Friday, July 24, 2020

Crises

From a Washington Post newsletter:
A reporter approached Sen. Mitt Romney in the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon to ask: “Do you have confidence in the president’s handling of this crisis right now?”
“Which? There are so many crises going on,” replied Romney (R-Utah). “I’m not sure which.”
The 2012 GOP presidential nominee was not trying to be flip and lamented President Trump’s response to the novel coronavirus when the reporter clarified. But our nation faces cascading crises:
the worst civil unrest since 1968, the worst economic upheaval since 1933 and the worst public health emergency since 1918. This morning’s jobs report shows another 1.4 million workers filed for unemployment benefits last week, the 18th straight week that more than a million Americans have filed claims.
Other ongoing crises get less attention because of the contagion, but that does not mean they have been solved.
There is an opioid crisis causing deaths of despair, the climate crisis that imperils the future of the planet, a looming sovereign debt crisis that most political leaders seem nonchalant about, rising great-power conflict with China, including a new space race, and fresh complications overnight in Afghanistan as America struggles to exit her longest war.

[And of course the biggest crisis is that there is an idiot in the White House.]

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