8/10/20: The Big Ten conference, a pillar of college football, announces that there will be no games this fall.
No one would have been surprised if President Trump had announced that this was a “hoax” and insisted that all football players should immediately report to practice and sneeze on each other.
In other bad news – indicating that the coronavirus is not going away – the American Academy of Pediatrics reported that 97,000 children tested positive for COVID-19 in the last two weeks of July. At least 25 died, proving for the hundredth time that when Trump talks about the spread of this disease, he’s as clueless as a corncob.
Children are not, as he said recently, “virtually immune.” So, good luck educators, as you reopen schools this month.
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AS FOR OUR DEAR PRESIDENT, you know he was delving deep into the details of the school reopening this weekend….
Okay, not. He got in another round of golf on Sunday, his 288th tour of the links since taking office. I swear, I think he’s trying to play as many rounds in one term as President Obama did in two – perhaps realizing that polls indicate (as of now) that a second term isn’t in the cards.
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When Obama golfed (about half as often as Trump) Trump and his cult members hated complained about every round. |
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“If 160,000 people had died on President Obama’s watch, do you think you would have called for his resignation?”
Reporter’s query for President Trump
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AFTER A BUSY WEEKEND, Trump was back, “hard at work” on Monday. At a press conference he talked about the challenge we faced in turning back the killer virus. By way of excuse, he said it was a challenge unlike any seen in more than a century. “The closest thing is in 1917, they say, the great pandemic was a terrible thing where they lost anywhere from 50 to 100 million people.” Then he added, “Probably ended the Second World War. All the soldiers were sick.”
The White House later insisted that Trump had suffered a slip of the tongue. He meant to say, “World War I.” But how does one make that kind of slip and not catch it at once? And even if it were a slip, it was wrong, and you would think the President of the United States would have a firmer grip on history. First, the pandemic erupted in 1918. Second, the Germans didn’t agree to an armistice in November 1918 because of flu. Their army had been bled white during four years of trench warfare. Over two million German soldiers filled the cemeteries and millions more had been maimed by wounds or disabled by lung-searing gassings.
Trump’s wrong-turn into history was prompted by a reporter asking a “Fake News” kind of question. “If 160,000 people had died on President Obama’s watch,” the journalist wondered, “do you think you would have called for his resignation?”
“No, I wouldn’t have done that,” Trump lied. (You could argue that whenever he tells the truth, that’s actually a slip of the tongue.) He was perfectly happy with the fine job he and his administration were doing. “I think it’s been amazing what we’ve been able to do [emphasis added]. If we didn’t close up our country, we would have had 1.5 or 2 million people already dead.”
“We’ve called it right, now we don’t have to close it. We understand the disease. Nobody understood it because nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”
Then he launched into his lesson about World War II, or World War I, or for all he knew, the Spanish-American War. Trump was just getting started bungling basic history, and soon showed he was not only clueless but classless. It was six years ago, that Ebola erupted in West Africa. Trump seems to have amnesia about what he said then. When President Obama allowed seven infected Americans to return to this country and go into quarantine, Trump was livid. He predicted “bedlam.” He called Obama a “psycho.” He said his predecessor didn’t care about the American people. Obama should have to “embrace” anyone who became infected as a result of his decisions.
Trump howled at the time. He did say Barack Obama should resign. He said that when a total of 11 Americans fell ill. He said that when two died. You’d think he’d remember and be humbler today.
Then again: This is Trump.
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NEW COVID-19 cases for the day:
40,522.
FEBRUARY 2020 – SPECIAL ADDENDUM
For four years now, I have done my best to highlight both the duplicity and the imbecility of President Trump. For today, I would like to quote at great length from a mocking editorial penned by George Conway, a Republican, a Never Trumper, and husband to White House aide Kellyanne Conway.
The editorial in the Washington Post, is titled, “I (still) believe the president, and in the president.”
Conway does a masterful job of using the president’s own words to expose the Orange Buffoon’s innumerable flaws. He begins, tongue-in-cheek:
I believe the president Made America Great Again. I believe we need him reelected to Make America Great Again Again.
I believe Joe Biden is “Sleepy” and “weak.” I believe Biden could “hurt God” and the Bible.
I believe that if Biden is elected, there will be “no religion, no anything,” and he would confiscate all guns, “immediately and without notice.” He would “abolish” “our great,” “beautiful suburbs,” not to mention “the American way of life.” There would be “no windows, no nothing” in buildings.
I believe it’s normal for the president to say “Yo Semites” and “Yo Seminites,” “Thigh Land,” “Minne-a-napolis,” “toe-tally-taria-tism,” “Thomas Jeffers” and “Ulyss-eus S. Grant.” I believe it’s Biden who’s cognitively impaired.
Conway also “believes” the 45th president has the pandemic totally under control, because – um – he says he does:
I believe the president has “a natural ability,” like his “great, super-genius uncle” from MIT, which is why he understands “that whole world” of virology and epidemiology.
So I believed the president in January and February when he said covid-19 was “totally under control,” that it was Democrats’ “new hoax,” and that he was “not at all” worried about a pandemic. I believed him in March when he said he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
I believe the president and the doctor who believes in demon sperm and the medical use of space alien DNA, and not Anthony S. Fauci, who’s an “alarmist” and “wrong.”
I believe the president’s suggestions that physicians should try injecting patients with household disinfectants, and shining ultraviolet light inside their bodies, make perfect sense.
I believe the “books” and “manuals,” if someone would just read them, say “you can test too much” for covid-19. I believe we now have 5 million cases because we test so much, and that the president was right to slow testing down, unless he was kidding — in which case he was right not to.
I believe that the president has done a tremendous job fighting the virus — and that he shouldn’t “take responsibility at all”— even though about 160,000 Americans have died. I believe the virus “is what it is.”
I hate to leave any part of this editorial out, but Conway finishes with a perfect takedown of Trumpian and Republican howling about the coming election – which will be totally rigged – unless Trump wins.
(Trump basically said the same in 2016.)
Conway finishes with this:
I believe absentee voting, where voters mail in their ballots, is good, and that mail-in voting, where voters mail in their ballots, is totally different, and bad — and will result in “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election” in history. Except in Florida, where absentee and mail-in voting are the same and both good, “because Florida has got a great Republican governor.”
I believe we should “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote” — but that “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!!”
I believe the president won the popular vote in 2016 “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” I believe he shouldn’t accept the election results if he loses in November.
(Proofreading and editing my blog in June 2021, we have to say Conway called Trump’s reaction to defeat perfectly.)
