These are the COVID Chronicles. From now until the Trump circus folds its tents and skips town and Joe Biden fumigates the White House — and an exorcism wouldn’t be out of line, either — we will report daily on how the denizens of Trump world are sinking to their knees, like the Martian tripods in War Of The Worlds. They were a pernicious and powerful force too, until a tiny germ wiped them out.
Similarly, as Trump lies in bed tripping on meds and tweeting, his sycophants who haven’t been diagnosed with the virus — an ever shrinking group — are out on the airwaves desperately trying to spin the utter collapse of this administration and the fact that the White House is dark today, after Kayleigh McEnany’s disclosure that she is COVID-positive, as a good thing. Daily Beast:
Asked by Fox anchor Sandra Smith if President Trump will “change his messaging” and stop “downplaying” the coronavirus moving forward now that he has dealt with it personally, Perrine touted the importance of “firsthand experience.”
“Firsthand experience is always going to change how someone relates to something that’s been happening,” she said. “The president has coronavirus right now. He is battling it head on, as toughly, as only President Trump can. And of course that’s going to change the way that he speaks of it because it will be a firsthand experience.”
When Smith pressed Perrine to explain why the pandemic has taken a backseat to the economy and “law and order” in the Trump campaign’s messaging, the aide insisted that he’s “talked about coronavirus as well.”
“He’s talked about it all,” she continued. “And listen, he has experience as commander-in-chief, he has experience as a businessman, he has experience, now, fighting the coronavirus as an individual. Those firsthand experiences, Joe Biden, he doesn’t have those.”
Here’s a great analogy.
This is like saying that Trump getting pneumonia makes him a better man than Joe Biden, because Biden had enough sense to come in out of the rain. I guess the base responds to this idiocy. Somebody must.
— Ursula Faw (@ursulafaw56) October 5, 2020
Meanwhile, back at the White House, the staffers are in revolt. Mark Meadows will be lucky if he’s only hung in effigy after this. Axios:
Frustration and anxiety built among White House staffers, who say they went days with no internal communication from Meadows about protocols and procedures — including whether they should show up to work — as COVID tore through the West Wing.
- By contrast, the first lady’s chief of staff, Stephanie Grisham, emailed her staff on Saturday advising them to work from home and reminding them of CDC guidance.
- And the vice president’s chief, Marc Short, emailed his senior staff at 3 a.m. Friday with an update on the president’s situation and urged them to work from home. Short also had a conference call with his staff on Saturday to take questions and explain the protocol and situation.
A senior White House official said it was “ridiculous'” that there had been no proper internal communication from the chief or operations officials since COVID started rapidly infecting their colleagues: “A bunch of us are talking about it and just gonna make the calls on our own.” […]
Several staffers told Axios they were furious with Meadows for leaving much of the staff in the dark, at the same time the White House was sending mixed, incomplete and inaccurate messages to the public.
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West Wing staff were privately circulating an unsparing indictment by Politico’s Tim Alberta, “How Mark Meadows Became the White House’s Unreliable Source.”
You remember Sean Conley’s pep talk about the “upbeat” Trump team on Saturday and you recall Mark Meadows taking reporters aside a short while later and saying that Trump’s “vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning, and the next 48 hours will be critical.” Axios is calling this “a debacle of deception and contradictory information” from the White House and we agree. And now we’re all waiting to see if Trump actually leaves Walter Reed in three hours (it’s 3:45 EDT at the time of this writing) or if they wheel him on down to the psych ward — or if he does leave, but Against Medical Advice.
What a mess.
I say again…I have not been afraid of this crowd because in the end, these supercreeps were never the scary monsters they wanted to think they were (points if you recognize the reference in that sentence). Watching them fall apart in the midst of a crisis of their own making when it finally reaches them proves this.
One of my favorites.
It’s no game, eh, Cmae?
I was waiting for this to happen, it took a bit longer than i thought it would.
In the movie Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, the recently baptized rubes were explaining how they, being escaped convicts, were now washed clean by the blood of Jesus. Everett(George clooney), explained with a wry smile, you may be straight with the Lord, but the state of Mississippi is a little more hardarse.
Olivia Nuzzi, in the cited tweet, had to change the actual quote from “those” to “that” in order to create the outrage. The original quote is still a stupid gaffe from a campaign that tried to run on the idea that the opponent was a gaffe machine. Jill Biden is right. Gaffe is a verboten word. More to the point: Trump has experience being incompetent at all those things. Nothing to brag about at all.
Link to the original tweet from the Trumpista? Because it doesn’t seem to be around anywhere.
The original appears immediately above the block with Pfeiffer’s response to Nuzzi’s tweet.
Nuzzi made the change since she omitted part of Berrine’s original quote. Berrine listed several things which is why she originally said “those.” Since Nuzzi only used the last part of the list, she needed to change Berrine’s final comment. Properly, Nuzzi should’ve put “that” in brackets to ensure the sentence was grammatically correct but retains the idea that a change was made to the source.
And if you think changing the quote from “those” to “that” was responsible for the “outrage,” you’re woefully mistaken. The original was just as likely to have created “outrage” as the modified tweet did (at least to you).
the problem with the modified quote is worse, because she removed the proper antecedent for “those” in order to pretend the speaker was not referring to commander in chief and businessman. We need to examine these quotes in their entirety and in their context, understanding the difference between extemporaneous speaking and prepared comments. Perrine did not actually attack Biden for being Covid-free. All three parts of the premises are arguable, and incompetence is the basis on which they should be argued.
“That” in brackets does not indicate that a change was made to the source. At least the use of brackets is not supposed to be used to change the source. The brackets are supposed to clarify when a quote is longish and the antecedent may have become lost. The antecedent was experience, not Covid specifically. Nor did I say that the change was responsible for the outrage. What is responsible is people’s readiness to overparse words if they think they can make political hay.
While we are on the subject, generally speaking every critical comment is not an attack, else teachers spend all their days attacking students. “Attack” like “hate” are well-nigh ruined words due to overuse in hyperbole. The original comment is just par for the course with Trump spokepersons, not “full-tilt. either that or they are always full-tilt.
Himself has no f*cking clue how bad the virus is, because he’s getting the best treatment he’ll allow his doctors (and the staff at Walter Reed) to provide, and he *still* doesn’t understand masking and distancing. Or isolation when he’s sick. Or that he’s on some fairly heavy drugs that make him feel a lot better than he really is. (They should tell him that if he leaves, they won’t give him any of the COVID drugs, because those require a full hospital set up, not the small stuff that the WH has.)
Yet more irony, ‘he’s getting the best treatment he’ll allow his doctors (and the staff at Walter Reed) to provide’ which is PAID for with everyone’s taxes- and he doesn’t PAY any taxes.
“He doesn’t pay any Federal income tax” is a losing argument unless there is proven fraud and tax evasion. Otherwise the argument is as faulty as when the right suggests Buffet should donate money to the IRS if he thinks rich people should pay more taxes.
Oh, come ON, Dana. In a few months, that theorem is going to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt and you cannot possibly be telling us that someone who paid $750 while claiming to be a billionaire isn’t playing tax evasion games.
Oh, come on, nothing. Still innocent until proven guilty. Actually in real estate, it is not uncommon to legally avoid all tax liability between 1031 exchanges, depreciation, and cost segregation (and more). Zero is a real number. If a taxpayer completes a legal tax return and the tax liability is Zero, then the tax payer paid his taxes. In taxes, zero tax liability and no tax liability are different things. In elementary school, maybe you learned the difference between the set of {0} and the set of { }, otherwise known as the empty set.
If someone we liked were able to zero out his tax liability, we would have a different opinion. Opinions need to be valid on their own merits, and not dependent on partisanship. I suspect there is fraud and tax evasion based on what we know of his character, but I am willing to only suspect, not assert.
Zero is a real number, yes. But that wasn’t a real theory, just a tax lawyer’s argument that would only impress an intellect like Trump’s. Speaking of whom, Napoleonic law’s presumption of guilt until proven innocent suits him far better.
What isn’t a real theory?
Presumption of guilt suits Trump better but the whole point of American core values is to constrain our druthers.
Somebody downrated facts. Classy. There is no virtue in jumping on partisan bandwagons just because of our confirmation bias.
It has come to this: A virus-spewing maniac on steroids pacing an empty White House. As Macbeth’s doctor advised, “Therein the patient must minister to himself.”
“Now does his title hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief.” Macbeth