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Jack is a graduate of Rutgers University where he majored in history. His career in the life and health insurance industry involved medical risk selection and brokerage management. Retired in Florida for over two decades after many years in NJ and NY, he occasionally writes, paints, plays poker, participates in play readings and is catching up on Shakespeare, Melville and Joyce, etc.

Saturday, April 4, 2020

A Cat Has Nine Lives ... And a Hard Choice


It’s often said that a cat has nine lives, coming close to getting killed, but rescuing itself at the last minute about nine times in its lifetime.  But after that, the magic wears off and the cat is on its own and usually doesn’t survive very much longer.

Could it be the same with our President?  What happens when our “cat” in the White House runs through his magic of lying, conniving and substituting image for substance for the ninth time, and is completely on his own?  That’s where we are right now.



Trump’s Nine Lives:

1.   Over the years, he managed to get out of not paying in full those who did construction and building work for him, suggesting they sue him to collect, which they rarely did.
2.   He came out smelling like a rose when his casinos declared bankruptcy, leaving the investors holding the bag.
3.   He got away with bribing Stormy Daniels, one of his girlfriends, to keep quiet, even letting his own lawyer who managed the deal go to prison.
4.   He got away with bribing playmate Karen McDougal, his mistress during his wife’s pregnancy.
5.  He insulted the entire female sex with his candid remarks about letting them do whatever he wanted with them on the Access Hollywood interview tape.  And it didn’t affect his popularity.
6.    He bilked thousands through his phony Trump University courses.
7.   He used his family’s charitable foundation’s money for personal expenses, and only stopped when New York State caught him.
8.     He managed to dodge the Mueller Report’s accusations of his improprieties by hiring a compliant Attorney General who would do his bidding.
9.   Despite being impeached by the House of Representatives, he avoided removal from office through the votes of the pitiful Republicans in the Senate, beholden to him for support.

Well, the magic is no more and Donald Trump has exhausted his “cats’ nine lives” and he is on his own right now as the country faces the most dangerous and deadly opponent in its history, the Covid19 pandemic.   



Right now, he is busy blaming others for whatever goes wrong, and contradicting the nation’s and the world’s medical expertise.  Soon he will go the way of those other cats who ran through their nine lives and were left to their own devices.   
JL




                                                               
Ahab and Trump Face Challenges


Trump Must Go

I have written on numerous occasions on this blog and in emails to individuals that the President must go.  He has failed to show the leadership and inspiration needed for the country to unite to fight the Covid19 pandemic.   Today, in addition to criticizing some journalists who posed hard questions, he left it to individual Americans to decide what steps they should take to “mitigate” the virus’ spread, including the wearing of masks which he pointedly refuses to do.  He continues to tout an untested malaria/lupus drug as possible cure, against the advice of the medical people on the daily panel, saying to Americans stricken with Covid19, “I’m no doctor, but ask yours. Try it! What do you have to lose?”  This is the antithesis of leadership.  He is an ally of the virus.  The President must go.

Here is a dated summary of some of his comments, and events, showing his lack of involvement, early on, in the crisis.  It amounts to “fiddling while Rome burns.” documenting his abysmal ignorance and lack of leadership. The President must go.  


Dec 18th - House Impeaches Trump
Jan 8th - First CDC warning
Jan 9th - Trump campaign rally
Jan 14th - Trump campaign rally
Jan 16h - House sends impeachment articles to Senate
Jan 18th - Trump golfs
Jan 19th - Trump golfs
Jan 20th - first case of corona virus in the US, Washington State.
Jan 22nd - “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
Jan 28th - Trump campaign rally
Jan 30th - Trump campaign rally
Feb 1st - Trump golfs
Feb 2nd - “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China."
Feb 5th - Senate votes to acquit. Then takes a five-day weekend.
Feb 10th - Trump campaign rally
Feb 12th - Dow Jones closes at an all time high of 29,551.42
Feb 15h - Trump golfs
Feb 19th - Trump campaign rally
Feb 20th - Trump campaign rally
Feb 21st - Trump campaign rally
Feb 24th - “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
Feb 25h - “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”
Feb 25h - “I think that's a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”
Feb 26th - “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
Feb 26th - “We're going very substantially down, not up.” Also "This is a flu. This is like a flu"; "Now, you treat this like a flu"; "It's a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we'll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner."
February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
Feb 28th - “We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”
Feb 28th - Trump campaign rally
March 2nd - “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”
March 2nd - “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”
March 4: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”
March 5th - “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”
March 5th - “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”
March 6th - “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”
March 6th - “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”
March 6th - “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
March 6th - “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”
March 7th - Trump golfs
March 8th - Trump golfs
March 8th - “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”
March 9th - “This blindsided the world.”
March 13th - [Declared state of emergency]
March 17th - “This is a pandemic,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
March 18th - "It’s not racist at all. No. Not at all. It comes from China. That’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate."
March 23th- Dow Jones closes at 18,591.93
March 25th - 3.3 million Americans file for unemployment.
March 30th - Dow Jones closes at 21,917.16
April 2nd - 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment.



We must rid ourselves of Donald Trump in one of three ways.  (1) Resignation … which he won’t do, (2) Defeat in the November election … which is uncertain in view of Joe Biden’s benign temperament and lack of debating skill on top of the Fox-viewing, talk radio-listening, gullible and ignorant people who will always support Trump or (3) a military coup d’etat, when it becomes clear to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that the President’s lack of leadership has so weakened the country’s position, should military action involving China, Russia or Iran become an additional threat, on top of Cofid19, that they must act to save the nation

JL

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