When I was a kid I feel like “the flu” was just sort of a general euphemism for being sick, really anything involving nausea or vomiting or whatever. Sometimes called a “24 hour bug” or something similar. It never lasted long and was never considered very serious. I don’t know if this was a regional thing, or something from the 70s, or maybe just my dumb family.
I never knew until I was much older that “the flu” is the same as influenza, a specific disease caused by a specific pathogen and can be serious or even deadly.
Makes me wonder if some of the “it’s just the flu” people are coming from this background.
Yeah if someone tells you they stayed home with the flu yesterday they had a cold or 24hr GI virus, if they tell you it feels like my bones are breaking and I might call 911 they have the flu
Imagine it now… Biden cruises to victory alongside Haley and then dies in 2027… Haley nominates someone like Jeff Flake or Mitt Romney as VP. A few months later, Sotomayor dies and Haley puts another Heritage Foundation lunatic on SCOTUS.
Haley being not Trump and not Biden gets her the two full terms since Joe made it halfway on his term, so Kagan gets into her 70s and bites it and we get an 8-1 SCOTUS.
Really depends on whether the GOP doubles down on Trumpism if he loses, or goes back to the Jeb and Romney types. Pretty good chance Biden would be a one term president in that timeline, and we’d currently have like Haley/Rubio/Romney, with HRC challenging them and losing this year.
To me the wild timeline is the one HRC holds off Obama or he waits to run, she loses to McCain, and we get McCain followed by Obama.
McCain was probably always losing in ‘08, that was going to be a dem wave no matter what given the economy, Bush, etc. HRC just wins by a lot less than Obama. She loses in ‘12 to Romney.
my favorite tweet in this fantasy alternative recent history genre regarding was in mid-late 2020, before the election, and said something like “in an alternate universe somewhere lindsey graham is holding hearings demanding to know why hillary let 300 americans die from covid”
Yeah, don’t forget that Obama won Indiana in 2008. HRC probably doesn’t, but that’s the kind of padding the Dems had then. McCain was a designated loser trotted out in a year when the GOP had no shot.
A lot of it was a mighty GOTV operation in Chicago that bled over into Gary, but yes, seems pretty far fetched that would be in reach for even the best GOTV team now.
McCain was ahead as late as early September then Lehman happened and the bottom dropped out. But if the shit hit the fan just 2 months later there’s a non-trivial chance McCain would’ve shipped it.
