Recently, as I have been following the national conversation about the Coronavirus, I came to a realization about my own doctor. He is an unelected elitist with an obsessive devotion to medical science, and therefore I can no longer permit him to be the steward of my health. Allowing one person to dictate to me what medications and medical procedures I need to take is undemocratic and quite frankly unpatriotic. I have decided that from now on, I will submit my health issues to a panel of my patriotic friends, and they will vote on what medications and procedures I shall take. Lest you think this an extreme measure, let me explain how I arrived at this important decision.
Immediately I was struck by the similarities between Dr. Fauci and my own physician. After all, who had elected him to make life and death decisions about my health? Sure, I had chosen him in a sense but the only other options I had were other doctors who had also had years of rigorous training in medical schools and many more years of practical experience. There were certainly no political commentators like Tucker Carlson or former reality TV stars like President Trump available to me when I had to make the critical choice of who would be the guardian of my health.
As Tucker pointed out, Dr. Fauci had been wrong about some things on the Coronavirus early on. I realized that my doctor, just like Dr. Fauci, had been wrong sometimes too. For instance, he doesn’t always immediately figure out the correct treatment for whatever illness or condition I might get. Sometimes he has to prescribe more than one medication to discover which one works best for me. At times, he has even had to adjust the dosages.
Since doctors and scientists can be wrong just like anybody else, then why should we assume they know more than the rest of us who have not been to medical school or acquired a PhD in Epidemiology? What kind of democratic society gives precedence to highly trained people in their own fields? Wouldn’t that be something like letting generals take charge in a war or relying on pilots to fly planes?
So I told my doctor we were finished. He was stunned at first but he smirked when I told him about the panel of my smart, patriotic friends who will now vote in a very democratic fashion on whatever medical treatments I may need. I couldn’t resist one last dig. “Sorry you wasted all that time in medical school, Doc’, but my buddies are razor-sharp citizen-researchers who are really good at the Google.” He was devastated.
The summer barbecue season is looking bleaker every day as workers continue to sicken and die from the Coronavirus apparently contracted at meatpacking plants around the country, and their stubborn coworkers stay home or demand onerous safety regulations.
Fortunately, the Trump administration has ordered meatpacking workers back to work while promising liability protection for wealthy owners and making the CDC guidelines designed to protect workers’ health and safety entirely voluntary. These bold moves hopefully augur a bounty of tasty meats on your poolside patio table this summer, and if you wash it all down with enough craft beer or Chardonnay, the image of dead immigrant and low wage workers will fade quickly from your minds.
Others have bemoaned the lack of testing for the virus in many meatpacking plants. Vice President Mike Pence addressed the outbreak at the JBS Plant in Greeley, Colorado on April 10th and promised federal help for testing for all the workers, but the help never came. The company started testing its managers, but abruptly stopped, never revealed the results and reopened anyway. Since the outbreak, 7 of its workers have died from COVID-19 and 280 have tested positive.
But Republicans have identified the real problem spreading death and misery among meatpacking workers: the squalid living conditions of swarthy immigrant workers. In South Dakota where an outbreak at the Smithfield Meatpacking Plant in Sioux Falls infected a thousand employees and people who came into contact with them, Governor Kristi Noem claimed that “99 percent of what’s going on today wasn’t happening inside the facility” and that the virus spread “more at home, where these employees were going home and spreading some of the virus because a lot of these people who work in the plant live in the community, the same building, sometimes in the same apartment.”
So immigrants are the infernal source of the plague and if they bring the virus from their filthy hovels into the immaculate and very safe meatpacking plants, they owe it to us to work to their very last breath and then step away from the assembly line at the moment they perish. These expendable–I mean essential workers must honor their duty to keep our tables laden with burgers, steaks and chickens. Stock up on your coals and lighter fluid and have a great summer.
Lane Tebbetts is informed by his mother that he is grounded until further notice.
Lansing, Michigan. The sputtering, red-faced, gun-toting white men storming the Capitol Thursday were an intimidating sight, screaming into the faces of policemen without wearing masks and shouting “Lock her up” as they protested the shelter-in-place order Governor Gretchen Whitmer has issued at the suggestion of virtually every credible medical expert on the planet.
But now the paunchy freedom fighters have been confined to their homes by a higher authority: their parents. The wily governor dispatched trusted aids into the raging throng of frustrated, overweight white men dressed up like dancers for a Las Vegas show about school shooters. The aids were equipped with retinal scanners that quickly siphoned key information from the eyes of the protesters, including their home phone numbers.
Whitmer’s staff spent Friday morning calling the homes of the protesters, and as expected, the vast majority of them still lived with their parents. When informed of the childish, pathetic antics of their offspring at the protest, the parents were uniformly ashamed and promised to keep their would-be revolutionaries at home for the duration of the governor’s stay-at-home order.
Candace Tebbetts, whose son Lane attended the protest, said she had laid down the law and confined her son to his room until further notice. “Lane’s not a bad kid, you understand. He just doesn’t have much going on right now. He does drywall and construction is halted so…He has his guns and his body armor, his computer games and his friends…well, they’re online friends, you know, not people he really sees. They post all kinds of crazy stuff on the Internet. But when I saw those jackasses on the news dressed up like SWAT team rodeo clowns and carrying on the way they did, I told him ‘Not while you’re living under my roof!'”
No needles! No hospitals! No nurses whining about the lack of PPE! Now you can overcome the dreaded effects of the Coronavirus by simply sipping a delightful summer beverage created by the brilliant mixologists and scientists of the Trump organization.
President Trump recently ruffled the feathers of stuffy, Deep State scientists and medical professionals by wondering aloud if injecting disinfectants directly into the lungs of Corinavirus vicitms might not have a beneficial effect on their conditions. Ridiculed by the media elites, Trump nonetheless doubled down and ordered his son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner to spearhead the drive to bring disinfectants into the treatment phase of the fight against COVID-19.
Kushner, whose success in bringing peace to the Middle East and solving the opioid epidemic in America bodes well for his newest venture, immediately tapped some of his old college buddies and the brainstorming was intense. Was the president’s idea of injecting disinfectants really necessary? Was there a more pleasant way of introducing the disinfectant into the patient’s body?
Employing some of the finest mixologists and scientists who nearly earned undergraduate degrees, Kush’ and the Trump organization came up with the Pineapple Disinfectant Spritzer, a libation as delectable to you as it is devastating to the virus. Just sit back and savor its tropical splendor three times a day for two weeks and all the spiky Coronavirus surface proteins in your lungs will be killed and flushed out of your system like hoodlums in the movie Death Wish.
You can order the two week treatment system online and if you do so before midnight tonight, you will receive a free MAGA cap. Did we mention that the Pineapple Disinfectant Spritzer also will give you six pack abs with no exercise?
Washington D.C. President Trump is planning to send what he is now calling “Victory Ventilators” to states where people are protesting against shelter-in-place orders encouraged by his own administration’s guidelines.
“These patriots are putting themselves at great risk of catching the virus in order to protest the totally unnecessary orders designed to protect them from catching it by their overreaching governors,” the President said in an announcement made in the Rose Garden Tuesday. “Remember, the disease cannot be worse than the cure–or wait, I mean the opposite, I think. The cure cannot be worse than the, uh…well, just watch Fox.”
Critics quickly pounced on the president for providing scarce medical equipment to states where people are deliberately endangering themselves, their families, and everyone around them by exposing themselves to crowds which are largely ignoring social distancing protocols, but the president was unmoved.
“We’re calling them ‘victory ventilators.’ They’re beautiful machines that help you breathe,” the president crowed. “A lot of people don’t know that. Help you breathe. Mechanical. We’re putting V for victory stickers on them–that was Mike’s idea. Mike Pence is doing a tremendous job. And these brave protesters deserve that, you know, to breathe. Very brave. They’ve earned these beautiful machines, so we’re giving them to them so they can breathe.”
Parched Thistle Prairie, Texas. An Evangelical swingers club, which had defied Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s April 2nd Stay-at-Home order and continued with its Wednesday night “Commingle for Christ” orgies, has finally halted the weekly event after three of its members perished from COVID-19 and another seven have become infected.
The group, which calls itself “The Swollen Vessel,” had insisted that “Godly recreational sex with multiple Christian partners is critical to the physical and spiritual health of open-minded believers,” and that they were operating under God’s protection.
Asked about the apparent failure of God’s protection for her group, co-founder Cynthia Griggs balked. “God knows what he’s doing. If he decides to cleanse the Body of Christ in a way that seems harsh to us, that’s his business. Mankind cannot understand the ways of the Lord.”
Queried as to whether she and her husband felt any responsibility for assuring their group members they would be safe under God’s protection when three of them are now dead and at least two are in an ICU unit, Ms. Griggs was philosophical. “One of the marvelous features of Christianity is that it allows you to make extravagant promises on behalf of the Lord, and if they don’t pan out…then it’s not really your problem.”
The Griggs had previously argued that it was safe to continue with the event since there were no known cases of the Coronavirus in Parched Thistle Prairie. But now a cluster of 23 cases has hit the town that all can be traced back to one of the group’s orgies in late March, which was attended by a Godly swinger from out of town.
For the immediate future the “Swollen Vessel” will be moving its orgies to Zoom, according to Carl Griggs. “It won’t be quite the same. But it’ll be a big step up from the ‘Old Rugged Cross’ phone sex line.”
Shrapnel Fluckiger and Jeff Napolitano in happier times.
Shrapnel Fluckiger, the troubled former lead singer for the seminal Alpine-Tejano-Punk band Necrophiliac Scourge, which inspired a generation of alienated Swiss-Chicano yodelers, died from complications related to the Coronavirus on Friday in Los Angeles at the age of sixty-two. The mercurial performer and songwriter had earlier suffered a series of disasters that left him blind and paralyzed from the neck down, but that did not stop his prodigious output. His conversion to Christianity had finally brought him some calm and stability, but the implacable virus claimed his life, leaving legions of grieving fans to ponder his legacy. National Public Radio shared the transcripts of his two most recent interviews with Terry Gross on her program “Fresh Air.”
March, 2010 Interview
TERRY GROSS: Shrapnel Fluckiger, welcome to “Fresh Air.”
SHRAPNEL: Thank you, Terry, it’s great to be here.
TERRY GROSS: You’ve suffered some calamitous setbacks recently, and yet, you’re still out there, touring.
SHRAPNEL: Well, Terry, being blind and paralyzed from the waist down sucks, but Alpine-Tejano-Punk music is forever.
TERRY GROSS: It seems like things started to turn sour for Necrophiliac Scourge during last year’s tour…specifically around the time you stabbed your bass player, Jeff Napolitano. What was it that created the feud between you two?
SHRAPNEL: I just sort of flew off the handle with Jeff because he was trying to get me out of bed to do a show in Venice. I’d had a rough night, there were groupies and gondoliers all over the floor, and Jeff was shaking me and shouting at me to wake up, and there was my buck-knife on the nightstand. It wasn’t anything personal, and I think Jeff understands that now, but there was some bad blood between us for a while there.
TERRY GROSS: Like when he tried to push that stack of amplifiers on top of you in Rome?
SHRAPNEL: Right, that was intense. The crowd thought it was part of the show, and I even got kind of a brush with death rush that gave my yodeling a real edge.
TERRY GROSS: You didn’t get the same kind of rush when he sabotaged that ramp you used during the concert in Amsterdam, did you?
SHRAPNEL: No, I didn’t, Terry, and if I’d known I was going to need a metal plate in my head after that fall, I wouldn’t have finished the show. But the crowd ate it up.
TERRY GROSS: This is kind of difficult question, Shrapnel, but do you think you showed good judgement in leaping headfirst into the crowd in Brussels?
SHRAPNEL: Well, I’ve done it all over the world, and the crowd always caught me, but I guess I caught them off guard because there wasn’t a Belgian within ten feet of me when I hit the concrete.
TERRY GROSS: Do you wish now that you hadn’t jumped?
SHRAPNEL: Well, I’d like to have my legs again n’ shit, but no use in second guessing myself.
TERRY GROSS: I don’t mean to dwell on the negative, but it must have been difficult for you after having a metal plate put in your skull, getting paralyzed, going through physical therapy and adjusting to life in a wheelchair, and getting the band back together and going on tour again when you accidentally rolled into that pyrotechnic explosion that blinded you during that ill-fated show in Austin.
SHRAPNEL: Oh, it was Terry. I mean, one second, I’m belting out the number one song in the country, and the next, I’m a raging inferno on wheels.
TERRY GROSS: What went through your mind when you, uh…?
SHRAPNEL: Burst into flames?
TERRY GROSS: Right.
SHRAPNEL: I remember thinking, “Shit, somebody put me out!”
TERRY GROSS: You were lucky your roady was right there with the fire extinguisher.
SHRAPNEL: Right, uh, Steve…Steve, uh, Steve something…he saved my life.
TERRY GROSS: It was sad what happened to him.
SHRAPNEL: Yeah, I mean, he was depressed before he was disfigured by the fire, but that kind of pushed him over the edge.
TERRY GROSS: I know when you were young, you split time living with your father, who was a Swiss cowherd and alphorn player, and your mother, who was a celebrated Tejano singer in Texas. But where did the punk influence on your music come from?
SHRAPNEL: A lot of people don’t know it, but there was a thriving punk scene up in the Swiss Alps in the mid-late 70s. Young people up there were fed up with the hardy, cheerful existence mountain people had been living for centuries, bringing their cows up to the alpine pastures every summer, playing their alphorns, yodeling and so forth. Some of us started wearing safety pins on our lederhosen. Where do you think Sid Vicious got that? He was up there on vacation, I think, in ’75. He was just a poseur.
TERRY GROSS: So what’s next for Necrophiliac Scourge?
SHRAPNEL: Well, as soon as Jeff gets out of the hospital–
TERRY GROSS: Jeff Napolitano is in the hospital?
SHRAPNEL: He had an altercation with the drummer from his other band.
TERRY GROSS: Oh, that’s right.
SHRAPNEL: And skin grafts take a while to heal.
TERRY GROSS: He threw scalding oil in his face?
SHRAPNEL: I warned Jeff about that drummer–he’s just bad news.
TERRY GROSS: So you’ll be working with Jeff again?
SHRAPNEL: We’re doing a benefit in Chicago for people injured in freak accidents. It’s called “Freaks for Freaks.”
TERRY GROSS: Wow, that sounds–
SHRAPNEL: Terry, did you know that every year almost two million people are maimed or injured in freak accidents in this country?
TERRY GROSS: No, I didn’t.
SHRAPNEL: This one construction worker fell off a building and was impaled on a protruding pipe. It went straight through his head so he has this giant hole in his head now.
TERRY GROSS: My God.
SHRAPNEL: His story is so inspirational. He still functions well enough to punch tickets at the movie theater.
TERRY GROSS: That is inspirational.
SHRAPNEL: So the performers are all people who’ve had freak accidents. Cora Phillips will be there–
TERRY GROSS: She also had a pyrotechnic accident, didn’t she?
SHRAPNEL: No, she fell off a building and was impaled on a pipe just like the–
TERRY GROSS: What?
SHRAPNEL: She was shooting a video up on this building and–
TERRY GROSS: That’s crazy.
SHRAPNEL: You’d be surprised, Terry. People get impaled on pipes. They fall into vats of beer or chemicals, they walk into propellers at airports, they fall into sinkholes or old chandeliers drop on them, their dogs sit on their guns and shoot them or their kid runs the power lawnmower over their feet. It happens almost two million times a year. So we’re trying to bring awareness about it, and raise some money for people who’ve lost arms or feet or had their noses ripped off.
TERRY GROSS: It’s great to see you turn your misfortune into something positive.
SHRAPNEL: Thanks, Terry. Don’t go up on any tall buildings…
June, 2011 Interview
TERRY GROSS: Shrapnel Fluckiger, welcome back to “Fresh Air.”
SHRAPNEL: Thanks, Terry. It’s great to be back.
TERRY GROSS: There have been some big changes in your life since the last time we spoke.
SHRAPNEL: Praise the Lord.
TERRY GROSS: Did it ever cross your mind that Jeff Napolitano still harbored resentment against you when you took the stage for your duet with him during the “Freaks for Freaks” benefit concert?
SHRAPNEL: Not really, Terry. He’d become a Buddhist while recovering from facial surgery, and I thought he was at peace with himself, but apparently he was still brooding over losing the lawsuit about getting the rights to some of the band’s songs.
TERRY GROSS: So that’s why he pushed you off the stage in your wheelchair?
SHRAPNEL: He may have still been pissed about the stabbing thing in Venice too.
TERRY GROSS: Shrapnel, after everything you’ve been through, getting your skull cracked in Amsterdam, being paralyzed from the fall in Brussels, getting blinded by the pyrotechnic explosion in Austin, being pushed off the stage in Chicago and losing the use of your upper body must have been a real blow to you.
SHRAPNEL: It was a real wake-up call, Terry. I wondered “Why was all this bad stuff happening to me?” It couldn’t just be bad luck. God was telling me to get me my soul in order so I gave my heart to Jesus Christ.
TERRY GROSS: What do you say to the cynics who say you only turned to religion when your body could no longer indulge in the epic debauchery you were notorious for most of your life?
SHRAPNEL: All I can do is pray for them, Terry.
TERRY GROSS: Are you working on any projects right now?
SHRAPNEL: Yes, my new album is going to be called “Responsible Rebel.”
TERRY GROSS: I like that.
SHRAPNEL: Let me sing a little of the title track for you…
TERRY GROSS: That would be great.
SHRAPNEL: (singing) I like working full-time, paying taxes and monogamy.
Going to my kid’s school night and volunteering at the library.
Now I don’t need lots of oral sex
From underage groupies
I get my kicks trying to build
My community…Cuz’ I’m a Responsible Rebel…
TERRY GROSS: That’s wonderful, thank you much, Shrapnel Fluckiger…
Patriots and Constitutional scholars around the nation have begun to rise up and defy the left-wing, modern medical science that has needlessly brought the economy to a standstill and cast the long, sinister shadow of socialism over our fruited plains.
Ironically, the focal point of the rebellion is in Idaho, a state that now has more Coronavirus cases per capita than California and includes Blaine County, which boasts the highest per capita concentration of confirmed cases in the entire nation. Rural Idaho conservatives are generally wary of socialist government services such as paved streets, fire codes, postal deliveries, police and fire departments and public libraries.
Constitutional experts such as Ammon Bundy, who led an armed takeover of a wildlife refuge in Oregon in 2016 that became a 41 day standoff with law enforcement, says that Republican Governor Brad Little “overreached” with his March 25th stay at home order. Bundy said he is willing to “physically defend citizens’ constitutional right to peacefully assemble and share the ‘Chinese virus,’ which is either the flu or a bio-weapon or the common cold or a hoax or all of the above, with fellow patriots.”
“I want the virus now,” Bundy exclaimed in a meeting with other patriots in an old factory north of Boise. Bundy is currently searching for a venue for an Easter Sunday service he hopes will attract up to one thousand people. Bundy is extending a special invitation to those who may be infected with the virus to attend. “I’m asking those with symptoms or who have tested positive to spit into a bathtub which I will get into and soak in while the pastor prays over me. That way, I can get it, develop Godly anti-bodies, and be resistant to future strains of it so I can continue my fight against the socialists who perpetrated this hoax in the first place.”
President Trump issued an executive order Wednesday morning declaring that “the past does not exist, never took place and therefore cannot be referred to in public discourse or in print in any way.”
Critics immediately claimed the president was attempting to erase the recent historical record of his statements on the Coronavirus, which, if they existed, would have shown that the president dismissed the crisis early on and were replete with dubious information, distortion and lies.
In contrast, Trump supporters were elated with the new order. Senator Lindsey Graham noted that “the Deep State has viciously used the president’s own statements against him in the past…well, I guess I can’t say that now that the past doesn’t exist. They’re planning to use his past comments against him, which they can’t do now, since they no longer exist. Checkmate, libtards.”
However, far-left, extremist anti-Trump radicals defied the order and underscored a series of non-existent Trump quotes from the past and contrasted them with his more recent statements, including his reversal on the Coronavirus being like the common flu.
For instance, yesterday, in his press conference, the president said, “A lot of people that thought about it, ride it out, don’t do anything, ride it out, and think of it as the flu. But it’s not the flu. It’s vicious.” As rabid Trump haters pointed out, as recently as February 26th, which no longer exists, Trump said “This is a flu. This is like a flu.”
Another Trump critic, Milo Ranchard, alluded to Trump’s non-existent March 17th statement in which he claimed that he had “always known this is real–this is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” Ranchard pointed out that the World Health Organization had declared the Coronavirus a pandemic on March 11th, just six days before, and that Trump had insisted on continuing his mass rallies six days before that on March 6th, apparently while knowing a pandemic was sweeping the world.
Conservative radio host Glenn Beck set himself on fire to encourage
other fifty-plus Americans to do away with themselves in order to “clear
the deck” for younger Americans to resume their work and jump-start an
economy shut down by the Coronavirus.
Mr. Beck was the third prominent conservative to immolate himself in
recent weeks. Fox News’ Brit Hume and Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan
Patrick had publicly torched themselves earlier in the month to
dramatize the need for older Americans to “remove the dry brush in the
path of the oncoming fire” as Mr. Hume put it in a sobering Fox News
commentary.
Brit Hume had told a friend that older Americans needed a “wake-up
call” before dousing himself with gasoline and igniting himself in front
of the Fox News building in New York City. Lieutenant Governor Patrick
had similarly expressed disgust for “selfish seniors who insist on
surviving while the Dow drops like a condemned man falling through a
gallows trap door” before squirting lighter fluid over himself at a
Texas barbecue restaurant and lighting himself up.
Beck had lauded the self sacrifice of Hume and Patrick on his radio
program Tuesday and acknowledged that his initial plan to send older
folks out to work was flawed. “Older people going out to work who get
infected are going to bring the virus back to other, younger people in
their families. I hadn’t really thought it through carefully. The fact
is we are the weak link, and the weak link must be eliminated or the
whole chain breaks.”
Right wing radio titan Rush Limbaugh was not impressed with the trio’s solo acts, however. The Medal of Freedom recipient, who had previously told his listeners “the coronavirus is the common cold,”
said their efforts were a step in the right direction, but that a
larger group of older patriots needed to step up and make a much bigger
“splash” to promote a mass die off of seniors to save the economy.
“Folks, we need a busload of brave seniors to barrel over a cliff to
counter the lamestream media’s mantra of ‘every life matters.’ Hell,
I’ll drive the bus myself.”
