Good morning everyone!
Yesterday was a day off and my body dictated that I should sleep in so that when I woke, the story of Bob Woodward’s recordings of Donald Trump was out there...and the rest of the news day was sheer madness.
I have an observation.
I’ve always had a real disliking for the “distraction theory” of Trumpian politics; that is, event y is meant to be a purposeful distraction for event x.
I hear it. I know what people mean.
One of the first things that I noticed as I began to read Twitter, the news, and even some diaries here is that the news of the Trump/Woodward tapes had bumped the story about Trump’s opinions of people who had served in the armed forces way down and off of some front pages.
The Trump/Woodward tapes story (especially the revelation about what Trump knew about the seriousness of the coronavirus and when he knew it) did function as a sort of distraction in this way
Trump tried to say/tweet other things; SCOTUS justices, even the military story which could be read as yet another attempt as a “distraction” from the Woodward tapes and the whistleblower report about the suppression of intel about Russian attempts to tilt the 2020 election.
There is no bottom. There is no “distraction.”
We all know that there is no bottom to the depravity of this *residency. Heck, my cynical side came out and I began to think that The Damn Fool would just have to do something like saying the n-word to give the media something new to chase after.
That, too, would be serious and, IMO, would have social consequences. That couldn’t function as a mere “distraction” even if Trump wanted it to.
Nothing that happens now is a “distraction.”
America has 52 days to decide whether it wants four more years of depravity and so-called “distraction”...and it only gets worse from here on out if Trump is re-elected.
And now...pundits.
The Editorial Board of the Boston Globe writes about The Damn Fool’s deliberate and dishonest handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and what America will need to do in the future.
In the short term, President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus is certainly on the ballot in November. How much incompetence and dishonesty are Americans willing to tolerate from the president? And how much slack are they prepared to cut his defenders in Congress, who repeatedly put politics ahead of Americans' lives? The president’s campaign strategy is clearly to addle white Americans with fear-laced messages this fall, hoping that will be enough to scare them into accepting his gross incompetence.
But the coronavirus fiasco raises questions that go beyond electoral politics. What is clear is that leaders of the United States government — not just the president — sat on vitally important information. It is also clear that American society, writ large, was too vulnerable to misinformation, too divided politically, and too distrustful of science to respond effectively when the threat did become clear.
With the coronavirus still raging, the first priority should obviously be to contain the outbreak. But the country also needs and deserves an honest look at how such a preventable tragedy was not prevented, and how to reform our government and institutions to stop the next pandemic.
Charles Pierce, writing for Esquire, takes his fellow journalist Bob Woodward to task for sitting on 18 hours of Trump tapes that proved that The Damn Fool’s lies about the coronavirus were deliberate.
Pause for a moment and gaze in awe at what happens when two towering careerists collide.
Let us be clear. Both of these men knew before anyone else that the president* was lying in public about the most serious public health crisis in a century. Both of these men knew before anyone else how serious that threat was, and how deadly the disease could be. Both of these men knew before anyone else that a potential disaster was not only possible, but increasingly likely. BOTH OF THESE MEN KNEW! The president* knew and lied because he wanted to get re-elected. Woodward knew and kept it to himself because he had a book to sell. Who’s worse? Far too measured a choice for this reporter, but, as someone who in his own small way practices the same craft as Bob Woodward, I have to wonder how Woodward watched the president* lie for six months as the body count ratcheted skyward without his conscience tearing out his heart. I have to wonder if, in some small way, journalism as public service died as collateral damage in that struggle.
Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post (where Bob Woodward continues to hold an honorary title as “associate editor”) also questions the ethics of Bob Woodward concealing this information from the public.
Woodward is hardly the first journalist to save juicy information for a book. But “is this traditional practice still ethical?” tweeted David Boardman, dean of the Temple University journalism school and the longtime editor of the Seattle Times.
Other critics were less circumspect: “This is really troubling. As journalists we’re supposed to work in the public interest. I think there’s been a failure here,”
wrote Scott Nover, a reporter for the industry journal Adweek.
In fairness, it wasn’t just journalists raising concerns. A reader wrote to me arguing that Woodward’s revelation “could have been helpful in the spring, both explaining the seriousness of the disease to the public, showing the Trump administration’s bungled and inept response, and pushing the Trump administration to do more.” He added, with a touch of cynicism, that he hoped the author’s advance fee made the delay worthwhile.
The questions are valid — and as Boardman notes, far from new. They surface almost every time a journalist writes a book that contains newsy information, especially about matters of national security or public well-being: Why are we only reading about this now?
It should also be noted that yesterday, it was reported Vice President Mike Pence is slated to attend a fundraiser being hosted by a couple that has expressed support for QAnon conspiracy theories.
Gregory Stanton writes for JustSecurity that QAnon is nothing less than repackaged Nazism.(!)
A secret cabal is taking over the world. They kidnap children, slaughter, and eat them to gain power from their blood. They control high positions in government, banks, international finance, the news media, and the church. They want to disarm the police. They promote homosexuality and pedophilia. They plan to mongrelize the white race so it will lose its essential power.
Does this conspiracy theory sound familiar? It is. The same narrative has been repackaged by QAnon.
I have studied and worked to prevent genocide for forty years. Genocide Watch and the Alliance Against Genocide, the first international anti-genocide coalition, see such hate-filled conspiracy theories as early warning signs of deadly genocidal violence.
Ed Yong of The Atlantic writes that America seems to be caught in a pandemic spiral.
The U.S. enters the ninth month of the pandemic with more than 6.3 million confirmed cases and more than 189,000 confirmed deaths. The toll has been enormous because the country presented the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus with a smorgasbord of vulnerabilities to exploit. But the toll continues to be enormous—every day, the case count rises by around 40,000 and the death toll by around 800—because the country has consistently thought about the pandemic in the same unproductive ways.
Many Americans trusted intuition to help guide them through this disaster. They grabbed onto whatever solution was most prominent in the moment, and bounced from one (often false) hope to the next. They saw the actions that individual people were taking, and blamed and shamed their neighbors. They lapsed into magical thinking, and believed that the world would return to normal within months. Following these impulses was simpler than navigating a web of solutions, staring down broken systems, and accepting that the pandemic would rage for at least a year.
These conceptual errors were not egregious lies or conspiracy theories, but they were still dangerous. They manifested again and again, distorting the debate around whether to stay at home, wear masks, or open colleges. They prevented citizens from grasping the scope of the crisis and pushed leaders toward bad policies. And instead of overriding misleading intuitions with calm and considered communication, those leaders intensified them. The country is now trapped in an intuition nightmare: Like the spiraling ants, Americans are walled in by their own unhelpful instincts, which lead them round and round in self-destructive circles.
Nicholas Florko of STATnews offers some sobering polling on eroding American confidence in the nation’s public health systems.
Public confidence in the CDC has dropped 16 points since April, according to the new poll. The agency has been widely criticized both by public health advocates, who want the agency to more frequently stand up to political pressure, and by Trump, who has accused it of being overly cautious and thwarting the U.S. recovery from the ongoing pandemic.
Trump’s critiques hit harder: Republicans’ confidence in the CDC has dropped 30 points since April. Democrats’ trust in the CDC has dropped less precipitously, from 86% to 74% over the same time period.
The CDC and Director Robert Redfield aren’t the only ones facing a crisis of confidence. The U.S. public’s overall trust in Fauci, the National Institutes of Health’s top infectious disease doctor, has declined 10% since April. Republicans have particularly soured on him: His favorables dropped nearly 30% among Republicans since April. Democrats’ confidence in Fauci, meanwhile, has increased from 80% to 86% since April.
The public writ large still trusts Fauci to provide reliable information more than it trusts the CDC, the White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx, President Trump, or former Vice President Joe Biden, according to the new poll. Trump is the least trusted out of the four: Just 40% of those surveyed said they trust Trump to provide reliable information about the pandemic. Fifty-two percent trust Biden.
Erin Garcia de Jesus of Science News on some of the very real dangers to young people that contract COVID-19.
Of roughly 3,200 people ages 18 to 34 who were admitted to 419 U.S. hospitals from early April to the end of June, 21 percent, or 684 people, landed in intensive care and 10 percent, or 331 patients, ended up on ventilators. Almost 3 percent, or nearly 90 people, died, researchers report September 9 in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Those numbers are “alarming figures given that COVID-19 outbreaks are rampant in many U.S. colleges that have opened for in-person learning,” says Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Younger adults now make up nearly a quarter of U.S. coronavirus cases.
A 3 percent death rate is lower than what has been reported for hospitalized older adults with COVID-19 — which was more than 20 percent in two separate studies from the United States and Germany — but still higher than it is for some other illnesses. For instance, it’s more than twice the death rate for heart attacks in young adults, the researchers wrote.
Underlying conditions like severe obesity or high blood pressure were linked to more serious illness or death. And the team found that younger adults who have multiple underlying conditions can face similar risks of serious illness and death as people 35 to 64 years old without those conditions. More than half of the hospitalized young adults were Black or Hispanic, although race or ethnicity was not associated with an increased risk of death or needing a ventilator.
Richard Florida and Michael Seman write for USA Today that Americans need to focus on saving arts and culture from the COVID-19 crisis.
We must do everything in our power to save arts and culture from this deepening crisis. What’s needed is a massive infusion of capital. In the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative government just appropriated about $2 billion in direct emergency aid for the arts. The original CARES legislation contained a paltry $40 million for artists and creatives who are paid wages, but none of it went to the many artists who live off of royalties and gigs.
An equivalent outlay, adjusted for America’s size, would be about $15 billion. Unfortunately, we cannot depend on the Trump administration and our polarized Congress to take this essential step.
Should Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris win the White House this fall, saving America’s arts and creative sector must be a top priority of their economic recovery strategy. The importance of the arts was underlined at the virtual political convention in which they were nominated. It was moderated by actors, motivated by musicians and animated by visual artists.
Kali Holloway writes for The Nation that what has always really triggered the sort of white rage that we are seeing nowadays is black achievement.
“The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement,” Carol Anderson wrote in her 2016 book White Rage. That rage helped ardent segregationist and presidential candidate George Wallace win five Southern states in 1968 and five primaries in 1972, including Michigan and Maryland. Promises to send “welfare bums back to work” and to defend white home sellers’ right to “discriminate against Negroes” propelled Ronald Reagan to California’s governorship in 1966 and later to the Oval Office. It is right to call the 2016 election of Donald Trump a white backlash against the first Black president—one so fervent, it won poorly educated, college-degree-holding, and young white folks alike—but it is also critical to recognize it as just one white backlash among many. Trump’s presidency is no anomaly but a confirmation of America’s pattern of Black political progress and white retaliation.
Yannick Giovanni Marshall/AlJazeera
But there is a particular form of fascism to which the American state conforms. A fascism that is organised around the logic of white nationalism, the destruction, exploitation and expelling of ethnic minorities, and white political supremacy. The charge of fascism conveniently leaves out or makes subordinate the race hatred that fuels, enables and is the primary reason for the support of this burgeoning authoritarianism.
A leftist that comes away from reading the history of Nazi Germany denouncing, first, the Third Reich's subversion of political norms, should be suspected of anti-Semitism. A leftist who warns of the rise of fascism as evidenced by the destruction of mail-sorting machines and the appearance of unmarked vehicles at protests in a country that has prison farms, is one for whom Black life has not counted.
As many have laboured to remind this society, Hitler's genocidal project was inspired by (if not a tribute to) the American colony. Contrary to the racist claim that racism is un-American, it is more accurate to say that the Third Reich was a type of Americanism.
Mr. Marshall’s essay may seem...strong but...consider this.
Black Americans (well, at least most of the ones that I have talked to online and offline about the coronavirus) remember that the “movement” to open up the economy did not begin until reporting surfaced that Black Americans were being disproportionately affected by COVID-19.
You cannot tell me that The Occupant or his supporters are not capable of genocide; They are.
And there are tens of millions of Americans who will vote for The Damn Fool.
The 2020 presidential election is, quite literally, a matter of life and death for whole groups of people.
In fact, given The Damn Fool’s comments that were recorded earlier this year by Bob Woodward, life and death was actually what was on the ballot in 2016.
Everyone have a good morning!