Sing it, brother.

Sing it.

FEVER

Never know how much I love you

Never know how much I care

When we do debate preparation

I get a fever that’s so hard to bear

You give me fever at the rallies

Fever when you hold me tight

Fever in the mornin’

Fever all through the night

Sun lights up the day time

Moon lights up the night
I light up when you call my name
And you know I’m gonna treat you right
You give me fever at your golf club
Fever when you’re raising cash
Fever in the mornin’
My toes have got a nasty rash

Everybody’s got the fever
That is somethin’ you all know
Fever isn’t such a new thing
You knew about it long ago

Donald he loved Melania
Melania she felt the same

When he put his arms around her

He said Melania baby you’re my fame
He gave her fever

When they cuddled
Fever with his flaming kiss
Fever I’m on fire

Fever yeah I burn and hiss

Captain Smith and Pocohantas

Had a very mad affair

When her daddy tried to kill him

She said daddy oh don’t you dare
He gives me fever with his kisses

Fever when he holds me tight

Fever I’m his missus

Daddy won’t you treat him right

Now you’ve listened to my story
Here is the point that I have made

Trump was born to give you fever

Be it fahrenheit or centigrade
He gives you fever

When you meet him
Fever if you live you learn

Fever till you sizzle

What a lovely way to burn

What a lovely way to burn

Entire Top of the Republican Party has been Exposed to Covid

‘President Trump’s campaign schedule has insured that that the top tier of the Republican party either has contracted or has been exposed to covid-19.‘

What is due in the way of kindness and sympathy to people who have no kindness and sympathy for anyone else? Should we repay horrifying cruelty in equal measure? Then we reduce ourselves to their level. But if we return indecency with the decency due any other person in need, don’t we encourage appalling behavior? …

The pandemic was not Trump’s fault, but at every turn, he made things worse than they had to be—because at every turn, he cared only for himself, never for the country. And now he will care only for himself again.

Trump should never have been allowed anywhere near any public office. Wish him well, but recognize that his deformed spirit will never be well—and that nothing can be well for the country under his leadership.

*************

The shriveling of Trump makes UD think of that Philip Roth title — The Dying Animal. Or the Yeats poem from which the title comes – for Yeats too knew how nightmarish it was to be merely an animal.

What is due to this self-sickened man? The pity we feel for a dying animal.

But would she listen?

********

“Wear your masks. Don’t listen to our idiot fucking president.”

Once inside the venue, [having arrived too late to be tested,] the Trump party were approached by a white-coated doctor, who asked them to put on face masks, but they refused, NBC reported.

France extends its now well-established burqa ban to everyone providing public services. Excellent. And if you’re having trouble understanding the separation of church and state, this secular republic will be happy to educate you in its citizenship.

UD, by the way, has been giggling at the argument some people lately make about masks and burqas. Like, uh, covid forces everyone to wear masks in order to save their lives and the lives of others in a global pandemic. How is that different from parents making their eight year old daughters wear burqas? Or women in the banlieues intimidated or beaten up if they’re not wearing burqas? It’s the same thing, ain’t it?

… down the street from UD: Bethesda’s Walter Reed Hospital. (Around here, we all grew up calling it the Naval Medical Hospital.) The place is directly across from NIH, where UD’s father spent his career studying (among other things) BCG’s effect on cancer. BCG is now considered one of the more promising covid therapies.

On Trump: Absolutely no surprise here. You spend your days and nights surrounded by crowds of strangers during a pandemic. You’re elderly. You’re under a lot of stress. You lead a relentlessly active life. You refuse to wear a mask.

I mean, you have go to characters like Adrian Leverkühn, who “goes out of his way to catch syphilis,” to approach the intensity of self-destruction.

Sources cited by The New York Times say the President was already lethargic on the way back from Thursday’s  New Jersey event, and that he fell asleep on Air Force One on Wednesday night when returning from a rally in Minnesota.

‘The Kimberly Guilfoyle Sexual Harassment Allegations Get Even Darker‘

Hold onto your hat.

Just hours before the president tested positive for Covid-19, he was shaking hands and posing for photos with wealthy supporters at his New Jersey golf club. Fifty thousand got you in the door; $250,000 bought you a seat at a private roundtable and, now, a likely two-week quarantine after direct exposure to a virus that has so far killed more than 200,000 people in this country.

They’re both currently reaping the personal rewards of cruelty, shamelessness, arrogance, and ignorance. And since the disease they recklessly invited to overtake them is insanely contagious, they are sharing those rewards with the rest of us.

“Most of the [ultraorthodox] community had it already, so we’re not so worried.“

***********

“Most people had it way back,” [Tzvi] Rosenberg told The Daily Beast, enjoying a cigarette unmasked a few feet from a similarly unprotected friend. “… We’re not wearing right now, because we’re smoking.”

***********

[M]any in the community believed in the Trump-touted … treatment of hydroxychloroquine…

[One man] approached his wife in synagogue and warned her … that masks cause COVID-19 infection.

***********

One man walking through Williamsburg provided the simple explanation. 

“We all had it already,” he said of COVID, not stopping long enough to give his name. 

An 18-year-old walking nearby said the same.

“I had it already and my community had it already,” he said…

***********

No major Hasidic rabbis in New York City have been seen wearing masks. In fact, photographs of large indoor gatherings — weddings, large prayer services and tisches, gatherings in which the rebbe sits at the head of a table surrounded by followers — have circulated on local news sites and social media.

***********

[M]ost of the rabbis themselves had the virus earlier this year and believe they have immunity.

***********

To some, the disregard for masks is evidence of an outlook in which everything in life is up to God.

“I don’t sense a lot of fear,” an administrator at a network of clinics in Williamsburg said. “I think there is a fatalistic attitude, like if it’s meant to be, I’ll get sick.”

************

************

And Trump’s epitaph? UD takes it, with a small alteration, from Larry Kramer’s great play about AIDS, The Normal Heart:

Being defined by [the president’s cock] is literally killing us.

In his swagger lies our doom.

Didn’t know the president was overseas today.

A Yale psychiatrist who has repeatedly raised questions about President Trump’s mental health argued that Tuesday’s debate against Joe Biden should never have been allowed to go forward.

Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine and the president of the World Mental Health Coalition, said in an interview with Salon that Trump lacked the basic “mental health” to participate in a presidential debate…

She told Salon that the media’s shock at Trump’s disastrous performance was the result of a years-long problem that has gone ignored far too long...

‘[P]eople can see how [my colleagues and I] predicted, almost with uncanny timing, what would happen if we failed to contain the psychological dangers of the president. It has now spread into social, cultural, civic and geopolitical dangers, just as we said.‘

*****************

If there are two more debates, UD thinks we should be prepared for Trump to disintegrate so desperately during one of them that he pulls out a Glock and shoots himself in the head.