4/7/20: The bad news piled up all day Monday and started piling up again today, even before the blogger awoke. U.S. healthcare experts have known for weeks that the COVID-19 virus can rage almost unchecked in clusters. The first cluster was a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, where 129 residents and staff contracted the virus. Another cluster erupted after a biotech conference in Boston. Cook County Jail, in Chicago, has at least 300 cases.
 |
U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt. |
Captain Crozier’s letter would anger the president.
We know at least 155
members sailors on the aircraft carrier U.S.S.
Theodore Roosevelt have fallen ill. That includes the former captain, Brent
Crozier.
Crozier
was removed
from command last week, in large part because the fat shadow of Donald J. Trump
looms over the U.S. Navy. After Crozier wrote a letter, demanding that his crew
be allowed to leave the ship and go into quarantine, Acting Secretary of the
Navy Thomas Modly (who replaced Richard V. Spencer, who described working for Trump
as “chaos”) made it clear. He knew Captain Crozier’s letter would anger the
president. He knew there would be pressure from the White House if he didn’t
act and act quickly.
The
Acting Secretary spoke with a reporter from the Washington Post about the
matter and the “Fake News” folks
decided, “Hey, let’s quote him.”
Modly
explained that his predecessor, Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, “lost his
job because the Navy Department got crossways with the president [emphasis
added, unless otherwise noted]” in the Gallagher case. “I didn’t want that to
happen again.” The acting secretary reiterated the point later in the
conversation: “I put myself in the president’s shoes. I considered how the
president felt like he needed to get involved in Navy decisions [in the
Gallagher case and the Spencer firing]. I didn’t want that to happen again.”
Spencer laid out his own response later, in an op-ed in the Post,
one of Trump’s least favorite newspapers in all the land. “This was a shocking
and unprecedented intervention in a low-level review,” Spencer said of the
president’s interference. “It was also a reminder that the president has very
little understanding of what it means to be in the military, to fight
ethically or to be governed by a uniform set of rules and practices.”
Yesterday,
we learned that Secretary Modly had made an announcement to the crew of the Theodore
Roosevelt.
Someone
recorded it and leaked it to the press, and the “Enemies of the People” picked
up the story again.
That
is: They held people in authority accountable.
In
his speech, Modly called the captain “stupid” and “naïve” for sending the
letter. He claimed he removed
the captain because his letter “created a
panic on the ship.” The letter “unnecessarily
raised alarms with the families of our sailors and Marines with no plan to
address those concerns.”
Yes! The letter caused unnecessary alarm! Not the fact that
dozens of sailors were coming down sick, with a potentially deadly virus.
A
storm of criticism –
of Modly –
began brewing up Monday. At first, he insisted he stood by “every word” of his
speech.
Even
the reported
profanity.
Then he, and we assume Trump,
realized he looked like an ass, and Trump realized he himself looked like an
ass, because he backed Modly.
On Saturday, the president said he fully supported Sec. Modly’s decision, although he hedged, as he often does, to avoid getting pinned down as the man who bears responsibility. “I didn’t make the decision,” the president pointed out. Or: the buck doesn’t stop here.
But the “letter was a five-page letter from a captain, and the letter was all over the place. That’s not appropriate.”
“I thought it was terrible, what he did, to write a letter,” the president added. “I mean, this isn’t a class on literature. This is a captain of a massive ship that’s nuclear powered. And he shouldn’t be talking that way in a letter.”
Now,
a new day had dawned and Modly had to tack hard as the winds in Washington D.C.
blew him off course. He apologized in a statement:
I want
to apologize to the Navy for my recent comments to the crew of the TR. Let me
be clear, I do not think Captain Brett Crozier is naïve nor stupid. I think,
and always believed him to be the opposite.
I
believe, precisely because he is not naive and stupid, that he sent his
alarming email with the intention of getting it into the public domain in an
effort to draw public attention to the situation on his ship. I apologize for
any confusion this choice of words may have caused. I also want to apologize
directly to Captain Crozier, his family, and the entire crew of the Theodore
Roosevelt for any pain my remarks may have caused.
Even
Trump seemed to realize it wasn’t a good look to fire a captain who was trying
to keep a crew of 5,000, crammed aboard the tight spaces of a warship at sea,
safe from an easily transmitted virus. “I’m going to get involved and see exactly what’s
going on there,” Trump told reporters at his Monday press conference. “Because
I don’t want to destroy somebody for having a bad day.”
Which is almost
exactly the opposite of what he said on Saturday.
*
WE ALSO LEARNED
that Trump might have to eat a few more words, even though, whenever the
president has to eat words, he chews with his mouth open, spits crumbs while he
talks, and always blames someone else.
It turns out Trump
might have to quit making excuses for his administration’s failure, in late
January, through February, and into early March, to take the threat of the
COVID-19 virus seriously.
Remember those happy days, when the president told us the virus would disappear in April; and besides, it was really nothing more serious than the flu?
Trump has
insisted repeatedly that no one could see this pandemic coming. The free press,
this time in the form of The New York Times, another one of the
president’s least favorite newspapers, has acquired an email from a top
White House economic adviser, Peter Navarro. Dated January 29, it reads in
part:
The lack of
immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans
defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil. This
lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a
full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.
Navarro was hopeful
that the virus would be no worse than the flu and economic damage would be
slight. But one worst-case scenario he laid out warned that as many as
half-a-million Americans could die.
But yeah. Who
could have seen this coming?
Not Donald J. Trump.
(See: 6/21/20.)
*
MEANWHILE, the
president insisted yesterday that anyone who needed a test for the coronavirus
could get one.
The testing the
U.S. was doing, with him in charge, was the envy of the world, he said. Every
other nation on earth wanted to have tests like us. The best tests. Fantastic
tests. Now that you mention it, he would give himself a “10” again for leadership.
He was doing a terrific job.
That is why,
adjusted for population, at least two dozen other countries were testing at
higher rates than the U.S.
That is why,
with all the wonderful testing Trump was doing – it was almost
like he was doing it himself, heroically risking his orange self – the U.S. now
led the world in confirmed cases of COVID-19.
Because our
testing was the greatest.
As of Tuesday
afternoon, Worldometers reports that the U.S. has 380,744 confirmed
cases and 11,907 have died.
*
FORMER FEDERAL
RESERVE CHAIRWOMAN Janis Yellen warned Monday that the U.S. economy will almost
certainly shrink by 30% in the second quarter. Unemployment, she added, has likely already
reached 12 or 13%, and “moving higher.”
*
IN OTHER NEWS:
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has told her members that a second package of
spending
increases, necessary to save the groaning U.S. economy,
could “easily” cost upwards of $1 trillion.
*
LOCAL AND STATE OFFICIALS in Georgia are also
fighting, after Governor Brian Kemp said he was going to reopen the state’s beaches. Kemp, of course, became “famous” recently after
admitting that he didn’t realize COVID-19 could be spread by individuals who
were asymptomatic.
Who knew!
Besides every nurse and doctor and health
department official, and even every fan of medical dramas on TV.
Mayors in several beach towns are unhappy, with
one labeling Kemp’s new order “crazy.” The mayor of Tybee Island, for one,
warned, “The health of our residents, staff and visitors are being put
at risk and we will pursue legal avenues to overturn his reckless mandate.”
“We are in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, and while we are
closing schools we are reopening beaches,” Savannah Mayor Van Johnson told NBC
on Sunday. “In my mind, that does not compute.”
(Thirteen
states have now closed schools for the rest of
the year. Others are likely to follow.)
POSTSCRIPT: When
analyzing the motives of President Trump, one should always keep in mind what a
narcissistic dick he is.
____________________
“It is hard not to think that the President’s
loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal
obligations as an independent and impartial Inspector General, and from my
commitment to continue to do so.”
Inspector General Michael Atkinson
____________________
While most of us have been busy
trying to keep at least six feet away from other human beings, another
Inspector General made the news. This time, the IG in question was Michael
Atkinson, a Trump choice for the job, and a man in charge of keeping the
intelligence community of the United States from breaking the rules. Atkinson
had the misfortune, as it were, to have done his job to the best of his
abilities.
When a whistleblower complaint
landed on his desk, involving President Trump’s questionable call to the leader
of Ukraine, Atkinson determined that the complaint was valid.
As per the law, he sent it on to
Congress.
Fired on Friday, he said in a
statement, “It
is hard not to think that the President’s loss of confidence in me derives from
my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and
impartial Inspector General, and from my commitment to continue to do so.”
Trump defended
the firing this past Saturday when a reporter asked. Atkinson, he said, was a
“disgrace.”
And, by the way,
you know who really hates
whistleblowers and likes to silence them in any way they can? Chinese
communist rulers.
Yeah. Those guys.
It is now believed
that China might have been able to limit the worldwide
spread of COVID by 95%, if authorities hadn’t been so anxious to
muzzle everyone who tried to blow a whistle.
Last year, China
sent 48 reporters to jail.
NOT-SO-MUCH-FUN FACT: Pastor Landon Spradlin, of Gretna,
Virginia dies from COVID-19. Even as he battled the virus, he posted on social media about the
“mass hysteria” surrounding the disease. He said the media was pumping up the
danger in order to make President Trump look bad.
“It will come and it will go,” he predicted.
Now he’s gone.
The story I read makes Pastor Spradlin sound like a good man, with loving
children who will miss him. A sad and
unnecessary waste.
No comments:
Post a Comment