Oh No, Not The Oleander
Put away your hypodermic filled with bleach – there’s a new cure for Coronavirus. And the MyPillow guy is gonna make money off it.
I love Oleanders, but I could never have any of them in my yard because they are poisonous. My daddy was freaked about them. Our Aunt Nelda had a big yard and instead of a fence, she had enormous oleanders. In summer, it looked like a pink paint factory exploded in her backyard. We’d go over for barbeques and my Daddy would spend the entire day standing between me and an oleander. My Aunt Nelda had barbeque and homemade ice cream – why the hell would I eat a plant? Geezzz, I was a full grown teenager and every time we were at Aunt Nelda’s my Daddy would still remind me several times during the day that oleanders were poisonous. Took all the joy outta smelling the damn things because it might just jump in your mouth if you got close enough.
After all that, Trump’s people are saying that oleanders will cure Coronavirus. They are telling me to eat something poisonous, I guess.
The experimental botanical extract, oleandrin, was promoted to Trump during an Oval Office meeting in July. It’s embraced by Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell, a big Trump backer, who recently took a financial stake in the company that develops the product.
But hell, come to think of it, this might be a simple way to get rid of herd stupidity.
Oleanders will cure COVID-19? They certainly will! They’ll cure whatever else ails you, too–permanently.
You know that somewhere, some idiot is going to brew some oleander tea and drink it, and die. That will end this project, I hope, and the My Pillow guy will lose his shirt.
1Given the reductions in government oversight provided by this maladministration, the My Pillow huckster could stuff his pillows with oleander.
Rule of thumb: if you do not comprehend with the difference between BSL-3 and BSL-2 labs, then stay the hell off the airwaves regarding SARS-CoV-2, and for certain do not occupy the Oval Office. Evuh. My rant inspired by Donnie and the covidiots in this maladministration who seek to reduce the lab standards for dealing with virus research. In their haste for a miracle cure there are already all too many inexperienced labs and lab personnel in the game.
But in the interest of FREEDUMB by all means add Sleepy Ben and the Pillow clown to the fray.
2Someone told me once that if a single leaf blew down on the grill – you had better throw away that food. That’s some kind of poisonous.
3Many kids in the south were poisoned by oleanders. Their stems were an excellent size and shape to roast hot dogs. Things did not end well for those who tried them.
I agree with your dad. Never have the damn things around for any reason. I know they are easy to grow. Kids, however, are not.
4No that this has come out a month later, Trumpf will say he’s never heard of My Pillow guy or Ben Carson. I just wish he’d tried it already. I agree someone is now bound to try – some of his cult and maybe QAnon folks. We can only hope.
5Well I guess they didn’t own any stock in Clorox bleach so now Trump, Ben Carson and the MyPillow guy are trying to get rich from selling toxic oleandrin. When I was growing up in California, Oleander fences were common and we were warned to not touch them much less put them in our mouths. They also used them as highway dividers for hundreds of miles because auto exhaust couldn’t kill them. There are still miles of the damn things existing in some places after all these years. Can’t these jerks find any benign stuff to get rich off of?
6What, they couldn’t have gone with forsythia?
7When I lived in St Paul, Mike Lindell was thought of as a dick. He callouslessly laid people off and had no business ethics.
I make sure to hide his pillows when I see them on display and give them bad reviews.
8The first house I bought had oleanders. I hacked and dug them out myself. Had a horrible rash On my arms that felt like a second degree burn from these poisonous shrubs. I’ll never do that again…
9One of my friends, a retired pastor who served churches in Texas, Alabama, and South Carolina during his career, assures me that oleander is well-known within a particular class of southern women as a reliable suicide plant. This conversation happened after I commented on the freshly planted oleander bushes in the back yards of several of my mother’s contemporaries, each of whom had passed from congestive heart failure.
10My mom was a nurse. When we went to Galveston the median of the highway was full of them. I would look out wistfully and she always said that was the perfect place for those poisonous plants!
11My mom planted them around the perimeter of the garden to keep the deer and rabbits from coming in. She did plant stuff deer and rabbits liked by the creek.
Trump and company don’t know as much about oleanders as deer and rabbits.
12Back in the early 60’s a group wanted to roast hot dogs on Daytona beach. The only sticks the could find were oleanders. Put them all in the hospital.
13Seems the only people left that are sick enough to give Trump praise and money are the religious extremist MyPillow type guys so Trump gives them what they want.
But how the heck are we going to inject oleander extract into our lungs?
“Trump’s big donors from 2016 want nothing to do with him this year”
14https://www.rawstory.com/2020/08/trumps-big-donors-from-2016-want-nothing-to-do-with-him-this-year/
My mom used to tell me about the time she caught my older sister and some little co-conspirator using oleander leaves as “toothbrushes.”Both lived to tell about it; the sister turned 78 today. And she’s gotten a lot smarter than that!
15Grandma Ada @11 Galveston once called itself the Oleander City. Don’t know if it still does.
I had lots of big oleanders in my yard when I lived on Maui. As a native Southerner I knew not to cook with them. You can even get sick by burning them and breathing the smoke.
16I was driving in northern California on Hwy 99 where the median was solid with oleanders in bloom. Very pretty until I got to a stretch where they were on fire. Boy, do those suckers burn! Snap, crackle, pop with lots of oil to make a smoky mess. I got past that stretch as fast as I could.
17AK @17 Hwy 99 was what I was describing in my post above. The median used to be Oleanders all the way from Sacramento to Bakersfield. There are still some stretches of it from Madera northward. That smoke you’re talking about is poisonous.
18Oleander Enema.
Donnie should say that 10 times fast and stuff one where he puts his ultraviolet light.
19I had oleandersons for years. ‘never ate a single leaf?!
20The first thing I thought of was Jude Law’s character in Contagion peddling forsythia as a cure. He was arrested at the end of the movie. I hope this part of Contagion is as oracular as the rest of it.
21I believe Oleander wine was what Cary Grant’s aunts used to kill people in the hilarious old movie Arsenic and Old Lace, so perhaps Oleanders have a fair amount of arsenic in them?
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