Louisiana Voice

I just finished a very good book called This Just In, by retired CBS newsman Bob Schieffer and among the myriad of wonderful stories he had to tell about his career, none stood out more than his account of the 9-11 attacks.

He described the horror of one reporter watching people jump to their deaths from the World Trade Center rather than being burned alive, the anguish of a news director trying to do his job while frantically trying to learn the fate of his daughter (she was okay), how another correspondent running from the collapse of the first tower heard a noise and looked back only to no longer see the man who had been running right beside him (he had been crushed by falling debris), how there were few injuries because anyone hit by debris died because of the size of the falling material. If you weren’t killed it was because you weren’t hit by anything and thus were not injured.

Schieffer also gives a heart-warming account of how we came together as a nation. It was one of those rare times when the color of your skin or your sexual preference or your religious affiliation or your social status no longer mattered. We were just Americans. All of us. And we were under attack and an attack on one of us was an attack on all of us.

Unity. For such a short word, Schieffer did a helluva job of describing just what it meant in a time of crisis.

I thought we had approached that measure of unity again when were attacked by the coronavirus. No one was immune. We were all vulnerable and we again cared for each other. We looked upon first responders and health care workers as the heroes they surely are and we watched as those who beat the virus were cheered by nurses and doctors as they left the hospital.

With one notable exception, of course. A man who made it all about him as he does about everything else. Donald Trump feels he must be the center of the universe with everything revolving around him and he sank to the occasion as is his wont.

He at first denied that COVID-19 was anything more serious than a cold. Then he said only one person had it and it was under control. He said it was a hoax Then he said it would disappear in April. But then, he really started sounding ugly when he declared it to be a plot by the Democrats to bring down his presidency. He made it about race when he called it the “China virus.”

It was, at best, behavior unbecoming the office of the president. At worst, it was disgusting, shameful, and pathetic.

When he was finally forced to acknowledge it was indeed a problem, he declared incredulously that he “knew it was a pandemic long before anyone used the word.” Of course he did. He’s Donald Trump.

Seriously, is this the kind of “stable genius” we can trust as leader of the free world?

Finally, when the gravity of the situation finally penetrated his orange Cheeto head, he was forced to shut down the country in an effort to contain the spread.

And it worked.

But then along came the Republican bomb throwers who just had to turn a pandemic into politics. First they passed a $1.2 trillion relief package that mostly relieved big business while dishing out $1200 checks to individuals—$1200 that, in most cases, wouldn’t even cover one month’s rent or mortgage payment, let alone food and utilities. But never mind, as long as big business got theirs, who cares? And wasn’t it convenient that some of the relief money went to Trump businesses? Wasn’t it Republican Herbert Hoover who sniffed that “The business of America is business” just before the crash of ‘29? No voting by mail, the Republicans said. Can’t risk letting Democrats confined to their homes do something so irresponsible as voting. Get the economy open again, they said. Better a few thousand more deaths than a recession, they implied.

So, now we have Louisiana, one of the hottest of the hot spots, thanks to Mardi Gras, which planted the match that flared in New Orleans and spread outward like waves on a pond throughout the rest of the state.

We have a governor who, while maintaining a cool, level-headed approach that has flown beneath the national radar, has systematically and calmly addressed the crisis as best he could with the limited resources available to him. Limited, of course, by a president who first claimed to have “full authority,” but then punted to the states while saying he was “not responsible at all.” Limited because Jared Kushner declared that ventilators and masks belonged to “us,” meaning the federal government—as if the “us” to whom he referred were somehow detached from the rest of the country—and not the states.

And now we have a small bunch of lunatics in the legislature passing around a petition to block Gov. Edwards from extending the stay-at-home order to May 15.

Seriously, folks, those people are maniacs who probably drink Lysol for breakfast and fart Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity platitudes.

For a far better explanation of that petition, you can read Lamar White’s exceptional account in Bayou Brief HERE.

If you really want to know why there was a toilet paper shortage, it’s because those hysterical idiots, led by the likes of LABI President Steven Waguespack, Republican operative Jay Connaughton, and State Sen. Sharon Hewitt are so full of crap.

And you have to wonder if Trump’s inspiration for ingesting disinfectant as a cure came after an evening of drinking weed killer with John Kennedy.