Lest We Forget

If America forgets where she came from, then will begin the rot and dissolution.

— Carl Sandburg

Covid-19 has killed 625,000 Americans.

Yet Trump, the ever-impertinent troglodyte, asks, “Have you noticed that they are now admitting I was right about everything?”

Right about Covid-19? Really?

Ebola, lest we forget, killed two Americans. 

Two.

Obama, lest we forget, dealt with Ebola with dispatch. (Ebola, lest we forget, is the virus that, before it kills you, makes you bleed from the eyes, ears, and nose, as you feverishly vomit and shit and cough up blood.)

Obama eschewed willful ignorance and heeded the science.

Obama strategized, asking doctors to guide his decisions. 

Obama activated the CDC and DOD, deploying men and materiel to West Africa to halt the spread of Ebola "at its source."

Obama built frontline hospitals; trained West African healthcare workers (25,000 of them); initiated contact tracing; and buried victims' bodies. 

“Here’s the bottom line,” he said in October 2014. “The best way to stop this disease, the best way to keep Americans safe, is to stop it at its source—in West Africa.”

Two years after the first case was discovered there, the outbreak was halted.

But not without costs.

Eleven people were treated for Ebola in the US during the epidemic, most of them doctors who deployed to West Africa. They flew back to the US for treatment. Two of the eleven died.

Two.

Not 625,000; two.

Trump tweeted at the time, "If this doctor, who so recklessly flew into New York from West Africa, has Ebola, then Obama should apologize to the American people and resign!"

And last May, Trump called Obama "an incompetent president—grossly incompetent."

Trump, incompetence incarnate—and the GOP's likely presidential candidate in three years.

GOP, you stand for amnesia, and for rot and dissolution.

I'll take leadership, any day.

“We are the United States of Amnesia," Gore Vidal once said. "We learn nothing because we remember nothing.”