Skip to main content

Ambush at the ABC Corral


A rough week got even rougher for the Donald when the CDC threw a wet blanket on his plans to roll out a vaccine next month just in time for the general election.  Dr. Redfield doesn't see a coronavirus vaccine being made widely available until the middle of next year, which of course led our SCROTUS to lash out at him on twitter.  What's worse for the Donald is that the leading pharmaceutical companies who are in a race to produce a vaccine say they will follow the CDC guidelines when it comes to testing their products to determine their efficacy.  So, unless Dr. Hydroxychloroquine has a magic serum up his sleeve or Trump can get the FDA to approve Putin's Sputnik V, the Donald's October Surprise is effectively scotched.

According to our SCROTUS it doesn't matter anyway, as we will all have "herd mentality" by the end of the year and we won't need a vaccine, or masks either.  This was one of the many jaw-dropping moments from his Town Hall debacle where he was forced to field questions from the public for the first time in his administration.  Laura Ingraham proclaimed it an ambush when voters asked him very basic questions that he was woefully unprepared to answer.  COVID Barbie tried to undo some of the damage the next day by saying that "herd mentality" is a medical term, but Fox news reporter Sandra Smith was having none of it

The problem is that Dr. Donald thinks he can fake his way through anything.  He refuses to read his briefings, which Bob Woodward and many others have noted in their books, relying on the manufactured opinions of Fox and other conservative news outlets for his information.  He refuses to accept that global warming is resulting in increased wildfires on the West Coast and hurricanes on the East Coast.  He doesn't even know that the jurisdiction of national forest lands falls to the federal government not states like California, Oregon and Washington, where many of these fires have sprung up.  Even as state agencies fought these fires on federal land, the Trump administration refused to cover the costs, repeatedly blaming bad state management instead.

This led Joe Biden to make an impromptu appearance on national television calling the president a "climate arsonist," because of his inability to grasp the root cause of these fires and hurricanes or do anything meaningful about them.  Biden went on to lay out a comprehensive strategy to fight climate change, which has resulted in the endorsements of several major science agencies and periodicals, including Scientific American, which had never before endorsed a presidential candidate.

No bother, Trump and his staff want you to believe that all the scientists and doctors are plotting against the President, as part of a worldwide conspiracy to unseat Trump.  This after it was discovered that Michael Caputo, the communications director at Health and Human Services, was altering reports from the CDC to make them more favorable of the dubious theories the president has been promoting.  

Judging from the ABC Town Hall on Tuesday, voters are fed up with Trump's misleading views and lack of action on coronavirus and everything else.  One diabetic man who said he voted for Trump in 2016 was particularly brusque on the president, catching the Donald totally off guard.  

Joe Biden will have his chance tonight to once again cast himself as the diametrical opposite to Trump, as he did in his Delaware speech on Monday.  This time he will be subject to the scrutiny of voters.  Let's see if he survives the "ambush."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

O Pioneers!

It is hard not to think of Nebraska without thinking of its greatest writer.  Here is a marvelous piece by Capote, Remembering Willa Cather . I remember seeing a stage production of O Pioneers! and being deeply moved by its raw emotions.  I had read My Antonia before, and soon found myself hooked, like Capote was by the simple elegance of her prose and the way she was able to evoke so many feelings through her characters.  Much of it came from the fact that she had lived those experiences herself. Her father dragged the family from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883, when it was still a young state, settling in the town of Red Cloud. named after one of the great Oglala chiefs.  Red Cloud was still alive at the time, living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, in the aftermath of the "Great Sioux Wars" of 1876-77.  I don't know whether Cather took any interest in the famous chief, although it is hard to imagine not.  Upon his death in 1909, he was eulogi

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Colonel

Now with Colonel Roosevelt , the magnum opus is complete. And it deserves to stand as the definitive study of its restless, mutable, ever-boyish, erudite and tirelessly energetic subject. Mr. Morris has addressed the toughest and most frustrating part of Roosevelt’s life with the same care and precision that he brought to the two earlier installments. And if this story of a lifetime is his own life’s work, he has reason to be immensely proud.  -- Janet Maslin -- NY Times . Let the discussion begin!