I watched with disbelief and disgust as Bill Maher on his Friday night show hosted his friend Brett Stephens, a conservative op-ed columnist for the New York Times who repeated the points of his recent column “Why should the rest of the nation play by New York rules?” There Stephens opines that if you take New York (with a rate of 124 death per 100k people) out of the equation, the country is doing quite well during the pandemic with a mere death rate of around 7.5 deaths per 100,000 people. However this, if true, is an average. New Jerseys’s rate is 87, Massachusett’s is 68 and Louisiana’s is 42. Even a death rate of 7.5 per 100,000 for the 300 million people who live outside of New York would put potential deaths in the multi millions.
He then claims that Dr. Mihaljevic, the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic, who supports lockdown, told him that “we cannot hold our breath forever.”
From this Stephens concludes, illogically, that states like Tennessee don’t need a lockdown despite not meeting the CDC requirements of declining cases, adequate testing or contact tracing. On the Maher show he focussed on the damage to the economy of the policy of putting people’s health before the economy (by which he means corporate profits). Stephens was previously an editor and writer at the Wall Street Journal so this should come as no shock. What was disheartening was the fact that Bill Maher hung on this guy’s every word and agreed with everything he said.
Trump and the right wing press, following the corporate lead, have been flirting with Covid-19 denial despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the American people understand the seriousness of the disease and the need for continued lockdown and testing. Maher, on the other hand, keeps deprecating these things as he broadcasts from his mansion in an exclusive section of Los Angeles. He appears to have little sympathy for the working people and doctors who put their lives on the line to combat the pandemic with health care and food production every day. As an older person he appears to have a kind of death wish claiming he’s not afraid of being infected.
Prior to the pandemic Maher did interviews following by a panel which usually included some voices of sanity who could counter the arguments of Maher’s worst guests. He seems to have dropped this format in favor of interviews only which is unfortunate since although a funny and talented comedian Maher often displays no grasp of basic facts instead displaying Trump-like gut instincts.
On the same show he had an interview with Mike Taibbi, journalist on the Rolling Stone, whose past work has often exposed the horrible exploitation of the 99 percent by the one percent. But something has gone wrong with this guy and he appears to have gotten it into his head that people are treating Trump unfairly and are saying “Y” if Trump says “X”. He ranted on and on about how people are opposing the use of hydroxychloroquine solely because Trump said it was good and so you could find nothing in the press that was objective about the drug. This overlooks about a gazillion news reports about recent medical studies showing the drug was killing people (including even on Fox News) which caused Fox and Trump to back down on their wild claims. Taibbi forgot to mention the run on the drug Trump created by his irresponsible remarks which has created a crisis for those with lupus and malaria who require the drug to live. Oddly he also forgot to mention Trump’s more recent remarks on bleach — was it knee jerk anti-trumpism that caused us to reject swallowing bleach? Come on Mike and Bill, you can do better than this.
Fun fact about Brett Stephens: he’s a racist. He recently claimed in a column that Ashkenazi Jews are smarter than everybody else. Aside from playing into Nazi anti-semitic tropes which claim that Jews are too smart for their own good and thus exploit everyone else, this is simply a canard. As a Ashkenazi Jew myself I can affirm that, although we do have a few smarties, I have personally met plenty of dopes amongst our brethren. Don’t get me started.
Please check out my Youtube channel TRUMP THE OPERA which combines classical music with Trump criticism in the form of animations. Thousands have viewed the latest video: The Trump Virus and even liked it. https://youtu.be/LL4mWEZ5QXk