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Welcome to the Badlands: Coronavirus and Trumpists Infest Rapid City

Last updated on 2022-02-16

Republicans are planning even more events to celebrate Il Duce’s triumphal ride through the Black Hills this week. In addition to their runners-up contagion fest in downtown Rapid Friday, the SDGOP is flying hyperbolic Trump-punk and coronavirus disinformer Charlie Kirk to come feed the frothers’ fears of fairness at the Rapid City Ramkota on Wednesday. On Thursday, Republican women (Rep. Tim Goodwin doesn’t specify which ones) are hosting a fundraiser with speeches from Trump spinster Kellyanne Conway, former Fox newsmodel Kimberly Guilfoyle, and her boyfriend Donald Trump, Jr. The location is being kept under wraps for “security concerns.” Tickets for the July 2 event cost $250.

Maybe Governor Kristi Noem can round up all these Trump inner-circlers at Mount Rushmore and take them on a tour of some other South Dakota sites:

Trump Noem coronavirus badlands
Jo Johnson, editorial cartoon, submitted to DFP 2020.06.29.

Between coronavirus and this Trump infestation, South Dakota really lives up to its status as home of the Badlands.

40 Comments

  1. Owen

    Infestation is a great word

  2. mike from iowa

    Just when you think it is safe to swim again and drumpf has ignored all the sharks away, a potential super shark pops up in China with the potential to become a pandemic in its own right.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53218704

    New strain f swine flu detected and is transmittable to humans, even low lifes like drumpf and his ilk.

    ps cartoon and caption is perfect.

  3. Donald Pay

    Great cartoon!

    I’m so glad I moved out of Rapid. I expect these parties have a “Walking Dead” theme. If you go, breathe that “freedom” in deeply. And have a nice death.

  4. Tim thomas

    All of you are so smart writing what you did. What do you want to do, stay locked down for many more months? This is not going to go away staying locked down. You liberals are a real peach, and a bunch of stupid sheep.

  5. SDDP chair Randy Seiler expresses concern about cost, wildfire, and public health risk from the Trump fireworks show and suggests the Presidents immortalized in our granite might look askance at this vanity play, just as Jo Johnson depicts in her cartoon in last week’s Native Sun News:

    What would the four overlooking presidents think of this display? George Washington, who always put country before party; Thomas Jefferson, who outlined a visionary democracy; Teddy Roosevelt, who preserved the west and our natural resources; and Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves and defeated the Confederacy; they too may have been concerned about throwing caution to the wind [Randy Seiler, op-ed, Pierre Capital Journal, 2020.06.30].

  6. “You liberals”—coronavirus doesn’t care what our political affiliations are.

    No, I don’t want to stay locked down for many more months. However, public health and the evidence of states’ premature attempts to reopen in May and June appear to require that we stay locked down, at least in some limited fashion, until we have administered a reliable vaccine to the entire population.

    Tim, do you oppose taking widespread action to restrain the spread of a deadly virus? Do you prefer two million deaths to a temporary economic slowdown?

  7. jerry

    Tim Thomas, what color flower arrangements should we send for your trumpian wake?

  8. mike from iowa

    This is a prime case for Tim Thomas to exercise his white privilege and party like it is his last night on earth, as it may well be. Go ahead and prove yer macho status, stud.

    Yer epitaph might well read, “he listened to drumpf and this is his earthly reward.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGNdvKvbxYQ

    Timothy by the Buoys, 1971.

  9. jerry

    President Hillary Clinton would never have allowed this pandemic to sweep this country, President Clinton would have had the necessary PPE for healthcare workers and would have followed the George W. Bush and Obama protocol for dealing with a pandemic.

    We would not be having a discussion about the dangers of a wildfire in the Black Hills due to firework entertainment with President Hillary Clinton.

    We would not have allowed the bounty program that the Russians put on the soldiers they have killed in Afghanistan with President Hillary Clinton.

  10. Donald Pay

    Tim Thomas, thanks for your question. I follow the advice of scientists and medical experts regarding COVID-19. I don’t listen to politicians.

    That meant wearing a mask, social distancing, and only making necessary trips into public spaces. Scientists have developed guidelines for when and how to ‘reopen” the economy. We should be following those. Unfortunately, their detailed guidelines have been censored and dumbed down by the Trump Administration. Also, some Governors have skipped over some steps in order to speed reopening. Added to that are selfish and stupid behavior on the part of people who think they are special people, and don’t have to use common sense.

    I have been lucky to have the advise of my daughter, who has experienced COVID from Beijing, China. They have been able to open their businesses with only a minimal increase in COVID cases. They have an unbelievably effective means for testing and contact tracing. These are things that we haven’t even began to get up and running with the necessary effectiveness to stamp out upticks in COVID. Businesses can remain open, but with temperature taking, reduced capacity and mask wearing, but bars and restaurants provide a difficult issue. It takes a competent government and an unselfish citizenry to implement the science. The US has the scientific and medical expertise to get us through this pandemic but we lack competence in our political leadership and a citizenry that understands the need to be unselfish and do the right thing. That is why we are heading toward renewed business closures, massive carnage and second-world status.

    I don’t look at following the advise of science and medicine as being like “sheep.” It’s that sort of thinking that is the problem. Everyone makes their own medical decisions, but they usually want to take the advice of a qualified physician over, oh, a reality show host.

  11. bearcreekbat

    mfi, I was not familiar with that Buoy’s tune. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. For folks like me that have difficulty understanding lyrics in some songs, here is a version with the weird lyrics printed out while accompanying the tune. All I can say is wow!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqDu5LBT8_Y

  12. mike from iowa

    Different song, to be sure. Released the same year, 1971, as I was from Public Schooling.

  13. jerry

    The latest from Doc Fauci, with news like this, it only makes sense for South Dakota to have these kinds of close festivities, it’s the only way to put GNOem’s name in the news.

    “We can’t just focus on those areas that are having the surge. It puts the entire country at risk,” Fauci said. “We are now having 40-plus thousand new cases a day, I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 cases a day if this does not turn around, so I am very concerned.”

    Fauci previously warned that the U.S. would have cases well into the fall.

    Trump, meanwhile, has been largely silent on the continued spike in cases, instead focusing on vandalized statues and his own ego. As more than 40,000 new cases and more than 800 new deaths were reported Tuesday in the U.S., the president was busy tweeting about himself.”

  14. DaveFN

    Tim, you are correct if you are thinking that coronavirus may never go away. If you are thinking infection is inevitable, however, you are mistaken. Lockdowns and other measures such as masks and social distancing buy us time for vaccine development as well as prevent overwhelming health care capabilities. It’s man against nature, for certain, but give man credit–something you don’t seem to do. Recall that we’ve triumphed over polio, smallpox, and numerous natural threats, whether or not you’ve been personally affected by any of those threats that the world has successfully addressed.

  15. Chris S.

    @Tim thomas
    Everybody wanting to wish away the pandemic and “reopen the economy” is being pretty shortsighted. If you “reopen” everything and half the population gets sick simultaneously, that’s going to crash the economy regardless. And it doesn’t matter much how sick people get. If they’re “only” bedridden for a few days with a mild case and then quarantined for two weeks, it’s awfully hard to keep businesses running. If half your employees are out sick, you can’t really function. The Water Department, Sanitation Department, hospitals, and the Corps of Engineers maintaining the dams are going to be in crisis mode at best.

    Look, all of us want this pandemic to be done. We want to get back to normal. But most of us also aren’t children who think we can wish a problem away, or throw a big enough tantrum to make the Coronavirus give up.

  16. cibvet

    I find the only redeeming quality of tim thomas’s reply, was that it unleashed several intelligent responses for those of us who enjoy factual information.

  17. Why is it that every disaster movie starts off with the government refusing to listen to a scientist?

  18. mike from iowa

    drumpf body count….

    Deaths:
    129,091

  19. Chris’s response reminds me that our economic situation is like a having a running injury. Sure, I want to get back to running. I don’t want to sit home for the rest of my life and never run again. But if I try to run full steam on this injury right now, I will make it worse, delay my return to the track or trail even longer, and maybe do permanent damage to my body and never run as well again. If I want to run again, I need to stay off my feet, let my body heal, and then ease back into running slowly, with careful attention to my body to make sure I’m not getting in the way of the healing.

    But hey, we’re working awfully hard to explain with facts and reason a topic that Tim Thomas simply views as an opportunity to toss off his drive-by frustrations on the bogeymen of his imagination instead of a hard reality requiring real changes in our lifestyle and delays of our self-gratification.

  20. Donald Pay

    I’ve been thinking about Noem’s lack of governmental response to COVID through the lens of my decades reading about and creating a bit of South Dakota history. Noem’s response is right in line with 50 years of governmental failure in South Dakota. Noem’s failure is bit different, though. In the past the resources that were despoiled and destroyed by such government failure were mostly natural resources. Noem, however, is putting in danger human resources, otherwise known as The People of South Dakota. It’s an altogether much escalated form of ecological genocide.

    It starts. I think, with the belief among the ruling elite that South Dakota and South Dakotans have nothing to offer. They think the people of this state are worthless except as they slave away at some job that provides benefit to the elite. In fact, they believe they can monetize the deaths of the people. As long as a death can be justified to them through profit and power of the elite, well, then, Noem and Republicans believe, let’s kill them all.

    There’s a long history of the national political and business elite considering South Dakota a “sacrifice area.” Ford Administration even developed a study that considered South Dakota and the West as a “sacrifice area,” a place they could rip up for energy and minerals and funnel those resources to the East and West Coasts for manufacture and export. South Dakota was supposed to be a vast corridor sacrificed to funneling electricity from coal and nuclear plants in the West to the East Coast and Rust Belt states. Besides serving as an electrical conduit, South Dakota was supposed to accept the nation’s hazardous, nuclear and solid waste.

    It’s not as if the national elites didn’t have willing partners in South Dakota political and business elites. Bereft of any creativity of their own, South Dakota elites fell back on government largesse and the promise of get rich quick schemes that depended on extraction of natural resources or destruction of natural resources subsidized by federal dollars. Extraction industries are notorious worldwide for being corrupters of politicians. And that’s what you have had decades of in South Dakota.

    For moral minded people this is altogether a different kind of sacrifice that is being asked, Taking human life for the aggrandizement of the elite is something we see in scary movies about “rimitive” people. Welcome to the elite of South Dakota. You and I are just a means to an end. They want power, and if they have to kill you to get it, they will. And they are.

  21. leslie

    We are all frogs in warming water.

    We do not realize how bad this is going to get. When infrastructure falls down that’ll be it. Without vision in the white house and senate, we have no chance. The political decision funding religion in school by SCOTUS confirms Republican’s conservative ideology and epitaph. (There is NO climate crisis; there IS an Omnipotent supreme being.)

    Perhaps, or more than likely, our Republican leaders intend to decrease population this way, shaving away the vulnerable. Perhaps young people just wanna have fun-uuunn.

    36 states now. Yikes.

  22. Debbo

    This is really the next step in GOP/faux conservative progression, as Don and Leslie have alluded to. The lower classes and any POC were always viewed as expendable items on an expense sheet. In this COVID-19 setting, the GOP/faux conservatives are simply being open about it. They view Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” as a guidebook.

    We cannot underestimate their lack of morality and empathy.

  23. Bob Newland

    Tim Thomas, you are a true leader, with all the eloquence of a heelfly grub.

  24. Francis Schaffer

    I thought New Zealand locked down and contact traced and eliminated the Coronavirus.

  25. Francis Schaffer

    Or we could follow the Swedish model.

  26. South Dakota as “sacrifice area”—interesting, Donald! Could we say that the situation of hundreds of missile sites across our state and the Plains reinforced that sense of being hung out to die?

  27. New Zealand did, Francis, but now lots of Kiwis are returning home from plague-lands and stressing the country’s isolation facilities.

    While Kristi recycles slogans about Freedom™ and Donald does nothing whatsoever, Asian and African countries with experience with epidemics have broken out their testing and tracing protocols and have kept their covid-19 death rates well below ours. There’s something Kristi and Donald could chat about while riding horsey through the Coronavirus Badlands.

  28. John

    Idiocracy is most of the South Dakota electorate and the trump worshipers.
    Noah Smith nailed the American decline to developing nation status.
    Not new to trump, he accelerated American decline. The decline began in late 70s – when the US quit dreaming big, quit aspiring to think big – and began “feeling”.
    https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-30/new-pew-poll-shows-big-biden-lead-but-also-dangerous-partisanship

    Jeff Daniel’s (Will McAvoy) nailed it in Newsroom — and it’s getting worse.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WxdaU9AsnU

  29. jerry

    Very interesting

    “Hundreds of officials who worked for former Republican President George W. Bush are set to endorse Democratic White House hopeful Joe Biden, people involved in the effort said, the latest Republican-led group coming out to oppose the re-election of Donald Trump.
    The officials, who include Cabinet secretaries and other senior people in the Bush administration, have formed a political action committee – 43 Alumni for Biden – to support the former vice-president in his November 3 race, three organizers of the group said. Bush was the country’s 43rd president.
    The Super PAC will launch on Wednesday with a website and Facebook page, they said. It plans to release “testimonial videos” praising Biden from high-profile Republicans and will hold get-out-the-vote efforts in the most competitive states.”South China Morning Post 7.1.20

  30. grudznick

    For Messrs. Pay and H, if the belly of the prairie is the “sacrificing land”, it sure is a sweet place to be sacrificed. Mr. Pay fled it, out of paranoia the government was all about digging too much, and Mr. H lives in the armpit of the sacrificing land, but yet they both blog about it a bunch.

    I think you will ultimately both arrive where my good friend Lar is, sporting “Rewild the West” bumper stickers and driving a VW van.

    The privilege and benefit of living in a more rural area where they want to put nukes is that the covid crowds and urban hippies don’t come here, and that’s all the better for those of us who live here. Governor Noem should fire that Hagen fellow who keeps inviting people to visit. We want people to stay out, and should advertise warnings about plagues and bugs and bears and monsters and redneck hillbillies running rampant to keep people out.

  31. Debbo

    John, I read your link and didn’t see anything that appeared to refer to your comment,
    “The decline began in late 70s – when the US quit dreaming big, quit aspiring to think big – and began ‘feeling’.”

    I don’t understand what that’s about. Will you help me out?

    BTW, the poll results are great.

  32. Donald Pay

    Grudz, I agree with you. I like the prairie the way nature made it, and the fewer white people the better. No boreholes, no garbage, no nukes, no corruption, 4Science, 7 generations and one Grudz.

    I sort of agree with John, too, except I think the US stopped believing in dreaming small. Instead, we started thinking that if it wasn’t a “big” dream, it didn’t matter. “A thousand points of light,” “small is beautiful, “get small or get out,” one Grudz.

  33. Debbo

    Outlook remains positive for a return to sanity in USA politics. Biden continues to out raise Drooling Doofus and has a sizable lead in electoral votes if the election were held tomorrow. However, we can expect heightened levels of GOP lying, cheating and election fraud. No let up! Gotta go for a Blue Tsunami!

    NPR is.gd/jFj6xX

  34. Debbo

    Kellyanne Conwoman, Junior IQ and whoever the other national numbskull was have backed out of the Rapid City infestivities. They were probably never going to come. Just gaming the rural rubes. How trumpian of them.

  35. Debbo

    Of course. How foolish of me. They follow the scent of money like a vulture follows the stench of rotted flesh.

  36. Robin Friday

    The Swedish model, which wasn’t a model at all, but a non-model, let-’em-loose, see who lives and who dies paradigm, was a failure. More deaths than other Scandinavian countries.

  37. Robin Friday

    Tim Thomas, I don’t speak from experience, but from recovering alcoholics I’ve heard “one day at a time” a lot. Good to use to live life in a pandemic also, seems to me. No, I don’t plan to stay hunkered down for a year. But I can do one day at a time if I have to. Or if I choose to.

  38. mike from iowa

    Junior and Gulliblefoil are sheduled for a hunt/fishing soire in Montana or Wyoming on the 4th, I believe. Of course you pay for the chance to soak up the drumpf stench.

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