Posts Tagged ‘CORONAVIRUS’
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In Bureaucracy, History, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on April 20, 2020 at 1:01 am
COVID-19 may well change our lives more fundamentally than even 9/11.
Yes, the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were horrific—and costly in lives. Almost 3,000 Americans died that day.
After decades of ignoring Islamic terrorist attacks on American lives and property throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world, America shook off its complacency.
First came a much-anticipated invasion of Afghanistan–the “nation” which had given shelter to 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. Starting on October 7, 2001, by December American planes and ground forces swept bin Laden’s hosts, the Taliban, from power.
Bin Laden disappeared into Pakistan, but was shot to death by United States Navy SEALs on May 1, 2011.
World Trade Center – September 11, 2001
The 9/11 attacks also resulted in unforeseen events. President George W. bush used them as an excuse to invade Iraq in 2003 and topple its dictator, Saddam Hussein, from power.
Bush had long blamed Hussein for not folding after the President’s father, George H.W. Bush, attacked Iraq in 1991 after its invasion of Kuwait. Hussein’s failure to fall from power, believed Bush Junior, had resulted in his father’s losing a second White House term in 1992 to Bill Clinton.
But once the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, it got stuck there—and remains so to this day. What started as a purely military mission became a “nation-building” one.
Yet another result of the 9/11 attacks was a complete restructuring of the United States military. In the past, Americans had excelled in set-piece battles and wars.
Americans have never forgotten their overwhelming victories over the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918 and Fuhrer Adolf Hitler in 1945. But when it came to fighting enemies where guerrilla warfare negated overwhelming military power, the United States had done poorly—first in Korea (1950-1953) and then in Vietnam (1960-1975).
As a result, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield reorganized the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, assigning highest priority to building unconventional military units such as the Army’s Green Berets and Delta Force, and the Navy’s SEALs.
These were all major changes resulting from the 9/11 attacks. They cost billions of dollars and got huge publicity. But they didn’t affect the lives of everyday Americans as intimately as has the advent of COVID-19, also known as Coronavirus.
Coronavirus
First, COVID-19 has killed far more Americans than 9/11. As before mentioned, 9/11 snuffed out the lives of almost 3,000 Americans. But as of April 20, more than 41,114 Americans have died of COVID-19. And the plague has not finished its murderous work.
Second, while 9/11 affected two American cities—New York and Washington, D.C.—COVID-19 has spread throughout the country. As epicenters like New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago gain national attention, the virus continues to seep into rural centers—especially in the South and Midwest.
Third, the combination of evil and incompetence of the Trump administration has shaken Americans’ faith in the ability—and even the willingness—of the Federal Government to protect them.
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks attacked President Donald Trump in terms usually reserved for serial killers. On the March 13 edition of The PBS Newshour, he said:
“This is what happens when you elect a sociopath as president, who doesn’t care, who has treated this whole thing for the past month as if it’s about him. ‘How do people like me?’ Minimizing the risks. ‘Does the stock market reflect well on me?’ And he hasn’t done the things a normal human being would do, which was to, let’s take precautions….
“And he’s incapable of that. And he’s even created an information distortion field around him.”
In 2014, following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, President Barack Obama created the White House Pandemic Office, run by the White House’s National Security Council (NSC).
Barack Obama
Heading it was Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer. Under President George W. Bush, he had successfully fought malaria overseas. His topflight team of infectious disease and public health experts was creating a national bio-defense strategy. Their goal: Coordinate agencies to make the United States more resilient to the threat of epidemics and biological warfare.
In May, 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s global health security unit shut down. The reason: Trump’s pathological jealousy of and hatred for Obama.
Compounding that outrage: From January to early March, 2020, Trump and his allies within the Republican party and Fox News Network repeatedly assured Americans they had nothing to fear.
Barnstorming the country in a series of hate-filled political rallies, Trump told his supporters:
- January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”
- February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”
- February 26: “The 15 cases within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
- February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
- February 28: “Now the Democrats are politicizing the Coronavirus….We did one of the great jobs….One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia’….They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax….It’s all turning, they lost….And this is their new hoax.”
- March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country of keeping it down. A tremendous job of keeping it down.”
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In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on April 15, 2020 at 12:22 am
During the week of November 24 – 26, 2019, The Economist and YouGov conducted a poll of 1,500 American adults. The purpose of that poll: To compare President Donald Trump with President Abraham Lincoln—and find out who was more popular within the Republican party.
Lincoln served as President from 1861 to 1865, steering the United States through the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.
Abraham Lincoln
Trump, by contrast, has largely made the United States a pariah nation throughout the world—and is now presiding over a pandemic which has killed more than 25,000 Americans.
So what was the result of the poll?
Fifty-three percent of Republicans believe that Trump is a better President than Lincoln.
This starkly contrasts with the verdict of both Democratic and independent voters. Ninety-four percent of Democrats preferred Lincoln—and so did 78% of independents.
Overall, 75% of poll respondents picked Lincoln; only 25% picked Trump.
Some Twitter users found this sardonically hilarious.
One of these was Billy Baldwin, the brother of Alec Baldwin, who portrays Trump as a befuddled tyrant on Saturday Night Live: “53% of Republicans apparently don’t even know who Abraham Lincoln was.”
Baldwin also posted an animated photo of the Lincoln Memorial with the Great Emancipator giving The Finger to Trump and First Lady Melania.
“Economist/YouGov Poll: 53% of Republicans believe Donald Trump is a better president than Abraham Lincoln was while 47% believe the president that got this country through the Civil War was better,” wrote Josh Jordan. “If you were wondering what segment of the population can not be swayed by facts.”
Political commentator Ashley Pratte took a more serious view of the matter.
Describing herself in a December 9, 2019 column as “a lifelong Republican before 2016,” she wrote: “According to a 2017 C-Span survey of the nation’s top presidential historians, Lincoln sits above all other presidents as the greatest of all time.
“The Republican party has strayed far since the days of Lincoln; it’s shameful to see how Trumpism has hijacked it. It’s truly shocking how Republicans are allowing him to carry the mantle of conservatism too with little-to-no hesitation.
“Trump’s years in office have been full of nepotism, scandal, profiting from his position as President and now he is about to become the third-ever president to be impeached.”
Donald Trump
Specifically:
- He has given unprecedented access to the Oval Office to unqualified members of his family and personal friends.
- When his son-in-law Jared Kushner was denied a security clearance, Trump pushed it through anyway.
- Republicans have refused to accept the conclusion of the Mueller Report that Trump campaign officials colluded with Russian Intelligence agents to win the Presidency in 2016.
- They have also acquitted him—against overwhelming evidence—of trying to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to run a smear campaign against former Vice President Joe Biden.
- Trump is personally profiting from his role as President. At least 250 officials in the executive branch have made 630 visits to Trump properties, and 90 members of Congress have made 180 visits.
For Pratte, Trump’s worst offense is this: “Trump has also been the most divisive president in our nation’s history….. From his Twitter rants and off-color statements to his pursuit of a travel ban and destruction of Obamacare, he’s not even bothered to try to get support for his policies.
“Instead, he’s forged ahead, continually pressed to build an impossible wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement and threatened to withdraw from NAFTA as a way to negotiate a slightly new version of it.
“…Republican officials should be eager to uphold the ideals of accountability, no matter which political party controls the White House. The problem is that these so-called morals are just a sham, and abandoning them is the only way to defend the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
There are two major reasons why Republicans regard Trump more highly than Lincoln.
First: In 2002, Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott gave away the game at the 100th birthday party for racist South Carolina Republican Senator Strom Thurmond:
”I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years, either.”
In short: If America had elected Thurmond—who ran ran for president in 1948 as the Dixiecrat candidate on a States Rights platform supporting racial segregation—we wouldn’t be having all these problems now with “uppity” blacks.
Thus, Lincoln—who freed blacks from slavery—is for Republican voters the root cause of “all these problems over all these years.”
Second, Lincoln waged a civil war to restore the Union—which meant sending Federal armies into the rebellious South.
Under the banner of “States’ rights,” today’s Republicans openly court millions of voters in the South who still wish the Civil War had ended differently: With a triumphant South still running its slave empire—and millions of blacks still held in bondage.
While these voters secretly regret that those “good old days” will never return, they can at least show their support for “States’ rights” by backing Trump—whose racism toward non-whites is universally known and applauded by white supremacist groups.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on April 14, 2020 at 12:30 am
President Donald Trump frittered away two vital months—January and February—by refusing to take Coronavirus seriously. Even worse, he repeatedly downplayed the virus in a series of public appearances.
Consider:
- January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China.”
- February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”
- February 26: “The 15 cases within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
- February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
- February 28: “Now the Democrats are politicizing the Coronavirus….We did one of the great jobs….One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia’….They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax….It’s all turning, they lost….And this is their new hoax.”
- March 6: “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country of keeping it down. A tremendous job of keeping it down.”
Now, with more than 23,000 Americans dead—10,000 of them alone in New York—Trump’s fanatical defenders are desperate to rewrite history.
Donald Trump
The outbreak of Coronavirus, first detected in Wuhan, China, in late December, 2019, has taken more American lives in the 21st century than any other disaster—natural or man-made.
Consider:
- 9/11: 2,977 deaths
- Hurricane Katrina: 1,836 deaths
- Benghazi Embassy attack: 4
- Ebola: 2
- Hurricane Maria: 2,982,
- Coronavirus: 23,604 (by April 14, 2020)
One of these defenders is Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.
On April 9, appearing on the Fox News network’s “Sean Hannity” show, Graham said: “The first thing I want to do is get the United States Senate on the record where we don’t blame Trump. We blame China.
“The Chinese government is responsible for 16,000 American deaths and 17 million Americans being unemployed. It’s the Chinese government and the way they behave that led to this pandemic. This is the third one to come out of China.
Lindsey Graham
“I want to make our response to this so overwhelming that China will change its behavior. I want to get the medical supply chain back into the United States, and I want to stop cancelling some debt that we owe to China because they should be paying us, not us paying China.”
Graham said that the “wet markets” in China should be shut down, because they have been the source of three pandemics that originated in China.
“So, I think you’re going to see a bipartisan push back against China to punish them so severely to deter them in the future.”
[As for “getting the medical supply chain back into the United States”: In 2018, China accounted for 95% of American imports of ibuprofen, 91% off hydrocortisone, 70% of acetaminophen, 40% to 45% of penicillin and 40% of heparin, according to Commerce Department data. Eighty percent of the American supply of antibiotics are made in China.]
* * * * * * * * * *
Seventy-three years earlier, Chief United States Counsel Robert H. Jackson had been assigned to prosecute the major Nazi defendants for war crimes at Nuremberg.
On July 26, 1946, Jackson delivered his closing remarks to the court. He might as well have been speaking about Donald Trump and his cheerleading—and misleading—chorus on Coronavirus:
“Lying has always been a highly approved Nazi technique. [Adolf] Hitler, in Mein Kampf, advocated mendacity as a policy. {Foreign Minister Joachim] Von Ribbentrop admits the use of the ‘diplomatic lie.’
“….Nor is the lie direct the only means of falsehood. They all speak with a Nazi double talk with which to deceive the unwary….’Final solution’ of the Jewish problem was a phrase which meant extermination. ‘Special treatment’ of prisoners of war meant killing. ‘Protective custody’ meant concentration camp.
Robert H. Jackson
“Besides outright false statements and double talk, there are also other circumventions of truth in the nature of fantastic explanations and absurd professions.
“[Rabid anti-Semite Julius] Streicher has solemnly maintained that…his reason for destroying synagogues…was only because they were architecturally offensive….
“This was the philosophy of the National Socialists. When for years they have deceived the world, and masked falsehood with plausibilities, can anyone be surprised that they continue their habits of a lifetime in this dock?
“It is against such a background that these defendants now ask this Tribunal to say that they are not guilty of planning, executing, or conspiring to commit this long list of crimes and wrongs.”
Citing William Shakespeare’s play about the murderous Richard III, Jackson concluded:
“They stand before the record of this trial as bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain king. He begged of the widow, as they beg of you: ‘Say I slew them not.’ And the Queen replied, ‘Then say they were not slain. But dead they are…’
“If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime.”
If Americans find Donald Trump blameless for refusing to take decisive action against the Coronavirus threat, it will be as true to say there has been no plague, there are no thousands of dead Americans, there has been no dereliction of Presidential responsibility.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on April 13, 2020 at 12:26 am
“I’ve chosen this life. I know what it is. There are things about it that sometimes are disturbing. But you just focus on the job you have to do. And just put all that other stuff aside.””
The speaker wasn’t a longtime Mafia enforcer turned-State’s-witness. He was Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
And he was speaking with an NBC News reporter about death threats he had received.
At 79, Fauci is getting the sort of protection reserved for organized crime witnesses through the Justice Department’s Witness Security Program.
Dr. Anthony Fauci
The U.S. Marshals Service has deputized nine officers from the Department of Health and Human Services as bodyguards for Fauci.
So what has this man—who has dedicated his entire adult life to protecting Americans against infectious diseases—done to require such protection?
He has merely spoken the hard medical truth about Coronavirus. In doing so, he has at times contradicted President Donald Trump’s statements filled with ignorance or outright lies.
For example: Trump has been loudly touting hydroxychloroquine, used for treating malaria, as a miracle cure for the Coronavirus.
Yet Fauci has dared to point out there have been no scientific trials of the drug for its effectiveness against Coronavirus. Moreover, given the medical condition of some patients, it could even prove fatal.
Statements like this have infuriated Trump’s base of—at best—half-educated fans.
During the 2016 Presidential race, after winning the Nevada primary, Trump infamously celebrated his victory: “We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”
A February 24, 2016 USA Today story covering this event carried the headline: “Donald Trump loves the poorly educated—and they love him.”
And at the bottom of the story came this warning: “Some—journalists, mostly—noted that Trump’s proud embrace of poorly less educated voters and the resulting shock may only cause those less educated voters to embrace Trump all the more.”
And they do.
There has been a growing divide between Democrats and Republicans on the merits of higher education.
An August 20, 2019 story in Forbes noted that a Pew Research survey, conducted in July, had found that “67% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning respondents say higher education is having a positive effect on the country compared to only 33% of Republicans and Republican-leaning participants.”
Furthermore, “the percentage of Republicans attributing a positive effect to higher education has steadily eroded from 58% (2010), 53% (2012), 54% (2015), 43% (2016), and 36% (2017). Among Republicans, 59% now say higher education has a negative effect on the U.S., compared to just 18% of Democrats.”
This disdain for education in general—and science in particular—has led to the following: In March, an NBC News poll found that only 30% of Republicans said that they would actually listen to the advice of doctors to stay away from large, crowded areas to avoid Coronavirus.
These are the same people who get their version of reality from Right-wing sources like Fox News Network and Rush Limbaugh.
Rush Limbaugh
On his March 27 show, Limbaugh dismissed Coronavirus as “the common cold,” then added: “We didn’t elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don’t know.
“And how do we know they’re even health experts? Well, they wear white lab coats, and they’ve been in the job for a while, and they’re at the CDC and they’re at the NIH, and they’re up, well—yeah, they’ve been there, and they are there.
“But has there been any job assessment for them? They’re just assumed to be the best because they’re in government. But, these are all kinds of things that I’ve been questioning.”
This is the same Rush Limbaugh who said, in 2015: “Firsthand smoke takes 50 years to kill people, if it does Not everybody that smokes gets cancer. Now, it’s true that everybody who smokes dies, but so does everyone who eats carrots.”
Five years later, in February, 2020, Limbaugh—a longtime and heavy cigar smoker—announced that he had Stage Four lung cancer.
And then there is President Trump—and his chorus of cheerleaders, both within his administration and on Fox News.
On February 25, Kayleigh McEnany, his fourth press secretary in three years, said on Fox Business: “This President will always put America first. He will always protect American citizens. We will not see diseases like the Coronavirus come here.”
During February and March, she repeatedly downplayed the threat of the disease, even as it spread across the United States.
By April 11 there were 561,103 cases of Coronavirus throughout the country, with 22,106 deaths.
These, then, are the types of “reliable sources” that millions of Right-wingers take as gospel—while dismissing the warnings of the medical profession as erroneous or, worse, products of a liberal conspiracy.
And by daring to contradict such blatant ignorance—if not outright lies—Dr. Anthony Fauci has made himself a target for Right-wing hatred and death threats.
Their hatred for Fauci proves once again the correctness of Ernest Hemingway’s definition of Fascism: “Fascism is a lie told by bullies.”
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In Bureaucracy, History, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on April 2, 2020 at 12:05 am
As the United States braces for the loss of as many as 200,000 of its citizens, President Donald Trump continues to attack anything he dislikes as a “hoax”—and to attack anyone who dares pose legitimate questions to him.
On March 27, this exchange occurred between Trump and ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl.
Karl asked Trump what the President could do to assure “these states, these hospitals, that everybody who needs a ventilator will get a ventilator.”
TRUMP: “I think we’re in really good shape. This is a pandemic, the likes of which nobody’s seen before.”
KARL: “But everybody who needs one will be able to get a ventilator?”
TRUMP: “Look, don’t be a cutie pie, okay? Nobody’s done what we’ve been able to do.”
One week earlier, on March 20, Trump had blown up when NBC reporter Peter Alexander dared to pose a question about Coronavirus that the President didn’t want to answer.
After citing the latest pandemic statistics showing that thousands of Americans are now infected and millions are scared, Alexander asked, “What do you say to Americans who are scared?”
TRUMP: “I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say. I think it’s a very nasty question, and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people. You’re doing sensationalism. And the same with NBC and Comcast [the parent company of NBC]. I don’t call it Comcast. I call it ‘Con-Cast. Let me just tell you something. That’s really bad reporting. And you ought to get back to reporting instead of sensationalism.”
Alexander said in a statement: “The bottom line is, this is a president whose experiences in life are very different than most Americans across this country right now. Not a person who likely worries about finances or had, not a person who in the course of his life is worried about his future.
“Not a person who is worried about where to find a paycheck for his bills or for his rent and as evidenced by the president suggesting that an opportunity to provide for American some reassurance about how they should feel right now, the president instead took it out on me.”
That’s why this is a good time to remember the closing remarks of Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) before the House of Representatives turned over its Articles of Impeachment against Trump to the United States Senate.
Schiff was addressing the unwillingness of Trump—and his defenders—to accept any evidence, no matter how damning, against him.
ADAM SCHIFF: “Anyone watching these proceedings, anyone reading the deposition transcripts would have the same impression that you evidently had from hearing my colleagues talk about the Russia hoax, that the whole idea that Russia had gotten involved in the 2016 election was a hoax put out by the Democrats.
“And of course, they’re not alone in pushing out this idea; it is trumpeted by no one other than the President of the United States who, almost on a daily basis at times, would comment and tweet and propagate the idea that Russia’s interference in our election was a hoax….
“The impression they would have you take from ‘It’s all hearsay’ is, because we in this committee were not in that Ward Room with you, Dr. Hill, we were not in that meeting earlier with Dr. Bolton, that because we’re not in the room, it’s all hearsay.
Adam Schiff
“After all, you’re relating what you heard, and you’re saying it, so it must be hearsay, and therefore, we don’t really have to think about it, do we? We don’t have to consider that you have direct evidence that this meeting in the White House was being withheld because the president wanted these meetings, these investigations. We can’t accept that.
“Well, if that were true, you could never present any evidence in court unless the jury was also in the Ward Room. That’s absurd. They don’t accept the documentary evidence, all the text messages about quid pro quos, and ‘Are we really saying,’ and ‘That’s crazy,’ and ‘My worst nightmare is the Russians will get it, and I’ll quit.’
“…But apparently, it’s all hearsay. Even when you actually hear the president, Mr. Holmes, that’s hearsay. We can’t rely on people saying what the president said. Apparently, we can only rely on what the president says, and there, we shouldn’t even rely on that either.
“We shouldn’t really rely on what the president said in the call record. We should imagine he said something else. We should imagine he said something about actually fighting corruption, instead of what he actually said, which was, “’I want you to do us a favor, though. I want you to look into this 2016 CrowdStrike conspiracy theory, and I want you to look into the Bidens.’”
For those who want to understand Trump’s behavior—and to predict how he will react the next time he’s faced with truths he doesn’t want to acknowledge—the key lies in seeing how he had reacted to bad tidings in the past.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on April 1, 2020 at 12:21 am
On June 22, 1941, German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler sent three million soldiers smashing into the Soviet Union. During the first six months—June to December, 1941—German armies lured huge Soviet forces into gigantic “cauldron battles,” surrounding and exterminating them.
An estimated 5.7 million prisoners of war (POWs) fell into German hands. The Germans found themselves surprised and overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of them. But their mandate demanded that they keep marching forward—ever forward.
So they simply imprisoned their captives behind barbed wire and wasted no food or medical care on them. Between starvation, illness and the brutal Russian cold, at least 3.5 million POWs died in custody.
Soviet POW’s
Republicans have learned a serious lesson from this. If you simply deprive those you detest of food, clothing and shelter, you don’t need gas chambers or firing squads.
That has been their chief reason for opposing Social Security since President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it into law in 1935.
That is why they opposed President Lyndon B. Johnson when he pushed Medicare through Congress in 1965.
And that is why they have fervently tried to overturn the Affordable Care Act—better known as Obamacare—since it went into effect in 2010.
Of course, Republicans will never admit this. Their mantra has always been they fear such programs will bankrupt the country.
That claim might have credibility—if they didn’t recklessly plunge into budget-busting wars like the 2003 Iraq war started by President George W. Bush. Not a single Republican opposed this needless, bloody conflict—which has cost the United States more than $1.1 trillion.
But the best evidence of Republicans’ desire to use illness as a weapon against those Americans they hate comes from President Donald J. Trump.
Donald Trump
On March 26, during an interview on Fox News, Trump blamed the failures of his administration’s response to Coronavirus on Democratic state governors like Andrew Cuomo (NY), Jay Inslee (WA), and Gretchen Whitmer (MI).
On March 27, during his press briefing, Trump said he told Vice President Mike Pence—who’s officially in charge of the White House’s response effort—to not call Inslee and Whitmer because they weren’t “appreciative” enough of his efforts.
Trump said this even as hospitals in each of their states were being overwhelmed with Coronavirus patients.
“I tell him—I mean I’m a different type of person— I say, ‘Mike, don’t call the governor in Washington, you’re wasting your time with him. Don’t call the woman in Michigan,’” Trump said. “If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.”
Trump said that when people criticized him, they were criticizing the federal government: “When they’re not appreciative to me, they’re not appreciative to the Army Corps, they’re not appreciative to FEMA. It’s not right.”
Trump also attacked Whitmer on Right-wing Fox News’ “Sean Hannity Show”: “I don’t know if she knows what’s going on, but all she does is sit there and blame the federal government.”
That same day—March 27—Whitmer told a Michigan radio station: “What I’ve gotten back is that vendors with whom we’ve procured contracts—they’re being told not to send stuff to Michigan. It’s really concerning. I reached out to the White House last night and asked for a phone call with the president, ironically at the time this stuff was going on.”
Gretchen Whitmer
Julia Pickett / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)
A March 29 story in the Washington Monthly sheds light on what lay behind Whitmer’s inability to secure desperately-needed ventilators from her longtime vendors. Its headline ran: “What If Trump Decides to Save Republicans But Not Democrats?”
And it was followed by a sub-headline: “He’s providing vital resources to red states and ignoring blue states.”
Florida submitted a request to the Federal Emergency Management Agency on March 11 for 430,000 surgical masks, 180,000 N95 respirators, 82,000 face shields and 238,000 gloves—and received a shipment with everything three days later.
It received an identical shipment on March 23, and is awaiting a third.
In 2019, Trump demanded a “favor” from the embattled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—“dirt” on Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden—in return for releasing military aid Ukraine needed to combat an increasingly aggressive Russia.
Now he is apparently demanding Democratic governors praise him and blame themselves if they want their citizens to receive desperately-needed medical supplies.
On Fox News, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, bluntly told governors: “Take the blame when you have to. When you play with your boss, sometimes it’s better when you don’t win the golf game. He’s the boss, he’s got all the resources.”
This is precisely the dictatorial arrogance of which Republicans falsely accused President Barack Obama.
The Washington Monthly story concludes on an ominous note: “What if the White House simply gives all the masks and ventilators to red states and counties, leaving blue ones to struggle? What mechanisms of accountability are left?
“U.S. democracy wasn’t set up to deal with a president openly behaving like a James Bond villain while being protected by a political party behaving more like a mafia than a civic institution.”
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on March 31, 2020 at 12:09 am
“Capitalism Kills” could have been a headline in Pravda, the official “newspaper” of the former Soviet Union.
Instead, it’s billionaires themselves who are responsible for such a sentiment. They are doing their level best to persuade workers: “I regret that I have only one life to give for my CEO.”
Richard Kovacevich is the former CEO of Norwest Bank (1966 – 1998) and Wells Fargo (1998 – 2007). He wants healthy people under age 55 to return to work in late April if the outbreak is contained enough.
There are two major problems with this:
- There aren’t enough test kits to screen everyone for possible signs of the Coronavirus.
- Many of those who carry the virus show no signs of infection.
“We’ll gradually bring those people back and see what happens. Some of them will get sick, some may even die. I don’t know,” said Kovacevich.
He might just as well have added: “I don’t care.”
“Do you want to suffer more economically or take some risk that you’ll get flu-like symptoms and a flu-like experience? Do you want to take an economic risk or a health risk? You get to choose.”
If President Donald Trump gets to choose, the nationwide social distancing practices that health professionals say are essential to saving lives during the Coronavirus outbreak will end on April 30.
He originally chose Easter as a pretext for doing this: “You’ll have packed churches all over our country. I think it would be a beautiful time.”
The real reason: He wants to return to return to holding his mass public rallies—which some have compared to the Nuremberg rallies hosted by Adolf Hitler. There he can spew hatred at everyone he dislikes and bask in the worshipful glow of his fanatical base.
Fortunately, the rising tide of COVID-19 cases forced him to abandon his original April 12 date.
And many highly-paid executives in American corporations are itching to put their employees back at work—and on the Coronavirus firing line.
“The damages of keeping the economy closed as it is could be worse than losing a few more people,” Tom Golisano, the founder and chairman of the payroll processor Paychex Inc. told Bloomberg. “I have a very large concern that if businesses keep going along the way they’re going then so many of them will have to fold.”
Forbes estimates Golisano’s net worth to be $3 billion.
Like Richard Kovacevich, he wants states that haven’t been hit hard by the virus to return to normalcy.
Tom Golisano
Penale52 / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
Lloyd Blankfein, the former head of Goldman Sachs, wrote on Twitter: “Crushing the economy, jobs and morale is also a health issue—and beyond. Within a very few weeks let those with a lower risk to the disease return to work.”
There’s no question that keeping businesses closed across the country—as scientists and health professionals are urging—will inflict large-scale economic damage.
But rushing people back to work would prolong the outbreak and overwhelm the healthcare system. And it would certainly increase—perhaps exponentially—the number of dead and infected casualties of the pandemic. Economists from Northwestern University calculated that keeping social distancing practices in place until cases decline could save 600,000 lives nationwide.
Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, warns that the United States could experience 100,000 deaths and millions of viral infections from the Coronavirus pandemic.
Ignoring these facts is Right-wing TV and radio host Glenn Beck, who, according to Forbes, was worth $90 million in 2014.
“I would rather have my children stay home and all of us who are over 50 go in and keep this economy going and working. Even if we all get sick, I’d rather die than kill the country,” Beck, 56, said on his show “The Blaze.”
Of course, Beck works alone in his own studio—and is thus highly unlikely to come in contact with an infected carrier.
Glenn Beck
George Skidmore photo
Like Beck, millionaires and billionaires can afford to socially distance themselves from others and still accumulate huge piles of wealth.
“I think what we are doing with the shutdown is good but in a few weeks people will need to be around people,” said billionaire Tilman Fertitta, owner of a casino, hotel and restaurant empire.
He certainly needs “people to be around people.” His businesses depend heavily on huge numbers of customers willing to spend money.
And, in this case, to risk their lives doing so.
Adds Fertotta: “Otherwise you are going to go into an economic crisis that is going to take us years to dig ourselves out of.”
Fertitta’s income is estimated at $4.4 billion, according to Forbes.
For men like Richard Kovacevich, Tom Golisano, Lloyd Blankfein, Glenn Beck and Tilman Fertitta,, the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt have no meaning: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have little.”
For Republicans and their wealthy benefactors, “pro-life” means strictly anti-abortion. Any other form of life—the elderly, the ill, victims of pollution, those slaughtered with military-style weaponry used by criminals—are totally expendable.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Medical, Politics, RELIGION, Social commentary on March 30, 2020 at 12:42 am
It has been said that President John F. Kennedy left his country with three great legacies:
- The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty;
- The Apollo moon landing; and
- The Vietnam war.
But there was a fourth legacy—and perhaps the most important of all: The belief that mankind could overcome its greatest challenges through rationality and perseverance.
White House painting of JFK
At American University on June 10, 1963, Kennedy asked his fellow Americans to re-examine the events and attitudes that had led to the Cold War. And he declared that the search for peace was by no means hopeless:
“Our problems are man-made; therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.
“Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.”
Today, Right-wingers exchange superstition for science and insults for solutions.
One of these was Landon Spradlin, a Virginia pastor who claimed the “mass hysteria” around the Coronavirus pandemic was part of a media plot against President Donald Trump.
The 66-year-old father and husband from Virginia died due to complications from COVID-19 on March 25. in Concord, North Carolina.
At a time when responsible Americans are self-isolating to halt the spread of Coronavirus, he was returning home from a mission trip to New Orleans to “wash it from its Sin and debauchery.”
On his Facebook page Spradlin misleadingly compared Coronavirus to the swine flu. He added that the media had created “mass hysteria” to damage Trump:
Spradlin also claimed that a missionary in South Africa “protected” himself from the bubonic plague with the “Spirit of God”: “As long as I walk in the light of that law [of the Spirit of life], no germ will attach itself to me.”
Had Spradin been as knowledgeable about history as he presumably was about the Bible, he would have known:
- The bubonic plague—better known as the Black Death—raged from 1347 to 1351.
- It spread quickly and virulently throughout Europe and Asia.
- It killed 75 to 200 million people.
- Faith proved no protection from its deadliness.
Reacting to the news, a Twitter user wrote: “On March 13, Pastor Landon Spradlin shared this post suggesting #COVID19 is a hoax. On March 24th he died of that hoax. You can thank Trump and @FoxNews for perpetuating that narrative. This is not a game.”
The despicable role that Fox News Network has played in convincing millions of Americans that COVID-19 is a hoax cannot be overestimated.
By March 9, the virus had stricken 1,016 Americans and caused 31 deaths. It was raging in 33 states.The stock market had had its worst week of trading since the “Wall Street meltdown” of 2008.
But on March 9, Trish Regan, host of Trish Regan Primetime on the Fox Business Network, attacked not the virus but those who do not share her fervent embrace of Donald Trump.
“We’ve reached a tipping point,” said Regan. “The hate is boiling. Many in the liberal media are using Coronavirus in an attempt to demonize and destroy the President, despite the virus originating halfway around the world.
“This is yet another attempt to impeach the President. And sadly, it seems the left cares little for any of the destruction they leave in their wake, including losses in the stock market. This, unfortunately, is all just part of the political casualties for them.”
To make certain no one in the television audience missed the point, an electronically generated caption read: “Coronavirus Impeachment Scam.”
Unfortunately for Regan, by March 9, too many Americans—including many Fox News viewers—realized the virus was not a Democratic hoax, as she and Trump had claimed.
A firestorm of outrage descended on Fox—and on March 14, Fox Business Network announced that Regan’s program would be on “hiatus” until further notice.
But far worse is almost certain to come.
President Trump has repeatedly said he wants to “re-open the country” to end the “social distancing” and shuttered businesses recommended by the medical community. Only this, they believe, will halt or at least slow the spread of COVID -19.
He intended to use Easter Sunday—April 12—as a pretext for his real reason: He wants to return to what many of his critics refer to as “Nuremberg rallies.” Packing stadiums with his most fanatical followers, he thunders insults and lies with abandon.
Unable to do this while “social distancing” is officially on throughout the country, he has substituted nearly constant “press conferences” filled with equal parts of lies and ignorance about Coronavirus.
On March 21, for example, Trump insisted he had a “very good” feeling about using a malaria drug to combat the virus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had to set the record straight: “No.”
On March 29, Trump announced he would postpone “reopening the country” until April 30. By March 29, the United States had more than 139,000 COVID-19 cases, with at least 2,425 deaths.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 26, 2020 at 12:27 am
Two dictators. Two crises.
Next up: Donald Trump.
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin received multiple warnings that his supposed ally, Nazi Germany, would soon invade Russia. He ignored all of them. And when the invasion came—on June 22, 1941—the result was the loss of 26 million men, women and children and four years of devastation.
President Donald Trump similarly received warnings that Coronavirus was now a major world threat—and would likely hit the United States. Like Stalin, he ignored those warnings—with similarly disastrous consequences for the United States.
The virus first appeared in Wuhan, China, in December, 2019. Its first reported victim became ill on December 1.
By December 31, the outbreak was traced to a novel strain of Coronavirus.
Coronaviruses are a group of viruses that affect birds and mammals. In humans, Coronaviruses can cause pneumonia and may cause bronchitis.
Coronavirus
According to the March 21 edition of Rolling Stone magazine: “The United States intelligence community has been warning the president since January and February about the dire consequences that would occur when coronavirus reached America, but the president seemed determined to play down the threat, leaving the country largely unaware and unprepared.”
An anonymous Intelligence official cited by the Washington Post said: “Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, 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.”
Trump first learned of the virus on January 3, 2020. This did not prevent him from playing golf on January 4, 5, 18 and 19.
On January 19, the first Coronavirus case appeared in the United States.
On January 27, then-acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney tried to get the President to act. But, according to officials who spoke with the Post, Trump was “dismissive” of early briefings “because he did not believe that the virus had spread widely throughout the United States.”
Trump fired Mulvaney one month later.
Then, for Trump, it was back to the golf course—on February 1, 2, 15.
Refusing to take action against the emerging Coronavirus threat, Trump repeatedly made statements that minimized it.
January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
January 30: “We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment –five—and those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for us .…that I can assure you.”
February 10: “Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do—you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases—11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.”
February 28: “[Democrats] tried the impeachment hoax…They lost…. And this is their new hoax.”
A major reason for the spectacular early victories of the German army in Russia was that, from 1936 to 1938, Stalin had gutted his own military by a series of systematic purges. Thus, there were few experienced, competent officers—from army corps commanders to four-star generals—to mount a strategic defense.
Similarly, upon taking office, Trump had gutted the permanent epidemic monitoring and command groups set up inside the White House: The National Security Council (NSC) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Pathologically jealous of President Barack Obama, Trump has tried to destroy every vestige of Obama’s legacy as the first black President of the United States. And these disease-monitoring groups were set up by Obama following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014.
In the spring of 2018, Trump pushed Congress to cut $15 billion from national health spending—and cutting the global disease-fighting budgets of the Centers for Disease Control, National Security Council, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Health and Human Services.
In April, 2018, then-National Security Adviser John Bolton forced Tom Bossert, director of the infectious disease unit at DHS, to resign—along with his entire team.
On February 29, the first American died of Coronavirus.
Trump continued to be unconcerned about the growing threat.
On March 7, reporters asked him if he was concerned that Coronavirus had arrived in Washington, D.C. He replied: “No, I’m not concerned at all. No, we’ve done a great job with it.”
And in a March 9 tweet, Trump wrote: “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”
Perhaps most dangerously of all, Trump has from the outset blatantly contradicted health officials—even when standing next to them at press conferences.
On March 21, Trump insisted he had a “very good” feeling about using a malaria drug to combat the virus. It fell to Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to set the record straight: “No.”
As of March 26, the United States had 68,489 Coronavirus cases—with 1,032 deaths.
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In Bureaucracy, History, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on March 25, 2020 at 12:25 am
Two dictators. Two crises.
First up: Joseph Stalin.
“I know what Hitler’s up to. He thinks he’s outsmarted me. But in actuality, it is I who have outsmarted him.”
So spoke Joseph Stalin, absolute dictator of the Soviet Union, to his future successor, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1939.
Less than two years later, on June 22, 1941, three million German soldiers poured across the western border of the Soviet Union.
On August 23, 1939, Stalin had signed the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact with German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler. The reason: Each dictator got what he wanted—for the moment. Hitler was planning to invade Poland in a matter of days—and he wanted to avoid a war with the Soviet Union. And Stalin got what he wanted: The eastern half of Poland.
Joseph Stalin
The agreement stunned the world. Since 1919, Nazis and Communists had fought bitter battles against each other in the streets of Germany during the Weimar Republic.
When this was replaced in 1933 by the Third Reich, German Communists were rounded up and imprisoned, if not murdered, by Hitler’s ruthless secret police, the Schutzstaffel (“Protective Squads”).
For the moment, however, all of that was conveniently forgotten.
But Hitler hadn’t forgotten his life’s ambition to conquer the Soviet Union and utterly destroy “the scourge of Jewish-Marxism.”
Stalin received numerous warnings from the United States and Great Britain about the coming invasion. But he dismissed them as efforts by the West to trick him into violating the pact and turning Nazi Germany into his mortal enemy.
When informed of the attack, Stalin at first believed it was being made by rogue German forces. He refused to order an immediate counterattack. Upon being convinced that the Wehrmacht intended to wage all-out war, he went into a funk in his dacha and shut himself off from everyone. To his closest associates he wailed: “Lenin left us a great inheritance and we, his heirs, have fucked it all up!”
Meanwhile, the Red Air Force was destroyed on the ground by the awesome Luftwaffe. And the Wehrmacht was advancing at a rate of 25 miles a day.
German soldiers marching through Russia
On July 3, after 10 days of brooding (and probably drinking heavily) in his dacha, Stalin finally took to the airways. He didn’t speak live; Radio Moscow played a recording of his voice across the Soviet Union.
Never a spellbinding orator, Stalin spoke in slow and faltering tones. Nevertheless, his opening words were startling: “Comrades! Citizens! Brothers and sisters! Men of our army and navy! I am addressing you, my friends!”
Stalin had never addressed an audience this way, and he never would again. Born Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili, he had given himself the name of “Stalin”—“Man of Steel.” And he had lived up to it, sending tens of thousands to the Soviet penal system known as the Gulag while ordering the executions of tens of thousands of others.
He said the “peace loving” Soviet Union had been attacked by “fiends and cannibals.” He claimed the non-aggression pact with Germany had given the army much-needed time to rearm and reorganize its forces. He claimed the Germans wanted to restore the rule of the landlords and re-establish Tsarism.
He repeatedly spoke of the treachery of the enemy—and of the need for constant vigilance against traitors: “We must wage a ruthless fight against all disorganizers of the rear, deserters, panic-mongers and rumor-mongers.”
This was accompanied by orders unprecedented in any other army: Those taken prisoner by the Germans were to be considered traitors—and shot or imprisoned. Those suspected of wounding themselves to avoid combat were also subject to summary execution. So were soldiers who had been legitimately wounded in battle but were suspected of inflicting those injuries.
The first two years of the war—1941 to 1943—proved disastrous for the Soviet Union.
During the first six months—June to December, 1941—German armies lured huge Soviet forces into gigantic “cauldron battles,” surrounding and exterminating them. An estimated 5.7 million prisoners of war (POWs) fell into German hands. Of these, at least 3.5 million died in custody.
But then the infamous Russian cold and snows of winter halted the Wehrmacht before Moscow. In the summer of 1942 German forces once again mounted a ferocious offensive, driving all the way to the Volga—and Stalingrad.
But they became bogged down in bitter house-to-house fighting. With the arrival of winter, Soviet forces surrounded the Wehrmacht’s powerful Sixth Army. The besiegers became the besieged. On February 2, 1943, Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus surrendered what remained of his army. The battle cost Germany 500,000 men, including 91,000 taken prisoner.
As the Red Army finally began to go over on the offensive, Stalin relaxed the iron controls that had long stifled creativity on the part of his commandeers.
The infamous political commissars were removed from control over Russian generals. Gold braid and fancy uniforms were manufactured and rushed to the front as morale boosters.
At last, Stalin realized there was no way to win a life-and-death struggle than to give his soldiers the flexibility they needed.
The war would last another two years—costing the Soviet Union at least 26 million citizens—before it ended with the Red flag flying over Berlin.
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TWO FACES OF TERROR: 9/11 AND COVID-19: PART ONE (OF FOUR)
In Bureaucracy, History, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on April 20, 2020 at 1:01 amCOVID-19 may well change our lives more fundamentally than even 9/11.
Yes, the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were horrific—and costly in lives. Almost 3,000 Americans died that day.
After decades of ignoring Islamic terrorist attacks on American lives and property throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world, America shook off its complacency.
First came a much-anticipated invasion of Afghanistan–the “nation” which had given shelter to 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. Starting on October 7, 2001, by December American planes and ground forces swept bin Laden’s hosts, the Taliban, from power.
Bin Laden disappeared into Pakistan, but was shot to death by United States Navy SEALs on May 1, 2011.
World Trade Center – September 11, 2001
The 9/11 attacks also resulted in unforeseen events. President George W. bush used them as an excuse to invade Iraq in 2003 and topple its dictator, Saddam Hussein, from power.
Bush had long blamed Hussein for not folding after the President’s father, George H.W. Bush, attacked Iraq in 1991 after its invasion of Kuwait. Hussein’s failure to fall from power, believed Bush Junior, had resulted in his father’s losing a second White House term in 1992 to Bill Clinton.
But once the United States invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, it got stuck there—and remains so to this day. What started as a purely military mission became a “nation-building” one.
Yet another result of the 9/11 attacks was a complete restructuring of the United States military. In the past, Americans had excelled in set-piece battles and wars.
Americans have never forgotten their overwhelming victories over the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918 and Fuhrer Adolf Hitler in 1945. But when it came to fighting enemies where guerrilla warfare negated overwhelming military power, the United States had done poorly—first in Korea (1950-1953) and then in Vietnam (1960-1975).
As a result, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield reorganized the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, assigning highest priority to building unconventional military units such as the Army’s Green Berets and Delta Force, and the Navy’s SEALs.
These were all major changes resulting from the 9/11 attacks. They cost billions of dollars and got huge publicity. But they didn’t affect the lives of everyday Americans as intimately as has the advent of COVID-19, also known as Coronavirus.
Coronavirus
First, COVID-19 has killed far more Americans than 9/11. As before mentioned, 9/11 snuffed out the lives of almost 3,000 Americans. But as of April 20, more than 41,114 Americans have died of COVID-19. And the plague has not finished its murderous work.
Second, while 9/11 affected two American cities—New York and Washington, D.C.—COVID-19 has spread throughout the country. As epicenters like New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago gain national attention, the virus continues to seep into rural centers—especially in the South and Midwest.
Third, the combination of evil and incompetence of the Trump administration has shaken Americans’ faith in the ability—and even the willingness—of the Federal Government to protect them.
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks attacked President Donald Trump in terms usually reserved for serial killers. On the March 13 edition of The PBS Newshour, he said:
“This is what happens when you elect a sociopath as president, who doesn’t care, who has treated this whole thing for the past month as if it’s about him. ‘How do people like me?’ Minimizing the risks. ‘Does the stock market reflect well on me?’ And he hasn’t done the things a normal human being would do, which was to, let’s take precautions….
“And he’s incapable of that. And he’s even created an information distortion field around him.”
In 2014, following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, President Barack Obama created the White House Pandemic Office, run by the White House’s National Security Council (NSC).
Barack Obama
Heading it was Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer. Under President George W. Bush, he had successfully fought malaria overseas. His topflight team of infectious disease and public health experts was creating a national bio-defense strategy. Their goal: Coordinate agencies to make the United States more resilient to the threat of epidemics and biological warfare.
In May, 2018, Trump ordered the NSC’s global health security unit shut down. The reason: Trump’s pathological jealousy of and hatred for Obama.
Compounding that outrage: From January to early March, 2020, Trump and his allies within the Republican party and Fox News Network repeatedly assured Americans they had nothing to fear.
Barnstorming the country in a series of hate-filled political rallies, Trump told his supporters:
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