I happened to catch a small piece of an interview this week in which Donald Trump Jr. was berating the interviewer and demanding that this guy moderate a debate between him and Hunter Biden. Really? I have no idea how Biden would handle himself in such a situation but I do know that if just facts were taken into consideration, Hunter couldn’t help but come out on top. That isn’t saying anything about Hunter. I don’t think I have ever seen him either live or on media but I have seen more than enough of Don Jr. for a lifetime.
So let’s look at what we know or suspect.
Hunter has his problems. We all know he was kicked out of the military for cocaine use but at least he joined up, which was more than Jr. or his draft dodger father ever did. He definitely took a highly overpaid job on the board of a Ukrainian gas company that, to be kind, had an unsavory reputation. Did he do anything untoward to earn that over the top salary? Well, so far, with half the members of the GOP sniffing around Ukraine, they have come up with zero facts to show that he did. Was taking the job a poor decision? Sure. No question, but there is no evidence that he actually did anything, good, bad or indifferent to earn that salary. Did his father do anything to help his kid get or keep that job? No evidence of that either, even though Rudy Giuliani has devoted his life to find even the most minute excuse for a fact that will point that way.
So yeah, Hunter made a bad decision and a lot of cash, but from a factual point did either lead to anything criminal or even unethical? A lot of work and money has been expended to prove that it did, but so far… nothing!
Then there’s Don Jr., the scabrous son of a scabrous father. Don Jr., like his father, has spent his life taking from his country. Don Jr. and his father are both the sons of rich men who have raised them to take, without supplying them with the intellectual or physical means to do so. His indulgent father constantly bailed out the Fat Liar in the Oval Office, while Don Jr. seems to have never held a real job outside the family business.
I wanted very much to compare character in both men but I really know little about Hunter’s sometimes hard to defend character, while the best character reference I can find on Junior is that he likes to kill endangered species for fun. Yes, I know, he hangs around the White House trying not to create a major scandal but the only thing that has actually been a highlight of his career was when he instigated the meetings that tried to put his father together with a bunch of Russian spies. I guess that’s about as good as anything one can say about a Trump.
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Donald Trump addressed the nation on Wednesday night on the most important problem of his Presidency, for a whole 11 minutes. I have since checked with a number of my indulgent friends and the absolute conclusion was that he was stoned out of his bird.
The idiot in the Oval Office spent a good portion of said 11 minutes, telling us about travel bans. Why? The virus is here, big time. It’s too late to keep it out of the country. Now the problem is testing, which would give us a much better grip on how bad the situation really is. What we need is not travel bans but treatment capacity. Our hospitals cannot handle what is coming. We need to set up special facilities aimed only at the treatment of those who are suffering from the virus. Regular hospitals can’t handle this because as soon as someone with the virus enters the hospital everyone who comes in contact with them is rendered useless to treat anyone who doesn’t have the virus. We need to start turning our armories and convention centers into viral treatment centers or our regular medical facilities will be rendered useless within weeks. We need drive through and walk through testing centers for when we get the test kits we so desperately need. And why don’t we don’t have these test kits? The government says we do but can’t seem to produce them. The reality appears to be first; because the CDC dropped the ball and second; because when test equipment was offered to our government weeks ago by a foreign source, our government passed. Why? The nearest anyone can nail down was because our government wanted to produce it as an American product… only they haven’t been able to do that so far and the horse is way out of the barn. This, like the rest of Trump’s crimes cannot be ignored. Once we have the virus under control, heads must roll … more on that later.
After the Ebola scare Obama created an agency just to deal with this kind of global pandemic. Trump eliminated it. Why? Simply because Obama created it and instead of running the country Trump has spent all his non-golf time trying to get rid of anything Obama did while in office. Trump is very simply, a boil on the ass of humanity. He must be lanced and drained.
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The world outside the White House has reacted pretty strongly to the necessity of recognizing the Coronavirus and dealing with it on some level. This has been especially true in both entertainment and sports. Hundreds of events have been cancelled representing many millions of dollars lost.
There have also been a couple of really strange calls that have led to one wondering who made them and if that person really understood what the hell he was doing?
The two that come immediately to mind have to do with basketball, both pro and college. In the NBA two pro teams were ready to take the court with a full house in their seats when the game was called off. Really? And what was accomplished by that? The fans were already there and already in contact with each other. It would have made sense if they had called the game before they opened the arena, thereby eliminating the possibility of the fans interacting, but they were already in contact. Why not just play the game?
And as if to trump that stupid move, college basketball doubled down on it when the game between St. John’s and Georgetown was stopped at halftime. These people had already been in contact for almost two hours. Was another hour or so going to make a difference? It just doesn’t seem like it’s a length of contact thing.
Don’t get me wrong. I completely agree with the cancellations of events, the business move to have employees work from home and whatever else works to help limit contact but I also think that those in charge must use their heads and make functional moves both to help the situation and to let the public see that they are acting for safe, intelligent reasons. We already know that our federal government isn’t doing this and we already have a sense that no one is at home in the Oval Office, but it’s really important that the general public has someone to fall back on when leadership is needed. That’s why those who are in a position to make decisions that need to be made for the public good must be very careful to make intelligent, logical decisions rather than shooting from the hip and making a decision that looks stupid and erodes confidence in leadership that is so necessary in times of travail. We have already given up on Washington and now we must fall back on State and City leadership and even that which comes from lesser levels like sports teams, concert management and Broadway shows. It’s going to be a long hard fight and every level of leadership must be up to the task.
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So here we are, about a month after the Coronavirus was an accepted fact everywhere except in the Oval Office and we still have almost no ability to test people and then be able to treat the problem. It is absolute fact that the problem of dealing with the disease, albeit not disease itself, is completely due to Donald Trump, his panic at the idea that the market would tank if the breadth of the disease were universally known and how that tanking would hurt his chances of re-election.
He made that clear in his speech about the cruise liner and why he didn’t want the people on board to disembark because that would raise the number of cases on American soil because that might effect the market.
Well, his fears about the market were well founded, but his solution has only made things worse. On Thursday the Dow tanked 2300 points, the biggest drop since 1967. Trying to hide the real facts about the spread of the virus has not kept businesses from closing all across the country, it hasn’t kept whole segments of the marketplace, like travel, entertainment or sports from canceling events and it hasn’t helped business that need no longer available parts from China from collapsing. But Trump keeps lying. In his speech from the Oval Office the other night, he appeared drugged but even his pharmaceuticals didn’t keep him from lying again and again to the American people. This lack of truth, more than anything else, is what is responsible for our missing out on treatment goals and that has led to the crash of the market. Who can have any faith in the word of a congenital liar to actually do the things necessary?
Almost two weeks ago VP Pence promised that a million tests would go out the next day. Where the hell are they? He also promised that 25% of that number of tests would be coming out every day after that. Has anyone seen them? Is Pence actually as stupid as Trump? Doesn’t he understand that a promise like that must be kept; you can’t hide your incompetence when the result was promised for the next day? Where are the tests? Is it even possible that they still haven’t been ordered and if they were ordered is it humanly possible that American industry hasn’t produced them?
This is a nation that transformed it entire industrial model from cars to tanks and planes in a matter of two months in 1941. Is it possible that in this advanced technological age that we can’t produce a simple functioning medical test kit in the same time?
Or is it that Donald Trump, in trying to maintain the lie that this disease wouldn’t spread, has deliberately impeded the whole process in order to stop the crash of the stock market thereby aiding his crumbling chances to retain the presidency. Is that failed effort really the reason that we stand completely exposed to this horrific pandemic today without any of the seemingly available but actually withheld tools we need to fight it?
If this supposition is accurate then Donald Trump, who has lied more than any other human being in government for the last three years, who has escaped the consequences of a major investigation and then of Impeachment all because of the natural reticence of government officials to condemn even the most heinous perpetrators among them, has accepted the pass given him by those in a position to condemn him and in order to protect his personal position, has endangered the entire population of the nation. Before this is over he will be responsible for thousands of deaths. We are speaking here of a mass murderer, an inhuman beast that recognizes no humanity but his own, accepts no wants or needs but his own. Is it possible that there is any punishment that can be considered too great for such a boil on the ass of humanity?