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Mrs Whiggins

By Mrs Whiggins
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I'd just like to point out that neither myself nor any of my fellow nurses, fellow advanced nurse practitioners, and other healthcare providers ever swore an oath that we would lay down our lives for

Bama Chick
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Welp, it finally happened. I snapped in public today. I went into work for a bit this morning because I’m trying to figure out the safest way to host physicians we are recruiting given our CV-19 sit

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I don't really know what to say anymore tbh. What happened last night is hard to put into words for anyone who hasn't worked in a hospital healthcare setting. Just unreal. Everyone is getting fucked.

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Bullneck

Bullneck 19028

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, Johnny Sack said:

Trump started calling it the China virus because China started to blame the US to the world press. I'm okay with our president calling out other countries bullshit.

Some of you care about the most frivolous shit. China starts a worldwide pandemic then tries to lie about it, and you're upset with our president about calling them out on it.

That's pretty much where it's at with you and Trump.  Nothing matters except not getting blamed. 

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horn4life

horn4life 3758

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Here is an excellent article on why this is so fuck much worse than it had to be.  

Quote

Neither the tide of pestilence sweeping the nation nor the economic calamity that will follow was inevitable. They are the predictable outcomes of the president’s authoritarian instincts, his obvious incompetence, and the propaganda apparatus that has shielded him from accountability by ensuring that the public is blinded to his role in the scale of this disaster.

Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality Did This
The autocratic political culture that has propped up the Trump administration has left the nation entirely unprepared for an economic and public-health calamity.

Spoiler

The president of the United States is a menace to public health.

I don’t mean that I disagree with him on policy, although I do. I don’t mean that I abhor the president’s expressed bigotry toward religious and ethnic minorities, although that is also true. I am not referring to Donald Trump’s efforts to corrupt the Justice Department, shield his criminal associates from legal peril, or funnel taxpayer money to his tacky hotels and golf courses, although all of these things are reason enough to oppose the president.

What I am referring to is the fact that, soon after the coronavirus outbreak emerged in China, the rest of the world began to regard it as a threat to public health, while Trump has seen it as a public-relations problem. Trump’s primary method of dealing with public-relations problems is to exert the full force of the authoritarian cult of personality that surrounds him to deny that a problem even exists. This approach has paid political dividends for the Republican Party, in the form of judicial appointments, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a rapid erosion of the rule of law. But applied to the deadly pandemic now sweeping the planet, all it has done is exacerbate the inevitable public-health crisis, while leaving both the federal government and the entire swath of the country that hangs on his every word unprepared for the catastrophe now unfolding in the United States. The cardinal belief of Trumpism is that loyalty to Trump is loyalty to the country, and that equation leaves no room for the public interest.

Neither the tide of pestilence sweeping the nation nor the economic calamity that will follow was inevitable. They are the predictable outcomes of the president’s authoritarian instincts, his obvious incompetence, and the propaganda apparatus that has shielded him from accountability by ensuring that the public is blinded to his role in the scale of this disaster.

Trump’s first public remarks on the coronavirus came during an interview with the CNBC reporter Joe Kernen on January 22. Kernen asked, “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?” To which Trump replied, “No. Not at all. And—we’re—we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s—going to be just fine.” In February, he falsely declared that “we are very close to a vaccine,” and that “within a couple of days [the number of cases] is going to be down to close to zero.” In early March, he was still urging Americans to ignore the issue, saying, “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

One might argue in the president’s defense that panic serves no one. It is important, in fact, that political leaders urge calm in the face of a crisis, even as they prepare for the worst.

Neither the tide of pestilence sweeping the nation nor the economic calamity that will follow was inevitable. They are the predictable outcomes of the president’s authoritarian instincts, his obvious incompetence, and the propaganda apparatus that has shielded him from accountability by ensuring that the public is blinded to his role in the scale of this disaster.

Trump’s first public remarks on the coronavirus came during an interview with the CNBC reporter Joe Kernen on January 22. Kernen asked, “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?” To which Trump replied, “No. Not at all. And—we’re—we have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s—going to be just fine.” In February, he falsely declared that “we are very close to a vaccine,” and that “within a couple of days [the number of cases] is going to be down to close to zero.” In early March, he was still urging Americans to ignore the issue, saying, “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

One might argue in the president’s defense that panic serves no one. It is important, in fact, that political leaders urge calm in the face of a crisis, even as they prepare for the worst.

In the meantime, doctors, nurses, and EMTs are getting sick. Medical workers are running out of face masks and gloves. The United States does not have enough ventilators for critically ill patients who need them. States lack sufficient testing capacity to measure the scale of the outbreak. Emergency rooms are overwhelmed. Hospitals are running out of beds. The president is tweeting praise of himself.

Nor has the president’s party evinced any greater sense of civic obligation than the president himself. Instead, as Trump downplayed the potential consequences of an outbreak, did nothing to prepare the federal government to curtail one, lied to the public about the availability of coronavirus tests, falsely claimed that the number of cases was going down, and misled the public about measures being taken to contain new infections, Republicans were echoing the servile praise of conservative media outlets and Trump officials, even as they quietly understood that the nation was about to be overwhelmed by a global pandemic, having been briefed in late January about the seriousness of the contagion. But instead of informing their own constituents about the danger they were in, several allegedly attempted to profiteer off of a pandemic by selling stocks right before one of the biggest Wall Street market crashes in American history. Properly warning the public of impending catastrophe might have drawn condemnation from the president, so they watched the cataclysm silently while turning a profit.

Other nations not led by Trump have also struggled to restrain the spread of the coronavirus. But the United States had advance notice of how bad the pandemic would get not just from China, but from Italy, where the potential severity was apparent in late February. South Korea, whose first case of the coronavirus was detected in late January, around the same time as the first case in the United States, has already contained its own outbreak by rapidly developing and implementing a widespread testing regime. Trump spent the intervening weeks trying to pump stocks and lying to the public about having everything under control, while the conservative propaganda apparatus that surrounds him did the same. Even public-health officials were forced to serve two masters, having to juggle their responsibilities coping with the widening coronavirus pandemic while maintaining a Juche-like commitment to lavishing the president with praise.

The bizarre ritual of public-health officials fawning over the president during coronavirus briefings is not some trivial matter. In fact, it illustrates how democratic backsliding during the Trump administration has damaged the federal government’s ability to respond to emergencies and the credibility of its public statements on matters of life and death. Authoritarian leaders prize loyalty over expertise, and part of the way such leaders determine loyalty is through demanding sycophantic praise from underlings, smoking out those unwilling to bend the knee. This is how you end up with the president’s unqualified, pampered son-in-law, his foggy brain addled by Fox News propaganda, using his influence to undermine officials trying to turn back the outbreak.

A pandemic is precisely the kind of situation that shows why it is important to have a government staffed by qualified civil servants, rather than whimpering toadies who can’t deliver bad news to a mercurial president whose main priority is protecting himself. At least part of the federal government’s delayed response, Politico reported, is because Trump “rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news.” The president’s fragile ego is proving deadly.

Trump is hardly the first politician to lie about the scope of a problem to preserve his public image. The distinction here is that, having decided that he would downplay the dangers of the coronavirus, the authoritarian cult of personality built up around the president and maintained by conservative media reverently amplified the president’s messaging. The conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, to whom Trump recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom, told his listeners that “this virus is the common cold.” The Fox News host Sean Hannity proclaimed that the president’s critics were attempting to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,” while his colleague Pete Hegseth told viewers, “I feel like the more I learn about this, the less there is to worry about.” The network aired a parade of medical experts offering bogus health advice about the coronavirus, including the claim that the “worst-case scenario” is that “it could be the flu.” Republican legislators appeared on the network urging Americans to defy federal health officials’ advice to avoid large public gatherings and work from home if possible, with Representative Devin Nunes of California telling Fox News on March 15, “It’s a great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant,” or “go to your local pub.”

Trump and the conservative media apparatus have had the predictable impact of persuading audiences not to take health officials’ warnings seriously, viewing them as just another liberal “hoax.” One pastor in Arkansas told The Washington Post that “half of his church is ready to lick the floor, to prove there’s no actual virus,” adding that “in your more politically conservative regions, closing is not interpreted as caring for you. It’s interpreted as liberalism, or buying into the hype.”

Conservatives have argued that it is the mainstream media’s fault for being so relentlessly negative about the president. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tweeted that “one of the dangerous consequences of having a totally dishonest left wing news media was that most Americans discounted their hysteria as phony.” Gingrich’s attempted indictment of the mainstream press is a backhanded acknowledgment that the conservative media do not conceive of their job as informing the public.

It's a nice writeup by Adam Serwer that shows how this slowly built over time, Interesting read.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/donald-trump-menace-public-health/608449/?utm_medium=offsite&utm_source=yahoo&utm_campaign=yahoo-non-hosted&yptr=yahoo

 

 

 

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washparkhorn

washparkhorn 9935

Posted
Posted

Agree - Biden needs to get out ahead of this - now. Dems are again letting Trump dictate the narrative to distract from the bigger issue of what's next. That is how he wins. 

I think the poll numbers favoring Trump are BS, but he will take them and run with them to solidify his base. 

Biden needs to do more - now - to capture those looking for a change for the better. "Trump = Bad" is not enough to win. 

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, F250 said:

What world do these people live in?

 

 

While this is already ridiculous, I'm taking bets as to how soon Trump supporters start with this like this...

"Only one man was in the lead at the AIDS outbreak, H1N1, MERS, SARS, Avian Bird Flu, and now Coronavirus...Anthony Fauci.  He's to blame for all these epidemics, he's the real monster!  Get him!!!"  I mean, can you prove that Fauci wasn't there for Spanish Influenza?  He's has no alibi, nobody else can vouch for where he was!  

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MaybeACoordinator

MaybeACoordinator 8349

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, Anastasis said:

Oh yes, lets set off a civil war in the midst of a pandemic.  That sounds like a brilliant fucking idea. 

I agree it's a drastic measure but we might be getting one anyway. I'd rather let the fucktards try to fight it out with the 101st Airborne that me having to do it myself. 

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bolverk

bolverk 29456

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Posted
3 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

Oh yes, lets set off a civil war in the midst of a pandemic.  That sounds like a brilliant fucking idea. 

It's already a war of words and, honestly, it ain't that civil -- not to take away from your larger point.

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JimmyJames

JimmyJames 12271

Posted
Posted
5 hours ago, Johnny Sack said:

Sorry to burst your bubble, but I liquidated my 401k in January because I was rolling it into a SEP IRA.  That's sitting there in cash.  I'll average back in over the next year.  I don't otherwise invest in the market.  I like real estate better.

I do have sympathy for those who are losing jobs and wealth due to the Chinese Cononavirus.

Hahaha. You don’t give a shit about anyone but yourself, just like your hero president shitstain and his “this is all a democratic hoax” bullshit that will wind up killing hundreds of thousands of Americans. 

You’re still gonna vote for him in the fall I’m sure. You are one evil sack of shit. I hope you are not a real person but since trump is the president, I do know people like you depict on the net exist.

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F250

F250 28717

Posted
Posted
17 minutes ago, Lobo said:

While this is already ridiculous, I'm taking bets as to how soon Trump supporters start with this like this...

"Only one man was in the lead at the AIDS outbreak, H1N1, MERS, SARS, Avian Bird Flu, and now Coronavirus...Anthony Fauci.  He's to blame for all these epidemics, he's the real monster!  Get him!!!"  I mean, can you prove that Fauci wasn't there for Spanish Influenza?  He's has no alibi, nobody else can vouch for where he was!  

I read that in Rush Limbaugh's voice.

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bolverk

bolverk 29456

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Posted
4 minutes ago, MaybeACoordinator said:

I agree it's a drastic measure but we might be getting one anyway. I'd rather let the fucktards try to fight it out with the 101st Airborne that me having to do it myself. 

Look, man, I know it feels good to say that kind of shit to let off steam. I absolutely detest, unequivocally, Trump and the Toadies too, but we've got to keep some semblance of a functioning democracy to get us through this shit and hope to come out with the least damage to our already scarred nation.

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MaybeACoordinator

MaybeACoordinator 8349

Posted
Posted
2 minutes ago, bolverk said:

Look, man, I know it feels good to say that kind of shit to let off steam. I absolutely detest, unequivocally, Trump and the Toadies too, but we've got to keep some semblance of a functioning democracy to get us through this shit and hope to come out with the least damage to our already scarred nation.

I don't want it to go there but I fear it might. I should have couched my first post along these lines less jokingly. 

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F250

F250 28717

Posted
Posted
3 minutes ago, hayden_horn said:

do you think that's actually a good look for the president?

that's a fucking softball question offering trump the opportunity to assuage the fears of the american public.

Yes, this was a softball setup on a tee. Trump just needed to demonstrate that he has the skillset of a mediocre business manager and address the concerns of the public.

Speaking of Trump's business skills, holy shit can you imagine being involved in a major project with him as the executive sponsor? I have had experience with a lot of executive butfuckery but they all pale in comparison to this shit show.

 

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Anastasis

Anastasis 23403

Posted
Posted
3 minutes ago, F250 said:

Yes, this was a softball setup on a tee. Trump just needed to demonstrate that he has the skillset of a mediocre business manager and address the concerns of the public.

Speaking of Trump's business skills, holy shit can you imagine being involved in a major project with him as the executive sponsor? I have had experience with a lot of executive butfuckery but they all pale in comparison to this shit show.

The reporter stated bad numbers.  Trump no like numbers. Especially bad numbers. His brain shut down immediately when he heard the ratings. He is a psychopathology wrapped in a flesh.  Maybe human, maybe not. 

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TwiceHorn

TwiceHorn 31326

Posted
Posted
4 hours ago, TXSG8R said:

China gives zero shits about shame, especially from the US.  Punishment will come from our government, and has absolutely nothing to do with the president calling it chinese-virus.  John Q Public calling it chinese-virus has nothing to do with any form of punishment that will come from the government.  The only thing it does for you, or the president, is tickle your anger muscle at best, or let you slide up to being a racist piece of shit line at worst while getting to claim "Im just saying where it came from."  I dont need you to qualify where you fall on that spectrum.  

True.  I'm mad at China the institution/country, but name calling isn't any good and taking it out on Chinese-Americans is no good.

Trump is using it as a diversion and will try to make it dovetail with Democrat=Socialist=Communist=China=Virus in some simple-jack campaign ads.

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LongestHorn

LongestHorn 759

Posted
Posted
34 minutes ago, Lobo said:

While this is already ridiculous, I'm taking bets as to how soon Trump supporters start with this like this...

"Only one man was in the lead at the AIDS outbreak, H1N1, MERS, SARS, Avian Bird Flu, and now Coronavirus...Anthony Fauci.  He's to blame for all these epidemics, he's the real monster!  Get him!!!"  I mean, can you prove that Fauci wasn't there for Spanish Influenza?  He's has no alibi, nobody else can vouch for where he was!  

Dr. Fauci is the Deep State!  Starting working for the govt in 1968 and has been breeding in the swamp ever since!  

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Bookman

Bookman 4611

Posted
Posted
5 hours ago, Blotto said:

Trump is such a baby-back bitch. Shut the fuck up and lead you cunt. 

He's such a whiny little fucking crybaby.

Reporters should ask "Mr. President, what is your message to Americans who think you're an incompetent, corrupt, failed businessman?"

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triplehorn

triplehorn 2664

Posted
Posted
45 minutes ago, Bama Chick said:

Not such a good call.

 

yeah, that’s my quad of town.  Very close to where I live.  Learned about it yesterday from my neighbor.  Not surprised in the least.  It’s been in the community here at least 3 weeks.  Not that I think I may have been exposed or anything.

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JimmyJames

JimmyJames 12271

Posted
Posted
3 minutes ago, Bookman said:

God.

God didn’t elect trump president. The criminal organization calling itself the Republican Party did that, along with the olds. 

You cant elect a guy like trump as president and expect to get away with it. That’s not how karma works. God said if that’s what you want, that’s what you get.

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Anastasis

Anastasis 23403

Posted
Posted
23 minutes ago, Hugo Stiglitz said:

I intend to get proper fucked up tonight, part of my social distancing regimen.

Come back later tonight and let's throw belligerent insults at each other.  It's a small but important solace and outlet. 

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Jack Straw

Jack Straw 2953

Posted
Posted
3 hours ago, LongestHorn said:

Smells like bullshit.

Johnny Hack posting a supposed signature block from an alleged email from his financial advisor to own the libs - not quite Rocko posting a picture of his paystub level pathetic, but damn close.  

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RayDog

RayDog 682

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, Bookman said:

Trump didn't originate the disease. He just stuck his head in the sand instead of doing something to prepare. It's what weak, incompetent, morons do. And 63,000,000 Americans think he's great.

59 million and rapidly dying.

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