COVID-19 cases are still growing exponentially in the US with now over 800,000 cases and 45,000 deaths.  That’s not bothering the old Basement Bar in Fort Worth, though.  There was quite a flame war going on over on their Facebook page this morning after they announced they were fully opening this weekend to sell their $2 beer in exchange for the public health.  Let’s just say that the majority of the comments we’re not very supportive of such idiocy, and the author of the post, who I assume is the owner, got a little chippy with some of the commenters.  Here’s an example:

After over 3,200 comments, most not very complimentary of the bar opening right now, the post was removed.  What I found amazing, though, were the supportive comments i.e. “This was all exaggerated.” “The government can’t tell us what to do.” “It’s just the flu.” “I don’t know anyone who has it,” etc., etc., so forth and so on.  Fort Worth has become the weird mixture of education, sophistication, forward thinking, entrepreneurial vigor, offset by up with mouth breathing stupidity.

I hope they don’t get a bunch more people killed.

OK, folks, it is seriously way past time to STOP airing Trump’s “briefings” on the Coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe.  During today’s briefing episode of The Apprentice, WH Edition, Trump actually aired a video that is nothing more than a North Korean style Dear Leader propaganda video that took snippets of actual news reports way out of context to make him look good.  Real networks immediately cut from their coverage, accurately reporting what Trump was doing.  The worst part was him standing to the side of the stage gloating and mugging for the cameras as the bullshit spewed from the WH video system.  We are WAY past time for the 25th Amendment.

I was talking to a reporter today from a local network affiliate who expressed frustration at Trump’s successful hijacking of the evening news by holding his Coronavirus “briefings” every single day during that time.  During said “briefings” Trump stumbles from one irrelevant subject to another, lies in a continuous stream, attacks previous administrations, insults everyone who dares disagree with him and has now taken to cutting off medical experts from answering key questions asked by the media.  Very little important information comes from these briefings and the incessant lying has become a serious threat to Americans’ very lives.

It’s long past time to cut Trump off.  His oxygen is media coverage.  He’s a gameshow host who doesn’t know shit about actually running anything successful except attracting media coverage.  It’s time to cut off that oxygen and send the clear message that 1) HE doesn’t control the media, and 2) The media’s obligation is to provide actual useful information that is TRUE to their audiences.  I don’t care in the slightest about Fox and OAN suckers.  They’re on their own.  I’m talking about normal Americans who desperately need information that can help them make their own decisions for their own lives.

It’s time for the networks to wake up and cut Trump off.  Report what happened, but take away his stage.  Take back control of the news hour.  In other words, get off your ass and do your goddam job and stop being intimidated by the biggest bully in the history of the US.

You knew it would happen.  Trump’s incompetent response to the COVID-19 outbreak is one of the few crises in the last three years that is not of his own making, and his sycophants have come to realize that he can’t lie or tweet his way out of this one.  The response?  Gen up the Noise Machine, WhatAbout Version.  One of the loudest blowhards in the Machine is PJ Media formerly called Pajamas Media, one of the biggest manure shovelers on the web.

The WhatAbout target this time?  Barack Obama, of course, and this time it was his response to the H1N1 flu outbreak in 2009, days after he had taken office.  H1N1 became apparent in January 2009 and being researched by the WHO then.  The first case of H1N1 was discovered on April 15, 2009, the WHO declared a medical emergency on April 25, and the CDC began releasing anti-viral drugs to fight the disease. Obama declared a US medical emergency on April 30.  He requested $1.9 billion then and as the pandemic grew, requested another $9 billion for response and vaccines.  In October of 2009 Obama did declare a national emergency, but only after multiple efforts to control the virus.  Today, H1N1 continues as a recurring flu virus and has killed an estimated 75,000 Americans since 2009.  It’s part of the annual flu vaccine today that many Americans still refuse to receive.

Let’s talk about how Republicans responded to the virus back in 2009 versus what they are saying now.  During the funding debates of 2009, Republicans opposed Obama’s request because, well, they’re Republicans.  Also, the noise machine cranked up led by Gleen Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Rush Limbaugh.  Glenn Beck, who at that time had a big show on Fox Noise said, “…you don’t know if this is going to cause neurological damage like it did in the 1970s,” adding that he would do “the exact opposite” of what the federal government recommended and might even attend a swine flu party to deliberately infect himself before the virus could mutate.  Rush Limbaugh said, “I am not going to take it [the H1N1 vaccine], precisely because you are now telling me I must. . . . I don’t want to take your vaccine. I don’t get flu shots.” He added that if “you have some idiot government official demanding, telling me I must take this vaccine, I’ll never take it.”  In Congress Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) commented, “We can’t let all of our spending and our reaction be media-driven in responding to a panic so that we don’t get Katrina-ed. . . . It’s important because what we are talking about as we discuss the appropriateness of spending $2 billion to produce a vaccine that may never be used—that is a very important decision that our country has to make.”  Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) added, “I don’t think we need to spend $1.5 billion on flu vaccine when . . . the research shows that it’s not going to be very virulent. . . . We are stealing our grandchildren’s future by borrowing and spending. . . . This hysteria over the flu is driving the media, and it’s driving the administration, driving the leadership here. We’ve got to stop that.”

The funding was passed, but after intense anti-vaxxer misinformation and loud Republican opposition, the distribution of the vaccine was greatly suppressed and even THAT was affected by party.  Democrats outnumbered Republicans by almost 50% in saying they would take the vaccine.

The Repubs are singing the same song this time, too, calling the outbreak of COVID-19 a hoax and supporting Trump’s idiotic and incoherent blabbering and tweeting about it.  Even as they try to cover for Trump, they’re attacking Obama for doing exactly the opposite of what he actually did.

Same song, different pandemic.

In a truly jaw dropping moment during the question period at Trump’s impeachment trial, Alan Dershowitz spewed some pretty outrageous assertions, especially when he tried to defend arguing the opposite side of what he argued for the Clinton impeachment trial in 1998.  But the breathtaking moment came when Dershowitz actually said that if the president believes his reelection is in “the public interest”,  he can do ANYTHING.  That’s right, folks, Alan Dershowitz, of OJ Simpson and Jeffery Epstein fame, has now debased himself completely by actually claiming that the president of the United States is immune from all oversight and consequences as long has he/she BELIEVES their reelection is in “the public interest”.  The “public interest”?  Dershowitz has cleared Richard Nixon of the crimes he committed because he believed his reelection was good for America.

This is the logical result from Trump’s “if I deny it, I didn’t do it defense”.  Now, denial is not even needed; if the president believes his actions are in “the public interest” he can just do it and no one can do anything about it. Trump has actually declared himself monarch, and HALF of the Senate is enabling that.  I wonder how they’ll feel about their position when he suspends the Constitution and disbands the Congress if he wins (or even loses) the election.

In early 2018 Steve Bannon gave away the entire game plan for Trump in an interview with Michael Lewis of Bloomberg News.  In that interview, Bannon said a lot of things, but summed up his entire strategy in this one sentence:

“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

That’s it.  That is the entire strategy for TrumpWorld.  Not surprisingly, that’s Vladimir Putin’s strategy, too.  In fact, he’s the guy who perfected it.  In the bad old days of Soviet communism, propaganda was directed in monolithic terms.  The government had it’s own version of truth, and repeated it 24/7.  But that stopped working as the few large media outlets lost the volume battle to alternative sources of “news” and with the rise of social media.  Putin’s strategy now is to confuse and contradict so much that people get numb to it all and start believing that the truth is unknowable.  In his new book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev describes this strategy in the modern Russia which is now completely controlled by Putin.  Putin controls all the mainstream media in the country, and his military hacks into social media around the globe to spread the same misinformation used to control his own people.

The Bannon/Trump strategy keeps Americans off balance by spewing a mountain of bullshit on a daily basis which is why you hear Trump complaining about everything from low water use toilets to windmills killing millions of birds.  He’s done it at least 16,000 times since he became president, and his entire group of enablers from Giuliani to Kellyanne do it in a continuous stream.  There is so much bullshit that people are exhausted trying to keep up, and those he has brainwashed amplify the amount of bullshit circulating television, radio, and social media, repeating said bullshit millions of times.  They did it to Hillary with the debunked uranium story, and they’re trying to do it to Biden right now with the false Ukrainian corruption fiction they’ve whipped up.

The strategy works almost flawlessly.  This is how you get Trumpists, in the face of a tsunami of evidence that Trump illegally extorted Ukraine for his own political benefit, deny he did, and if he did, they say “so what?”    Think about it – what used to be headline news just ten years ago is now just a little dust you brush off your sleeve.  The disinformation is so perfectly delivered and maintained that people actually believe that everyone, including all of the mainstream press, all Democrats, all nonpolitical people, intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and the courts are lying.  The ONLY source of truth is Donald Trump and his talking heads.  Confusion propaganda is designed to sideline the truth and convince otherwise normal people that the only way to get unconfused is to believe only one leader who, in his “great and unmatched wisdom” is the only person to know true truth.

This is how democracy is destroyed.  When the people no longer trust the system, especially when it comes to voting, the news, and the common good, then the bad guys win.  Trump, Bannon, Giuliani, and the rest of the criminals in TrumpWorld want you to be stupid.  And they keep you stupid by feeding you mountains of bullshit. When you believe that bullshit, he’s got you, and you then virtually can’t be saved.