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edbermac

edbermac's Journal
edbermac's Journal
March 14, 2020

Donald Trump to appear in a remake of A Few Good Men.

Taking over the role of Lt Sam Weinberg previously played by Kevin Pollak.

He’ll be a natural.


March 13, 2020

The sick joke of Donald Trump's presidency isn't funny any more.

Richard Wolffe
The Guardian

For three long years the world has been treated to the sick joke of Donald Trump’s presidency. Some days were more sick than others. But now the joke is over.

So is the entire facade of the Trump White House: the gold-plated veneer of power and grift will be stripped bare by a global pandemic and recession.

Of all the obituaries we’ll read in the next several weeks, every one will be more meaningful than the political end of a former reality-TV star.

But make no mistake. The humanitarian crisis about to unfold will consume what’s left of this president and the Republican party that surrendered its self-respect and sense of duty to flatter his ego and avoid his angry tweets.

Trump was right about one thing, and only one thing, as the coronavirus started to spread across the world. The sight of thousands of dead Americans will hurt him politically. It will also hurt many thousands of Americans in reality.

Multiple reports have detailed how Trump did not just ignore the growing pandemic; he actively sought to block his own officials’ attempts to track and stop it. Why has there been such a disastrous lack of testing? Because the president didn’t want to know the answer, and because his staff were too busy fighting each other to do the right thing.

“The boss has made it clear he likes to see his people fight, and he wants the news to be good,” Politico reported one Trump health adviser saying. “This is the world he’s made.”

Never mind a world turned upside down by fear and death. Trump’s world is upended by his gobsmackingly childish comments about how the whole thing will blow over. “It’s going to disappear,” he told one reception inside the White House just two weeks ago. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

The only miracle of this presidency is that it’s taken so long for this country to wake up to the catastrophe.

How could we have known that Trump would deny the resources to deal with a disaster, deny the truth about the death toll, and denounce anyone daring to tell the truth?

It wasn’t hard to know. After Hurricane Maria devastated the American island of Puerto Rico in September of his first year in office, Trump gave himself a 10 for his response to the devastation. He also said he couldn’t keep the military in Puerto Rico forever, which was news to the national guard.

At the very time he was bragging about his response and trashing his own citizens, more than 3,000 Americans were dying on the island because of Trump’s botched response to the hurricane. Those Americans were our most vulnerable citizens: the sick and elderly, who lost power, lacked medicine or needed a hospital bed when the hospitals were stricken.

Those are the same Americans who face the greatest peril in the coming weeks from the same toxic mix of callousness and incompetence from the same sociopathic president.

This is everyone’s catastrophe and one man’s calamity. For Trump, there is no escaping the stench of failure that seeps through every unmade decision, every fumbled response, and every unhinged tweet.

This is a president who can’t formulate a coherent coronavirus policy, and can’t even read the words written for him on a prompter.

One paragraph from Wednesday’s disastrous Oval Office address managed to only worsen the political pathogen that is his presidency.

“There will be exemptions for Americans who have undergone appropriate screenings,” he explained about his new travel ban from Europe, ignoring the reality that he limited all testing so there are no appropriate screenings.

“And these prohibitions will not only apply to the tremendous amount of trade and cargo, but various other things as we get approval,” he added, wiping out many billions in transatlantic trade – and various other things – with one flap of his lips.

“Anything coming from Europe to the United States is what we are discussing,” he explained in case anyone had any doubt about his economic stupidity.

“These restrictions will also not apply to the United Kingdom.” Ah yes, the British immunity to coronavirus is a well-documented medical fact. British people who play golf on a Trump course are especially healthy individuals.

If Trump was trying to reassure the markets, he failed, like he always does. Even the Federal Reserve magicking $1.5tn out of thin air could not stop the stock market from suffering its worst single day since the 1987 crash.

“This was the most expensive speech in history,” one investment strategist told the Financial Times.

There is hope amid the horror: an election in just eight months when Americans can vote for a return to the once-normal life of a competent government. Joe Biden’s response on Thursday was a stark reminder of what presidents and vice-presidents used to sound like.

In the meantime, before January 2021, the world faces two deadly diseases: a pandemic and a pathetically incompetent president

“We’ll lead with science,” the former vice-president said. “We’ll listen to the experts. We’ll heed their advice.” It all sounded so shockingly novel. “We’ll build American leadership and rebuild it to rally the world to meet global threats that we are likely to face again. And I’ll always tell you the truth.”

The truth: it’s getting harder to remember a time when we expected our leaders to say such things.

In the meantime, before January 2021, the world faces two deadly diseases: a pandemic and a pathetically incompetent president.

On Thursday, as schools shut down and troops took to the streets of a New York suburb, Trump of course bragged about himself in ways that made you wonder about his own medical condition.

“I mean, think of it: the United States, because of what I did and what the administration did with China, we have 32 deaths at this point,” he said in the Oval Office. “Thirty-two is a lot. Thirty-two is too many. But when you look at the kind of numbers that you’re seeing coming out of other countries, it’s pretty amazing when you think of it.”

And you know what? Instead of thinking about preparing thousands of new hospital beds, or millions of virus tests, Trump has probably committed the largest part of his brain to thinking about that number. That very tiny number, so small compared to the rest of the world, that represents the full measure of his compassion.

https://news.yahoo.com/sick-joke-donalds-trumps-presidency-142745521.html

March 11, 2020

Rush Limbaugh on coronavirus: "Who cares if it's 10 times more lethal than the flu?"

RUSH LIMBAUGH (HOST): The very top headline on the Drudge page right now is this: “Top Doc: Virus 10 Times More Lethal Than the Flu.” Now, wait. That’s not the – they’re burying the lede. That headline is gonna scare people to death. It’s an outrageous headline. The headline comes

It’s not Drudge’s headline. The website is called The Week. “Coronavirus Is 10 Times More Lethal Than the Seasonal Flu, Trump’s Task Force Immunologist Says.” That’s not the point of the story. Do you know what’s really the point of the story? The fatality rate is just 1% from this disease! So who cares if it’s 10 times more lethal than the flu?

The fatality rate of the coronavirus is 1%. “Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told lawmakers during hearing on Wednesday that COVID-19 is probably about 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.

“At the same time, he clarified that 10 times figure actually brings the new fatality rate lower than official estimates, which hover around 3%. The flu has a mortality rate of about 0.1%, so Fauci places the new coronavirus lethality rate at somewhere around 1%.” That’s the story. It isn’t that it’s 10 times more lethal than the flu, and this is how this crap gets politicized!

Pardon my yelling, but this stuff is what ticks me off, and my instincts tell me this. I know this kind of trickery and monkeying around with stuff is going on in these things because I know the media, I know the left, I know the Democrat Party, and I know how they’re trying to scare everybody and now they’re using Fauci here. “This is Trump’s guy! Trump’s guy is saying it’s 10 times more lethal than the flu,” which means nothing.

Ten times more lethal? Lethal than what? What does lethal mean? Does lethal kill you? Does lethal infect you? Does lethal give you a temperature of 102 versus 100? What does it do to you? It’s a meaningless comparative. Ten times more lethal? The only thing worth knowing in this story is that Anthony Fauci says the fatality rate to coronavirus is much less than what they believed.

It is 1%. It is not between 3 and 6%, and that number 3% and 6% has been out there for a couple of weeks. So here comes a news story saying, “Guess what? The fatality rate’s only 1%,” and that’s not the headline. The headline is: “Coronavirus 10 Times More Lethal Than the Seasonal Flu, Trump’s Task Force Immunologist Says.”

Well, yeah, he may have said it, but it was a setup for the actual lede in the story, and you have to read to the last paragraph to get to the nut. “At the same time, Dr. Fauci did clarify that 10 times figure actually brings the coronavirus’ fatality rate lower than official estimates”

So what the hell is the point of a headline that says the coronavirus is 10 times more lethal than the flu, if what that means is the fatality rate is actually much less than we thought it was? It isn’t 3 to 6%. It’s 1% tops. So, no, I’m not apologizing for one damn way I’ve approached this today, and I’m not gonna apologize. Not that anybody’s demanding, anyway.

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/rush-limbaugh-coronavirus-who-cares-if-its-10-times-more-lethal-flu

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient.

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