Once upon a time, when Obamacare was new, furious Republicans lied daily that the president’s signature reform law would ration health care and dictate who should live and who should die.
Remember that flap, back in 2009? A crackpot named Sarah Palin coined the fake term death panels – there was no such provision in the law – and Republicans, who fancied themselves “pro-life,” latched onto the phony notion that the Democrats were mandating death.
Palin wrote on Facebook that Obamacare would sacrifice “the sick, the elderly…based on a subjective judgment of their level of productivity in society.” Republicans ran with that. Senator Chuck Grassley said the Democrats were plotting “to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.” Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina congresswoman, said that Obamare will “put seniors in a position of being put to death.” Betsy McCaughey, a former Republican lieutenant governor turned right-wing commentator, said that Obamacare would require seniors to get government counseling on “how to end their life sooner.”
All lies, of course. All in the service of what Republicans trumpeted as their “culture of life.”
Well. What a difference a decade makes. Because here we are in 2020, and Republicans are truly devolving into a death cult. A failed business dolt who couldn’t even run profitable casinos has shown that he’s too inept to fight a pandemic – wow, big surprise! – so instead he has thrown up his hands and decided to sacrifice tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) more American lives in the renewed pursuit of lucre. And if grandma has to go – and if even young people with mysterious strokes have to go – then, hey, no problem, his nihilistic Republican pals are down with that.
His old message (which had many moving components) was that the coronavirus was just like the flu, and that 15 cases would reduce to “zero”; but that even if the cases did go up, the whole thing would disappear “like magic”; but that even if it didn’t disappear, he was “doing a great job” to curb it; but that even if it wasn’t being curbed, it wasn’t his fault, it was China’s…and so on. But now he’s simply bored with the virus. He’s tired of talking about it, because whenever he does, he becomes more of a detestable laughingstock. For Trump, the whole topic is a “loser,” and he wants to look like a “winner.”
So the new spin is: Yeah, we got a lot more death coming our way, but that’s the price we gotta pay to make American great again. Yeah, there’s lots of death in those meat-processing plants, but they gotta stay open and keep my cheeseburgers coming. Let’s get the governors to reopen America, and may the survival of the fittest triumph.
Forgive me for paraphrasing dear leader. Let’s quote his actual, semi-coherent words: “There’ll be more death, that the virus will pass, with or without a vaccine…It’s going to pass and we’re going to be back to normal…The people of our country are warriors. I’m not saying anything is perfect. Yes, will some people be affected? Yes. Will some people be affected badly? Yes.”
It’s a tricky gamble for Trump, because if and when the virus spreads more fiercely in reopened red states, he risks a backlash among those who swallowed his MAGA propaganda in 2016. But at this point, having failed so miserably at the job he was never qualified to hold, he doesn’t have any other moves.
But have Republicans disputed his endorsement of human sacrifice? Nope. Have they risen up and said, “We’re supposed to be the pro-life party, we can’t be so reckless with American lives”? Quite the opposite, in fact.
Dan Patrick, the Texas lieutenant governor, said recently that if we have to throw old folks under the bus, so be it (“There are more important things than living”). Doug Ducey, the Arizona governor, doesn’t even want to know how many more people will die when he lifts his lockdown order; he has shut down the state academuc experts who were charting infection projections. Trey Hollingsworth, an Indiana congressman, says that we need to accept “the loss of life, American lives” as the price for speedily reopening America, that it’s time for us “to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils.” Chris Christie, who’s still auditioning for relevance in Trumpworld, said this week: “Of course, everybody wants to save every life they can — but the question is, towards what end, ultimately?”
And, of course, Trump gets the big thumbs-up from evangelicals like Louisiana’s Tony Spell, pastor of the Life Tabernacle Church, who recently said: “Death looks to (us) like a welcome friend. True Christians do not mind dying.”
If OK with pastor Spell, those of us who do mind dying would prefer to keep living – and not be infected by those who are so cavalier about dying. Whatever happened to the right-wing belief that every life is sacred?
Trump and the Republicans don’t actually want to kill a lot more people. But because they live in denial and marinate in magical thinking, they will kill a lot more people. In our criminal code, killing via negligence or recklessness is the very definition of involuntary manslaughter.
As Mike Lofgren, a former congressional staffer on the House and Senate budget committees, recently wrote, “It is now long past time to simply call the Republicans and their religious and secular conservative allies what they are, and in unadorned English: a death cult…Our national government might just as well be run by the infamous People’s Temple of Jonestown.”
The existential question, this November, is how many voters are still willing to drink the Kool-Aid.