As a child, I was obsessed with the 1940 Disney movie Pinocchio. I was haunted by Pinocchio’s trip to Pleasure Island. He was conned into going by Honest John the fox seen above. Instead of paradise, it was hell as wayward boys were transformed into donkeys. Holy Cautionary tail, Batman.
I thought of Pleasure Island when I heard about Nightmare Scenario. It’s a new book by two WaPo reporters about Team Trump’s handling of the pandemic. It has a passage that reminded me of the time then President* Pennywise suggested that people ingest bleach to deal with COVID. This is just as stupid:
“We import goods,” Trump specified, lecturing his staff. “We are not going to import a virus.”
Aides were stunned, and when Trump brought it up a second time, they quickly scuttled the idea, worried about a backlash over quarantining American tourists on the same Caribbean base where the United States holds terrorism suspects.
It’s Pleasure Island all over again with then President* Pennywise in the role of Honest John and Slumlord Jared as his smarmy sidekick, Gideon the cat. Like everything else about the Trump regime, the idea was a con, a variation on the cup and ball trick. Instead of hiding the ball, Trump hoped to hide the virus. The stupid burns like bleach. Oy just oy.
We all knew that the Impeached Insult Comedian was an ignorant idiot, but this is stupid even by his standards. Guantánamo is a naval base, not an island. It’s a piece of Cuba that the second Bush Administration transformed into a prison for terrorists in 2002. It’s a relic of the age of gunboat diplomacy: the US Navy “leased” it in 1903.
Since the Kaiser of Chaos knows nothing about history, he was oblivious to the other image this would have evoked to the sentient public: Leper Colonies. Leprosy is now called Hansen’s Disease to reduce the stigma associated with the original term. It was once believed to be highly contagious and was a huge problem during the Dark Ages. That resulted in a primitive and cruel form of social distancing: Leper Colonies, which were often islands. Hence the original post title: Welcome To The Trumptanamo Leper Colony.
Just imagine if then President* Pennywise had been shipped off to the Trumptanamo instead of Walter Reed Medical Center when he was stricken with COVID. It’s a good thing that some of his aides had sense enough not to drink that version of the Trumper Kool-Aide. The stupid burns like bleach. Oy just oy.
The last word goes to The Who with a song in which Tommy serenades his cult members: