Someone should make a campaign commercial out of this. We have to learn this lesson all over again when we have Republicans in charge. From Meet The Press with Katie Tur yesterday:

"Anyway, the president's going to address the nation tonight. This is a crisis he has not been able to control," Tur said.

"In the words of Peter Baker, he can't tweet his way out of this. And it's exposing a real lack of leadership on a federal level for a coordinated response in the event of a real emergency."

"Yeah, I mean, this kind of thing would be a challenge for even a president who is very invested in the federal government working and functioning as it is," senior political reporter Beth Fouhy said.

"And we know from President Trump that this hasn't been something he's, A, been interested in or B, believes in. He's suspicious of the federal government, sort of the levers of the federal government, working in a way he can't completely control. So he's done a lot to sort of marginalize civil servants, question their loyalty, in some cases empty out offices across the federal government. Now that he needs them, it's very hard for him to reclaim his credibility with managing something like this."

"He fired the pandemic response team in 2018. I mean, the team that was in place to prepare for an event like this," Tur said.

"And he said you couldn't expect something like this happening, although you definitely could and experts have been warning about it. We've had threats like ebola or SARS or various other issues in the past."

Yep. So much for the "reducing government until it's small enough to drown in a bathtub." (We see you, Grover Norquist!) The fact is, much of the federal government prepares itself for handling the worst-case scenarios, and we pay for that because, as smart people understand, horrible things do happen.

Or, as bloggers have been saying for more than a decade, don't vote to put people who hate the federal government in charge of the federal government!