During the same virtual conference with another one of
Donald Trump’s inbred “advisors” and spokespersons, daughter-in-law Lara Trump,
in which he claimed that Barack Obama was “classless” for criticizing the “chaotic”
responsive to the COVID-19 by the Trump administration, McConnell went on to
repeat another false charge being spread around by Trump, his chief domestic
policy “advisor” and speechwriter Stephen Miller, and various right-wing media:
that Obama failed to leave behind a “game plan” to deal with a pandemic of this
sort. "They claim pandemics only happen once every hundred years
but what if that's no longer true? We want to be early, ready for the next one,
because clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration
any kind of game plan for something like this.” Lara Trump, ever the loyal flunky
whose only qualification for anything is that she is a member of the Trump
crime family like Jared and Ivanka, chimed in "That's exactly right.”
Of course, if you listen to Trump all day and take him at
his word, you learn all kinds of things you would only thunk of if you are as dangerously ignorant and open to
wild conspiracy theories as he is to “explain” his rampant failure of
leadership. For example, Trump claimed that "And remember this: We
inherited—the word is we inherited bad tests. We really inherited bad tests.
These are horrible tests. And it was broken. It was all broken. And we fixed
it," Ok. But the TRUTH was that there was no test for the COVID-19 because
it is a “novel” virus—meaning it is a brand new strain which older tests were
not equipped to detect. It was the CDC’s responsibility to develop a new test,
and that could only have been done when it was known what they were dealing
with. That the initial tests failed was not the fault of Obama—it falls in the
lap of the current Commander-in-Chief, whose known contempt for science if it
interferes with his personal views is well enough known.
Trump also claimed that the Obama
administration left no guidance on how to respond to a pandemic, before
Politico revealed that there was a plan developed by the Obama national security
council entitled Playbook for Early
Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological
Incidents, which Trump’s national
security political appointees ignored, claiming that it was “out-of-date”—but more
likely because like in everything else, Trump wanted to erase any trace of
Obama and his policies and legacy for petty personal reasons, and he had no “back-up”
plan of his own. Anger from former Obama administration in response to
McConnell’s repeating of Trump’s lies was swift. "We literally left them a 69-page Pandemic Playbook
that they ignored," tweeted Ronald Klain. Previously, experts in the field
accused Trump of “100 percent” lying and that current technology is not “faulty,”
but had to be tailored to a new, previously unknown virus.
In
reality, as CNN’s factchecking noted, “The playbook—40 pages plus appendices—contains
step-by-step advice on questions to ask, decisions to make, and which federal
agencies are responsible for what. It includes sample documents that officials
could use for inter-agency meetings. And it explicitly lists novel
coronaviruses as one of the kinds of pathogens that could require a major
response. The color-coded, checklist-style document addresses issues like
testing, funding, personal protective equipment, emergency declarations, border
control measures, diplomacy, the use of the military, public communication,
even mortuary services…It lays out dozens of key questions to ask at certain
stages of the response (‘Should there be arrangements for medevac or in-country
clinical care advisory for U.S. Persons?’ ‘What is the robustness of contact
tracing?’ ‘Is the incident likely to impact housing such that alternative housing
needs may become necessary?’) and dozens of key decisions to make (‘Determine
whether to implement screening and monitoring measures, or other travel measures
within the US or globally’; ‘Prioritization and allocation of resources subject
to the Defense Production Act"; "Tailor waste management plans to
incident specific conditions’). While each emerging infectious disease threat
will present itself in a unique way, a consistent, capabilities-based approach
to addressing these threats will allow for faster decisions with more targeted
expert subject matter input from federal departments and agencies.”
This
doesn’t sound like the Obama administration wasn’t taking the potentiality of a
pandemic seriously. We can only accuse Trump and his advisors with political
and personal survival principally on their minds for doing that. When
confronted by the truth by Bret Baier on friendly Fox News, McConnell admitted
he was “wrong” to make repeat Trump’s lies: “They did leave behind a
plan, so I clearly made a mistake in that regard.” Naturally, McConnell couldn’t
leave it that, adding to his credibility problems by claiming he didn’t have an
“opinion” about the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic, because he
didn’t “know enough about the details of that to comment on it in any
detail."
Still, it is one thing to criticize a former
president from the opposition party based on one’s own partisan political ignorances,
but to repeat the ignorances of a known dangerous ignoramus with a history of
misleading and outright false claims is another thing. That Obi-Wan Kenobi line
in the original Star Wars film comes
to mind: “Who is the more foolish—the fool or the fool who follows him?” McConnell
still hasn’t learned that it doesn’t pay for his own credibility and reputation
to be Trump’s fool.
No comments:
Post a Comment