President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

I'm fairly certain they didn't. Minnesota and this county had their cases for sure, but I don't think outbreak numbers ever got to crisis situations where they were treating people in parking garages or pairing up for ventilators. Could be wrong.

 

Trumpers underperformed (again) tonight. I still believe he's going to get destroyed in November. People are sick of that asshole.

 

I completely understand why things were shut down and all of the issues surrounding a completely novel virus that acts the way COVID does. We did what we had to do at the time with the information we had.

But that doesn’t change the fact that non-medical interventions weren’t nearly as effective as we’d like to believe. Pre-vaccine, the numbers were going to largely be the same no matter how long businesses and schools stayed closed.

It certainly wasn't as simple as “people temporarily lose jobs or more people die.”

 

Elvis could sell out stadiums. Elvis imitators never could.

 

That isn't entirely true because it ignores that part of the design was to keep the situation in overwhelmed hospitals from getting worse. Also, it was about buying time so doctors could study the virus, working on treatments as well as vaccines. That time had value. It would have had more value if the president had started Operation Warp speed in March of 2020 instead of spending his time in denial.

Trumpists love to play the hindsight game with this. I know you aren't one, but that nonsense gets really old.

 

As we approach the first presidential debate of this cycle, remember that during the first one four years ago, Donald Trump hid the fact that he was sick with a deadly, highly contagious disease. What else is he hiding?

 

He has a diaper in his pants.
And he has poop in his diaper.

Screw the drug test. Let's see a diaper test.

 

Yes, I understand the “why” quite well. I work in public health and have been close to the front lines in both of this century’s pandemics.

The fact still remains that we were not getting out of it without a vaccine and medical treatment methods. And it was not an either-or situation with closing businesses and people dying — the point I was originally responding to.

Without universal implementation, nothing was going to work. Not masks, when more than half of this country whined and refused and the other half couldn’t even figure out how to wear them properly. Not shutdowns, when grocery stores and other “essential” businesses (like in my case, Total Wine) stayed open.

And sure, we only found out later that most of those measures largely protected the LEAST vulnerable, not the most. But we did hold on to some of those restrictions for WAY, WAY too long and the resulting damage is catastrophic in its own right.

 

Trump was the absolute worst person to preside over government during COVID.

Perhaps at best, what a president can do in those moments is make sure intense, brilliant people balance each other out a bit and be the face of some sense of national unity, which is hard in a non-authoritarian nation of our size and population. (And, no it's not remotely authoritarian in the way China or Russia is, no matter what we think of Trump.) A kind of let's do this, but not this person who takes the heat and protects the government from too much criticism or praise.

One of Trump's errors, ironically, was letting Fauci become the face of the response. It wasn't good for Fauci - went to his head, and also made him a lightning rod - and it wasn't good for America, which pretty quickly split for or against a scientist and bureaucrat. Fauci knew, intrinsically, that the response would be trial and error, not this binary thing, and under a different president - Obama - I think he would have been able to wisely say "Mr President, I advise, you decide and explain" more than he (or anyone) thought he could with Trump.

And the left - and this board - will just sit there and say "well, one half of America is just bad people" as if an indignant wave of the hand solves something. Government is precisely the thing of getting people to collectively in ways they don't wanna.

And Trump can't.

 

Agreed. He's going to lose. And I suspect he loses the debate Thursday night. (I mean that he actually loses, not the "he's a bad human being so he can't win a debate" kind of losing.)