The Perils of a Know-It-All President

President Donald Trump is a self-described “very stable genius” with “a very, very large, uh, brain,” and he knows more than anybody about many things, but we’ll not be looking to him for medical advice. During Thursday’s press briefing he urged the government’s top experts to explore the possibility of treating COVID-19 by injecting patients with disinfectants and shoving ultraviolet lights inside their bodies.

The remarks came after William Bryan, the head of science at the Department of Homeland Security, told the assembled press corps how government research had found that sunlight and disinfectants can kill the coronavirus on surfaces in a little as 30 seconds. Clearly excited by the news, Trump took the podium to say “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but we’re going to test it? And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, either through the skin or some other way.” After getting a seemingly reluctant nod from Bryan, Trump went on to say “And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute — one minute — and is there a way we can do something like that injection, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

The videotape clearly shows Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, with a rather inscrutable look on her face. When she took to the podium she said, in carefully chosen words, that Trump’s suggestion was not a promising avenue of research. “Not as a treatment,” she said. “I mean, certainly fever is a good thing when you have a fever. It helps your body respond. But not as, I have not seen heat or…” At which point Trump cut her off, saying “I think that’s a great thing to look at, I mean you know, OK?”

We’re piling on the huge heap of ridicule Trump has endured partly for the fun of it, but also because Trump’s worrisome tendency toward wishful thinking and pseudo-scientific hunches have impeded his response to the coronavirus crisis. He delayed a coordinate effort to secure and family distribute medical equipment for weeks he spent assuring the public that it would all go away with the warmth of April and one day miraculously disappear, and continues to resist calls for testing on a per-capita scale that more than 20 other countries have already achieved. On a visit to the Centers for Disease Control Trump boasted that all the doctors were in awe of his scientific knowledge of virology and epidemiology, although he also admitted he’d been surprised to recently learn that the seasonal flu can be deadly, and it does not bode well that he clearly believes he knows more than anybody about almost everything.

Trump has lately abandoned his advocacy of hydroxychloroquine as the miracle cure for COVID-19, after three recent studies from three countries indicate it is not an effective treatment and can have deadly consequences, but he’s still urging his scientists to pursue time-wasting research and resisting calls for the widespread testing that might reveal some numbers Trump does not want to hear. The daily press briefings are intended to reassure a frightened American public that the nation’s best and brightest are on the job, and on a day when the national death toll surpassed 50,000 and the unemployment rate hit Great Depression levels Thursday’s performance was counter-productive.

— Bud Norman

A Rainy Day of Gloomy News

Wednesday’s weather here in Wichita was rainy and chilly and gray, so there was little to do in a shut down city than stay at home and read the equally gloomy news.

One prominent story was about the forced departure of scientist Richard Bright from his head post at the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, which Bright said was prompted by his public warning that “government should invest the billions of of dollars allocated by Congress to address the Covid-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that that lack scientific merit.” One needn’t have a Ph.D. in immunology, as Bright does, to know that he was talking about hydroxychloroquine, a drug that President Donald Trump and the prime time lineup of Fox News opinion show hosts have touted as a cure for the disease caused by the coronavirus.

Hydroxychloroquine has proved effective against malaria and other diseases, but no studies have shown it can cure Covid-19 and recent studies have suggested it can cause fatal heart arrhythmia in patients suffering from that disease. Trump has a tendency to defenestrate anyone who dares publicly disagree with him, and officials ranging from Attorney General Jeff Sessions to former national security advisor H.R. McMaster to the commanding officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt have all been ousted not for the mistakes they made rather for things they did right. The president’s penchant for dismissing not only expertise but the experts themselves is especially worrisome in the time of a global pandemic that is killing thousands of Americans each day.

In happier story, Trump was apparently persuaded to criticize the Republican governor of Georgia for lifting all the shutdowns and stay-at-home orders in that state earlier than what the consensus of expert opinion recommends. Trump hasn’t recanted his advice to protestors in Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia to “LIBERATE” their states from restrictions imposed by the Democratic governors of those states, but his willingness to criticize a Republican governor is nonetheless encouraging. It’s most likely a preemptive move to avoid blame for the outbreak of new coronavirus cases that is almost certain to ensure, but at least he’s listening to knowledgable advisors rather than trusting his gut instincts for a change.

Elsewhere in the news, Trump also stated that Naval officers are authorized to “shoot down” any Iranian ships that continue to harass the American fleet. Trump apparently isn’t hep to military lingo, in which you “shoot down” enemy aircraft and “sink” enemy vessels, but otherwise we can’t criticize the statement. Longstanding policy allows American ships to defend themselves against any imminent deadly threat, but Trump was probably wise to emphasize it to the erratic Iranian mullahcracy. The story got bottom-of-the-page coverage because the top of the page is all about the coronavirus, but it is related to the extent that the Iranians might have decided to exploit America’s current preoccupation with coronavirus to harass American ships. There are already conspiracy theories on the left that Trump is itching for a war with Iran to divert attention from his handling of the coronavirus, but we doubt it, as Trump was eager to run for reelection on a peace-and-prosperity pitch and would like to have at least one of the two to brag about come November.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also made headlines by telling a radio interviewer that he’d rather let states running debts dealing with coronavirus while their economies are collapsing as a result of the epidemic declare bankruptcy rather than receive more federal aid. Trump and numerous other Republicans quickly disagreed, another encouraging development, but it was another reminder of the expensively unprecedented mess the country is currently in.

Via Facebook we learned that one of our favorite people is losing her brave battle against pancreatic cancer, and there were no baseball box scores to pore over, so it was a rather desultory day. Our Okie relatives on Facebook shared a picture from Tuesday of a tornado with a rainbow clearly visible in the background, so we’ll take some hope in that and try to get a good sleep and wake up this afternoon to a better day.

— Bud Norman

Hunkering Down for the Long Haul

As if an Easter spent alone wasn’t depressing enough, the weather around here was awful. A bitter cold wind was shaking all the trees, the sky was a gloomy gray, and for a short while there was even snow. No one is more eager than we are end the shutdown of public life, but we hope it doesn’t so soon that it causes more deaths.

President Donald Trump had expressed a hope that the churches would be packed on Easter and the country would be “raring to go” by today, but of course that didn’t happen. Now Trump is hoping to reopen the country on May Day, but the same experts who talked him out of the Easter reopening are warning that date might also be premature. The shutdown has slowed the spread of the coronavirus, but it hasn’t yet stopped it, and that might well take a frustrating amount of time.

The impulse to hurry the reopening of the country is understandable, given the catastrophic damage the shutdown has done to the economy and the psychological toll it is taking on many Americans. Trump is eager to win reelection, and he’s right to note that voters are more likely to know one of the 17 million Americans who have lost their jobs than one of the more than 22,000 Americans who have died of coronavirus or even the half-million who have been sickened by it.

Many of Trump’s most outspoken supporters have taken to criticizing the medical experts who are urging caution, especially Dr. Anthony Fauci, but recent polling suggests the public has more faith in experts in general and Fauci in particular than it does in Trump. Fauci has recently become more outspoken about his differences of opinion with Trump, which will no doubt escalate the attacks on him, but Trump will likely have to put up with it for a while, as firing Fauci would be disastrous to his reelection chances.

The country is eager to get back to business, but it seems a majority don’t want that to happen until it be done without getting someone they killed. If Trump can get more people tested and hospitals better equipped to deal with the current crisis the happy day that’s clear might come sooner rather than later, but until then most Americans will endure hardships rather than sacrifice their own lives or those of their fellow citizens.

As hard as it is, which is damned hard, that’s where we’re at.

— Bud Norman

Saving Dr. Fauci

In one of the many depressing stories about the coronavirus, we read that Dr. Anthony Fauci now requires an enhanced security detail due to several death threats against him. As the government’s top expert on infectious is perhaps America’s most essential worker at the moment, but his willingness to present hard facts and occasionally contradict President Donald Trump’s statements seems to have some provoked a murderous rage in some deranged individuals.

They’ve been encouraged by some of the Trump-friendly media, who believe that the measures Fauci has advocated to fight the coronavirus outbreak cause harm to the economy that outweighs the number of lives they might save. They also believe that Fauci isn’t helping to get Trump reelected, and that also outweighs the number of lives that might saved.

The cache of e-mails that were hacked from the Democratic National Committee and leaked to the public during the last election included a missive from Fauci praising Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and although Fauci has served every administration since President Ronald Reagan brought him on board that was enough for internet publications such as Gateway Pundit and American Thinker to tar him as a Hillary-loving partisan. His long and distinguished career as a public servant are considered suspect in certain circles, as it suggests he part of the “deep state” conspiracy against Trump and everything good. When Trump referred to the State Department as the “Deep State Department” during a press briefing Fauci could be seen slapping his forehead, and that was proof of his complicity to a number of viewers.

The Trump-friendly made a general distrust of scientific experts, as well, as they’re seen as pointy-headed know-it-all “elites” undermining democracy. As recently as last week radio-talker Rush Limbaugh was advising his listeners that “the ‘deep state’ extends very deeply, we did not elect a bunch of health experts that we don’t know. We didn’t elect a president to defer to a bunch of health experts that we don’t know.”

Trump has lately begun striking the same somber tone and citing the same grim projections as Fauci, though, and seems to be taking Fauci’s advice more seriously than he does Limbaugh’s. We hope the Trump-friendly media will lighten up, and that Fauci survives not only the coronavirus but also the result craziness.

— Bud Norman

On an Ironic April Fools’ Day

President Donald Trump is no longer downplaying the severity of the coronavirus epidemic, and is now warning that as many as 240,000 Americans might die. As a Facebook friend of ours pointed out, that’s more than the American death toll from World War I and the Korean and Vietnam wars combined.

The president also now acknowledges that it won’t be over by Easter, that Americans will have to stay at home as much as possible at least through April and perhaps past May, and that the economic consequences will be grim. He also wants you to know that the lack of testing and shortages of essential medical supplies are the fault of President Barack Obama and various nasty Democratic governors and his good friend the Chinese dictator, and the media are only reporting all the horrific news to make him look bad, but at least he’s stopped peddling the pie-in-the-sky optimism which encouraged far too many of his most die-hard fans to go out and potentially expose themselves to the virus.

America has until November to assess the job Trump has done in responding to this crisis, and there’s no telling what things will look by then, but clearly mistakes have already been made. Despite the eight long years we spent criticizing Obama on an almost daily basis we don’t blame him for a disease that came along three years after he left office, we see no reason why any Republican or Democratic governor should have to flatter Trump to get needed federal help for they states, and now that Trump admits that all the “fake news” about a public health emergency wasn’t so fake after all we wish he’d stop castigating reporters for asking questions that he’d rather not have to answer.

Whatever the eventual coronavirus death toll might be, Trump will boast that it would have been far worse if not for the actions he took, and he’ll be right about that. The experts Trump is at long listening to say the death toll would be in the millions if no actions were taken at all, but surely Trump isn’t the only possible president who wouldn’t have simply ignored the problem, so far most of the action has been taking place at the state and county and local levels, and as much as we still despise the damn Democrats we can’t see how any of this mess is their fault.

We’re hoping and praying it all ends as well as possible, even if that redounds to Trump’s political benefit, and we’re doing our part by mostly staying at home and going slightly stir crazy and trying to hold public officials accountable. It’s not so much that we’re so very patriotic and selfless, but that there’s currently nowhere to go, even with gasoline prices at the lowest we’ve seen in many decades.

Stay well, dear readers, no matter what you might decide come next November.

— Bud Norman

A Slow Rush to Judgment

When Rush Limbaugh first took to the national radio airwaves back in the late ’80s we found his shtick somewhat amusing, and during many of the controversies he deliberately provoked over the years we came to his defense. He was espousing what were then mainstream conservative views, which we usually agreed with, and we found it slightly amusing how apoplectic the left would become over it.

Since the nomination and election of President Donald Trump, though, Limbaugh has taken an infuriating turn toward a more newfangled conservatism. Limbaugh was once an outspoken advocate of the North American Free Trade Agreement and free trade in general, he defended President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq and Bush’s presidency in general, and railed constantly against the federal government’s mounting debt. Trump called NAFTA the worst deal ever and started protectionist trade wars with just about every country, accused Bush of lying America into the Iraq War and said it was the worst foreign policy decision ever, and is racking up the national debt at an unprecedented pace, but Limbaugh has capitulated to Trump on every issue.

We usually sleep late and don’t drive around with the car radio on these days, so we only occasionally hear Limbaugh’s broadcasts, but when we have we’ve become very disenchanted. The first time was when a video showed a high school girl losing a state track championship by stopping to help a fellow competitor who had stumbled, which went “viral” as an example of sportsmanship, and Limbaugh castigated for her compassion and lack of a win-at-all-costs ruthlessness, which is now inconsistent with the newfangled conservatism, which don’t much like. After that he assured his listeners that whoever was sending pi0e bombs to Democratic politicians and various media would surely turn out to be a lefty trying make Trump look bad, and when the feds arrested a guy whose van was covered in pro-trump decals he embraced his callers’ conspiracy theory that the decals weren’t sufficiently faded so it must have been a “deep state” conspiracy.

One day we happened to be listening Limbaugh asked if any of his listeners had seen and heard the press conference by several women who allege that Trump had sexually assaulted them, and by coincidence we had, so we were interested to hear his account of it. He said that one of the “babes” had complained that Trump asked for her phone, and wondered what’s wrong with a world where a man can’t even ask for a woman’s phone number. He said another was a contestant in of one Trump’s beauty pageants who complained about being ogled, and remarked that the being ogled whole point of beauty pageants. Limbaugh didn’t mention that the first women alleged Trump was grabbing her and kissing her without consent, as Trump bragged about doing on the infamous “Hollywood Access” tape, and thought the request for her phone number added insult to injury. Nor did Limbaugh explain that the beauty pageant contestant said Trump’s ogled her in a state of undress when he invaded her dressing room, as he had bragged about doing on Howard Stern’s pornograahic radio show.

Limbaugh proudly claims to be a fearless truth teller, but on that day he was flat out lying to his 20 million or listeners, and exactly the sort of sexist pig that all of his critics have long alleged.

He later told a caller who was concerned about the growing national debt that it’s no big deal, and that he and other conservatives never really cared about it and only used it as an arguing point with Democrats. That pretty much ended our regard for his commentary, but last week he went on air and said that Trump shouldn’t be heeding the advice of government experts about the coronavirus epidemic, as they’re part of a conspiracy to undermine his presidency, so we’re now done with him entirely.

Limbaugh has bravely announced that he has stage-4 lung cancer, and we’re hoping and praying for his recovery, as we don’t wish that on anyone. Even so, we won’t be listening to his daily diatribes.

— Bud Norman

In the Age of the Coronavirus

The coronavirus seems to be steadily spreading around the world, and the panic about it is spreading even faster. Large events are being cancelled, vacations are being postponed, employees of major businesses are being asked to work at home, cruise ships are being held at sea, and stock markets around the world are tanking.

Even here in Kansas, where there has so far been no reported cases of coronavirus, some people are already taking precautions. They’re being extra careful to cover their mouths when coughing or squeezing, which is the polite thing to do even in the best of circumstances, and some are resorting to more extreme measures. Some folks we know are even washing their hands a few dozen times a day and singing “Happy Birthday” twice while doing so to make sure they’re there at it for the recommended 20 seconds, which used to be considered a severe symptom of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder but is now merely good hygiene. Although we try our best to be hygienic we probably won’t take up the habit until our neighbors start getting infected, as we’d feel damned silly otherwise.

Humans everywhere are also advised to avoid rubbing their eyes or otherwise touching their faces, but that’s an instinctively human habit that will be hard to break. These days we’re constantly slapping our foreheads and scratching our chins and rubbing our eyes as we read the news, and all these stories about the coronavirus don’t help.

Otherwise, we have few serious problems with the new protocols of the coronavirus. We’ve never been the touchy-feely types, and are uncomfortable with hugs even at a family reunion, and we only allow a person to touch our faces in very special circumstances after they’ve been thoroughly vetted, and we consider a respectful nod a sufficiently respectful greeting in most social interactions, so the new no human-to-human contact rules are fine by us. So far we’ve proudly never failed to shake a stranger’s hand, but if the new rules forbid it, so be it.

President Donald Trump has tried to reassure the nation by saying that all the experts are wrong and his “hunch” that everything will soon be fine is right, but that kind of crazy talk only seems to have increased the panic. The stock markets had a good day after the “Super Tuesday” Democratic fueled hope that self-described socialist and Vermont Sen. Bernie won’t be the next president, but on Thursday they were once again slumping on news of the spreading coronavirus. The stock markets are betting that neither Trump nor for-now presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden have a cure for this latest pandemic and its resulting panic, and we figure they’re probably right.

We’ll probably be slapping our foreheads and scratching our chins and rubbing our eyes as we watch it all play out, but we’ll hope for the best.

— Bud Norman