Re: Trump Refuses Responsibility for Extant Policies
Faith writes:
And since you and the Left in general put all YOUR energy into bashing the man it's no wonder if so much of what he says is on the defensive.
If Trump is being bashed then it's by the facts, not by the left. When someone lies or misleads then the true facts should be brought to people's attention, and that's all that's happening. Perhaps you have some alternative facts from your fantasy world that refute what I said?
But he HAS been blamed for a lot of stuff Obama did. Not that I expect anyone here to acknowledge that.
So blaming Obama is your go to deflection strategy, too. Let us know when you're prepared to deal in facts.
I'm just amazed he's able to function so well with all the artillery that batters him every minute of every day.
I'm just amazed at both you and him for your ability to cram so many errors into such short periods of time.
Re: Trump Refuses Responsibility for Extant Policies
Faith writes:
So he delegated responsibility to others and forgot about it, SO WHAT?
So it will cost lives. Is maintaining the pretense of Trump's pristine and perfect leadership skills more important than people's lives?
May as well take this opportunity to mention what's going on here locally. This is for people generally and not part of the reply to you.
Massachusetts, a state next door, has closed all schools, bars and restaurants. Here in New Hampshire the schools are closed but bars and restaurants remain open. I've been in PT for a minor tennis injury, and they're shutting down for at least two weeks except for priority cases such as post surgical PT.
Grocery store shelves were mostly cleared out of paper products, but then they started placing limits on how much you could buy at a time and the situation has improved. Strangely, chicken is cleaned out, but there's plenty of pork, steak, ham, ribs, etc. All the other food aisles seem well stocked. Liquor stores are experiencing a run, primarily beer and hard liquor, wine not so much.
Masks and hand sanitizer are unavailable. Because the pandemic is viral, not bacterial, any non-alcohol hand sanitizer will not work against the coronavirus. If you can't get any alcohol based hand sanitizer then buy alcohol and dilute it down to about 60%. Dish soap is also effective as it attacks the viral membrane and in effect dissolves it.
My wife's place of work shut down this morning. Shortly after she fetched her laptop and monitors and brought them home they locked down the building. She'll be working from home for at least the next two weeks. She's installed herself in the living room. The quietude of my retirement is gone and I guess I'll have to stop dancing around naked because I never let her find out about that, oh woe is me!
This morning I listened to a horror story on BBC as their financial program gathered stories from correspondents across the EU describing how life has been affected. They described the difficulties people and businesses are facing and will face in the coming months. It was mentioned that airlines are only weeks away from bankruptcy. Will airlines survive? Without airlines can airports, the airlines essential partner, survive? What will be the impact on the railroad industry and trucking?
Transportation infrastructure is essential for the movement of people and goods, but during this period of restricted movement it is the transportation of goods that is most essential. While we lockdown in place we must still be able to buy food and essential products at the grocery and home supply stores.
People in many industries are already being laid off. Bars and restaurants are the most common example, and as airlines reduce scheduling by around 80% the retail stores in airports will be shutting down and laying off employees. How will those suddenly without jobs afford their rents and mortgages? Bankruptcies of both people and businesses will not be far behind. How will the banking industry withstand the onslaught of bankruptcies?
Some businesses are being compassionate at the moment. The Boston Celtics, the local basketball team, has announced that employees will continue to be paid through the end of the season, but the people who man the food and concession stands at the Boston Garden (the arena is called the Garden) are not employees of the Celtics.
I could go on, but I'll stop. Is this a worst case scenario? I don't know. It is the scenario I imagined but only alluded to in my Message 5319, written about a week ago just after the WHO declared a world pandemic. This is quickly sprinting past just a major health concern to become a world wide economic disaster affecting life very severely in the short term and very significantly for years to come in the longer term.
It is appropriate to ask whether this lockdown is worse than the resulting economic disaster. What if government, instead of a lockdown, put its full force and power behind the production and distribution of masks, gloves and effective sanitizer? Would that approach cause ten thousand more deaths? A hundred thousand? A million? More? Would an overburdened health industry result in even more deaths of people unaffected by the coronavirus but unable to obtain the necessary care? And on the other hand, how many deaths will economic depression for years cause?
I don't have the answers, but I do hope that those at all levels of government and business who are not up to the demands of this crisis move aside to allow the most competent, the experts, to handle things.
How long will this last? I don't know, but Major League Baseball is talking about a June resumption. I hope that's not optimistic.
Briefly summarizing, no modern economy has ever experienced anything like this before. In the US $2.1 trillion is spent every year on transportation (air, train, car, Uber, etc., but not the cost of purchasing automobiles), recreation, food (not groceries brought home), and accommodations. It is not a simple matter of saying, "If we're shut down for 10% of the year then that would cost $0.21 trillion," because lost income would leave people much less able to spend money on these things.
As Trump has recently been forced to remind everyone, he has been relentlessly hammering on the critical seriousness of the coronavirus threat all along. This reminder has been met with the usual leftist lies, such as this collection of obviously manufactured video:
Here's an opinion piece by lyin' George Conway, Kellyanne’s husband, who refuses to acknowledge the magnificence that is Trump: There is no new Trump. A short excerpt:
quote:But the sudden shift can’t conceal the fact that Trump has shown himself to be wholly inept at dealing with the pandemic. It doesn’t change the fact that he puts himself first, always. It doesn’t alter the fact that, as he once told top aides, he thinks of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals. It doesn’t dissolve Trump’s compulsion to lie, even when truth would serve him best. It doesn’t diminish his incompetence, ignorance or propensity for administrative chaos.
For the truth, of course, we need only turn to Trump. His handling of the crisis has been "perfect," a "10 out of 10."
Trump never declared the pandemic a hoax, he declared the Leftist hype about it the hoax,...
Yes, that's what DrJones* meant. Here's Trump's actually words:
Trump was speaking about Democratic expressions of concern in February. Given what has happened in the intervening weeks, can these concerns reasonably be characterized as "hype" or a "hoax"? Weren't the Democrats far more accurate about what was coming than Trump, who among other things predicted that the number of infections would soon drop to zero? Is the difference between what Trump was saying several weeks ago and what he's saying now apparent to you?
The ornate "T" in the upper left is for the UK newspaper The Telegraph.
Shouldn't even you be getting tired of the incessant attacks on Trump about absolutely everything, now including the Corona virus?
Since Trump never tires of lying and misrepresenting about almost everything, now including the coronavirus, why should anyone tire of calling him on it.
As he says in the video his administration's response to the problem has been early and effective but they continue to attack him anyway.
Yes, he does claim that he moved early and effectively, and that's why the video included him saying that, because it is so starkly at odds with reality.
Yes Trump too often speaks in hyperbole,...
Hyperbole is exaggeration, not lying.
...you can get him on that but not to the extent he's usually subjected to.
Nobody living in reality and hearing Trump's pronouncements would characterize them as exaggeration but as lies and misrepresentations. Trump views each day as another opportunity to fight to come out looking good in the media (which is why he hates most of the media, increasingly including Fox News), instead of as another opportunity to do good for the country. That's why his responses to the coronavirus threat are likely to be so unsuccessful, because he'll be making decisions based on what he thinks will play best in the media instead of what is best for the country.
In responding to the attacks he overstates things he then has to take back.
Saying the number of infections would go down while it was going up is not overstating things. It is misrepresenting things.
Those who support him might be more inclined to comment on these errors if it weren't for the incessant overkill from his enemies. Their incessant attacks are the hoax.
A video of Trump speaking his own words is a hoax? Interesting perspective.
I'm sure everyone would love if the man at the top had given all indications of being up to the task before him, but he didn't, and he hasn't since before he took office. He continues to stumble, and it is the nation that will pay the price.
When they accuse him of lying that's the end of it for me.
Actually it's the beginning of it for you. Every time attention is called to a Trump lie you treat it like your call to arms to demonize those reporting it and to raise all possible spurious denials, deflections and accusations in his defense. Kellyanne Conway has nothing on you.
He talks too freely...
What you're calling "talks too freely" is what is known in popular parlance as lies and misrepresentations. It's not like it's subtle - he does everything out in the open.
...playing up the lack of danger on the basis of the small number of cases and the fact that he has acted to prevent the problem from spreading and has supported programs to deal with it...They acted early and they've put a lot of important measures in place. The Left's disproportionate reactions to a very effective leader are contemptible.
He was treating the problem as one to be managed in the media while ignoring the reality until Tucker Carlson hightailed it down to Mar-a-Lago and told Trump he had to begin taken the coronavirus threat seriously. Trump is media driven, so he listened to Carlson when he didn't listen to experts like Dr. Fauci.
That's not lying and I'm sick of the Left's inability to appreciate his many achievements. I have to agree that his response is a ten.
It's pretty much lying and a zero.
--Percy
Admin
AbE: When I have to answer posts with words in them that are censored for me, which censorship originated I know not where, I don't see how I can be expected to search for alternative words since they aren't my words to begin with.
Periodically you calm down and I clear your disallowed words list, but it doesn't take long before you're accusing your fellow participants of lying or some such again, and so I begin adding words back to your disallowed words list. I'll clear it out again, but whether it remains empty is up to you.
And now we get the standard litany of Trump bashing.
You say this as if criticism of Trump is an unjustified outgrowth of personal dislike. But criticism of Trump does not spring from dislike but from the nature of what he does, which includes lies, misrepresentations, misogyny, racism, bigotry, xenophobia, self enrichment, personal animosity and insults, a chaotic management style, antagonism toward American institutions, inability to master detail, keeping his own council on matters he knows little or nothing about, ignoring expert advice, establishing cronyism at the top of government by making loyalty the primary qualification of his administration, turning government into a daily reality show, an extreme narcissism that leaves him devoid of any empathy, and caring about no one but himself to so great an extent that it threatens the entire country.
It is baffling that nearly half the country either can't recognize these qualities or doesn't care.
It is instructive that you defend Trump not by arguing from facts but by denying them while attacking those who call attention to them.
Sandy Hook wasn't real, climate change isn't real, the pandemic isn't real. They're all just liberal plots.
When are conservatives going to tire of this mindless formula and start basing their thinking on facts. The answer is never. Facts don't convince most people. Most people's minds don't work that way unless the facts smack them right in the face. Emotions and social pressures are a huge component of how people form opinions. One's social group plays a large role.
quote:Then Mark Frilot 45 years old, never, ever sick came home with a fever.
In the haze of days that followed, Ms. Frilot, a 43-year-old oil-and-gas analyst, occupied one world, the rest of her community in Kenner, La., another. She saw her friends making jokes on social media about the coronavirus eye-roll emojis, Fox News talking points, Rush Limbaugh quotes writing off the threat. And then one person asked if anyone really had this thing.
Ms. Frilot had an answer to that.
I have been seeing a lot of posts about people taking this virus lightly and joking about it, she began in a Facebook post. Mark has tested positive for the coronavirus. ... Today, Ms. Frilot’s husband of 12 years remains quarantined in the ICU, hooked up to a ventilator, one of the 280-plus cases in Louisiana of the novel coronavirus rapidly spreading across the United States. ... It was a revelation for the conservative suburbs of New Orleans, where many had written off the pandemic as liberal fear-mongering. ... The language they used was the language politicians and media figures were also using. On March 8, when Mr. Frilot first went to urgent care, President Trump retweeted a joke from his White House social media director about Nero fiddling as Rome burned. The next night, Sean Hannity said on his prime time Fox News show that the virus was the media’s attempt to bludgeon Mr. Trump with this new hoax. ... Ms. Pitfield lives in Metairie, about 10 minutes from Kenner. Like many in the area, which is represented in Congress by House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, she is a supporter of President Trump. She, and many of her friends, she said, believed that the coronavirus was a political stunt and media-induced hysteria.
And then finally light bulbs go on in ways like this:
quote:Ms. DeLaup had mixed emotions at first about the virus. On the one hand, her fellow Trump supporters were insistent that it was being blown out of proportion, that the flu was far deadlier, that everyone was being ridiculous. On the other hand, she thought, It’s not just us: Everyone around the world is reacting like this. Would everyone be throwing things out of proportion? Just to try and hurt the president?
Many people see reality through a glass darkly filtered by the opinions and attitudes of those around them. Conservatives in this country have been conditioned by three years of Trump to distrust the media, and it wouldn't be surprising to learn, after this is all over, that conservatives were affected more than liberals.
Studies of coronavirus transmission say that though it can survive long periods ranging from 30 minutes to 72 hours in the air and on various surfaces, it rapidly loses virulence. Despite this it is somehow very contagious, so I think they’re missing something. I plan to take extreme precautions.
Later today I will be playing tennis (outside because the indoor clubs have all closed). We'll keep our distance from each other, and especially with this partner because he works with a vulnerable population. Before starting we will rinse our hands in 70% alcohol because we'll be touching the balls, and because the balls also give off bursts of nap particles when struck or when they bounce.
Afterward I'll be doing the grocery shopping and I'll be wearing a bandana. I'd wear a mask if I could find one. When I return home the grocery bags will sit in the garage for 48 hours. Bags of groceries requiring refrigeration will be placed in the garage fridge (cold doesn't affect the virus). My clothes will be thrown in the washer and I'll take a shower.
I advise everyone, conservative and liberal and everyone, to take a similar level of caution. Infection risks serious illness hooked up to a ventilator for weeks. And ask yourself for how much longer will sufficient ventilators be available? No one should have to lie on a hospital gurney listening to doctors in a triage debate about whether you or someone else deserves the last available ventilator. The vaccine will likely not be available until summer next year at the earliest and hopefully we will all get our immunity from the vaccine and not from the virus itself.
The seriousness of the infection caused by the virus varies widely. Why is not yet understood. The latest estimate of mortality is 1.4% for the non-elderly (Lower death rate estimates for coronavirus provide glimmer of hope - STAT), and that is good news if it is true as prior estimates were 2%-3%, but it is still very high.
The mortality rate for the flu is less than a tenth as great, and that figure includes the vulnerable elderly population. But it also varies widely from year to year depending upon how accurately experts have guessed which strain of flu will prevail in any given winter. They're forced to guess considerably in advance because of the time it takes to gear up vaccine production. When they guess right the mortality rate is lower, when wrong it's considerably higher. According to the CDC (Disease Burden of Flu | CDC) annual deaths vary between 12,000 and 61,000 each year. Without the vaccine it would be much, much higher.
That's the situation we're in with the coronavirus. There is no vaccine. If we don't practice social distancing and use serious sanitizing practices to keep infection rates low then the number of deaths could reach into the millions.
The polarization of political opinion can lead us to believe that those whose views we share have a monopoly on morality, so it's important to make clear that that's not what we're saying. There's another reason why zero Democrats have been caught.
The Republicans were caught sending one message publicly (the coronavirus threat is a fiction) and another privately (the coronavirus threat is very serious). It was dishonorable of them to make public expressions that everything's fine while privately dumping stock.
In contrast the Democrats had only one message, that the coronavirus represented a very serious public health threat. It would make perfect sense and be perfectly honorable for them to act on the convictions they publicly expressed by dumping stock.
While it's still very faint, more are adding their voices to the clamor that ruining the economy and people financially for years to come is the wrong answer. The amount of misery and death caused by economic depression, starvation, homelessness, homicide, suicide, child abuse, and so on may be greater than just letting the virus run its course. Here's my proposal for an alternative approach to the coronavirus:
Immediately begin mobilizing for the massive health crisis that is about to confront us, whatever that requires. I'm not a medical professional and won't attempt any detail.
Nationalize ventilator manufactures and rapidly ramp up production.
Use Navy hospital ships.
Turn cruise ships into floating hospitals.
Continue the lockdown for a couple more weeks, then reopen everything. Bars, restaurants, schools, businesses, travel, everything.
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