Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Saturday, April 4, 2020

In Defense Of Competence

Journalism is the rough draft of history.  This is the first attempt I've seen that takes a stab at the dysfunction and errors that have created this crisis.

Trump is exactly who he was when the Republican Party foisted him upon this country.  Fundamentally narcissistic, deeply stupid, absolutely incompetent.  This is a man who bankrupted companies that provided Americans with football, steaks and gambling.  He is presiding over a party that is already deeply suspicious of the idea of public goods and competent governance, and then empowered the farthest reaches of that ideology within his maladministration.

Trump is the problem, sure, but the GOP is equally culpable in all this.

This is a helluva line for a straight news piece:

In reality, many of the failures to stem the coronavirus outbreak in the United States were either a result of, or exacerbated by, his leadership.
For weeks, he had barely uttered a word about the crisis that didn’t downplay its severity or propagate demonstrably false information. He dismissed the warnings of intelligence officials and top public health officials in his administration.
At times, he voiced far more authentic concern about the trajectory of the stock market than the spread of the virus in the United States, railing at the chairman of the Federal Reserve and others with an intensity that he never seemed to exhibit about the possible human toll of the outbreak.

Of course, members of Cult 45 will dismiss this as fake news, but reality is out there, waiting.

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