Six years ago, after a meeting of the writers’ group I belong to one of the members voiced the opinion that in the3 USA who you voted for did not matter as all the politicians were effectively the same. It was another instance of cynicism masquerading as wisdom. The next presidential election presented the choices between an experienced candidate who had spent their entire life in the arena of publica service and narcissistic game show host with no experience in politics, service, or empathy. Today we are paying the price for selecting the game show host and pretending that the choices were in any way equivalent.

As of this week more than 100,0000 American have died of the COVID-19 pandemic and the crisis is far from over. When the news began filtering out of China, there were those in the administration that tried to sound alarms, tried to ready the nation and the government for a crisis but their leadership shut their eyes and plugged their ears pretending the crisis did not exist. When the outbreak became undeniable the nation was plunged, state by state, into an economic coma, throwing tens of millions out of work and destroying more than a decade’s growth but that might have been the right choice if the time it purchased had not been wasted. The ‘shut down’ was not the tool that would by itself suppress and mitigate the pandemic it was there to buy time so that the real tools, testing and tracing could be brought to the front and deployed against the enemy.

Again, the leadership failed the public. There was no mass mobilization for either testing or tracing. There wasn’t even coordination of efforts across the federal system but rather the opposite, states were pitted against states and against the Federal government itself. At least one state deploying its guard to protect incoming vital medical supplies not from bandits but from the Federal government coming in and confiscating the supplies for itself.

So now we are beginning to revive the comatose economy and we still do not have adequate levels of testing and we do not have the capacity to contact traces outbreaks. The best we can hope for is that the curve does not go up again but that we can keep the rate of infection and death level. If we do that, forestall any increase as people venture out and are forced back to their employment weather it is safe or not, then we can expect another 100,000 dead Americans by the end of the year. We will be near a quarter of a million dead Americans and for what?

For conservative judges?

For tax breaks on capitol?

What conservative gain is worth the lives of hundreds of thousands of American lives?

(Side note: Sweden did not put its economy into a coma and it is seeing as of this morning the first signs of economic growth, but it has a death rate from COVID-19 of 4.55 per million and the USA’s is 3.55 per million. Had the US followed that course it would have produced another 28,000 corpses.)