Friday, May 15, 2020

McConnell still hasn't learned that it doesn't pay to play Trump's fool


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Threats and Biological Incidents,  which Trump’s national security political appointees ignored, claiming that it was “out-of-date”—but more likely because like in everything else, Trump wanted to erase any trace of Obama and his policies and legacy for petty personal reasons, and he had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.

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