mistakes. That his daily briefings have returned, though, is a relief. We need his voice back in the fight.

Whatever you say about him, and believe me, I don’t think he’s a saint either - far from it - he listens to scientists and health-care professionals. He is not afraid to make unpopular choices. For right or wrong, he leads.

I am sure that whatever happens over these next weeks and months that he will have learned lessons from the first wave and will apply them to this one.

That’s all that we can expect from anyone. Learn from experience. Learn from the past.

We can’t expect our leaders not to make errors, but we absolutely can expect, if not demand, that they learn from them. We can demand that they tell us the truth even if it is hard to hear. We can demand that they put the needs of all of us before their own personal needs.

That, plain and simple, is their job. That’s what we’ve hired them, as Public Servants, to do: Serve.

Welcome back Governor Cuomo. We’ve missed you.

Please don’t screw it up.