Mock Paper Scissors

Stable Jenius Prznint Stupid
(Credit: @MemphisJohnny1)

The 4th Reich has requested $2.5 billion in funds from Congress to help fight the Wuhan coronavirus. Yay, that’s good, innit?

However, the request comes with two poison pill provisions. Comrade Stupid wants to…

1. raid other budgets for about half of the Ameros, such as the Ameros already set aside to fight Ebola.
2. move money around, at his discretion, in the federal budget.

What could go wrong? Nancy Pelosi and the Dems do not want to…

1. guess which pandemic is going to be deadliest and get blamed for choosing one over the other. Better to have separate buckets of money.
2. set a precedent that Team Evil can move money around at will, you know, for his Last Monument To The Confederacy at the southern border.

Meanwhile, Politico says that this flu outbreak could be a black swan event:

President Donald Trump’s top aides faced an increasingly urgent threat Monday with potentially monumental implications: a global outbreak knocking down the U.S. economy and walloping markets in an election year, all against accusations about whether the Trump administration had mismanaged and underfunded a critical response with American lives on the line.

A swift drop in the stock market — the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than 1,000 points, its largest slide in two years — jolted officials in the White House and across Washington, delivering implications from the long-simmering coronavirus threat to a wider swath of Americans.

Given that Comrade Stupid claims that windmills can give you cancer from the sound, and who had the silverware at Merde-a-Lardo steam cleaned after HIV-positive Roy Cohn dined there, does give one pause to consider what advice he might be getting, and then one remembers he You’re Fired’ed people who give advice, because he’s a Stable Jenius.

Vanity Fair:

Even if Congress provides additional funding, there remain fears that the Trump administration has already hamstrung it’s ability to address this emergency. As Foreign Policy’s Laurie Garrett wrote last month, the administration has “intentionally rendered itself incapable” of dealing with a problem of this scale. It wiped out its “entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure,” Garrett wrote, and shut down the National Security Council’s global health security team, as well as its counterpart in the Department of Homeland Security. In addition to proposing funding cuts for national and global health programs, the administration has also kneecapped its public health teams by declining to replace officials who have left. While the president established a Coronavirus Task Force led by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar last month, “it’s not clear how it will function,” Garrett noted—essentially forcing the administration to “[resort] to improvisation” in its approach to the crisis.

But then again, our Stable Jenius also told us that viruses know how calendars work and the virus plans to go away in April. Of course, earlier this month, Trump proposed a 2021 budget that would slash funding at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, so we got that working for us, too.