Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Republicans do not trust women.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

No one could have predicted…

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / Bad Takes Pandemic VENTING Open Thread

Bad Takes Pandemic VENTING Open Thread

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It would be pointless to fill up the regular COVID-19 update thread with imprecations. Yet I cannot refrain from praying that Sekhmet, Goddess of Consequences, catches up with the Squatter-in-Chief, every single one of his vile kinfolk and corrupt enablers, and let’s not forget Bob ‘Wise Chronicler’ Woodward very soon and very thoroughly.


Brave Sir Woodward!


And the ‘stupid, smug, self-assured’ (elderly) white men are not all mopes in MAGA caps, either.

Reader Interactions

126Comments

  2. 2.

    FelonyGovt

    Helen Kennedy is exactly right. It’s not so much that he didn’t warn the public, it’s that he knew all this and did nothing to coordinate a strong federal response.

  3. 3.

    debbie

    IT WAS NOT KEEPING EVERYONE CALM THAT HE CARED ABOUT. HE WANTED TO KILL OFF AS MANY LIBTARDS AS POSSIBLE. HE STILL DOES.

  4. 4.

    Another Scott

    The true evil of the Electoral College is that makes the vast majority of people's vote not matter, and by extension it makes their lives not matter to politicians.

    Trump has no reason to care that California is on fire. Literally none. Because he can't get votes from it.

    — Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) September 13, 2020

    Donnie doesn’t follow that logic, because he can’t. He won’t spend any money on disasters in red states, either, because his number one job is to break federal government and people’s trust in it.

    But the overall point of the tweet is a good one. The Electoral College needs to go.

    https://www.nationalpopularvote.com/written-explanation

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  5. 5.

    Immanentize

    I’ll repeat what someone on Twitter said —

    In some alternate universe, Woodward sat on the book until after the election — and people in that universe wish they lived in ours.

  9. 9.

    Another Scott

    @Immanentize: The dynamics change a lot when states aren’t winner-take-all, of course.

    “Donnie got 4,483,810 votes in California, and 2,819,534 votes in New York, bro.”

    ;-)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  10. 10.

    Matt McIrvin

    The fact that the current dogpile of negative Trump stories is mostly shits turning on other shits gives the latter shits the opportunity to just dump on the sources (and anti-anti-Trump left ratfuckers the opportunity to complain that Democrats are in some sense in league with bad people). But there’s not much alternative given who has inside information.

  11. 11.

    Wag

    I’m feeling decidedly mixed emotions about Woodward holding on to his information for has long as he did.  On the one hand, I agree that there is the possibility that had he released the interview tapes earlier that we might have changed the course of the pandemic and saved lives.  This is counterbalanced my my certainty that had the information been released in March that one of two things would have happened: One- the information would have disappeared down the memory hole, and would have been just another blip on the downward spiral that we have found ourselves in for the past three years and the pandemic would have played out exactly as it has, or Two-it would have caused a shift in how the Trump administration had handled the pandemic, and Trump would be cruising to reelection.

     

    By waiting, Woodward has been able to maximize his impact.  There is no way that anyone can downplay the pandemic, Trump now owns the deaths, and there is the possibility of a seismic shift in public opinion that wouldn’t have existed under the other scenarios.  On the whole, and as much as it pains me to say it, I think that Woodward has done us a great service by waiting for this moment.

  14. 14.

    Mike in NC

    Fat Bastard’s minions have been all over the Sunday talking heads shows to tell everybody what a ‘perfect’ response he had to the pandemic (because of course everything he does is ‘perfect’).

  18. 18.

    Another Scott

    @Wag: Counterfactuals are often fun.  And maybe you’re right that it would have been memory-holed by now.  But it really wasn’t Woodward’s decision (nor the decision of all of these other authors) to make.  They should have blown the whistle.

    One thing that we do know would have mattered…

    If the CDC had been allowed to lead public communication, Americans would have better understood the risk of Covid and how to protect ourselves and our families. We would have saved lives and jobs.

    — Dr. Tom Frieden (@DrTomFrieden) September 12, 2020

    (via HelenBranswell)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  20. 20.

    Immanentize

    @Another Scott: Your quote, wherever it’s from, falls into the “figures don’t lie, but liars figure” innumeracy problems.

    Clinton received more votes over Trump in California than she received over Trump nationally:

    Approx. 8,754,000 vs 4,484,000 in Cal.

    She received 1.7 mil. more in New York making a surplus equal to what would be half of Clinton’s excess votes nationally.  So yes, without the electoral college, New York and California would have elected the president.

  24. 24.

    Another Scott

    @Immanentize: But the campaign would have been very different.  Yes, she probably would have still won – that’s the whole point after all – everyone’s vote should count.

    But if Donnie didn’t write off CA and NY and instead had campaigned in Rochester and Buffalo and Yreka and Fresno and … then who knows what might have happened.

    The EC distorts campaigns, politics, and our national government.  OH, FL, PA, WI aren’t the only states that matter.

    My $0.02.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  26. 26.

    Sloane Ranger

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: What I thought was funny (and not in a ha ha way) was him going on to say “What do we do wear masks and stay inside for another year? What does that get us?” When right behind him were some saner Trump fans who were wearing masks, thereby proving that you can wear a mask AND go outside at the same time!

  27. 27.

    Benw

    Points at Trump: “fuck you!”
    Points at Woodward: “and fuck you!”
    Points at Liz Warren: “you’re cool”
    Points at Ivanka: “and fuck you!”

  29. 29.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Wag:

    or Two-it would have caused a shift in how the Trump administration had handled the pandemic, and Trump would be cruising to reelection.

    If this had happened, I would have welcomed it. Minimizing the direct human toll is always more important than the political effects.

    But… it never would have happened. Impossible.

  31. 31.

    Kent

    @Wag: Agreed.   The Woodward interviews were conducted just weeks after impeachment.  If that didn’t bring him down, the Woodward interview wouldn’t have either.*  Some disagreement about the severity and infectiousness of Covid-19 at a point in February or early March when very few people had actually died would have had zero effect on the course of US policy and would long ago have disappeared into the memory hole.

    It’s not like we were flying blind.  We had the examples of Italy and Spain happening at those same moments.  There was immense coverage of the course of the pandemic in Italy.  We knew what we were dealing with.

    November 3 is the only thing that matters.

    *I mean Bob Woodward is still a tool. But I don’t blame him personally for the course of the pandemic.  That is all on Trump and the 40% of the nation who enables him.

  33. 33.

    germy

    “why aren’t you wearing a mask?”

    “I have a hard time hearing people when they speak.  That’s why I don’t wear a mask.”

  34. 34.

    sdhays

    @Wag: I agree with this mostly. I don’t think it would have caused a shift in how the Dump administration handled the pandemic. Dump would have reacted like a feral chicken and lashed out at Woodward and the Republican Senate would have all hidden under their desks until reporters stopped asking them for comment, which would have taken a day or two with our ADD media. And then the Dump administration would have gone back to doing what it does best: jack shit.

    But maybe it would have changed how states and private enterprises dealt with the virus and that could have saved lives. That’s what the tweet up above asserts. I don’t know.

  35. 35.

    RSA

    @Another Scott:

    Counterfactuals are often fun.  And maybe you’re right that it would have been memory-holed by now.  But it really wasn’t Woodward’s decision (nor the decision of all of these other authors) to make.  They should have blown the whistle.

    Agreed. And even back in March we had projections of the number of deaths COVID-19 could lead to—some much, much higher than what we have today. Woodward can’t be credited for waiting without also being blamed for standing by and not doing anything to help.

  36. 36.

    Matt McIrvin

    @RSA: Yeah, I don’t think the general picture of the disease was ever rosy. Some of the projections imagined COVID spreading essentially unchecked, infecting 60-70% of the US population over a two-year period and killing about 1-2 million people in the US.

    As it is, I think we’re on track for about half that, though it could be lower if a vaccine or much more effective treatment gets widespread distribution first. And what difference there is is entirely down to states, localities and individuals acting without federal help.

  37. 37.

    patrick II

    If you believe Trump withheld information about the dangers of COVID because he felt his countrymen would panic it just shows the disdain he has for the American people.  Leaders in other countries informed their countrymen of the danger and began truth based policies that suppressed the spread of the disease. The people of those countries were able to handle it.  They didn’t run around like their hair was on fire, but generally complied with the difficult task laid before them.  Because Trump has disdain bordering on hatred for the people he claims to be one of we lead the world in COVID deaths. His followers should be clear-eyed about the slap in the face he has given them.

  39. 39.

    zhena gogolia

    WaPo:

    Biden, who is leading Trump in the money race, got even more good news in the form of a pledge by former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg to spend at least $100 million in Florida to help elect the Democratic presidential nominee.

  40. 40.

    RaflW

    BTW, can anyone shed light on the dank and disturbing world of anime fanboi twitter? I made an anti-‘militia’ twitter comment in re: Multnoma County the other day, and a host of Anime freaks have been pushing back.

    They all have cartoon avitars and many of their bios are full of ingroup signaling that means little if one doesn’t give a shit about their, uhhh, culture. But they seem Nazi-curious, some of them, and others are anarcho-tear-it-downs (which doesn’t make sense, of course, since ‘ungrowth’ing would likely come with an unstable internet and less access to Anime pr~n).

    Anyhooo, it’s probably not important. But I just wanted to vent about another shitty corner of America. I could care less what gets people off (as long as consent is central to it). But when a fandom/kink crosses into fascist ideology, and then bubbles up on my timeline, I’m gonna go ‘yeesh, what is this?!’

  41. 41.

    Scout211

    Good news.  I wondered about this postcard that we got in the mail (California) last week.  It was so confusing and filled with generic “absentee ballot” information that does not apply in California, where we all will be getting ballots in the mail.

    https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/local-politics/colorado-sues-us-postal-service-incorrect-voting-statement/73-932f58cb-b14f-4e21-933b-994ef55b6008

    DENVER — A judge granted a temporary restraining order Saturday evening after Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Postal Service over a USPS mailing to Colorado voters that includes what the lawsuit states are “false statements.”

  43. 43.

    RaflW

    @zhena gogolia: That credible money drop (unlike Trump’s notion that he ‘might’ kick $100M into his own campaign) has Trump flop-sweat-tweeting this morning.

    But honestly, Bloomberg is just now offering to come up with a fraction of the cash he’d previously said he’d drop on Dems around the country. Glad he’s finally making progress towards his earlier promise.

  44. 44.

    Kent

    @Another Scott:Counterfactuals are often fun.  And maybe you’re right that it would have been memory-holed by now.  But it really wasn’t Woodward’s decision (nor the decision of all of these other authors) to make.  They should have blown the whistle.

    How many high ranking Generals and other top former administration and GOP officials are sitting on information RIGHT NOW that would inform us further about the quality of the man sitting in the White House?   The number is in the dozens if not hundreds.

    Does Woodward have a greater obligation than say Mattis, Kelly, or Tillerson?  Who actually all took an oath to defend the constitution and country?

  45. 45.

    scav

    Maskless And Greedy Ass*s.  Or, Maskless and Greedy Authoritarians for the terminally polite. Maskless Authoritarians Grumbling Audibly. Minority Assholes Grabbing Authority. This could go on for a long long time.

    But the masks sure have come off the Republican and Conservative Agendas.

  48. 48.

    MisterForkbeard

    @FelonyGovt: To use Trump’s own metaphor: This is like Churchill trying to keep a panic while civilians were being bombed in WWII. And then grounding the RAF and telling everyone the bombing will just stop on its own.

  52. 52.

    Robmassing

    @Wag:

    Two-it would have caused a shift in how the Trump administration had handled the pandemic, and Trump would be cruising to reelection.

    Here’s the thing though: I don’t think it would have caused a shift. Trump would have lied lied lied about his lying and continued to lie, and continued to do nothing. And his Republican enablers still would have twisted themselves in knots to rationalize supporting him. His base would have said “FAKE NEWS!!” just as they are doing now.

  53. 53.

    Robmassing

    What makes Woodward’s callousness even worse is that he is so rich and has so many best-sellers, how could one more vacation home have been enough reason to sit on this?

  56. 56.

    Brachiator

    @patrick II: 

    If you believe Trump withheld information about the dangers of COVID because he felt his countrymen would panic it just shows the disdain he has for the American people.

    It is not just that Trump withheld information or tried to make sure that the nation did not panic. It is here that Woodward is a bad reporter. He records Trump’s self-serving lies, but does not go deeper.

    Trump’s response to the pandemic was insufficient because Trump is incompetent, stupid, unable to assess information, unwilling to listen and incapable of making a good decision with the information he is given.

    I also suspect that Trump has a phobia about disease and illness. He is afraid of the virus.

    You are right that Trump has disdain for the people he is supposed to help. Another way of looking at this is to say that he only has regard for himself and he wants people to make him look good. Especially people writing books about him.

    Trump’s lie about why he withheld information about the pandemic is a feeble attempt to claim that he had some good intentions at heart. Trump is an instinctive, natural born liar when it comes to trying to make himself look good.

    The bottom line is that he not only withheld information, he failed to act to make help available at the federal level and he actually refused to help states. Somewhere in his twisted mind, not causing panic meant publicly lying about the pandemic and doing little to help contain it.

    Are we supposed to accept the lie that if Trump provided massive aid and assistance, the public would have said “Wow. Trump is doing so much to fight this virus. I guess it must be really bad!”

    Trump is such a fraud and liar that he cannot even pretend to honest.

  57. 57.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Another Scott:

    Donnie doesn’t follow that logic, because he can’t. He won’t spend any money on disasters in red states, either, because his number one job is to break federal government and people’s trust in it.

    Breaking the government is his enablers agenda. Trump’s thinking about the West Coast is far simpler: we didn’t (and won’t) vote for him, so we should be punished, i.e. “When someone attacks me, I always attack back…except 100x more.”

  58. 58.

    oldgold

    Watched the Stephanopoulos program this morning.

    Taken as a whole, a casual viewer of politics would have come away thinking  Biden had a tough week. Insane.

  60. 60.

    Lum’s Better Half

    The only thing that matters is winning in November and getting the CFSG out of office.

    If holding this information until the right moment helps, so be it.  100000 dead versus the millions at risk makes the decision clear.

    Sometimes you need to be the adult.

  61. 61.

    sdhays

    @Brachiator: It is not just that Trump withheld information or tried to make sure that the nation did not panic. It is here that Woodward is a bad reporter. He records Trump’s self-serving lies, but does not go deeper.

    This. He operates at this gossip level, documenting what people are saying. And when they say outrageous, criminal things, he puts it down in his notebook as “hmm, this will be juicy”. He literally wants nothing to do with another story like Watergate, even if it landed right in his lap.

  62. 62.

    Ken

    @RaflW: I think cracked.com did an exposé a couple weeks ago on the weird Nazi sub-groups of the anime, furry, and similar communities.  At least for the furries, the writer’s take was that it seemed, well, inconsistent to combine Nazism with a demand that society accept your desire to dress up as a fox.

  64. 64.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @patrick II: It’s “The Third Man” ferris wheel scene.

    (Long shot from Martins’ eye line of the fairground far below and the people now on it.)

    Would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?

    If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped – would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man……free of income tax.

    It’s the only way to save money nowadays.

  65. 65.

    sdhays

    @Sister Golden Bear: It’s more than that, though. He didn’t really give a shit about the destruction in Iowa either, and they voted for him in droves. I think it’s related to his dislike of veteran amputees – it brings “people” (aka Donnie Dump) down, so he doesn’t want to think about it or see it. He doesn’t want anything to do with 90% of the responsibilities of a normal President, because those things are a drag and hard.

    That the fires are happening in blue states just makes it more “defensible”.

  66. 66.

    patroclus

    What actually happened was that Xi was honest with Trump and told him the virus was airborne and caused by droplets (and the Chinese scientists mapped the DNA and provided other relevant information) in January and early February.  Trump downplayed it and lied about it until the turning point came on March 12-13 when the NBA player got diagnosed and all the sports leagues shut down.  Then, for about 3-4 days, Trump took it seriously – he declared a national emergency, freeing up some funds, signed the first relief bill and said he had invoked the Defense Production Act (although it turned out he did so only partially).  Then, as the Seltzer book points out, Fox convinced him to start downplaying and lying about it again, which he’s been doing ever since; except that he did sign the 2nd and 3rd bills, only after negotiating and watering them down somewhat.  We all have watched this in real time.

    Would Woodward behaving like a journalist instead of a smarmy money-grubbing bookseller have changed that timeline?  I don’t think so.  Woodward is not to blame for the deaths; Trump is.  Woodward’s revelations really aren’t all that revelatory.  It only seems that way because the Beltway regards him highly for some reason (despite much evidence to the contrary).  Serious observers have known about Trump’s lies and downplaying since the pandemic began.

    Am I glad that Woodward’s “revelations” are now being taken seriously and have created a week-long firestorm?  Yes.  It seems to have helped in the campaign.  But it doesn’t change my perception of Woodward.  Nor Trump.  Trump’s lies and inept response to the pandemic are pathetic and caused many deaths (in magnitudes dwarfing 9/11).  Woodward is merely a bad journalist.

  68. 68.

    Ella in New Mexico

    Nobody with a firing brain cell did not know the truth about the deadliness of the Coronavirus when these conversations were being taped by Woodward.

    The only people who refused to believe all the scientists and doctors and the smart people and deny all the images of death and grief and destruction on the screens right in front of their faces were die hard Trump Culters or Republican sociopaths who short-sitedly valued the “economy” over the needs of Americans.(Which tanked even worse than it could have. And those people actually took plenty of precautions because, fuck, dying from COVID is what the little people do.)

    At some point we have to hold The Stupids accountable for choosing to ignore what the vast majority of the rest of us decided was the right thing to do. Trump included. THEY caused the deaths of many, many innocent people and even now are persisting in places like ND/SD not because Bob Woodward didn’t immediately release his tapes in March but because they are fucking, God-damned stupid people.

    I love what we do in NM with these folks: tell them to STFU and put on the mask or GTFO of my business, restaurant, gym or clinic. We fine or shut down businesses who give the Gov’s orders the finger. We’re persisting with our rules even though were at an R0 of 0.75. Mostly because we’ve got the whiny Red parts of our state acting like this is either a hoax or the fucking end of the world because they have to wear a mask to Walmart, so Gov. Lujan is being absolutely merciless in her refusal to release restrictions. I. LOVE. IT.

    At some point a few weeks ago, I just stopped agonizing over what this Governor or that Legislator or those cities did or did not do in response to the Coronavirus and focused on what my community and state was doing. Because I don’t give any more fucks about these people. What kind of “Rugged Independence” is it that you’ll literally do a 180 degree reversal your beliefs just because the Great Orange MAGA Man has declared it to be the New Truth?

    Every step of the way on Corona, Trump has revealed himself as the complete and utter failure we all knew he is. Every stupid decision, every news conference where he told people to inject bleach, every loud mouthed demand for a state or a city or a sports team to “OPEN NOW!!” has lead to the giant lead in the polls for Biden, and in a sad, tragic way, it had to happen for us to get rid of this demon. God forbid he’d have done a marginally decent job and just let the smart people handle this, we’d be looking at a shoo-in this fall.

    The rest of us are the sane ones. They’re the minority. Fuck them. We owe them NOTHING. And when this is over they should get absolutely NO MERCY. Their party needs to be run so deep into the ground it never finds its way out of the swirling hot magma at the center of the Earth

    Thank you for allowing me to vent.

  71. 71.

    MattF

    I guess it’s worth noting that David Frum has a somewhat different take on the Woodward revelations:

    For what it’s worth, I believe that there is much less than meets the eye to the most headline-grabbing quote in Rage: “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

    As recorded, that reads like a cold-blooded confession that Trump intentionally concealed deadly knowledge at a time—February and March—when that knowledge could have saved lives. But you can reach that conclusion only if you believe that Trump knows things the way fully rational people know them: as statements about reality that exist independently from the speaker. Trump’s mind does not work that way. He does not observe the world and then use words to describe it. He speaks the words he wishes you to believe, and then trusts the world to conform to his wishes.

    This undermines the ‘Woodward should have spoken up’ argument. If Trump will say anything that the listener wants to hear, then there’s nothing to argue over.

  72. 72.

    scav

    I’m not sure the “it doesn’t matter if lives are lost, the important thing is winning the election (so hide the data)” is a good look for either / any of the sides.

  73. 73.

    germy

    The fact that white people can believe in QAnon but not believe in systemic racism is an indictment on the failures of the American educational system.

    — Corey Richardson (@vexedinthecity) September 11, 2020

  75. 75.

    germy

    @Immanentize:

    He makes a lot of sense.

    So we’re clear; cell phone cameras haven’t found Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, UFOs, or the Chupacabra, but damn near twice a month we see a video of the cops brutalizing a Black person. If you can’t acknowledge systemic racism, it’s because you’re enjoying its benefits. https://t.co/XzgWsMRRHt— Corey Richardson (@vexedinthecity) September 12, 2020

  76. 76.

    PsiFighter37

    @MattF: I would tend to agree with that. Donnie clearly lives in an alternate reality, so he will try to convince everyone else about it. But he’s also too dumb to realize when the truth slips, so now that it has, he is repeating the exact same words he told Woodward and is expecting everyone to believe it.

  77. 77.

    Immanentize

    Report from the front of Covid:

    UT Austin decided that football must go on!  They tested a good number of students who indicated they would attend.  1200 tested, 95 positive.  But U Texas didn’t count those tests on its reported totals.  A student population of over 35,000; they are testing fewer than 2000/wk.  That is a horrible rate of testing and potential infection!  Game testing extrapolated across the student population (about 40k students only) more than 3000 students would be positive.  Shit!

    Meanwhile in Houston — Rice U (student population approaching 7k) has conducted over 18,000 tests since August 1 — 16 positives total (10 undergrads and six staff). Hootie Hoo!!!

  79. 79.

    RSA

    @Lum’s Better Half:

    100000 dead versus the millions at risk makes the decision clear.

    I’m thinking of a variation on an old Twilight Zone episode: You’re given a magic box and told, “If you press this button, 100,000 Americans will die and Trump will certainly lose the election.”

    For me, that would be a very hard choice.

  80. 80.

    schrodingers_cat

    If Woodward’s revelations had come earlier they would have saved more lives, simply because the MSM takes his utterances seriously. But he sat on them till he could write a book about it. Some journalists at the NYT have done the same.

    The onus of close to 200,000 dead is entirely on the administration but Woodward the excuse maker for Republican Presidents is no prince either.

  81. 81.

    cmorenc

    This morning, I saw a tell-tale sign the GOP (at least the business wing thereof) is thinking they’re going to lose this election.  Was channel-flipping and caught a brief segment on Fox Business Channel where maria bartiromo was interviewing some Wall Street flack on the subject of the federal government currently borrowing 50% of its expenditures, and how the need to pay that back would force the federal government to contract the scope of its programs and reach.

    • confirms that a likely Biden win means the GOP plans to abruptly go all budget-hawk come January 2021.
  82. 82.

    Sebastian

    I am wondering what would happen if democratic spoxpeople on TV started showing up slathered in orange like Trump.

  85. 85.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    @germy: I want to smack the woman who is holding the baby In that video. Sure bring your infant out on broiling tarmac in a crowd of unmasked strangers

  89. 89.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @oatler.:

    George apparently went on and on pressing Symone about what Biden did about the pandemic in January and February, as if he both had access to the briefings and were in a position to do anything about it. (Even as it was, he wrote a detailed and clear-eyed op-ed for USA Today on January 27, only days after the first case in this country was confirmed.)

    Remember, in January and February, a great many people still believed Joe didn’t have a prayer of getting the nomination. It wasn’t really until Jim Clyburn’s endorsement and the March 3rd Super Tuesday results that he became unstoppable. It’s just stupid for Snuffleupagus to act as though Joe Biden was in dereliction of duty at a time he held no official government position and wasn’t even the presumptive Democratic nominee.

    What garbage.

  90. 90.

    lumpkin

    Have Woodward’s revelations made any difference in the present? No. And it wouldn’t have made any difference if he’d gone public earlier. Trump’s enablers just love it that people are getting wrapped around the axle debating whether or not Woodward is the bad guy here.

  91. 91.

    Citizen Alan

    @cmorenc:

    What really fills me with seething rage is the GOP scum who absolutely insist that the deficit and the national debt are the biggest problems facing America but who hysterically refuse to consider addressing it by raising taxes or by cutting the military budget. No, the only way to fix it is by reducing the most vulnerable segments of society to penury and misery. You know, like Jesus would have wanted.

  96. 96.

    Kay

    I’ve been working about 4 hours a week at the Dem headquarters here, and what NOT “very online” Democrats are saying is they don’t see any Biden campaign coverage.

    They hear Trump, Trump, Trump and although most of that is negative (Trump aside the Trump hires are overwhelmingly negative and nasty) it’s still unequal coverage and they want to see Biden coverage. I think we could help with this but I can’t find A or ANY of the reporters who are covering the Biden campaign, outside of one at Bloomberg.

  97. 97.

    Kay

    The upside of more Biden campaign coverage is, outside the fanatical far Right base people really are fucking sick to death of hearing from and about Donald Trump and his horrible grown children and their spouses and the other assorted low quality hires, so Biden campaign coverage is new.

    There’s a lot of room for growth in Biden coverage, while Trump coverage has been maxed out for years.

  98. 98.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Lum’s Better Half: Oh joy, a newbie** Legend In His/Her Own Mind who expects us all to remember a lame homebrewed acronym. Jeebus Frackin’ Cripes (JFC).

    ** And spare us the “I lurk a lot but rarely comment” BS – that dog don’t hunt.

    @zhena gogolia: No you shouldn’t have. Why should you have to guess what’s in his/her mind?? Anyone who chooses to use her/his own acronym & can’t be bothered to define it at first use is a shitty stylist and a fucking arsehole.

  99. 99.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    I will again call bullshit on blaming Woodward over this.

    I know, I know, I know… there was only *ONE PERSON IN THE ENTIRE US WHO KNEW TRUMP WAS A LIAR*, right? No one, besides Bob Woodward knew that Trump told lies, right?

    And *NO ONE*, no one, no one, no one, knew that Covid-19 was dangerous, except Trump and Woodward, I get that.

    And sure, I get  that Trump is the entire Trump administration; there are *no other people* who could have taken action to have saved American lives.

    Even in that alternate reality, if a reporter was covering George Floyd’s death, the reporter was not expected to stop the police from committing murder – the reporter was expected to *REPORT* on the murder, as if the reporter wasn’t present.

    That’s precisely what happened here: Woodward noticed criminal behavior in progress, and reported on just how far Trump and his enablers would go. Don’t go acting like the entire Republican Party doesn’t have the resources for *one* prominent Republican to talk to an epidemiologist, and sound the alarm about how Trump’s incompetence is killing people. Don’t act like the Democrats weren’t scorned and vilified *FOR TELLING THE TRUTH AND SAVING LIVES*. Don’t act like somehow “But Bob Woodward said something!” would change the political climate where the entire Republican Party perpetually acts like the shopkeeper in the Monty Python Dead Parrot Sketch, rather than admit the plain, obvious, truth about their party’s leader.

    “Bob Woodward sat on this!” is *NOTHING* compared to Trump’s fat, lazy, ass which he sat on when action was needed. Don’t play the game where the Republicans can pretend they got fooled by a lack of information. The only thing Woodward changed was, he proved that Trump was not a goddamned, ignorant, lying, incompetent shit-for-brains whose inaction was killing people; he proved that he was a goddamned, *INFORMED*, lying, incompetent, shit-for-brains. Swapping that one word out is not an excuse for the Republicans cheerleading Trump’s gross negligence in protecting the American people.

  100. 100.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Ella in New Mexico:

    The rest of us are the sane ones. They’re the minority. Fuck them. We owe them NOTHING. And when this is over they should get absolutely NO MERCY. Their party needs to be run so deep into the ground it never finds its way out of the swirling hot magma at the center of the Earth 

    Amen!

  102. 102.

    Another Scott

    @LongHairedWeirdo: Beautiful fire you’ve built there.  Who knew that strawmen were so flammable??

    :-/

    Nobody’s saying it’s all BW’s fault.  We’re saying he should have spoken up.

    Thanks.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  105. 105.

    germy

    Four times in a month: @chucktodd invites REPUBLICANS on his @MeetThePress *panel of journalists* and no Democrat

    Aug. 9: Two journalists & Rich Lowry
    Aug. 23: Two journalists & Gov. Scott Walker
    Aug. 30: Three journalists & Gov. Pat McCrory
    Today: Two journalists & Al Cardenas pic.twitter.com/dwlAyk91cy

    — Matt Negrin, HOST OF HARDBALL AT 7PM ON MSNBC (@MattNegrin) September 13, 2020

    heard from several reporters who are frustrated NBC puts them in this position. Because there are no Dems on panel, journalists end-up voicing D viewpoints…. thereby fulfilling right-wing attacks of liberal bias among press.
    The media’s self-destructive behavior is bottomless. https://t.co/wPGJRNV4Yd

    — Eric Schultz (@EricSchultz) September 13, 2020

  106. 106.

    Bill Arnold

    @RSA:

    For me, that would be a very hard choice.

    As it should be. What would your choice be?
    Remember, there are global impacts too; American actions and memes circulate worldwide. And there are downstream consequences that might affect the trajectory of global heating one way or the other. Four more years of DJT as POTUS would have consequences, e.g. (probably) including at least 10s of millions of deaths due to additional global heating [1]

    [1] Longtime Climate Science Denier Hired At NOAA (September 12, 2020, Rebecca Hersher)
    David Legates, a University of Delaware professor of climatology who has spent much of his career questioning basic tenets of climate science, has been hired for a top position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
    He’s at least a publishing scientist, https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=vCRJYfwAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
    Amusingly, I see he’s a card-carrying wingnut. These wingnuts are so connected!
    The Experiment: Capitalism versus Socialism (David R. Legates, Ph.D., 2017/3/22) (Summary: East vs West Germany shows that worry about global heating is socialism and therefore bad. I mock, but it’s not much better.)
    That’s published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, which is the journal for a small (5000 members) radical wingnut medical association that has recently (2000s) denied a connection between HIV and AIDs: Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, that has published other global heating skeptic articles and at least one article (2007) suggesting that the “HIV does not cause AIDS” hypothesis should be considered.

  107. 107.

    germy

    *Trump declares victory on election night and refuses to leave office*

    CHUCK TODD: Joining us for our panel are two NBC correspondents and the president’s new Brigadier General of the new Law And Order Police, Stephen Miller. Stephen: What’s your take on the unlawful rioters?

    — Matt Negrin, HOST OF HARDBALL AT 7PM ON MSNBC (@MattNegrin) September 13, 2020

  108. 108.

    JPL

    @LongHairedWeirdo: trump brags to anyone who listens, so no way was Woodward the only one to know trump was lying to the public.

    trump was busy golfing and didn’t care.   It’s that simple.

  109. 109.

    Benw

    @germy: Thanks for having me, Chuck, but before I explain antifa Biden dementia socialist, could we please stand and say the Pledge of Allegience replacing God with Trump?

    Todd: sure!

  110. 110.

    germy

    RNC chair Ronna McDaniel’s defense of Trump’s comments to Woodward, to @chucktodd is not that there was a plan on the pandemic, but: “Think of what would have happened if he'd have gone out and said, ‘This is awful. We should all be afraid. We don't have a plan.’”

    — Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) September 13, 2020

  113. 113.

    Kay

    Nate Cohn
    @Nate_Cohn
    ·2h
    The Bloomberg playbook in ’18 often involved striking very late. Most of the time, they didn’t show their hand until they played it. And why should they? There’s plenty of evidence that late ads are most effective. Striking late means no opportunity to organize a counter.

    The belief in Michael Bloomberg springs eternal. Is it because he’s rich? Yes, yes it is. Rich = smart and good.

    At least wait until he spends the money. This guy JUST BURNED US and yet for some reason we’re all supposed to pretend he’s trustworthy. He’s not.

  114. 114.

    Bookeater (formerly JosieJ)

    You know, call me naive, but I still think Woodward should have come forward sooner.

    Even if nothing changed.

    Even if the information was memory-holed.

    Even if it didn’t make a difference.

    Even if the ultimate responsibility—and blame—rests with Trump.

    That he didn’t says to me that he was OK with the fact that he might have made a difference, but didn’t even try.

    Does that make him as bad as (or worse than) Trump? No.  But it puts him on a par with every other administration or elected official who enables Trump.

    If he’d shouted into the void, I’d have more respect for him, even if it was futile.  Now I just think he’s a shit.

  115. 115.

    germy

    @Kay:  You were warning everyone during the primary not to trust Bloomberg, and I was glad to see your comments.  I still believe he only joined the race to thwart Warren.

  117. 117.

    Reboot

    @Uncle Cosmo: You won’t have seen my nym, most probably, since I’m a recent and MOL rare commenter, but I’ve been reading BJ since a little before John Cole converted to Dem. Lum*s Better Half has been around for a while and commenting infrequently before you came on the scene (at least under that nym).

  118. 118.

    Ruckus

    @opiejeanne:

    She has a few metric tons of things to be sorry for. None of which she probably is or ever will be. And really do we give a damn if she’s ever sorry, it would be for all the wrong reasons if she ever is.

  119. 119.

    RSA

    @Bill Arnold:

    As it should be. What would your choice be?

    I don’t think I could push the button, though you’ve laid out a good argument in utilitarian ethics for doing it. This seems to be an example of a ‘dirty hands’ problem, and those are hard to resolve in general, I think.

  120. 120.

    Gregory

    Journalist Bob Woodward, facing criticism for only now revealing President Trump’s early concerns about the severity of the coronavirus, says he needed time to be sure that Trump’s private comments from February were accurate.

    You. Have. Him. On. Tape. 

  121. 121.

    artem1s

    I get the temptation to brush off Woodward’s decision to release as one of those things that would have gotten lost in the chaos. But Bob wants to be the “go to” guy.  The one that everyone listens too when he gets the breaking headlines out there.  And he and the stenographers at the FYNYT and other glitterati news outlets love to be in the know and protect their images as newsmakers.  Yes we all know that a February release of the info wouldn’t have made any difference to Trump or the GOP.  Bob’s crime is he wants to be an influencer and he blew it.  Either he’s the man or he’s just another hack that the world ignores as fake news.  He could have started a chum that led to the cascade of underbussing 6 months ago. But he chose instead to hedge his bets and wait for a time when the rest of the MSM had already started to pile on so he wouldn’t feel irrelevant and ignored.  He was afraid of losing access to the WH. Just like the rest of the WH Press Corp. Period.

  122. 122.

    catclub

    @Matt McIrvin: But… it never would have happened. Impossible

     

    Nobody bothered to tell Trump that the way to get re-elected was to claim no interest in getting re-elected and only interest in protecting the US from the pandemic, and bringing all the resources of the Federal government to bear on the problem. The Democrats would have gone along with a huge stimulus program.  For whatever reason, the GOP is against that kind of thing, now.

  123. 123.

    Brachiator

    @artem1s:

    I get the temptation to brush off Woodward’s decision to release as one of those things that would have gotten lost in the chaos. But Bob wants to be the “go to” guy. The one that everyone listens too when he gets the breaking headlines out there. And he and the stenographers at the FYNYT and other glitterati news outlets love to be in the know and protect their images as newsmakers.

    Decades ago, when he and Bernstein were chasing down Watergate, Woodward was trying to uncover what the White House was doing.

    Now, he and Haberman are essentially White House courtiers. He can say that he is writing for the historical record, but he and the others working on books must also protect Trump, keep his secrets and keep information away from working journalists.

    Woodward and company are part of the Establishment. They have a vested interest in seeing it continue, no matter how corrupt this administration has become. And Trump knows this as well. He can talk about fake news all day long, but in the end he seeks the approval of the NY Times and the Post. It’s another ego boost. It says that he is presidential.

  124. 124.

    Chris Johnson

    Anime fans coming across all alt-right? Yes, absolutely. I promise you there’s been years of determined effort in furry, anime, even My Little Pony fan communities to get people to become literal Nazis: there’s a video series called Alt-Right Playbook that explains how that’s done. That’s absolutely real, and I’m not surprised. Treat them as nothing more than alt-right, MAGA extremist who just happen to have a weird hobby. Alt-right people targeted these groups ON PURPOSE specifically because it’s not expected.

    I lost friends (I talked about this not that long ago) to this phenomenon. Not making it up. The kid (a 4chan kid for years, heavily pilled) ended up immediately changing to a literal attractive-Nazi pony avatar the instant it was clear I was out of there and prepared to walk away from the friends he’d been pilling until they were completely alt-right indoctrinated but thinking they were normal and I was the weird lefty. The instant I was out of there, his avatar was ‘Aryanne’ (not making this up) the white blonde Nazi girl pony used as a ‘free speech, we can make a Nazi pony hero in stories and pictures!’ trojan horse. This is not subtle, it’s working an angle. It’ll be the same with the anime fandoms, with furry. If that fails they go ‘we will make our adorable Nazi pony the BUTT of jokes and still adorable, there, now it’s a joke that she fails to murder the more powerful communists, you can’t censor that! It’s cute how she fails and never gives up!’

    Neither do they. This is not subtle.

    As far as Trump and COVID, that’s not subtle either. I don’t think we’d have gained anything if Woodward had gone public right away, because ‘Trump failed’ isn’t the story. I don’t know how much Woodward knows, but Trump got exactly what he wanted because he was and is out to kill as many ‘bad worthless Americans’ as he can, and they thought maybe black people were going to die off more than whites. And they thought poor welfare people were going to die off more than rich people. And he answers to Putin, but in trying to kill mass numbers of Americans that’s not asking Trump to do anything he wouldn’t do anyway: he DOES NOT CARE and is only in it for himself, and the Republicans have been desperate to fix what they saw as a demographic risk.

    The real story is Trump trying to orchestrate a natural genocide of mostly Democrats, and to keep the pandemic exploding as hard as possible with the aid of Russian meddling and QAnon and every technique available to worsen the contagion. They are still idiots, and they thought, much like young people called it ‘Boomer remover’, that they had a Democrat Remover on their hands if only they could just blow it up. It would fix their problems and leave Republicans in power.

    COVID don’t care what they THOUGHT it would do. And so, now, the Trump forces are totally exposed to the pandemic and these guys are down in the bunker going ‘well, at least it will kill all those poors, and we can make the survivors completely hysterical and they will attack Democrats as crazed terrorists, and if we can’t rule we can at least destroy the country before the Dems get their hands on it, and we can make SURE they can’t possibly prosper’.

    That’s the story. It’s still unfolding. I believe Woodward knows this, too. So there wasn’t that much point going with ‘Trump failed to protect!’ when, underlying that, there’s the even bigger scandal of Trump is literally trying to mass murder Americans on a huge scale because he thinks that’s useful and good. And it’s harder to establish that one, the full treason Russian asset psychopath one, and Woodward may well know it’s true.

    So he suffers from Village syndrome. That’s when these people have an inkling of this horrible stuff, but it’s THEY who don’t want to ‘panic the poor dumb American people’. So he, the elite, he’s gonna try to orchestrate with the other elites and come up with a way to sell the story so us poor dumb plebs don’t get frightened too much. That is very Woodward, that is very Village. They lie to us, like the alt-right radicalizers. Just because they act dumb doesn’t mean they are as dumb as they act. Villago delenda est.

  125. 125.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Reboot: Lum*s Better Half has been around for a while and commenting infrequently before you came on the scene (at least under that nym).

    Yeah, I don’t recognize yours either & I’ve been on this blog practically every day for the last several years. Maybe yinz only comment on the garden or pet or recipe threads, which i skip right past since I have neither a garden nor a pet and TaMara’s customary culinary offerings are weaponized to kill diabetics like me.

    And just FTR I have never had another nym here, since I never posted anything I felt I needed to skulk away from – I own my own faux pas. And like a responsible poster, I define any acronym that isn’t commonplace on the Net.

  126. 126.

    LongHairedWeirdo

    @Another Scott:  He *did* speak up, and before the election, so, now you know that Trump lied, and his entire administration did, and the entire Republican congressional caucus just didn’t care until it turned out there was proof.

    I suspect you think there was another time when exposing the lies would have saved lives, which is totally ridiculous because we already knew he was spouting harmful untruths day in and day out. All that’s changed is, now we know it was a conscious choice to lie, not just stupidity.

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