Balcony critic
I guess Marina Hyde is not a huge fan of Trump’s.
A rare moment of unity in the US election, as Donald Trump marked his return to the White House by gasping along with his detractors. On Monday night, the president puffed up the front staircase of his residence, his face coated in several more gallons of paint than the front elevation of the building. “Don’t let it dominate your lives,” he panted of the virus, a bad case of which tends to dominate your death.
…
Still: don’t call him Wussolini. He beat this illness – which he still very much has – like a man. One of the really manly ones, who takes all the best drugs and leaves everyone else exposed and misled and unprotected. Even so, early reactions to the gasping spectacle suggest the move could only have backfired more if Trump had ascended the front steps via a hastily installed stairlift carrying a pack of adult diapers.
Once he’d wheezed through the unpleasantries, all that remained was to remove his mask and set about infecting any remaining staff yet to be exposed to his droplets…
…One current secret service agent assigned to the first family’s detail expressed frustration, telling CNN: “We’re not disposable.” Two housekeeping staff have already tested positive for the virus.
Way to show the socialists, right?
Speaking of physicians who really need to heal themselves, what a striking misinformation campaign it’s been from presidential medic Sean Conley, who has been continually obfuscating about Trump’s condition since calling his symptoms “mild”, only for even the White House to contradict him. For me, that’s the new low. Of course, we now expect the president of the United States to lie as default – to tell us black is white, or up is down, or to claim he never said something he’s on camera saying. But for a professional and senior doctor to mislead apparently without remorse shows how necrotic the body politic has become, from the very top down. The lying, the reality-denying is not a one-off case – it’s the other epidemic.
H/t Omar
“When we signed up to take a bullet for you we didn’t think it’d involve you walking back and forth in a shooting range.” – anonymous SS agent
Despite everything, Giuliani is following his boss in misleading and lying, claiming that the science on COVID is baloney. That he did this in an interview for Fox and didn’t wear a mask – he denies that the science is right on those, too – is unsurprising. That he coughed and spluttered his way through the interview while stating that he isn’t infected suggests denial, more so as what he didn’t mention was that he was only COVID-free in the technical sense that the result of the test he’d had 2 hours prior to the interview wasn’t yet known, so he’s negative until told otherwise.
Idiots, the lot of them.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/06/trump-lawyer-rudy-giuliani-masks-coronavirus-fox-news
AoS #2 — The Onion reported Friday that Giuliani tested positive for a Slew of Obscure Bat Diseases but they are unrelated to COVID-19.
The chance of false negative tests is so high that the assumption should be that one has the disease even after a negative test. And so, wear a mask around other people, maintain precautionary distancing, wash hands thoroughly and often, etc. because anything else is playing with people’s lives.
tigger,
Exactly. Back in June/July, I came down with COVID-like symptoms. I had no known exposure, and had been pretty careful (I live alone, only left home for walks or essential shopping trips, or the occasional socially distanced outdoor meeting with a friend). My doctor (via videoconference) told me to presume it was COVID, self-isolate, and she’d see about getting me tested. So of course that’s what I did, along with alerting anyone I knew I’d been near — which is a fun thing to get to tell your friends — all of this despite the lack of a positive test and the lack of any known exposure.
When I eventually got a test, it came back negative, but there was a ~30% false negative rate on that test. My symptoms remained mild and then went away completely. So to this day I still don’t know if I had COVID or not. (You certainly won’t hear me proclaiming that I’m immune.)
So yeah, it flabbergasts me that people who have been in contact with known COVID patients, without using appropriate precautions, are essentially going about their business as if nothing happened, blase to the risk that they are spreading it further. And I didn’t have a high opinion of these people to begin with.
Mike Pesca at Slate said that Trump’s handling of his own protection showed that, while we’ve long known Trump was stupid and a liar, we now know that “stupid” is the dominant characteristic. Perhaps that’s true of Guiliani and others in Trump’s circle, too. Another hypothesis I’ve read was from one of the bloggers at Lawyers, Guns & Money, asserting that the GOP braintrust is so used to be insulated from every bad thing in society (recession, crime, restrictive abortion laws) that they really thought that their status would protect them here, too. “Hey, everyone at this Rose Garden ceremony is a Big Shot, too. Not only of those filthy people who works in a meatpacking plant! And we (well, the taxpayers) paid for the best testing, so it’s all ok!”
Screechy – sort of their version of prosperity gospel? Yeah, I have a chronic persistent cough because of my asthma, but I take it seriously. I don’t go around telling people “I’m coughing”, but if I added any other symptoms, I would definitely exercise even more caution than I do now (which is a lot now). No justification for being stupid.
Have you seen this new Lincoln Project video, the balcony scene from “Covita”?
https://youtu.be/4tZVnbDq9B4
Yep.
iknklast,
Yeah, you could look at it that way, I guess. I found the original LGM blog post I was thinking of, but it mostly quotes this NY Mag piece so I’ll link directly to it.