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    Watching Trump's briefing gave me anxiety. I'm veering wildly between total blissed out serenity and skin-blistering stress as it is, but watching Trump tonight made my skin crack.

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      Originally posted by EIM View Post
      Watching Trump's briefing gave me anxiety. I'm veering wildly between total blissed out serenity and skin-blistering stress as it is, but watching Trump tonight made my skin crack.
      Watch this instead.

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        Hmm, watching that video, you'd get the distinct impression that 60% of his goals were headers.

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          Originally posted by Nocturnal Submission View Post
          I wonder if even a sociopath like Trump has paused for thought and considered that he could have been the direct cause of 2m Americans going to an early grave.
          Briefings and numbers and such don't get through, but if he ever paused for anything, it would be television images of New York. Several times at these press conferences he's gone on about the empty streets, and maybe a little light bulb said "The flu doesn't do that".

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            FWIW, the empty streets are in Times Square, the Financial District and the uber-posh parts of the Upper East Side, not where we actually live.

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              This could go in various threads but here will do:


              "Trump Gets Real about COVID-19


              Donald Trump's daily COVID-19 briefings are still packed full of falsehoods and attempts to rewrite history. However, reality is also starting to take hold. On Tuesday, acknowledging the "hard days that lie ahead," the President said that even with nationwide adoption of stringent mitigation efforts (something that has not happened yet, of course), the death toll in the next several weeks projects to be between 100,000 and 240,000. Trump also suggested that if the number can be kept closer to 100,000, that will mean he's done a "good job."

              One wonders what caused Trump to have his (semi-) "come to Jesus" moment. Certainly it wasn't Jesus himself; if the Lamb of God is talking to anyone these days, it's not Donald J. Trump. Maybe newly anointed Chief of Staff Mark Meadows got to the President, or maybe Dr. Anthony Fauci's words finally began to sink in. Our best guess is that Trump has figured out (or had it explained to him) that people in "his" states are about to be hit really hard. There are many reasons for this, among them a habit of holding irresponsible large gatherings (like church services and funerals), inadequate COVID-19 testing, and a large number of uninsured or under-insured residents (which is due, at least in part, to many red states' turning down Medicaid expansion).

              Just because the President has gotten serious about the epidemic doesn't mean he's pulled things together in terms of combating it, though. There remains no centralized management and/or distribution of resources. When asked on Tuesday about the shortage of ventilators, administration officials shrugged and suggested sharing. Meanwhile, the Pentagon said that it's still sitting on the 2,000 ventilators from its supply that it promised to share, because...nobody has told them where to send the equipment. Trump also put the kibosh on a plan to re-open Obamacare enrollment, so that sick and/or potentially sick people can get insurance. This decision was not explained; readers will just have to make their best guess as to what the problem was (hint: It isn't the "care" part of it). Perhaps the best indication that the President is not particularly interested in the hard work of taking a disastrous situation and making it into a merely bad situation is that he continues to pursue "miracle" solutions; the latest is an unproven Japanese drug called Avigan.

              Meanwhile, consistent with the view that this is primarily a PR problem—and now, a very serious PR problem—Republicans are looking for ways to blame the whole thing on the Democrats. This is not an easy logical leap to make, since the Republican Party controls most of the federal government, and the Democratic Party's signature issue for more than a decade has been better and more widely available healthcare. Nonetheless, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (undoubtedly in conversation with other Republican leaders) thinks he has a way. On Tuesday, he sat with Hugh Hewitt for an interview and said: "[COVID-19] came up while we were tied down on the impeachment trial. And I think it diverted the attention of the government because everything every day was all about impeachment."

              That doesn't work so well timeline-wise (only the very earliest days of COVID-19 overlapped with impeachment), nor does it explain why Trump and his administration could not do two things at once (especially since the President found time for plenty of unnecessary tweeting during the trial). McConnell's thesis also does not explain the near-total lack of action on COVID-19 between the end of the impeachment trial (Feb. 5) and, say, the formal declaration of a national emergency (Mar. 13). Still, guess you gotta go with what you've got; we'll see if the right-wing media picks this up and runs with it."



              https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp20...01.html#item-2

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                Of course they'll run with it and their audience is too gullible and stupid not to make it the new truth.

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                  Or maybe not. Just saw Trump's response to the suggestion:

                  “I don’t think I would have done any better had I not been impeached, okay?” Trump said. “And I think that’s a great tribute to something, maybe it’s a tribute to me, but I don’t think I would have acted any differently, or I don’t think I would have acted any faster.”

                  It is a great tribute to something.

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                    Originally posted by Bruno View Post
                    "I don’t think I would have acted any differently, or I don’t think I would have acted any faster.”
                    Sometimes he tells the truth by accident.

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                      No president has ever responded faster to Covid-19

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                        This is where his inability to admit being less than perfect gets him into trouble. He can't say he'd have acted differently, because that would involve admitting he acted wrongly. Even with an "excuse", that's unacceptable to him.

                        See also "I don't take responsibility at all", which you can't imagine any non pathologically narcissistic politician ever saying in those terms, because it obviously sounds so terrible, even if they might use weasel words to the same effect.

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                          Click through to read the whole thing

                          https://twitter.com/BizballMaury/status/1245741140420079616

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                            The Republicans seem to be leaning very hard in to "Blame the WHO" right now. Rick Scott and Martha McSally are all over supposed connections between the WHO and China and the WHO covering up China's lack of early action. They're obviously trying to divert attention from the astonishing current mismanagement, and it looks so incongruous.

                            It's not the only diversion, of course. Half the Republican Senators seem to be blaming impeachment and the fact that they can't walk and chew gum at the same time. And there's some really weird stuff about how Obama didn't do something during SARS or Swine Flu or H1N1 or something outbreaks, with the obvious disconnect that those obviously didn't have the same impact

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                              [URL]https://twitter.com/anthonymkreis/status/1245195934654488576?s=21[/URL]

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                                Barrage of insults directed at reporters in the room today. Might be setting a new record. His delight when he (thinks he) does a "gotcha" on one journo over an appointment date is a sight to behold.

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                                  Why do you do this to yourself?

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                                    Heh. It's a drug. The pivot from Trump to the experts is a real insight into how courtiers deal(t) with monarchs. "As the President says ... " (says opposite).

                                    Who needs the History Channel when it's live?

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                                      Imagine any of us trying to explain the current state of shite to our early 2016 selves.

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                                        "A darkened attic of fluttering bats*" - hahahaha. That's brilliant. I'll see them in my mind's eye every time he does one of his vacant pauses or Dr. Evil pursed-lipped declamations.

                                        * Slightly unfortunate given the presumed source of COVID-19 though.

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                                          It's why he's immune.

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                                            Originally posted by Bruno View Post
                                            It's why he's immune.

                                            Heh!

                                            Wouldn't it just be our luck if narcissism and spray tan turn out to be better protections against COVID-19 than a healthy immune system and precise social distancing protocols.

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                                              We have a British prime-minister to disprove the first part of that, if not the spray tan element.

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                                                Another classic contribution to the history of public non-apologies, from the Navy Secretary on this captain who got dumped on for speaking out:

                                                "I do not think Captain Brett Crozier is naive nor stupid ... I apologize for any confusion this choice of words may have caused."

                                                Nobody was confused. He called him "naive or stupid".

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                                                  The Trump briefings are making Twitter an even more no-go area because the ball-by-ball commentary is just so pointless. My bad for going back there in times of boredom.

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