The Trump Pandemic

[JimC]

Verbal diarrhoea...

[Hermit]

Verbal diarrhoea...

At least two puddles of it, each containing amazing U-turns:

1) From "It's nothing" through "it's nothing much to worry about" to "fucking hell!"
2) From "No need to do anything" through "I'm managing this really well." to "I'm not responsible for this disaster."

All in a matter of a few weeks.

[Seabass]

Seabass, I don't see Sean as a Trump apologist at all. He clearly accepts that Trump is an arsehole, and that he deserves some blame for a less than competent government response to the covid-19 crisis. You may well assign a higher level of blame than Sean, but the strength of your hatred of Trump sometimes seems to imply that everything is his fault, which leaves no room for a careful analysis of the systematic failures and bureaucratic errors that were present, independent of who is president.

Lol. I've never said nor have I implied that I think everything is Trump's fault. In fact I have explicitly stated on numerous occasions that Trump is a symptom and that the Republican political philosophy, the right-wing media bubble, and other factors are at play. At the end of the day, however, Trump is the head of the executive branch. You know, the branch that is tasked with handling pandemics.

And no, Sean generally isn't a Trump apologist, but he has definitely been doing apologetics with regard to Trump's handling of the pandemic.

[pErvinalia]

I tend to agree with Seabass. Don't know what Sean's smoking.

[Hermit]

This'll give Sean something to complain about.

[Hermit]

I tend to agree with Seabass. Don't know what Sean's smoking.

A somewhat less potent strain than our member from Yellowknife.

[Animavore]

March 31, 2020 (Tuesday)

Our coronavirus numbers continue to climb. Today America has more than 185,000 known infections and Covid-19 has killed 3,768 people, more than those who died on 9/11. Coronavirus continues to weaken the economy as well. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 400 points today, ending the worst quarter in stock market history, despite more than $2 trillion in relief measures and actions by the Federal Reserve to inject money into the economy.

Today, the White House warned Americans to expect 100,000 to 240,000 deaths over the course of the pandemic; more—as many as 2.2 million-- if Americans do not strictly self-isolate.

This best case scenario is close to the numbers of US Army soldiers-- 235,000—who died in battle in World War Two.

Trump is trying to spin this appalling disaster as a victory. He has declared that if we are able to keep the deaths in the lower range “we all together have done a very good job.”

The president and his team are eager to absolve him of responsibility for America’s slow and erratic response to the pandemic, a response that will cost the lives of thousands more of our friends and family than the disease otherwise would have claimed. Trump has repeatedly said that it was “nobody’s fault,” just one of those “things that happened.” Kellyanne Conway, an advisor to the president, recently expanded on this line, saying Trump “is presiding over the country’s response to an unanticipated, unprecedented pandemic of global proportions, and he is getting credit for his handling of the pandemic … In due time, he will preside over the great American comeback, which is more likely to be in the summer or fall, depending on the effectiveness of mitigation and relief efforts and the uncertain path of the virus itself.”

This is gaslighting, designed to absolve the president of blame for this disaster and to pave the way for the crisis to be redefined as a victory before the 2020 election.

Who could possibly have known that a pandemic was coming? Every White House official. In preparation for taking over in January 2017, outgoing Obama administration officials worked through a pandemic emergency with the incoming officials, but the administration did not make epidemic preparedness a priority. It cut more than two-thirds of the staff at the Centers for Disease Control in China, from about 47 people to 14. It cut the pandemic response team from the National Security Council in 2018, leaving no epidemic disease specialist on the NSC. It had a playbook for managing a pandemic, prepared in 2016 by officials in the Obama administration after the Ebola crisis; Trump’s people ignored it.

More specifically, after reports of the disease developing in China emerged at the end of December 2019, U.S. intelligence agencies repeatedly warned Trump in January and February in classified briefings what was coming; he continued to downplay it. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) asked the administration to declare a public health emergency in late January to free up money to fight the coronavirus. But as late as February 24, Trump tweeted: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this,” one official said, “but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it…. The system was blinking red.”

Today Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tried a different argument for Trump’s frittering away two months that would have protected us from the worst of the pandemic. McConnell told radio host Hugh Hewitt that the impeachment trial of Trump had distracted the president from paying adequate attention to the coronavirus.

This was too much for George Conway, founder of the anti-Trump super PAC the Lincoln Project. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, he called it “gaslighting of the highest order.” “Look at the calendar,” he wrote. Impeachment was pretty much over on January 31, when Senators killed the idea of testimony, although the final vote wasn't until February 5. Trump went to Mar-a-Lago at least four times in the first two months of the year, held frequent campaign rallies, and repeatedly went golfing. And he commented often on the coronavirus, telling reporters and tweeting that “we have it totally under control.”

From a political standpoint, as well, this argument doesn’t hold water. If Trump and his advisors were focusing at all on the coronavirus in those crucial weeks, they would have deployed then the argument that impeachment was hurting their ability to respond adequately to the crisis. It was a winning political argument that would have played well across the country (in addition to promoting our ability to fight the epidemic).

For his part, Trump seemed torn between having an excuse and having to admit he hadn’t done a bang-up job. During today’s press briefing, he said: “Did it divert my attention? I think I'm getting A+'s for the way I handled myself during a phony impeachment, OK? ... But certainly, I guess, I thought of it and I think I probably acted -- I don't think I would have done any better had I not been impeached, OK?”

I am belaboring this point tonight because this deliberate effort to change the public perception of what really happened is a profound attack on our democracy. While this disinformation is designed to absolve Trump of blame he deserves, it is far more than that. We are seeing government officials rewriting our history in real time. And in October, if campaign officials for the Republican candidate are telling voters that Trump was a hero for his handling of the unanticipated coronavirus despite Democrats’ impeachment witch hunt, I want to have laid down this marker so that there is a record of when that story began.

As late as February 26, Trump said, “This is a flu. This is like a flu.” “I mean, view this the same as the flu.” Today he said: “’A lot of people’” said “’ride it out. Don’t do anything, just ride it out and think of it as the flu.’ But it’s not the flu. It’s vicious.”

Today the editorial board of the Boston Globe wrote: “the president has blood on his hands.”

https://www.facebook.com/24144692933271 ... 524283868/

[Brian Peacock]

We passed rational and useful blame of Trump for his many faults ages ago. I've been here before. When I worked for someone I considered a psycho , dealing with him eventually consumed my thinking. I'm sure I was quite irrational at that point. Thankfully I began to see my way through it.

Unfortunately, I'm not seeing much progress in that regard for the Trump obsessed.

But maybe that's just politics? You go crazy, literally.

Aye, people often become preoccupied or infatuated with their abuser.

At this point it seems that Trump only has to open his mouth and something stupid falls out. I've lost interest - he no longer has the capacity to surprise me and I'm way way past impotent fury. It took a while to train Google not to keep showing me Trump notifications though - but I now get far fewer politics and far more science notifications than I used to.

And this kind of apathy is why he'll win again.

Not that you can do anything any way not being a US citizen, but hopefully enough US citizens are still angry enough to destroy him in November. That said I've no hope for that when I read stupidity like this from just today -

"Right now I'd rather Trump win, if Bernie won I'd rather him win. I just don't want the clear establishment and it's deep seated corruption to win with among other things it's near complete control of the media. At least Trump is a real person, not some groomed plucked sheep that is just a puppet. I always find it funny that the whole DMC hacking scandal focused on Trump over how the Democrats corruption was exposed

But I don't like either party but our system is so f**ked there's not reality anyone but them win"

There is so much stupidity contained in this comment I can't even...

It's not apathy Ani, it's acceptance - I accept that he's a bigoted narcissistic troll who's only concern is to serve his own an Capital's interests, and I simply refuse to be primed and triggered over him. If I had s vote in the US I would have resolved never to vote for him in 2016.

[JimC]

I agree, Brian - there is a limit to how much emotional energy I can expend fulminating over a moronic foreign ruler, when we have plenty of our own to fulminate about...

[Brian Peacock]

Indeed.

[Tero]

Mitch the explainer

We all know by now why the U.S. was caught off guard so badly by the current pandemic. Real reasons exist — with tangible, obvious cause-and-effect consequences — for why COVID-19 is sweeping through our country.

Tuesday morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the right wing airwaves of Hugh Hewitt’s radio show to unveil a theory of his own on why America was so unprepared for a looming pandemic: The federal government was too distracted by the impeachment process to work on anything else.

“It came up while we were tied down in the impeachment trial. And I think it diverted the attention of the government because everything every day was all about impeachment,” McConnell claimed in the interview.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2 ... LQQrnFJ8Ms

[Cunt]

They are utter cretins.

I understand you quite well.

Those four words being all you replied to from the post you quoted, I can only wonder about your capacity to understand me - or anything else for that matter.

I think you are smart as hell, and absolutely hate Trump, in a way that makes your answers predictable.

Now I'm beginning to understand you do (or maybe 'must') think of his voters the same way.

I tend to agree with Seabass. Don't know what Sean's smoking.

A somewhat less potent strain than our member from Yellowknife.

Yeah. I'm SO HIGH I started to think that Trump got testing times down to 2 minutes, by allowing the private sector to jump in, rather than the (seemingly China-controlled) W.H.O.

But I must be high, because even a 5-minute test isn't possible, or the good countries would have already been doing it.

[Hermit]

They are utter cretins.

I understand you quite well.

Those four words being all you replied to from the post you quoted, I can only wonder about your capacity to understand me - or anything else for that matter.

I think you are smart as hell, and absolutely hate Trump, in a way that makes your answers predictable.

Now I'm beginning to understand you do (or maybe 'must') think of his voters the same way.

You are correct, except for four details.

1) My smartness barely reaches the average of everyone else, and that only on my better days.
2) I don't absolutely anything. At least not for the past four decades.
3) I don't hate Trump.
4) I don't think of his voters the same way.

Still waiting for a response from you on the meat of my post. Going by your record I doubt it will be forthcoming, though, evasion being your preferred reaction to what people write.

[Cunt]

They are utter cretins.

I understand you quite well.

Those four words being all you replied to from the post you quoted, I can only wonder about your capacity to understand me - or anything else for that matter.

I think you are smart as hell, and absolutely hate Trump, in a way that makes your answers predictable.

Now I'm beginning to understand you do (or maybe 'must') think of his voters the same way.

You are correct, except for four details.

1) My smartness barely reaches the average of everyone else, and that only on my better days.
2) I don't absolutely anything. At least not for the past four decades.
3) I don't hate Trump.
4) I don't think of his voters the same way.

Still waiting for a response from you on the meat of my post. Going by your record I doubt it will be forthcoming, though, evasion being your preferred reaction to what people write.

I'm still waiting for a response from you on many things, so just chalk it up to the same reason.

Meanwhile, China has been sending equipment around the world, which has been rejected for cause. They lied about many aspects of this pandemic, and you are here, hoping to blame Trump. I wonder why so little of your time is spent blaming people closer to the source of this pandemic...

Wait, I don't wonder. US voters are cretins. Presumably because they don't vote the way you would want them to.

I'm going to keep waiting though, because you probably can't criticize certain peoples. Good that you feel confident and free blaming this pandemic on Trump though. You gotta have someone, right?

Just a reminder that the communist party has an interest in sowing propaganda. So do some others.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/harvard- ... na-related

Unbeknownst to Harvard University beginning in 2011, Lieber became a “Strategic Scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and was a contractual participant in China’s Thousand Talents Plan from in or about 2012 to 2017.

But go ahead and keep blaming Trump for this. Especially in countries controlled by Chinese government investment.

[Hermit]

I understand you quite well.

Those four words being all you replied to from the post you quoted, I can only wonder about your capacity to understand me - or anything else for that matter.

I think you are smart as hell, and absolutely hate Trump, in a way that makes your answers predictable.

Now I'm beginning to understand you do (or maybe 'must') think of his voters the same way.

You are correct, except for four details.

1) My smartness barely reaches the average of everyone else, and that only on my better days.
2) I don't absolutely anything. At least not for the past four decades.
3) I don't hate Trump.
4) I don't think of his voters the same way.

Still waiting for a response from you on the meat of my post. Going by your record I doubt it will be forthcoming, though, evasion being your preferred reaction to what people write.

I'm still waiting for a response from you on many things, so just chalk it up to the same reason.