I want everyone to know I'm doing my absolute best to behave. I have not engaged in this particular discussion directly because I do not want to get banned, but I can't let this one slide. It just may take a couple of days to show up as I may have to edit (and re-edit, and re-re-edit) some ... colorful ... expressions, although I won't guarantee a total family-friendly rant. I'm accustomed to being more direct on other forums.
How long before Trump boasts that they have more COVID-19 cases than anywhere else in the world?
How long before Pelosi is more reviled than Trump?
I don't get all the news over here. What is she doing?
Apart from all the wasted time and money investigating Trump for Russian election collusion,
The bulk of the Mueller investigation took place in 2017 and 2018, when the GOP held the House majority and Paul Ryan was speaker and Devin "Mooooo" Nunes was the chair of the HPSCI. The Democrats were not in power when the decision was made to launch the investigation in the House, nor were they in power when the bulk of indictments were issued, nor were they in power when Manafort and Cohen were convicted for real crimes (fraud, campaign finance violations) above and beyond lying to investigators.
Nothing was directly tied to Trump thanks to a coordinated obstruction effort between the WH and Republican Congressional leadership (such as allowing witnesses to simply
refuse to answer subpoenas). Nothing about that investigation shocked me more than discovering Jeff "Weed Whacker" Sessions had the most integrity in the
entire goddamned administration.
Yes, Nancy and the rest of the House Democrats pushed for the investigation, which was warranted based on the intel gathered to that point. Hell, "Russia, if you're listening" was a
GIANT RED FLAG that should have caused the GOP to drop Trump like a lump of hot plutonium all by itself (and would have, not that long ago). Once the Democrats took power they
should have used Congress' inherent contempt power to frog-march witnesses to the Hill.
and trying to impeach him on other grounds (when the whole WORLD knew it was useless),
Impeachment isn't just about removing someone from office, although Trump should have been before things got this far
Trump withheld critical military aid from an ally against a shared geopolitical adversary
in exchange for a political favor. Not for an official policy position, not for a commitment to shared defense, not for one of a hundred other
legitimate strings that we have tied to aid in the past, but for a
political favor against a domestic rival.
There's a term known as "normalization of deviance" - the gradual acceptance of practices that were previously unacceptable. As deviant behavior is repeated without catastrophic results, it slowly becomes the new norm. The term comes up a lot in discussion of the
Challenger disaster, and how NASA progressively let more and more previously unacceptable practices slide, until they needlessly killed 7 astronauts. And then did it again a couple of decades later.
Doing
nothing accelerates that normalization. By bringing up articles of impeachment, the Democrats were at least taking a stand to say that hey, this behavior is unacceptable, it has always been unacceptable, and it should be called out as such.
The fact that you think it was a waste of time means you are part of that normalization of deviance. That you and so many others are
just fine with a President using the resources of foreign governments (friendly or otherwise) to go after his domestic political rivals means that deviant behavior
will become the new norm. Which means you better
keep your goddamned mouth shut when a Democrat starts doing it, because if you think it's acceptable for Trump, then it's just as acceptable for Biden.
I mean, ask yourself honestly, would you have objected if Obama had used his power to pressure, say, the Saudis into announcing an investigation into Don Jr. or Eric for the purpose of embarrassing or discrediting their father? For me, the answer is yes. I would be genuinely surprised if your answer was no (if it
is no, and you
are cool with this regardless of who does it - we are so doomed).
This is the horror of this (mal)administration. So many lovely precedents are being set regarding the expansion of Executive power and behavior and the so-called party of small government is cheering it on loudly and enthusiastically, never considering for an instant that this same expansion of power can
and will be used against them at the earliest opportunity.
she held up the COVID-19 aid bill for Americans to force non-essential green deal and socialist riders onto it.
The primary objections to the relief bill as it was written were that it gave Mnuchin sole discretion to disburse $500 bn (yes, Virginia,
half a trillion dollars) with
no oversight,
no guarantees workers would be retained,
no assurance that it wouldn't personally enrich the Trumps, etc.
Recently, she accused Trump of killing Americans with his COVID-19 policies, despite the fact his early travel bans undoubtedly spared hundreds, if not thousands of lives, yet were criticized at the time by the Democrats.
We have community spread in all 50 states. We're still in the exponential part of the curve and nowhere near the inflection point. We've hit over 155,000 confirmed cases, over 2800 deaths, and it isn't showing any signs of slowing down. The travel bans did
dick-all. It's here. It's entrenched. It's not just killing the old and the sick. The average rate of increase in deaths over the last 12 days is 1.3, based on the Worldometer numbers. If that rate continues to hold (and I have no reason to doubt otherwise, people aren't practicing social distancing for
shit), around 6000 people will be dead by the end of the week. Beyond that things start to get ugly. If that 1.3 rate holds for the entire month of April, then we could be looking at close to a million deaths. While I think 1.3 will hold for the week, I doubt it will hold for the entire month. If the average rate from here on out is, say, 1.15, then we're looking at "only" 225k dead by April 30. A drop to 1.1 will limit deaths to 54K. But that only happens if a) people stay home, b) testing ramps up so we can more effectively target resources, and c) a viable treatment shows up in the next couple of weeks.
There's still plenty of headroom in the
S part of the
SIR model. 50% of the US population lives in just
144 counties. Over 150 million people are concentrated together in large, highly interconnected urban areas with lots of opportunities to infect each other. With little to no testing, we have no idea who's sick, who's put other people at risk, or where new clusters are going to pop up.
Had Trump listened to health experts and his own intelligence community, we'd have been ramping up testing in late December/early January, aggressively testing and tracking everyone entering the country from affected areas, and isolating and quarantining everyone who'd been exposed, and we could have kept the total number of cases in the dozens, maybe low hundreds, and it would be done.
But thanks to his actions, his insistence on downplaying it as a hoax during the critical weeks it was gaining a toehold in the country, we're going to
celebrate if we manage to keep the death toll to "only" 200,000 or so (best case scenario at this point), and we'll be in this mode for
months.
200,000 deaths is a
failure. An abject, wholly unacceptable, wholly
avoidable failure. And that failure will lie with the man who said, and I
fucking quote, "No, I don't accept any responsibility".
