The Right Side of the News

Gee, if only there were a resource at everyone's fingertips that could provide information about anything. Ah, well, you can lead a horse to water... McCarthyism means weaponizing derogatory labels without regard to their truth, accuracy or consequences, and in your case you're even using the same derogatory label of communism that McCarthy used. He once produced a list from his pocket (that no one was given the opportunity to examine) that he claimed contained a long list of State Department employees who were communists known to the Department itself. It eventually became apparent that McCarthy had no such list, no private conduit into government of where all the communists were hiding, and that he was just playing a political game with people's lives. Most who lost their jobs and livelihoods (remember blacklisting?) as a result of McCarthy's lies were not members of the Communist Party.You are without doubt a McCarthyite. Look it up, it isn't that hard. You should read Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds sometime. It explains Trump followers and why people are buying up all the toilet paper.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

My my, aren't we the little McCarthyite. You're using the term leftist as a synonym for unobjectively biased against the right, and as a smear, and as an excuse for automatically ignoring information and evidence without examining it. With you, truth and accuracy are nowhere in sight. You're not in a pinch, and you haven't revealed anything about your sources, which are probably the same discredited right-wing pundits you always cite.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Clarify.

You mean the The Trump Presidency thread where attempts at keeping up with Trump's misdeeds and mismanagement have been largely abandoned because there is just too much of it? Trump doesn't need any help looking bad - he does it all by himself. The image provides quotes from four presidents, Roosevelt, Truman, Obama and Trump, but only the quotes from Truman and Trump are relevant. Putting their quotes side-by-side shows the huge disparity in willingness to accept responsibility. For Trump everything he does is perfect. Anything bad about anything was either someone else's fault, usually Obama's, or is just a hoax of the left mischaracterizing his perfection. Here's how that image should have appeared: Regulations slowed down production and distribution of coronavirus tests? Really? What regulations would those be? He'd been assuring Americans that whoever wants to be tested can be tested, but now suddenly there are regulations preventing it? Regulations that no one, including him except on Friday, has ever mentioned? Even his infectious diseases point man Dr. Anthony Fauci has never mentioned them, and he was on both ABC's and NBC's Sunday morning shows. Dr. Fauci mentioned other issues, but not regulation.Even worse, Mass General, one of the top hospitals in the country, was so concerned about the federal government's inability to provide test kits that they developed their own but were prevented from using it until they obtained FDA approval on Friday. Trump was asked if he took responsibility for the testing lag. His answer was no, that the fault lay elsewhere, anywhere but him. If you find out what regulations he was referring to you let us know. In the meantime it is safe to conclude that Trump was lying again. It's his go to device, his MO. This is the reason efforts weren't expanded a month or two ago, because until the last few days Trump was saying things like (not an exact quote), "We only have 29 cases now and that will soon go to zero." I think most would agree that defending significant failures in judgment and knowledge by lying and blaming others is a poor approach. Obama has been out of office for over three years. Trump might at least show some originality and find a new scapegoat. Maybe try a mirror. Test kits aren't needed for those exposed. Quarantine is sufficient in such cases, for one famous example, Ted Cruz. He's in self-quarantine right now.The test kit is needed for those who have symptoms that point in that direction, and right now there aren't enough test kits for that purpose. I don't know if you are right or wrong. I'm only commenting because it's very unlikely you know, either. You're likely just passing on something you heard on one of your right-wing talk shows. You're seriously trying to minimize the importance of test kits just because ultimate responsibility for their unavailability lies with Trump? Who said anything about testing everybody?--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

With more than 120 messages posted since early this morning, this thread is pulling away me. I assume this is because of a blizzard of absurd and irrational posts from you. After Trump's constant denials of the seriousness of the coronavirus threat, asking him if he accepts responsibility for the lack of testing is a very reasonable question. Which policies would those be? Trump didn't say, and no one seems to have any idea what he's talking about. And aren't any policies now in place Trump's responsibility?Your attitude seems be, "If it's good then Trump's responsible, and if it's bad then it's not ." Given that no one knows what these policies are or whether they even exist, including you, how could you know Trump had no way of speeding them up? And if these policies are actually real then obviously since things are now speeding up then Trump did have a way of speeding them up. So which is it? Either the policies don't exist and Trump was making it up, or the policies do exist and Trump could have sped them up but didn't because he wanted to ignore the impending crisis instead of doing his job. Again, you have no idea what "systems" Trump was referring to or whether they even exist. The media would have reported that Trump accepted responsibility, and pundits would probably have expressed surprise given his history of denying all responsibility for anything bad.Interesting factoid: on Meet the Press today they revealed polling showing that the seriousness with which people are treating the virus threat differs widely between Democrats and Republicans, even among older people, the most vulnerable group. Republicans are much more likely to play down the seriousness. This means they're much more likely to continue normal activity, including going out to restaurants and then visiting poor grandma.--Percy

That would be incorrect. No person or department within government has stepped up to take responsibility. From How testing failures allowed coronavirus to sweep the U.S. - POLITICO from a little over a week ago:

quote:

---

But neither the CDC nor the coronavirus task force chaired by Vice President Mike Pence would say who made the decision to forgo the WHO test and instead begin a protracted process of producing an American test, one that got delayed by manufacturing problems, possible lab contamination and logistical delays.

---

Also note that the above describes the reasons for the delays, revealing Trump's claim of rules, regulations and specifications from a different time to be false, just as suspected.If Trump hadn't shut down the White House pandemic office (formal name: National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense) back in 2018 then perhaps a different decision might have been made. This is just nonsense. The WHO test is for the current pandemic. From the same article:

quote:

---

On Saturday Jan. 11 a month and a half before the first Covid-19 case not linked to travel was diagnosed in the United States Chinese scientists posted the genome of the mysterious new virus, and within a week virologists in Berlin had produced the first diagnostic test for the disease.

​

Soon after, researchers in other nations rolled out their own tests, too, sometimes with different genetic targets. By the end of February, the World Health Organization had shipped tests to nearly 60 countries.

---

You sure manage to cram a lot of error into a small number of words.--Percy

Amazon.comTrump apparently had a doozy of a press conference today where he misstated many facts and provided false and misleading assurances: https://www.vox.com/...ump-google-fed-relax-press-conference--PercyEdited by Percy, : Try to get link to render.

So much for reading comprehension.DWise1 wasn't discussing creationism, just referring to you as a creationist as part of his characterizing you as anti-science. The evidence might even suggest something beyond anti-science and more like anti-reality. If it's not true then why don't you respond substantively to his Message 5374 instead of being evasive.--Percy

No kidding. Yes, we know. Given that most of the Internet is "lengthy white pages of information" you're reduced to listening to conservative wingnuts. It explains your combination of ignorance and crazy ideas. Your claims of inability to access cited information is nearly always proportional to how wrong you are. So you're doubling down on your McCarthyite accusations to further claim that McCarthy was right? You've been listening to wingnuts again. I can hardly wait. Let me save you some trouble since a Google search turned it up, first search I tried, took two seconds. You're thinking of Blacklisted by History - Wikipedia.--Percy

You did not use the term "leftist" accurately because Snopes isn't leftist, and you *are* using at as a smear and as an excuse for ignoring information. You use the term "leftist" as an epithet, but of course some things I say are left of center because I'm a social liberal (and a fiscal conservative), but most of the time you're just casting the term "leftist" at anyone who disagrees with you. It's as if you believe that calling someone a name is a meaningful and sufficient argument in favor of your position.What it tells most people is that you have no facts and/or rationale. What people find frustrating is that you carry on discussions in a complete fog of ignorance and misinformation without any self-awareness that that's what you're doing.The term left of center also applies to many things other people say here, because many people here are left of center. Oh, what a surprise, left of center people advocate for left of center views.But your biggest and constant transgression is to accuse those with the temerity to disagree with your political views as evil. You do not suffer disagreement well.--Percy

The reason it feels like you didn't find what you thought you remembered is because you didn't actually find the thing you were thinking of. Again, you were thinking of Blacklisted by History - Wikipedia.--Percy

I accept at face value that the polls are telling us that how seriously someone takes the coronavirus threat depends upon their political affiliation. Those who trust Trump's information or that of many of his zombies in Congress do not take the threat anywhere near as seriously as those who don't and who instead get their information from a reliable source of health information such as Dr. Fauci or the CDC or many of the state governors.Some examples: --Percy

This history of Trump's pronouncements of how we're not in any serious danger from the coronavirus is taken from Opinion | A Complete List of Trump’s Attempts to Play Down Coronavirus - The New York Times: --PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

Like firemen who sit around much of the time, we do need an emergency preparedness team for health emergencies, as our present circumstances are vividly demonstrating. Trump was blowing hot air. This is just Trump blowing more hot air. When you eliminate firemen jobs they go off and find other jobs. It is the same with the people on the emergency preparedness team. Also, the analogy with firemen breaks down in the nature of the work. The emergency preparedness team provides their benefit from the preparations they make before emergencies. Once the emergency has already happened it is too late to get much benefit from a newly regathered emergency preparedness team. All they can do at that point is say stuff like, "Well, what you should have been doing a few months ago was such-and-so." Now *you're* blowing hot air. No one has any idea what these policies are, and Trump is likely making it up. When are you going to stop letting this guy pull the wool over your eyes? How many times is enough for you? I'm guessing infinity.--Percy

And you'll never know what these policies were, because Trump was making it up. If you truly believe he wasn't making it up then just try to find out what these policies were and report back to us. Blaming Obama for things is Trump's main go to refuge from criticism.Trump puts most of his energy into managing the news cycle to his advantage instead of leading the country through the crisis. He's reacting, not leading. He figures out what to do by watching Fox News and talking to his cronies instead of listening to experts.Here's some of what Ben Rhodes, former Deputy NSA advisor, said in a recent interview about the emergency preparedness team (https://thehill.com/...-trump-obama-left-him-a-global-health):

quote:

---

I think, importantly, what Obama did leave Trump is a global health infrastructure that we had set up informed by the lessons of the Ebola outbreak
...
And what we did is set up, in the White House, ... an office that was responsible for managing pandemics, managing global health threats that was shut down two years ago by President Trump.
...
And when you don’t have an office like that, you don’t have dedicated people inside the White House who are ensuring that information is acted upon. When you see an outbreak in a place like Wuhan, China, you want people in the White House who are thinking about what needs to be done right away so that you don’t get behind the curve, which is what happened in this White House.

---

--Percy

I can only echo DrJones* comments. He doesn't know or maybe forgot? What criteria are you applying to assess leadership?--Percy