It was going to be relegated to Democratic states
Vanity Fair has a big new article on how Prince Jared made himself the boss of the administration’s coronavirus testing plan, and how that plan just disappeared because they’re all fools and hacks.
By early April, some who worked on the plan were given the strong impression that it would soon be shared with President Trump and announced by the White House. The plan, though imperfect, was a starting point. Simply working together as a nation on it “would have put us in a fundamentally different place,” said the participant.
But the White House said Naaaaaaaaaaaaaaah we don’t need to do that.
Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically—and erroneously, it would turn out—predicted the virus would soon fade away.
So, you know, let’s just do nothing. Sound good? Ok then, nothing it is.
But wait, it gets worse.
Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.
Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.
Ah. Cool. They’re happy to kick back and watch people in “Democratic states” die by the thousands, because that’s an effective political strategy. Good to know.
Experts are now warning that the U.S. testing system is on the brink of collapse. “We are at a very bad moment here,” said Margaret Bourdeaux. “We are about to lose visibility on this monster and it’s going to rampage through our whole country. This is a massive emergency.”
This morning Jim Jordan has been yammering at Fauci about churches and protests. We’re all doomed.
Kushner is a talentless corruptard, out for himself. Anyone who would put him in charge of other people’s interests is a fucking moron, oh wait, that was the Moron in Chief. Figures all to hell, dunnit. Good news is that generally, from what I’ve seen here in Atlanta, despite the idiot governor suing the mayor for mask mandates, most everyone is complying with the good advice to wear a mask, and most private businesses require it (which the idiot governor has no control over). The politicians can fight about the good or bad of it, but here in the real world, most of us are trying to do the right thing in spite of our idiot representatives.
Unfortunately, twiliter, not everyone is so fortunate. Here we have no businesses with mask mandates, and neither grocery store even has signage to suggest it. Walgreens does, but it is now less prominent than it was in March. Schools are seriously considering it a bad thing to have a mask mandate, because some of the parents say they will not enroll their students if there is a mandate; do they outnumber the parents who say they won’t enroll them without a mandate? From what the paper tells us, it’s difficult to know. And are the groups given equal weighting in the value and strength of their opinion? Almost certainly not.
The one trip I made to Lincoln since this all started showed higher levels of masking, and mandatory masks in all the businesses I entered. Sounds a lot more like Atlanta. So I suspect a lot of it depends on where you live, and also what sort of businesses you frequent. WalMart just started mandating masks; I don’t know how bad it will have to get before I decide to take my business to WalMart (it would have to be bad).
Who is it that vaunts Trump’s political instincts? He rants and throws shit around, hoping that it will stick, but he hasn’t done anything to broaden his base. That was enough to win in the perfect storm of 2016, but if he wins this year it’ll be because of his authoritarian, not political, instincts.
To further my point, and also in partial response to iknklast, a president with good political instincts would have realized that the virus was going to cause economic pain regardless of what happened, and so would’ve taken actions to mitigate and then get past that pain as fast as possible, especially in an election year. Be honest with the people, mandate or encourage strict restrictions regarding social distancing and mask wearing, urge Congress to pass legislation that would help people suffering economically from those restrictions, and so on. There would’ve been a lot of grumbling, but in November when we would’ve been more or less back to normal, he would’ve gotten a nice bump in the polls.
But that’s not Trump.
Ikn @2 I understand, and I’m not happy about the school reopenings, but here, from what I’ve seen, and I don’t get around much these days, is that most businesses, Walmart, Kroger, Publix, Target, CVS, Walgreens, auto parts stores, pet stores, veterinarian offices, medical offices, et cetera, require masks for entry, with some medical offices also requiring temperature taking. This is anecdotal from my personal experience. The City of Atlanta also, per Mayor Bottoms, also requires masks in public venues, no matter what the occasion, which in my opinion, is the smart thing to do, not just in private busineeses, but everywhere people congregate. It makes sense. I think if public schools open here shortly, there will be similar mandates, masks, social distancing, and quarantining or not allowing students, teachers, or administrators who are ill to be present on school property. Whether the idiot governor Kemp fights this or sues whomever for taking necessary precautions has yet to be seen. Surely masks aren’t an infringement on personal freedom, but as you say, it depends on where you are measuring this. All I can say is wear a mask, it’s not illegal, and it will give you some measure of protection.
Ikn, incidentally, here’s a current map of states that mandate masks. Unfortunately our states are not of those. The good news here in Georgia is that most people are doing this willingly anyway, which shows how much smarter the general population is than the elected ‘officials’, and hopefully the citizenry there is just as savvy, or will become so soon. :)
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/19/us/states-face-mask-coronavirus-trnd/index.html
twiliter, we do have medical offices requiring masks, but other than that, not so much. For a while, masks were required in places like barber shops, etc, but I think since we reopened, there are fewer requirements. In fact, our governor went so far as to tell county and city offices they could implement a mask mandate (he had previously forbidden that), but they would lose state funding if they did. Yeah. Ouch. There are reasons my husband and I call him Dr. Evil…partially because he actually looks like Dr. Evil, but also because of his failure to do the right thing in most situations. He wants to take all state funding away from community colleges so he can get rid of property taxes (a tax the poor never have to pay, because they don’t have enough money to own property; the claim is that it is ruining farmers, but most of the farms are corporate owned, not individual farmers). His excuse for defunding community colleges? Because we are doing such a great job! That’s right, he thinks that because we are doing good work, private businesses will step up and take over the funding, since they have forbidden us to increase tuition. And some businesses already do that, but the cost is too high, IMHO, because they end up telling us what we can and can’t do in many cases. And…they won’t fund academic education classes, only the classes specifically in the skill they need. They expect the state to pay for teaching the students basic academic skills like writing, math, and science.
Isn’t it a great state I live in?