Case #1 - Dan Patrick. That's just his fake name. He was born here in Baltimore as Dannie Scott Goeb, and served in the noble trade I once plied, as a radio DJ at a country music station here in town just months before I arrived. It was there that he began using the Dan Patrick pseudonym, probably before Daniel Patrick Pugh left Ohio and began calling himself Dan Patrick and becoming a famous sportscaster. The Dan Patrick who worked at WISZ before me was a big favorite with the office staff down there. The ladies in the office used to tell me all about how wonderful he was. They were in their 50s and 60s then, and I wonder if they would still think he was such a great guy if they knew that in 2020, he would think that people our age ought to step off the stage of life and let the economy recover.
Here's what Dan, who parlayed an unsuccessful stint of running sports bars and righty radio talk shows into his current gig as the lieutenant governor of Texas, said the other night on that Foxxxxxx news station:
“My message is that let’s get back to work (sic). Let’s get back to living. Let’s be smart about it,” Patrick told Tucker Carlson. “And those of us who are 70 plus, we’ll take care of ourselves. But don’t sacrifice the country. Do we have to shut down the entire country for this? I think we can get back to work."
Dan Patrick seemed to be suggesting that we should go back to work in the middle of this coronavirus pandemic. To heck with the consequences. He mentioned that “grandparents” - we wheezy old baby boomers at greater risk of contracting COVID-19 -- should walk the plank for the benefit of the national economy.
Patrick and Governor Greg Abbott are resisting calls to have Texans stay home to flatten the curve, the procedure we hear will help stem the virus. Yeah, what the heck, let's all go to work and stop off at Dairy Queen and go to a ballgame. How could that hurt?
Rep. Donna Howard of Austin used to be a nurse, and she wonders about this idea of old folks falling on their swords.
“The idea that the only option is for us to sacrifice ourselves is really incredulous to me,” said Howard, herself a grandmother. “I mean, there are definitely other routes we can take that make much more sense.”
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| He seems quite sincere. |
God, I hope not. Oh, I mean, "how noble."
Then comes Case #2. An unidentified man who retired to sunbaked Arizona with his wife is dead today, having ingested chloroquine phosphate. He believed it would protect him from the coronavirus. His wife took some too, but she survived (but is in critical care).
The man's wife told NBC they had seen on the news that President Trump thought chloroquine was a good therapy for the virus, even though no testing has been done to support that notion.
However, they did not take the medication form of chloroquine. The woman used to keep koi fish, and had liquid chloroquine around from her days of adding it to the fish water to kill parasites.
"I saw it sitting on the back shelf and thought, 'Hey, isn't that the stuff they're talking about on TV?'" she told NBC. "We were afraid of getting sick."
So, they mixed the chloroquine with some unspecified liquid, and drank it, and shortly thereafter, the man was dead and the woman quite ill.
Friends and neighbors, we are all going to go to that great big diner in the sky someday. For some of us, that day might come soon. But there is no need to volunteer to go so that WalMart can stay open and sell more Wals, and no valid reason to guzzle ersatz medications because a former real estate mogul said it sounded like a good idea to him.
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