I got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell...

I don't know Ovi, I'm about ready to put her on block to reduce the spam.

Hey, you started it. But if you agree to stop, I will as well.

Jesus, you can't even remember the shit you post. The media was excoriating him for acting at all at the beginning, then it switched to he should be doing what we want him to, and now it's he never did much of anything and always downplayed it. The selective memory of all of this is staggering.

You want to complain about a rally, where everyone has to sign wavers recognizing the risks and get's their temp checked before attending but you don't criticize the protests that didn't do either. I know, I know, the excuse is that since it's inside it's worse, but that's just the latest bullshit being used to attack Trump while shielding the preferred kind of stupid.

Is it stupid to hold the rally? Yup, I think so. Is it a bit worse inside rather than outside? Yep. Is it remotely okay to complain about the rally while supporting the protests? No, it's rank hypocrisy. Was it okay to protest? Eh, maybe, grown ups should be able to choose their risk. But, if you're going to afford the protests that, you can't turn around and complain that an even clearer choice should be banned because it's for a political cause you don't like.

Because I don't buy for a second that anyone floating this argument actually cares about COVID-19.

Yes, I've seen the timeline from much later in the pandemic after the news switched to the 'He didn't do enough!' You note the lack of any contemporary reporting around the early timeline, because that would showcase that Trump was being attacked in the press by his opponents for doing anything at all.

Really, this isn't hard, you just have to notice and have a memory capable of remembering for longer than a goldfish.

This is hindsight. At the time, the major news services were running stories citing Democrat politicians complaining that Trump was overreacting. Everyone was bitching about shutting down travel from China -- there wasn't a single soul on the networks suggesting, at the time, that this wasn't an overreaction.

Again, memory longer than a goldfish's.


No, no, no, and maybe.

No, he didn't gut the CDC in any way that hampered it's core mission. The CDC has had massive mission drift over the last 20 years, such that they're studying things that aren't at all related to disease, like social interactions. Trump killed a bunch of the extraneous stuff and pointed them back on mission.

He actually followed the previous administration's process for testing and test development, which is why we got soooo far behind on testing at the start. This is directly due to how the CDC did business and how it had done business during the Swine Flu epidemic during Obama's administration. I'll bet you have no idea about the Swine Flu epidemic. I'll further bet that you'll claim you do but just regurgitate the intro paragraph from wikipedia. The existing policies failed -- Trump actually took action to dump them and get something that worked.

The previous Administration did leave something -- useless junk policies. The same policies that allowed the Swine Flu epidemic to go mostly unaddressed were what was passed down. These are the same policies that led to the testing fiasco and had to be trashed before we got testing working at all. Do you not remember the lack of tests in March and early April? I do, I got tested in early April. Negative, if you care, I just had run of the mill pneumonia.

Finally, maybe. Trump blames everyone else and rarely takes responsibility unless it's something he thinks is positive. However, he's owned much of the response, largely because he thinks he did a good job. I agree, given the information and capability at the time he made his decisions, they were good decisions. He followed the advice of his medical advisors pretty well, and where he didn't it was usually not a bad call. It's only in the game of hindsight, where you've moved the goalposts so he fails and leave out any information that conflicts with this goal, that Trump looks bad during the response.

If Trump was inadequate and short-sighted from the start, then everyone else was worse. NY didn't follow his directions until it was too late, and then stuck to them too long and managed to seriously damage the state, especially the City. Of course, that gets blamed on Trump, which is funny because it was all Cuomo and DeBlasio -- they were the only ones with authority over the response in NY and NYC. Trump could only provide things. And, if you recall, no one, anywhere, ran out of either beds for sick people or respirators for sick people. That was a stellar piece of management and belongs to Trump's administration entirely fairly.

Worse, most lefty news orgs called him "RACIST!" for wanting to shutdown travel to and from China. And then three weeks later were all "OMG! You didn't shut it down fast enough your incompetent moron!"





Nice. You're completely called to the carpet and instead of just owning being wrong, "It's complicated".


I'm going to go out on a limb and bet you didn't even read the article. See, when it says "Yes, the CDC testing system couldn't handle the current crisis because it wasn't designed for it, but..." the 'but' and everything that follows after is completely disingenuous. Everything after the but is opinion, not fact. You have to be careful with factcheckers, they like to confuse lefty opinions with facts.

That means that "Yes the CDC testing system couldn't handle the current crisis because it was outdated". I agree that "broken" is an inarticulate way of saying "needs to be updated and designed to handle these sorts of crisis", but it isn't a lie. It's the fault of the previous administrations not foreseeing a pandemic sweeping the US... despite numerous pandemics having already done so. But likewise, it comes down to money. Do we fund the CDC outrageous sums every year whether those sums are needed or not to remain in a state of top-readiness for problems that do not come? I'm going to bet that future administration may decide that "Yes we do".


(Note I have the same quibbles about the outrageous sums spent on the military each year, but that's neither here nor there.)


"The president kept his criticism lighter and more forward-looking at first, declaring that his administration is “leaving a very indelible print in the future in case something like this happens again.”

“That's not the fault of anybody — and frankly the old system worked very well for smaller numbers, much smaller numbers but not for these kind of numbers,” he added."

Yes, he gets stupid and testy later in the press briefing when the press begins poking him over this, they know a few well placed personal jabs at his ego and he'll give them nice soundbites to take to their kirinkest followers. So what? Only dumbasses care about that level of shit.


Because it is. I know it's complicated, that we live in a duopoly system, Federal and State, but our States have a lot of Rights and Responsibilities that they must uphold themselves. The attempt originally at a small lever of control at the top (the same small lever the top has been going back and forth over expanding and reducing since jump), that means fundamentally (and by the spirit of the document), unless it's a dispute between States or Nations, the Fed really isn't supposed to be getting involved.

So yes, New York needs to own its shit about not getting its shit together fast enough.


There is so much factually wrong with this I'm not sure where to begin. Other than to say, tighten your tinfoil headband before reading it.

Which weren't racist at all. They weren't "No Turkistani, or Saudi, or Iraqi" bans. They were bans on travel from countries. They included people of all colors and creeds.

And no, Muslim is not a race. It's a backwards superstition that should be stamped out with vehemence. Likewise Catholicism, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Shinto, Intersectional Feminism, Critical Theory, etc. Basically all the religions.


Compared to the responses of his detractors, who wanted him to do nothing at all you mean.


No, the idiocy of the left fueled that.


And he sat on his hands for three years following the same path his predecessors did. I blame Obama.


No, I'm (once again) saying "Stop getting upset over the stupid things that fall out of his mouth". Just like with how you got panty-soaked every time Obama said anything, you can't just hear their words and decide your righteous path, you have to wait for the actions.