COVID-KristiMaybe more so than even governors Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Brian Kemp (R-GA), Doug Ducey (R-AZ) and Greg Abbott (R-TX), South Dakota Trumpist Governor Kristi Noem should face charges of manslaughter for the willful decision to shit-can public health requirements and infect her state-- and surrounding states-- with a deadly and preventable virus.
On Thursday Kristi Noem infected 334 more South Dakotans with COVID-19 and then yesterday she gave her states 259 more cases, bringing the state total to 14,596 or 16,499 cases per million residents. By way of comparison, the worst hit European country, Spain which is already in Wave II, has significantly fewer cases per million that South Dakota-- 11,060. And after Spain, the numbers drop dramatically: Sweden (8,406 cases per million), U.K.
South Dakota had another bad pandemic weekend-- 98 new cases Friday, 106 new cases yesterday and 128 today, bringing their total to 9,605. That doesn't sound like much, does it? The problem is that South Dakota only has about 885,000 residents and that puts them in an unenviable position-- almost 11,000 cases per million South Dakotans.
The Second American Civil War has a geographical dividing line rather different than the first Civil War did. The Mason-Dixon Line was a figurative reference for a long geographical border separating the Slave States from the Union States (a.k.a. “Free States” even though they were not exactly free). The boundary is show on maps and is easy to find. It is essentially a line running east-west across most of the territory now occupied by the Lower 48 US states. But the geographical divisions for this new war should be all circles, drawn around most of our large cities.
South Dakota is a mostly rural, sparsely populated state that has drifted far to the right in recent decades, far from a once proud populist history. Today, both U.S. senators and the state's lone member of Congress are supine Trumpist Republicans. The governor, attorney general, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, treasurer and every other member of the state's executive branch are Republicans.
I'd like to think that at the end of this nightmare, there will be a national consensus about which governors were as destructive as Trump in their responses to the pandemic and that they're all tossed into a live volcano like on that Spectrum TV commercial. I'm not even talking about the governors who were slow to react before they fully understood the gravity of them problem-- like Cuomo or Newsom, each of whom learned how badly they screwed up and moved to improve.
The Dakotas are Trump country. Both states are red hellholes-- 2 right-wing Republican senators each, one at-large right-wing House member each, and each has a crackpot Trumpist governor and a sociopathic state legislature controlled by the GOP. In 2016, North Dakota gave Trump a 216,133 (64.1%) to 93,526 (27.8%) landslide over Hillary. He won 51 of North Dakota's 53 counties.
There are three governors who have been judged so dangerously incompetent that none can be singled out as the worst pandemic governor in America and all three share the spot: Kristi Noem of South Dakota, Ron DeSantis of Florida and Brian Kemp of Georgia. Because all have opposed sane social distancing policies, thousands of their states' citizens have been infected. California now has 865 confirmed COVID-19 cases per one million in the population.
