Virus Stoking

Unmasking Lies:  Over the weekend the Washington Post detailed how Trump hedged and hawed about putting in place his March restriction on flights from Europe.  They laid out how Trump’s delayed action combined with the way that the flight freeze was finally implemented, first opposed by but then guided by son in law Jared who was more focused on maximizing political benefit than an orderly rollout, ended up causing a last minute surge of travelers into the US, feeding the deadly COVID 19 assault on New York, which as Governor Cuomo reminds us daily, got its coronavirus injection from Europe rather than China.  Nevertheless, yesterday, as the death count in the US continued to climb towards 100,000, Trump once again stuck with his oft repeated mantra, that it was his “brave” decision to shut down flights from China while Speaker Pelosi was dancing in Chinatown that saved us from having ten times as many deaths.  For the record the Washington Post article points out that the curtailment of those Chinese flights predated Trump’s announcement, as most flights had been cancelled by the airlines before he took action.  The article also notes that the number of flights and passengers arriving from Europe on any normal day far exceeds the number coming from China. Having amped up the death count, Trump is still at it.  He continues to mock the wearing of facemasks and remains all in on threatening to pull the RNC convention from swing state North Carolina unless the state’s Democratic governor commits by next week to allow 50,000 Republicans from all over the country travel to Charlotte, virus in hand, to celebrate his August re-crowning.  On the facemask front, yesterday he again mocked Democratic challenger Joe Biden for wearing one, and then gave a member of the White House press pool a hard time for wearing one while asking him a question, claiming he couldn’t hear his facemask muffled voice that was clear to everyone else, while suggesting that the reporter was only wearing a mask to be “politically correct.”  Biden who at least for now has replaced his Twitter “egg” picture with one of him wearing a facemask, responded to Trump’s criticism with an appropriately blunt retort, he pointed out that "every leading doc in the world is saying we should wear a mask when you're in a crowd" while calling Trump "a fool, an absolute fool to be talking that way. It's costing people's lives," this is "stoking deaths." That concern about stoking the pandemic is the reason that North Carolina’s Governor Cooper refuses to commit to lifting his state’s restrictions against crowds of more than ten people, an obvious problem for a convention the size that Trump still wants to hold.  Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be a concern to the Republican governors of Texas, Florida and Georgia who have all made it known that they’d be happy to hold a virus infused convention in their states, COVID or no COVID.  Trump continues to deny that he’d ever consider moving the convention to one of his properties, but like a lot of Trump assertions, that one is probably a lie, Florida’s Doral is likely his preferred location.  As to tweeting and lying, yesterday Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey refused to take down Trump’s hateful tweets amplifying the conspiracy theory that the death of “Morning” Joe Scarborough’s former Congressional aide was “very suspicious” even after her husband’s pleading letter request for him to do so was brought to everyone’s attention by well-known media analyst Kara Swisher.  However, late yesterday Twitter did adopt a new policy with regard to Trump’s most absurd, lie filled tweets.  The company is now tagging them with lie notices that link to the facts, and by facts think the truth rather than those Trumpian lies.  Twitter’s fact checkers responded to Dorsey’s announcement by attaching fact check tags to the Scarborough story as well as to Trump’s tweet asserting that expanding mail-in balloting would lead to election fraud.  Suffice it to say, Trump who, like his newest press secretary, refuses to back down from the Morning Joe tweet, is not happy with Twitter’s new “obstructive” policy.

Et Cetera: By now we know that Trump ignored Obama’s pandemic playbook and that together with then national security advisor John Bolton, he got rid of or dispersed all of those pandemic experts from his national security apparatus to nooks and crannies of the government where their shouts of impending doom were muffled.  Yesterday NPR reported that Trump’s team also stopped work on new federal regulations that would have forced the health care industry to prepare for an airborne infectious disease pandemic such as COVID-19.  NPR reports that "If that rule had gone into effect, then every hospital, every nursing home would essentially have to have a plan where they made sure they had enough respirators and they were prepared for this sort of pandemic."  Those OSHA rules, which the Obama administration, had been working on for some time were intended to be a response to inadequacies uncovered at the time of the H1N1 flu epidemic.  The rules were due to go into effect at the beginning of Trump’s term, but were thrown out as part of Trump’s efforts to get rid of “unnecessary” government regulations.  Besides, they came from the Obama era so they couldn’t have been critical, right?  On the insider trading front, the Justice Department is no longer investigating trades made by Senator Kelly Loeffler, the embattled Republican appointee up for election in Georgia, nor are they looking into trades made by  Senators Feinstein and Inhofe, two others who sold stock in the run up to the pandemic, largely because they, unlike Loeffler weren’t even at the intelligence meeting that allegedly spurred the questionable stock sales.  However, Justice is still going after North Carolina Senator/former Intelligence Committee chairman Burr.  On the Inspector General front, Glenn Fine, the Pentagon IG who was supposed to head up the oversight of the trillions being spent to spur the economy but who was pushed aside over Trump fears that he might actually take his job seriously, has resigned but nothing to worry about there because top Senate Republican Chuck Grassley wrote a letter saying that he isn't satisfied with the White House's explanation for Trump’s dismissal of multiple inspectors general.  That ought to make things better? One more thing, having recovered from COVID 19 and having shared her infection with her husband, Trump’s favorite Stephen Miller, Pence Press Secretary Katie Miller is back at work and…..pregnant.  Not clear if Stephen is back yet, but his infection goes a long way towards explaining Trump’s hydroxychloroquine intake.