Category: Covid-19

… and they shall reap the whirlwind.

So Trump has Covid-19 and we all wish him a speedy recovery.

At least Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have all made apparently heartfelt declarations to that effect. It makes you wonder what Trump would have said if the shoe were on the other foot and it was, say, Biden who was stricken.

Foxnews, meanwhile, has decried all the hate directed at Trump (apparently there are some on social media who do not wish Trump well), and Twitter has banned posts wishing for Trump’s death on their platform. Not surprisingly, the four members of “The Squad”, who have all been receiving Trump-fueled death threats on Twitter for years are wondering why this policy couldn’t have been invoked for their benefit as well.

As faithful readers of GOML know, yours truly, Stewie Generis, has often railed against Trump and everything he stands for, i.e Trump himself. You might be wondering how I feel about all this. Well, I don’t wish him ill or, actually, anything at all. I simply wish he would go away and let us all get back to life as we knew it Before Tweety. It will take years to repair the damage this guy has wrought on our country, its institutions, and its place in the world. We need to begin as soon as possible.

But you do have to feel something, perhaps pity or scorn, for the many in Trumpworld who have been required to accept the anti-science fantasy that the big boss has been insisting on since February, and who are now also stricken. Some will not recover from this, and some, Herman Cain comes to mind, have already paid with their lives.

But today’s post isn’t about how Trump’s incompetence and narcissism have led us into this entirely predictable and preventable tragedy, or how it is now clear that, until an effective vaccine becomes available to everyone in this country, we can all, every one of us, expect to get sick at some point.

No, today’s message is about how numb we have all become to the many bombshells that have been dropped on us in rapid succession. So many, so fast. And how it’s now as if they never exploded at all.

Just 48 hours before the news dropped that Tweety tested positive for Covid, he managed to completely blow up one of the last institutions of American political life that was still intact – the Presidential Debate.

I had briefly puzzled over reports that he wasn’t “preparing” for the debate at all, while Biden was holed up with experts and documentation trying to get informed on all the issues and policies he needed to think about as president. Then it dawned on me that of course Trump didn’t need to prepare. Preparation is only necessary in a fact-based environment, an environment Trump has little use for and avoids at all times.

His debating strategy is simple: wait for a “keyword” in the question, then interrupt with a fire hose of insults, lies, slander and non-sequiturs. For example, if the question begins, “On the subject of health care and the pandemic…”, Tweety jumps in and does about five minutes of “No one in history has done more for health care than me. Insulin is now free for everyone. It’s beautiful. If Biden had been in charge, millions would be dead by now. One is too many. China, China, CHINA”, and so on. Why would anyone need to prepare for this?

The media went wild about the debate/tantrum for the two days before the Covid diagnosis, but neglected to mention that it had completely erased the previous bombshell that had fallen only the day before: Trump’s tax returns had finally been produced by the Failing New York Times. It was the biggest story in four years but Trump’s “debate” performance cancelled it and now you can’t even remember that it happened.

Doesn’t really matter, though. As soon as the news dropped that Trump wasn’t a successful businessman at all, that he had cheated the U.S. government for years, and that it was only the success of The Apprentice that kept him from personal ruin (and vaulted him to the presidency), he launched the expected rebuttal: it was all fake news and the Times had broken the law in getting the info. Lock them up! Makes you wonder, though, why the Times would need to break the law to generate fake news. Couldn’t they just make up the fakes right there in their own offices without talking to anyone else?

Anyway, the holy grail of Trump’s taxes had been found and, contrary to the fondest hopes of everyone who values democracy and sanity, it had no effect whatsoever. Less even than the Mueller report, for example, which showed clearly the Russians had interfered with the 2016 election and Trump had been complicit, but which was immediately and permanently relegated to the status of “hoax”. Forgot about that one already, didn’t you?

But the tax story did have an important effect. It evaporated any and all memory and interest in the previous week’s bombshell – Bob Woodward’s book, “Rage”, which again outed Trump as the liar he is by revealing tapes of him admitting that he knew the truth about Covid since February, but played it down anyway (resulting in millions of Americans unnecessarily getting sick and hundreds of thousands dying). And also that he thought members of the military were suckers, etc. etc.

Again, none of that would have mattered even if it had gotten more than the week or so of attention it did. Team Trump had already mobilized its response, which boiled down to “So what?”. This torch was carried by a truly ridiculous senator from Louisiana, one John Neely Kennedy, who answered all questions about it by repeating the mantra, “These gotcha books don’t really interest me that much. There will be a new one out tomorrow.” Check it out for a laugh:

Anyway, I just want to forget about all this for at least a few hours. Don’t really feel like waiting for the next bombshell to explode, either.

Fortunately it’s Sunday and that means I can zone out and watch the Patriots. I don’t like their chances much against the brilliant Patrick Mahomes and the Superbowl champion Chiefs, but it’s something to look forward to and might let me temporarily escape the whirlwind. And who knows- with Cam Newton now at quarterback for the Patriots, maybe they can make it interesting.

Wait, what? What’s that you say? Cam has tested positive and the game is postponed?

Ah, shit.

Trump surprised me the other day. Was it yesterday? Last month?  No one can really keep a time-line anymore. Probably doesn’t matter since everything changes every day and nothing that happens seems connected to any of the other things that happened.

Anyway, he surprised me by announcing that he was going to allow the sun to make its own decisions about whether to rise and set each day, while providing guidance and support from his office. He added that he strongly encouraged more daylight, though  – good for the economy. He said that his administration had been very tough on the sun and had set a fantastic record, with the sun rising and setting on an unbelievably great 35 days in February, resulting in higher ratings for the sun than it had under the Obama administration.

Wait. Just kidding. That wasn’t it.

What did happen was that Tweety announced that he would give the governors permission to decide on their own whether and when to “re-open” their states. This surprised me because I knew he wanted everything to go back to the way it was as soon as possible and to declare victory over Covid-19, and maybe have a parade of tanks or something down Pennsylvania Ave. to celebrate. And I knew he doesn’t like any inference that someone might have some authority that he doesn’t have.

I had been expecting him to make some stupid declaration about how everyone should just stop with the masks already and Make America Great Again.  I even jumped the gun on the morning of his speech by writing about how he was actually going to murder people on 5th Ave., like he said he could a couple of years ago.

Instead, it was one of those very few occasions where Trump appeared “presidential”, struck a somber tone, and delivered a message that was appropriate and apparently based on the advice of experts, even though that advice went counter to his own infallible instincts and infantile desires.

So of course he couldn’t just let it be. It wasn’t broken, so he had to fix it. It only took a couple of hours for him to burst. In a perfect tweet-storm, he contradicted his own newly-minted policy, attacked everyone who seemed not to be worshiping him, re-established his hatred of facts and science and reality, and endangered the lives of millions.

To no one’s real surprise, the tweets came just minutes after Fox News aired a segment featuring coverage of a Facebook event called “Liberate Minnesota.” Although only a few hundred people expressed interest in the event on Facebook, local news sites and conservative blogs drove attention to the event Thursday, one day before the president’s tweets.

Of course, by now you’ve all read that these three states were hand-picked for the Tweety-treatment because they all have democratic governors running for re-election, and they all have a small number of understandably desperate but misguided people carrying signs in protest of the whole lock-down thing. Neighboring states with the same problems, demographics, and contagion, but with Republican governors, were spared this treatment.

The above picture is interesting. First, it isn’t much of a “movement” – only a handful of people with signs and a couple of dozen listening. Second, everyone is voluntarily maintaining social distance, despite their objection to the “tyranny”. And last, there seems to be as many people with masks on as not.  Bottom line is this really isn’t something that calls for the President of the United States to go nuts over. I suppose it does make for a decent episode of the highly-rated reality show “The POTUS”, which probably is all the explanation anyone needs.

But the recklessness of Trump’s behavior is really unforgivable. Never mind the blatant politicization of the most serious public health crisis we’ve faced since the polio epidemic of the 1950’s. Never mind that Trump is again purposely turning citizen against citizen and neighbor against neighbor for his own perceived benefit. This stupidity is going to unnecessarily cost more lives. Just when we all agreed to stay in to keep the carnage down, this Manbaby-In-Chief tells us it’s not necessary and not to give in to those democrats and their partners in the lame-stream media that want to ruin our country with their socialist agenda.

And then there’s the whole dog-whistle to the extreme right, anti-vaxxers, and the QAnon conspiracy nuts. This NBC News article talks about it:

“We the people should open up America with civil disobedience and lots of BOOGALOO. Who’s with me?” one QAnon conspiracy theorist on Twitter with over 50,000 followers asked.

“Boogaloo” is a term used by extremists to refer to armed insurrection, a shortened version of “Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo,” which was coined on the extremist message board 4chan.

The saner voices among us, e.g. Governor Jay Inslee of Washington have it right, but who’s listening to them that hasn’t already figured it out?

The president’s statements this morning encourage illegal and dangerous acts. He is putting millions of people in danger of contracting COVID-19.

His unhinged rantings and calls for people to “liberate” states could also lead to violence. We’ve seen it before. 1/7

— Governor Jay Inslee (@GovInslee) April 17, 2020

Anyway, the whole thing got me thinking again about why the symbols for the two major political parties are the elephant and the donkey. It’s all ancient history and a bit murky. The donkey comes from Andrew Jackson’s 1828 opponents calling him a jackass, and the elephant goes back to the Civil War era, when Lincoln was a “Republican”. Who cares, right?

We definitely need an update to this iconography. I think the Democrats should adopt the frog as a mascot and the Republicans, now entirely in the death-grip of an unhinged sociopath, should adopt the scorpion.

In the Russian fable of the frog and the scorpion, they both share a common need to cross dangerous waters. The scorpion suggests that the frog let him ride on his back as he swims across. The frog has his doubts, and asks the scorpion for assurances that he won’t sting the frog half-way out. The scorpion points out that if did that, they would both die, so there really isn’t any rational motivation for him to do it.

The frog sees logic in this argument and takes the scorpion on his back. Half way across, the scorpion of course does sting the frog and they both start to drown. The frog screams, “What the Hell? Are you crazy? Now we’re both dead!”. The scorpion says, “What did you expect? I’m a scorpion.”

… and not lose voters. Remember when Tweety said that, early on in his campaign?

We all thought it was hyperbole. Just a figure of speech to highlight how loyal his supporters were, or maybe how mesmerized.

Guess what?

He wasn’t kidding. It wasn’t a figure of speech. Today’s the day. He’s actually going to do it. He’s going to “open the country” even though there is no vaccine to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and no medications to treat it.

New revelations about how completely asymptomatic people can remain infectious for weeks are of no concern to the man-baby. “We’re past the peak”, he will say, as if the threat is over. Doesn’t matter to him that reporting of new cases has slowed because we’re all self-quarantined, and the minute we go back to “normal” it will start up again. What will prevent it? Hydrochloroquine?

Do we have testing in place for everyone? Masks? Protective gear for medical workers? Has anything substantially changed at all in the six weeks since Tweety told us it was all a hoax, like impeachment? That it will all magically disappear in the warm weather? That it was all under perfect control?

It’s not enough for him to simply be incompetent, leaving the heavy lifting to the experts while he impotently pouts in front of Fox and Friends. No, it is his mission to throw gasoline on the fire, sending as many people into the streets as he can. And thinking up new villains to blame for everything while asserting and insisting on his own brilliance.  Yesterday it was the World Health Organization not doing its job. Today it’s that the Chinese invented it in a lab.

As I write this, 31,000 people are dead from Covid-19 in the U.S., and that may be greatly under-reported when you understand that many people are simply dying at home without being “counted”.  By the time you read this, the number will certainly be much higher. As of a week ago, deaths were doubling here every five days. Tweety’s perfect management of this crisis puts us among the worst places in the world to be right now.

You know who’s doing a better job of managing this thing than we are?  Ghana. Burkina Faso. Albania. Azerbaijan. Cameroon. Guyana. Mali. The World.

This chart is updated every day, but at the time of this writing, Coronavirus deaths in the U.S were doubling every five days.

Find more statistics at Statista

A commonly heard complaint from managers in large corporations, military officers in the field, school teachers, and myriad others is that they’ve been given the responsibility to get something done but not the authority to do it. They see what the problem is and understand how to fix it, but they’re not allowed to hire or fire the needed people, or spend the needed money, or give the needed orders to others.

If the problem doesn’t get solved, the person who is “responsible” is to blame, and if it does get fixed, then the person with “authority” gets the credit. Most of the people that find themselves in this bind don’t really care about credit or blame – they just want to do their job and achieve a positive outcome. Especially when lives are at stake.

When Brett Crozier, Commanding Officer of an aircraft carrier with over 4000 people under his command, realized that there was a Covid-19 outbreak on the ship and no way to slow contagion in the ship’s close quarters, he knew that the only way to save lives was to off-load the sick for treatment and test and quarantine anyone else who was infected. But he didn’t have the authority to do it.

He wrote an urgent letter to the Secretary of the Navy outlining what needed to happen, but the letter was “leaked” outside the chain of command. Crozier was relieved from his duties by the acting Naval secretary, Thomas B. Modly, who said Crozier “cracked under pressure”.   Weird how just about everyone in the administration of Donald John Tweety Trump is “acting”, isn’t it?  Much more convenient for Tweety, though, when it’s time for the acting guy himself to be terminated, as all Tweety enablers eventually are.

Modly said Crozier should have known the letter would be made public and if he didn’t realize that, he was either “too naïve or too stupid to be a commanding officer.” Modly made these remarks over the ship’s P.A. system and of course they were immediately made public, so he, too, has now had to resign. Too naïve or stupid for the job, it seems.

Captain Crozier is now himself infected and in quarantine, and sailors on the U.S.S. Roosevelt have begun to die.  All so predictable. And Tragic. But these events happened over a week ago, and in the sped-up world of the hit reality show, “The POTUS”, we can barely remember them now. No point in going over ancient history anyway – the only question we need to address is “where to from here?” Some might say we need to talk about how we got here before we can figure a way out, but that just seems like the kind of “expertise” that always gets in the way.

I stopped listening to Trump’s daily Covid-19 “updates” a while ago for the obvious reason that they are not designed to impart useful information, but rather to put Tweety’s greatness and omniscience on display for all.  He’s a very stable genius and we must never forget that.

But every now and then some outrageous example of Trump topping himself at one of his crypto-rallies seeps into my consciousness. Yesterday he had an apparent meltdown, choosing to show some bizarrely-edited campaign propaganda video about how every decision he has made has been perfect, and then screaming at every single person who asked a question about the video they had just seen.

Apparently no one asked, “if you’ve done everything perfectly, why do we have more than three times as many cases as any other country, and 25,000 people already dead with no plan announced to end the contagion?”

The one question that was foremost on this day was whether the President actually had the authority to “open the country”, or was this ultimately going to be up to the governors of each state. Predictably, I suppose, Tweety said that, as president, his “authority is total”.

Of course, no constitutional scholar agrees with this pronouncement. For the record, though, Tweety does have total authority to control the day’s news cycle, limiting it for today to a heated discussion of whether or not he has total authority over everything else. And, of course, “many people” believe he does, which is usually all that matters these days. I’ll leave it to you, GOML reader, to guess which “news” network those believers are appearing on.

What was interesting about this tantrum was that it was just a short time ago that Tweety declined to issue a national stay-at-home order, saying it was the responsibility of the state governors to do so. He said it was because he believed in the constitution, perhaps more than anyone, and the constitution says the governors are responsible for a shut-down order, not the president.

He said it was also the governors’ responsibility to procure ventilators, N-95 masks, and other personal protective gear for their own states, thereby setting up a bidding war between the states for these things, with the federal government also goosing prices higher by bidding themselves.

So it’s a puzzle, right? Tweety first says only the governors can decide to make people stay at home, but then says only the president can decide to make them go back out.  Leaving aside the obvious, i.e. that Tweety says everything and its opposite all the time, and therefore no one can take anything he says seriously, how can these two apparently contradictory statements co-exist?

Well, it’s actually pretty simple. Just as those who really want to get things done can point out that they have the responsibility but no authority to do them, Tweety’s game is rigged so that he has all the authority and none of the responsibility.

A person who is doing their job to achieve the best outcome for all doesn’t really care if he is blamed when things go wrong or not praised when things go right. Tweety, on the other hand, cares nothing about others and is obsessed only with his own “ratings”. He needs to make sure that he gets credit for anything that goes right, whether he had any part in it or not, while blaming others for everything that goes wrong, even when he is wholly responsible for the fiasco.

 

 

What one word or phrase best describes the Trump presidency? So many to choose from.

Chaotic. Paranoiac. Belligerent. Reckless. Mendacious. Arrogant. Greedy. Bullying. Combative. Tactless. Mean-spirited. Bigoted.  Willfully ignorant. Demagogic. Dishonest. Un-American.

Is there a single word for “demanding total loyalty, obedience, deference, and subservience”.  There must be.  Does “tyrannic” say it all? That’s the word you find when you look up “rule by fear”, but I’m not sure that’s exactly what’s called for here, at least not all by itself.  There’s so much more that needs to be said.

Anyway, if we’re making up bumper stickers, I guess we don’t have to limit ourselves to one word. But there probably should be one slogan that we can all agree to and rally under – one rebuttal to the “Make America Great Again” deception.

I’d vote for “It’s the incompetence, stupid”.  A close second would be “It’s the stupid incompetence”. To me, that’s the greatest problem Trump poses, particularly during a real crisis, an existential crisis where his “I’ll wing it” method of governing simply doesn’t work.  When real leadership is required, confidence is nice but competence is required. If you don’t have it yourself, you must recognize it in others and rely on it where you find it.

Trump doesn’t have it and has no idea what it looks like.

It’s all up here. The only metric I need.

That was Trump’s answer when asked what metric he would use to make the most important decision of his presidency, i.e. whether to “re-open” the country during the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s really not surprising, since that’s how Trump decides everything. No facts or science gets in the way, no professional counsel or expert opinion. Just whatever flies out of his head onto his Twitter. He has such fantastic instincts.

If Fox and Friends likes the sound of it, we’re done. Sometimes it works the other way around, too: someone at Fox blathers something, and the next thing you know it’s flying out of Trump’s Twitter.  If it turns out that the initial blathering posed problems, he simply denies he ever re-blathered it. Fake news. Lamestream media playing “gotcha”.  No, what he really meant was the exact opposite. See?

And that, kiddies, is how a bill becomes a law in the Land of Trump.

There’s so much about the Covid-19 pandemic that the Man-baby just can’t grasp. First and foremost, he can’t just simply pronounce it over and proclaim yet another fantastic accomplishment. Better than anything any president has ever done before, except maybe Lincoln. He was pretty good, too.

Everyone who understands science and medicine will tell you that no real progress can be made until we have widespread , virtually universal testing in place. We have to know who is presently infected, and who has already had it. That’s because it’s highly contagious and we have no way to prevent its spread. And no way to treat it. We don’t even know for sure at this point whether you can get it a second time. Or even whether you can give it to or get it from your pets.

Trump is on record as saying that we won’t have testing for everyone. He said, “Do you need it? No. Is it a nice thing to do? Yes.”  Of course, it doesn’t really mean anything anymore for him to be “on record”, but it does give you a clue to the absurd reasoning he’ll be using to make the biggest decision he’s ever had to make.

If you encourage people to go back to church, to work, to concerts and ballgames, they will simply continue to spread the disease until every last one of us gets it.

Tweety and his minions want to point to the “peaking” of new cases as a sign that the worst is behind us. They have forgotten that the whole point of “flattening the curve” was to spread out the inevitable infections over time so that our health care system might not be overwhelmed all at once, and perhaps give researchers time to come up with a vaccine or treatments, and time for manufacturers to make enough protective gear. “Flattening the curve” and “turning the corner” are not the same.

If it looks like we’ve actually managed to flatten the curve at this point, it is because of the success of the social distancing and other measures we’ve all agreed to over the last weeks. If the country is “re-opened”, those gains evaporate. We have to wait until we have a means of prevention or at least treatment.

If Trump says, “OK, that’s it – country’s open again!”, are you going to do anything differently? Are you going to put down your face mask? Go out to restaurants? Ride public transportation? I’m not and maybe you aren’t either, but there are millions of people who are still listening to the man-baby and still think he knows what he’s talking about. If he tells them it’s over, well, that’s all they need to know.

They think he’s competent.

But despite it all, there’s still some great news to report. The good old U. S. of A.  is back on top! In just 45 days we have gone from having no deaths, fewer than 15 cases, and going down to zero fast, to having the most Covid-19 deaths in the world and three times more confirmed cases than any other country.

We’re Number One!

I remember when Trump first announced he would star in The Apprentice, a ridiculous and ridiculously popular vanity project that promoted the questionable narrative that he was a brilliantly successful businessman. I thought, “Huh? An obscenely rich and successful real estate developer and entrepreneur wants to ‘star’ a silly piece of fluff? Why? Would Warren Buffet do this? Bill Gates? Carlos Slim?”

It took me a while to understand that Trump had not, in fact, been a brilliantly successful entrepreneur, and that the “why” was that his greatest aspiration had always been to be on TV, where the largest number of people could see him, talk about him, and admire him.

What Trump actually did have an exceptional talent for was deceiving people, sometimes referred to as “marketing”.

At the time, Trump was already pretty famous as a promoter, scam artist, and business fraud, but the TV show really propelled him into the national spotlight.

Promoter, as “heel”

Scam Artist – gotta love that Coat-of-Arms. Classy!

A Few Trump Businesses – where are they now?

The TV show, however, was a whole new level of celebrity, and the “Executive Presence” he appeared to demonstrate on camera apparently qualified him for elective office in the opinion of millions of voters.

What Trump has always understood better than anyone else is that, doubters notwithstanding, lipstick really does kind of make a pig more attractive. Enough, anyway, to make it weirdly desirable in the very short run.

Everybody knows that, yes, it’s still a pig, but there’s something, um, I don’t know, different about it. Different and better. The thin veneer of “luxury” and “quality” he applies to his rickety projects has always been more than enough to put them over on unsuspecting investors, customers, and publicity agents.

The one thing that Trump has learned better than anything in his career is that to make people believe in what you’re selling, you have to believe it yourself. And you have to make them want it. Bad. It doesn’t make any difference at all if the thing you’re selling actually is what you say it is or does what you say it does. If the buyer wants it bad enough, he will attest that it works. And you can always sue him for libel or whatever if he complains about it. Or fire him, if he works for you. He’s done it literally thousands of times.

The approach that brought him so much “success” in business is the approach favored by Tweety in the day-to-day execution of his duties as POTUS. Or maybe we should say “in the current episode of the hit reality show ‘The POTUS'”.

Go with what you know. If people are worried about getting sick, you simply sell them a cure. It is, of course, first necessary to silence any credible voices, also known as medical professionals, who may want to point out that what you’re selling is not, in fact, a cure, and that unfortunately there is no cure.

As everyone knows, President Tweety gets all the information he needs, including information on science and medicine, from FoxNews. Sean Hannity, his friend, adviser, and daily phone buddy, has determined that an anti-malarial drug called Hydroxychoroquine will cure Covid-19. He has implored New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to stop denying the wonder-drug to sick people there.

That’s good enough for Tweety. Inside the White House “Situation Room”, where the Coronavirus Task Force meets, a battle over Hydroycholoquine has broken out. As Axios reports, Trump believes it’s a game changer and so his closest allies on the task force, specifically Peter Navarro, are championing the miracle drug.

“Who is Peter Navarro?”, I hear you asking, “and why is he on the task force?” Both good questions. He’s an economist, Assistant to the President, Director of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and the national Defense Production Act policy coordinator. And why is he on the task force? To protect the economy, of course.

Another medical expert at the table, Jared Kushner (you remember Jared, right? The guy who brought us peace in the Middle East), agrees with Navarro about the value of the malaria med, but had to tell him to take it down a notch as he was screaming at Anthony Fauci, accusing him of being against Trump’s policies. Navarro had a bunch of papers which he said were “evidence” that Hydroxychloroquine cures Covid-19, but Fauci was pointing out they were not evidence, but rather anecdotes from France and China with no Control Group testing (there’s that damn scientific method again, always screwing things up for the good guys!)

Fauci didn’t bother to mention that there is also anecdotal evidence that taking the drug could kill you. That’s what GOML is here for. Anyway, the day’s meeting ended with the agreement that the administration’s public posture would be that the decision to use the drug is between doctors and patients.

Of course Tweety doesn’t care what a bunch of egg-heads, even his own egg-heads, agree that he should say. He’s going with what he knows – marketing!

“What do you have to lose? Take it,” the president said in a White House briefing on Saturday, pushing Fauci out of the way when the question was asked. “I really think they should take it. But it’s their choice. And it’s their doctor’s choice or the doctors in the hospital. But hydroxychloroquine. Try it, if you’d like.”

Yup, it’s your choice. Reality or Reality Show. Problem is, the people who prefer the Reality Show are making the rest of us sick.

Learn from Taiwan.

The U.S. and Taiwan got their first confirmed cases of Covid-19 on the same day, January 19, 2020. Taiwan was ready for it and acted aggressively to stop its spread and save lives. The U.S. ignored it.

As I write this, less than three months later, the U.S, has 312,245 cases, three times as many as the next most severely-hit countries, Spain and Italy, and nearly 1000 times as many cases as Taiwan, which now has 355 cases. Depending on when you read this, these numbers will have become worse, much worse, or catastrophically worse. Have a look.

In the internet age, it’s easy to learn how Taiwan succeeded, and what we could have done differently here, given halfway intelligent leadership. In this short video, for example, you will learn that Taiwanese officials boarded planes arriving from China to test passengers before they deplaned. They coordinated health agencies and used “big data” to merge health records with travel records to determine whether Covid-19 tests should be administered to the de-planing passengers (they had sufficient tests ready to deploy on the spot). They issued masks and escorted people who tested positive to their destination alone in special vehicles. They quarantined the affected people and used cell-phone data to track them and called them three times a day to monitor their symptoms. They brought them food or took them to the doctor. During quarantine, the police first started detaining violators and then began paying them to remain home.  And so on, etc., ad infinitum.

The Taiwanese government took control of making and distributing masks, and are now in a position to donate their surpluses of over a million masks to other afflicted countries who hadn’t displayed their intelligence, foresight, and determination to stop the virus. Like that poor “superpower”, the U.S.A.  It feels like the story of The Ant and the Grasshopper, but with a potentially more charitable ending.

In the U.S., however, we are led by a very stable genius who doesn’t take advice from scientists, health professionals, or history, since his instincts and gut-feelings are always correct. So we embarked on a different course. While bragging about how we have the best health system in the world, the best scientific minds, the best corporations, etc., there has been virtually no action from the Executive branch to marshal these resources against the outbreak.

It wouldn’t have been that hard to do, even without Taiwan’s example.

Bob Kraft’s jet brings 1.7 million masks from China

Joe Tsai, Nets owner, donates masks and ventilators

We all know the continuing evolution of  Tweety’s pronouncements on the pandemic. They’re too ridiculous to catalog here, but it boils down to him asking himself first whether the person who is explaining things to him is a devoted Trump ally or not. He often concludes that a scientist, for example, may not not have voted for him, and so science must therefore be a liberal hoax, like the Russian collusion investigation or the Impeachment process, whose objective is to bring him down.  His son and principal surrogate, Don Jr., clarifies the Trump camp posture by saying that Democrats want millions of people to die in the pandemic.

Trump far prefers fighting with everybody about everything to actually doing his job.  He is a liar, a con-man, and a fraud who lied and conned his way into the most powerful position in the world. He has repeatedly been revealed to be utterly incompetent, and we are all now paying a devastating price.

I would like to wear an N-95 mask the next time I go to the market. I had a whole package of them a while back, but used the last one during a spray-painting project and failed to get a new supply. Now, it’s impossible to find one. I looked on my healthcare provider’s web site for guidance, and saw that they had issued a plea for people to make masks at home and donate them to the facility.  The medical professionals that have always been there to help us must now ask us to help them.

I found this mask in my tool-box, but the filter cartridges are not available for purchase anymore – they’re designated on Amazon as “Prioritized for hospitals and government agencies directly responding to COVID-19 in the U.S.”

Guess I’ll just have to take my chances when going for food. Like everyone else who’s been paying attention, I feel a bit trapped and without options, just waiting for the Angel of Corona to pass over. I never in a million years thought I’d say something like this, but, today at least, I think I’d rather be waiting in Taiwan.

 

 

How many times have you read that Trump has “doubled down” on something? A hundred times? It’s almost always a situation where someone tried to call him on his bullshit, pointing out that what he said or did or predicted last month is now demonstrably false or inappropriate. I just googled “Trump doubles down” and got 208 million hits.

Trump is compelled by his disease to double down on everything. If he didn’t, someone might conclude that he was actually wrong about something, and that must never happen.

The very real damage he has done with this personality defect includes costing people their livelihoods and even their lives. Remember the Central Park Five, those kids wrongly convicted of the Central Park Jogger attack? It was Trump that led the charge, relentlessly insisting on their guilt and prosecution without any evidence or due process, doubling down on this position even after the five were shown to be innocent and were released after years of incarceration, and continuing to double down even to this day.

And then there was the “Birther” movement. You may or may not remember that this absurd harassment of Barack Obama was led by Trump and kept alive by him years after everyone who was open to actual evidence about it realized it was nutty. Trump and his newspaper-of-record, the National Enquirer, wouldn’t let it go. Trump banged away at his talking points: “What’s he hiding? Why won’t he produce his long-form birth certificate? Every president should be required to do it! I have investigators in Hawaii and you wouldn’t believe what they’re finding! We’ll be releasing information soon”.

Right. We wouldn’t believe what they’re finding. You won’t release information because there is none. And oh, by the way, there were never any investigators, either. And the reason Obama didn’t want to produce his long-form birth certificate was that he was busy being president and couldn’t be constantly responding to every lunatic making crazy demands on him.

Obama bore the whole years-long assault with his remarkable equanimity and good humor, and, because it seemed like the only way to put an end to it, finally did produce the magic birth certificate, which of course convinced no one of anything.

And, of course, Tweety predictably declared victory, not because it proved Obama wasn’t born here, but because he had succeeded in forcing this unnecessary action by Obama when no one else could (because no one else gave an actual shit). And just to put a Trumpian bow on the whole thing, the man-baby refused to release his own birth certificate.

So I think we have to forgive Obama for doing the thing that lit the fuse that ultimately led to the Tweety administration – he had the audacity, after all the aggravation Trump caused, to poke some gentle fun at him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ dinner. Watch this clip to understand the pathogenesis of Trump’s “movement”.

On that night, Trump’s humiliation was such that he vowed to take revenge against Obama and all the “elitists” who refused to take him seriously. And, as revenge-taking is one of the few things Trump actually excels at, he did it.

Trump’s first and only real policy imperative on being elected was to undo anything and everything the Obama administration had accomplished, no matter how great or how trivial. From the Paris climate accords to the Iran nuclear treaty, and from school lunch standards to re-naming a mountain,  the man-baby got busy reversing it all. If he couldn’t prove Obama had been an illegitimate president, he would erase the record that he had ever been president at all, illegitimate or otherwise.

The most important element of this project was the elimination of “Obamacare”. Trump’s Obama-erasing could not be complete as long as the historic, landmark health care initiative was still in place, especially since it had ‘Obama’ right in its name! Trump could not rest while the thorn of Obamacare was still in his paw.

As we all know, the republican obsession to gut or extinguish Obamacare has resulted in a years-long string of bills meant to diminish it and law-suits aimed at declaring its central tenets illegal or unconstitutional. But Obamacare survives, primarily because so many people believe that it was a good thing to enable tens of millions of people who hadn’t had health insurance to finally get it.

Which brings us to the Coronavirus pandemic. A lot of people with an ounce of empathy, i.e. democrats, as well as a lot of people who could never be accused of having any real empathy at all, i.e. some health insurers, have implored Trump to open an enrollment window for Obamacare during the Covid-19 crisis so that some of the afflicted can be helped, if only a little. People who have lost their jobs and thus their insurance because of the pandemic could benefit. Insurers had expected the Trump administration to open the window last Friday.

Although the annual enrollment period ended a couple of months ago, the Trump administration initially responded by saying they would “explore the options” of re-launching the HealthCare.gov website.

The decision has now been made. Nope. No Obamacare registrations during the pandemic. That might make it seem like Barack Obama helped someone, and worse, might imply that Trump had been wrong about something. Time to double down.

Yesterday, just hours after I wrote about Trump converting the Corona Virus briefings into campaign events, he abandoned all pretense of providing relevant information about the Covid-19 response. Millions of Americans tuned in to the afternoon briefing  to hear what’s happening, get some guidance, and maybe even find out when they can get an N-95 mask. Instead they got a press conference on new developments in The War On Drugs, an update on how fabulously effective Tweety’s “Wall” on our southern border is, and some self-congratulatory nonsense on the long-forgotten, imaginary “caravans” that have been assaulting our borders.

This went on for hours, while nervous citizens at home waited patiently for information about the pandemic.  Secretary of Defense Mike Esper was front and center with all the great news about Trump’s successes, and, of course, thanking him profusely for his “leadership” as is now required as the opening lines to any speaking part in the Tweety Show.

I hadn’t really paid much attention to Esper until this week, when he appeared on some news interviews explaining that he would not comply with Capt. Brett Crozier’s desperate request to evacuate the 4000 sailors on the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier now in Guam. In the necessarily close quarters of the ship, where “social distancing” is not possible, dozens of men are already sick with Corona Virus and hundreds have tested positive. No mention of how many of the 4000 were tested in all.

Crozier wrote a four-page letter to the Navy Department that said, in part, “We are not at war. Sailors do not need to die. If we do not act now, we are failing to properly take care of our most trusted asset — our Sailors.”  Esper said he had “not had a chance to read that letter … in detail” and claimed the sailors were not seriously ill.

At the time I saw this, I thought, “Wow. Is this guy a moron or what?” Then I realized that he may be a perfectly sane and qualified person, who hoped to serve the country well in the vitally important role of Secretary of Defense. But when you work for Tweety, you need to give up all thoughts of patriotic service.  As everyone knows by now, everything Tweety touches dies. Your moral compass is the first casualty, and it’s a long, steady slide downhill after that. Guys like Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, or Roger Stone didn’t really have that far to fall, since they had no moral compass to begin with, but even those who start out straight wind up in the same place anyway.

So I guess I wasn’t all that surprised to see Esper participate so enthusiastically  in the alt-Covid briefing.  There are fifteen “cabinet members” in the Tweety administration, but there might as well be none. Not a single one of them can say or do a single thing that Trump hasn’t personally authorized, and they must do everything that he commands.

Here’s a triva question for you: what do James Mattis, Rex Tillerson, and John Kelly have in common? The answer is the title of this essay: they were all once considered the adults in the room. They were well-qualified, experienced professionals who would not be yes-men to a man-baby and would intervene to thwart Trump’s most destructive impulses. We all tried to take a measure of comfort in the idea that they might be able to control events in some small way after a crazy-tweet, a lashing-out, or the implementation of an insane policy based on made up “facts”.

What happened to them has happened to every individual who has tried to do what they thought was right when it differed in any small way from what Trump wanted them to do.

So, for anyone still waiting for some useful information from Trump on Covid-19, just forget it. Even that hero of science and truth, Anthony Fauci, who has appeared to defy Trump’s nutty pronouncements on occasion, has had to pull in his horns time and again, and will do so even more as the death threats from Trump’s loyal brown-shirts increase.

But GOML does have a few nuggets for you.   Here ya go. If you want an N-95 mask, you’ll have to make one yourself. There will probably be no ventilators for you if you are hospitalized, and even if you got on one, you are very unlikely to get off it alive. There will be no vaccine for, optimistically,  another 18 months. There are no known meds that treat the virus effectively. Health care professionals, who are valiantly trying to help the afflicted, are most at risk, and their numbers will be greatly diminished by the time you will need them.

Hunker down and buckle up. It’s going to be a rough ride.

On February 26, 2020, Donald J. Trump informed us that Vice President Mike Pence would be in charge of the administration’s Covid-19 response. Trump was in India at the time and insisting that the situation in the U.S. was under control. A typical Tweet from those days, only a month ago:

“Low Ratings Fake News MSDNC (Comcast) & @CNN are doing everything possible to make the Caronavirus [sic] look as bad as possible, including panicking markets, if possible. Likewise their incompetent Do Nothing Democrat comrades are all talk, no action. USA in great shape.”

The appointment of Pence to this role was a response to that bunch of deep-state never-Trumpers known as the Center for Disease Control saying that the spread of the virus in the U.S. was all but inevitable, and various “advisers” whispering in Trump’s ear that some sort of action was called for.

Putting Pence in charge was a no-brainer.  If the virus was indeed nothing, Pence would be in charge of nothing. If it was as bad as those “scientists” were saying, Pence would be at fault and Trump would have a great excuse for dropping him from the 2020 ticket in favor of someone more aligned with his long term goals of self-enrichment and re-shaping the position of President into something more akin to Pharaoh.  Don Jr. would be perfect!

Anyway, something unexpected happened to cause Tweety to rethink this plan: people were actually listening to Pence and giving him a lot of kudos for the job he was doing. And he was on TV everyday for an hour or more. Clearly this could not stand.

So after a week or so, the daily Covid “briefings” were taken over by Tweety himself, with Pence standing dutifully and silently behind him, as better befits his true role in the Trump administration.

And the briefings themselves were transformed from a daily update on where we were with Covid-19 to a daily campaign rally where the usual Trump exaggerations, misinformation, and preposterous lying were combined with vicious attacks on the reporters asking for information and constant carping about what a mess Obama left him.

The beauty of being Trump is that his daily eructation of nonsense is so voluminous that there is simply no time to try to tease out actual information before the next day’s output. And, of course, no chance to hold him accountable for outright lies, even when they put the health and even survival of others at risk.

This enables him to say absolutely anything at all with the same air of conviction and self-righteousness as when he said the exact opposite, perhaps just the day before. A nice example of this is Tweety suddenly asserting on March 17th that “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

The mind-numbing effect on his audiences of this daily whipsaw has always worked for Trump. If he had ever been elected to a position like Mayor or  Governor or even hall-monitor, where he was held accountable for his own actions, maybe things would be different now.  I remember those days of innocence after the 2016 election when we all thought that this crazy behavior would have to end, as the Presidency was not a joke, and anyway we had two other co-equal branches of government, congress and the courts, who would rein him in. And, of course, there would be plenty of clear heads in Trump’s own party who would call him on his bullshit.

If only.

Over the last three years, virtually every avenue of resistance has been eliminated. Not only has the attrition of honest Republicans like John McCain, Jeff Flake or Bob Corker made way for more sycophants, but those who supported Trump every inch of the way, like Jeff Sessions or Paul Ryan have been purged for trying to do their jobs as they understood them. Just one ambiguous action or remark can be a career-ender.  Even Trump’s most vociferous critics before the election, like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and even Mitt Romney have gone silent.

The other day Lindsay Graham, once McCain’s best friend and a vocal Trump critic, accused Nancy Pelosi of “the most shameful, disgusting statement by any politician in modern history.”  She had said Trump’s delayed response to the Corona virus would cost lives.

Of course it’s true. The problem created by Trump’s wild pronouncements is that his foot-soldiers out there in the heartland, i.e. republican governors, have to repeat and act on them. If he says Covid-19 is no worse than the flu, or that it’s a hoax, or that it’s completely under control and no one should change their behavior, well, OK, that is now reality, and policies will be announced reflecting it. But unlike Trump, those “leaders” on the ground can’t walk it all back the next day. Even if they could, the damage is already done: people congregated where they shouldn’t have, businesses stayed open when they shouldn’t have, respirators and ventilators remained un-manufactured for another day.  And, of course,  the average voter in those states doesn’t know what to think or what’s real.  Pelosi simply stated the obvious, but Graham was required to fight about it.

Trump’s de-fanging of the fourth estate is now complete. Not only is any news he doesn’t like immediately dismissed as “fake”, but he has now moved strongly against those who only wish to hold him accountable for his own words. He has issued an order that his critics Cease and Desist from quoting him in campaign ads.  According to this Slate piece, the order “threatened to sue critics of the president in a brazen effort to censor Trump’s opponents into silence”

There are no credible voices left to dissent to Trump’s war on science, expertise, and truth, and his re-election is all but assured. During this time when Trump is spewing on all media for hours every day, Biden is nowhere, completely irrelevant. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that Trump’s approval ratings have spiked upward during the last few weeks.

With Trump’s grip on information tightening every day, it is no longer newsworthy when he says something that is manifestly untrue, which he does dozens of times every day. On the contrary, it is now a news story if someone in the Republican Party disagrees with him, as Maryland Governor Larry Hogan did this week.  Citing Trump’s assertion that Corona Virus testing problems have all been solved, he said “that’s just not true.”

Hogan made the statement during an NPR interview, so there is virtually no risk of anyone in Trump’s thrall hearing it, so he may escape the inevitable wrath from the bully’s pulpit.  But I doubt it.