FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I need some big head hundreds/

To go with these ones and twos

I've opened the newsletter (Get the name right: Roy Edroso Breaks It Down) for today's issue, a peek-in on the President and his coronavirus team. Media reaction to the pandemic is jacked up as one would expect, and factota like Mick Mulvaney are beefing, but the reaction is categorically different from 2014, when the previous President adroitly handled the more deadly Ebola threat -- using now-abandoned methods like employing teams of epidemiologists -- and every wingnut in America went nuts, claiming Democrats were trying to give all the white people Ebola as payback for slavery. Ha, no, literally, that's what Rush Limbaugh said: "they have this attitude, 'Well, if they have it in Africa, by God, we deserve to get it, because they're in Africa because of us and because of slavery.'" Where was Dinesh D'Souza then, to tell him Democrats were pro-slavery? Diana West -- man, I'm almost afraid to say her name, lest she come back -- even had a Trump-style list of African countries she was mad Obama wouldn't seal off:

Common sense and love of country dictate that air travel to the United States from the West African Ebola hot-zone nations of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone be suspended until the highly contagious, highly lethal Ebola outbreak is over. That's obvious. Thousands of travel visas issued by the U.S. to nationals in these same countries should be canceled. That's obvious, too.

But President Obama isn't taking such obvious measures to safeguard the American people. On the contrary, the administration is doing nothing to prevent Ebola from entering this country, even after the first case erupted on American soil in a Liberian tourist named Thomas Eric Duncan...

The White House response? The Daily Caller's headline says it all: "White House: We Won't Stop People From the Ebola-Stricken Countries from Coming to the U.S."

What explains this presidential cop-out? So far, the left side of the media seems to be taking heart from the unlikelihood that any — or, rather, very many — Americans will become infected with Ebola...

This, speaking of Trump, was one of the poison wellsprings of the Trumpian mania for isolating America from "shithole countries" via the Muslim Ban. And it's the same thinking that's got the Trumpkins yelling that blue cities are full of bum shit and diseases -- because the propagandists who keep stoking their amygdalas know fear of contagion can keep them voting Republican even as the top Republican fucks up the country's coronavirus response. I guess they figure if they're going to die, at least they'll have the comfort and dignity of knowing that the bugs came from a white person.