Archive for January, 2021

Thoughts Of The Day

Monday, January 18th, 2021

Was Azar intentionally lying, colossally incompetent, or both?

Given the last four years, I’m guessing Door Number 3.

Because both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two shots, administered 21 and 28 days apart, respectively, Operation Warp Speed’s initial plan, announced in early December, was to hold back half the supply to make sure there was enough for the second shots. At the same time, the Trump Administration was saying it would vaccinate 20 million people by the end of the year.

On Tuesday, 12 January, as it became apparent the first doses of COVID-19 vaccinations were proceeding much slower than predicted (the 20 million prediction had turned into an 11.4 million reality), U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Alex Azar announced the government was making all of the coronavirus reserve vaccine supply immediately available, urged states to provide shots to anyone 65 and older and warned governors that states with lagging inoculations could see their supply shifted to other places.

You could hear the collective country-wide sigh of relief. Help was on the way.

That is, until three days later when we learned the only place the “reserve supply” existed was in Alex Azar’s imagination, because the Administration admitted to state and federal officials it stopped stockpiling the second doses at the end of last year as it attempted to hit the 20 million goal. The reserve supply no longer existed. The states were left to scramble again, as they have throughout the pandemic. Remember the PPE fiasco? States were forced to compete against each other and the Feds to get any. Remember the Administration’s leadership about masking? Neither do I. I could go on.

This latest FUBAR catastrophe led President-Elect Joe Biden to tell the world the vaccine rollout was “a dismal failure.” Seems fairly accurate to me.

“Never ruin an apology with an excuse” – Benjamin Franklin

Here’s the way it worked. After the election, which he lost, Donald Trump spewed lie after lie about how he actually won “in a landslide.” And he convinced millions of people this was so. A new Quinnipiac poll reports 73% of Republicans believe there was “widespread fraud” in the election, which allowed Joe Biden to win. Trump’s two-month assault on truth led to the 6 January armed insurrection.

It is questionable whether he would have persuaded his millions of followers to believe the lies if he had not had profound assistance from Twitter, Facebook and conservative media. Case in point: the conservative outlet American Thinker which, with no investigation,  bought the Dominion Voting Machines stole-the-election line – again and again.

Yesterday, American Thinker “screwed its courage to the sticking post” and apologized. It was not one of those, “We did a bad thing, but we did it because…” things. No, this was an apology that would have made Ben proud. Here it is in full:

We don’t know what prompted American Thinker to so abjectly fall on its sword. I choose to think optimistically, believing journalistic ethics won the day. Regardless, this is how you do an apology.

Speaking of optimism

Why not end on a lighter note?

Back in pre-pandemic times (you remember those, don’t you?), when you wouldn’t think twice about sitting in a pub with friends discussing the metaphysics of Sartre, I once did just that with two friends, one a conservative republican with whom one could actually debate policy issues with smiles all around; the other, an MIT engineering professor.

We were talking about how people so often view the same thing in different ways, which led us to a discussion about optimism. That led to further discussion about the differences between people who were naturally optimistic and those who were naturally pessimistic.

One of us brought up the old glass half full or empty screed. I, the eternal optimist, said to me the glass was always half full. My conservative friend said he couldn’t help seeing it as half empty.

My friend from MIT said, “There’s too much glass.”

Stay safe – and, if you can, optimistic.

 

 

 

 

 

This Is What Happens

Thursday, January 14th, 2021

This is what happens when leaders sell their souls for power.

In the last week, our country and the very concept of democracy have come perilously close to being crushed by the triumph of insurrection. Every day, every hour, we learn more about the plot to bring down the government and establish Donald Trump as de facto dictator. That this was predictable, yet still happened, will be analyzed for years. That it failed (so far), should give no comfort to anyone.

Sabateurs, terrorists in the literal sense of the word, hiding in the belly of the mob, were on a mission to kill Nancy Pelosi, Mike Pence and probably others if they could find them. The FBI is discovering a carefully planned attack, and we are fortunate, indeed, that the traitors’ targets survived. It could easily have gone the other way.

This is what happens when monumental hubris and blind ambition turn the leader of a political party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, into Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Four years ago, a Kentuckian named McConnell agreed to a deal with the Mephistopheles who rode the golden escalator in June of 2015 as The Music of the Night, from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, blasted through the basement of Trump Tower. How fitting.

In this Faustian bargain, the Kentuckian’s deepest desires were granted: remaking the nation’s judiciary; changing tax laws to benefit corporations and the wealthy; dismantling environmental regulations; eviscerating the country’s immigration system; abandoning global partnerships; solidifying a populist base. In exchange for this unholy alliance, Marlowe’s devil-in-chief ran amuck around America preaching authoritarianism, white supremacy and “American carnage,” which he “alone could fix,” to a congregation of millions of vulnerable citizens long fearful of the way life was changing and leaving them behind. They swallowed it whole.

This is what happens when, in April, 2021, armed white supremacists, Neo-Nazis calling themselves Proud Boys, but acting more like “Brownshirts,” stage a rehearsal for last week’s coup attempt in Lansing, Michigan, invading and taking over the state’s capital with plans for capturing and killing the governor, after which they face zero criticism from our modern-day Mephistopheles. What a boost to their movement.

This is what happens when a country, bombarded with more than 34,000 presidential tweets and 323 fan-the-flames presidential rallies over four years, becomes so desensitized to the stoking of racism and intense polemical bullying that politicians, elected to serve their constituents and the Constitution, become too fearful to denounce such behavior, let alone suggest it should never be condoned in America.

This is what happens when, taking a page from the propaganda manual of Joseph Goebbels, lies are told loud enough and often enough that gullible people believe with biblical certainty that the most secure election in our history was rigged and riddled with fraud. Polls continue to show more than 60% of Republicans believe this.

This is what happens when no one but toadying sycophants, whose moral corruption knows no bounds and whose sole job requirement is total devotion to the whims of their Mephistophelean leader, are placed in senior positions of authority. Now, as their deal with the devil unwinds, they are deserting the ship of state with nary a lifeboat in sight.

This is what happens when hate replaces kindness and a willingness to work collaboratively toward the common good to the extent that winning requires annihilation of one’s opponent. The result is a deep crack to the nation’s foundation.

This is what happens when the worst pandemic in a century is allowed to kill more than 400,000 of our fellow citizens by the time Joe Biden utters the solemn words of his oath of office. A pandemic during which never once has Donald Mephistopheles addressed the nation with words of comfort, empathy or even hope. A time in which the Oval Office has become an oval room of mirrors, where everywhere he looks he sees only himself. There’s no one there, Donald.

This is what happens when leaders sell their souls for power.