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.“

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“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.”

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[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.

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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…

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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.

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

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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.”

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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.‘

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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.

Get used to it. Just one more gift to you from the man of the hour.

The briefing descended into chaos from there with [Kayleigh] McEnany trying to answer questions reporters fired at her, both sides talking over the other repeatedly.

… (as Elizabeth Bennet says about herself and Darcy) so similar. Both can be acidly vindictive rule-breakers; both live in a world of their own. Why so vindictive? No one will ever know.

Why in a world of their own? Eh. Who knows why many damagingly out-of-it haredim can’t think of anything better to do than stew in their super-spreader isolation?

As to the belle indifférence on Trump’s face as he flopped around, the other night, like the dying Quilty at the end of Lolita (“We rolled all over the floor, in each other’s arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.”), he has always lived in a grandiose fantasy world, and no one did the guy any favors, mental health-wise, to crown him the actual president of the United States. By this point, in his head, he’s Napoleon. (“The man has spent years at war with reality: living in delusions, perpetuating fantasies, imagining hoaxes, constructing conspiracies, accruing debt, rewriting history constantly as self-serving myth. At some point, reality was going to get personal in return.”)

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Both Trump and many ultraorthodox pretend that they are victims. Both sometimes seem drawn to violence. Both are nihilists – the atheist Trump poses for pious pictures with his evangelical Christian base and then tells his WH associates that believers are dumb pricks, losers; and the minutely ritualistic haredim often in fact seem spiritless, passively accepting their own and others’ untimely deaths.

Both Trump and many of his ultras, I mean to say, have ripened to something close to madness, and need to be subdued in the name of public safety. Mayor and governor have indeed stepped it up with the ultras, threatening a lockdown.

Is there, among Republicans, a Duke of Wellington?

You name the scandal, one of America’s most Catholic educational institutions has a high-profile entry. Georgetown had more Varsity Blues bogus students than anyone else; its longtime tennis coach is just a plain old career criminal; a half dozen priests with Georgetown associations “have [recently] been credibly accused of sexually abusing minors.” It took ages and lots of pressure from students for it to revoke the honorary degree it gave to super-sexed Theodore McCarrick, a regular and adored presence in Georgetown’s chapels and classrooms. And so it goes.

And I mean yeah it really goes. Like every month. This month there’s the knotty little matter of one of its football players getting arrested for first degree murder.

Clearly the Jesuits running the school are weenies. A firm hand is needed, and UD recommends as next Georgetown president Pater Edmund Waldstein, a leader of the Adrian Vermeule-sponsored Cathophate-to-Come, who would not hesitate to burn people at the stake.

Here’s one from a theater critic who gets it: He doesn’t mention the character this blog has been mentioning from the moment the current president took office: Alfred Jarry’s Pere Ubu. (Here’s last night’s debate. Settle in.) But in a short piece he makes two other stops along the Theater of the Absurd: Sartre’s No Exit and Carroll’s Wonderland.

And what in particular he gets is that Carroll, Jarry, and Sartre (throw in Beckett and Kafka and Ionesco) deal in tragicomedy – the grotesque mix of violence (“Stand back and stand by.”), farce, and despair that characterizes human beings abandoned by a world of meaning and spirit and therefore no longer human beings at all, only empty angry creatures mired in the thing we’ve got left when humanity vanishes: “primate-dominance.”

Still having trouble grasping the tragicomic absurd, the agonized incredulity we feel again and again at the spectacle of our shabby, vacuous, almost unbearably stupid world? Try this: Our country’s most intensely Christian, most deeply born-again, population, has anointed as its savior, its avatar of spiritual transformation and transcendence, a stillborn baby, one of the dead bundles tossed onstage in another absurdist drama, The Marriage of Bette and Boo. That’s what we’re worth! That’s the value of human life in a dead world!

And that’s why the theater critic writes this – of a political debate! –

“No other presidential debate, ever, has been so personally painful, or made one feel one’s mortality more.“

Why the hell does one feel one’s mortality during a presidential debate?

Because this husk, lent artificial animation with rouge and roughhousing, embodies our fears about about our own death-in-life — he’s Gustav von Aschenbach at the end of Death in Venice, a corpse painted and pomaded in an effort to disguise itself as infused with vitality, spirit, and meaning. The pointlessness of the debate, with Ubu doing his terminal rattle over the thing until time ran out, is the futility we feel when we allow ourselves to contemplate not just the death that awaits us, but the life-in-death of our absurd world. Mr Trump, last night, staged the personally painful possibility that nothing – including us – means, or is, anything.

UD has been against debates – you don’t debate a lying ranting paranoid.

UD didn’t watch tonight. All the reactions she’s gathered – beginning with Mr UD’s and then the media’s – vindicate her. Masochists and nihilists who want to watch yet another venerable American tradition be shredded to shit in front of their eyes might have enjoyed this; they might enjoy the anticipation of two more identical events. The rest of us should hope that Pelosi’s common sense will now prevail.

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Pelosi’s rolling her eyes. Why didn’t anyone listen to her?

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[W]hat we had was Trump ranting, visibly angry, launching off on numerous digressions, lying. It was ugly, unhinged and exhausting – a good summary of Trump’s entire presidency.

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“What a dark event we have just witnessed.”

Okay, so UD wants to issue an apology, a mea culpa, whatever, to Bandy X. Lee and other psychiatrists who were out in front months ago warning about Trump’s dangerous mental instability, and indeed calling for some form of congressional intervention in the situation before … before a nation had to watch a shit show that “scared America.”

They were right.