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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMitch McConnell Is Lying Shamelessly About Obama, Because What Else Is There to Do?
it is clear now, if it were ever in doubt, that the strategy is just to "flood the zone with shit," as Steve Bannon once said. On Sunday, the president debuted the pitifully obvious Distraction Object that he called "Obamagate." What is Obamagate? Nobody really knows! That includes the president, who was asked about it the very next day, specifically about what crime his predecessor supposedly committed. "Obamagate!" he replied, as if eager to confirm it was tautological nonsense geared solely towards inflaming his supporters. "Some terrible things happened," Daniel Dale reports he added, "and you'll be seeing what's going on." Can't wait!
But it's not just El Jefe who would like to throw enough manure in the discourse to obscure the fact that the federal government, primarily controlled by the Republican Party, has completely botched the American response to the coronavirus pandemicand to the economic downturn that has accompanied it. The feds did not use the two months we've all sat at home to develop a testing regime on the scale necessary to reopen safely, though they have implemented a rigorous testing scheme at the White House. So it looks like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is also interested in changing the subject, or at least burying it. He added some of his own shameless lies.
Link to tweet
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While the Obama administration did not leave their successors a "game plan," they did leave them a 69-page pandemic playbook which the Trump administration then completely ignored. The Trump administration also eliminated the Pandemic Preparedness Office, established under Obama as part of the National Security Council on the basis that international plagues create national-security issues. They also nixed a pandemic early-warning program called PREDICT, also created under Obama, two months before the novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China. That program specifically sought to help researchers at the Wuhan labon which Republicans have grown increasingly fixatedto respond to this kind of event. And most recently, as 60 Minutes reported this Sunday, Trump cut even more funding geared towards finding a cure for COVID-19 based on misinformation he gobbled up gluttonously.
Whatever else you want to say about Obama's record, he was a mostly competent technocrat suited to respond to this kind of crisisnot unlike Angela Merkel of Germany, a country whose response, despite a setback today, has lapped the United States at least twice already. But of course McConnell, who must be harboring growing fears about maintaining his Senate majority as folks like Colorado's Cory Gardner look set to walk the plank, would choose to engage with none of this and simply lie. While Trump has birthed a whole new era of public shamelessness and mendacity, McConnell is actually one of his great inspirations in the shamelessness department. It's McConnell who's spent more than a decade now ravaging the institutions of self-government, turning the Senate into a right-wing judge installation machine while fostering the authoritarian impulse in the party's ranks.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a32446009/mitch-mcconnell-obama-administration-pandemic-playbook-trump/
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