The Right's Assault on Facts, Data, and Reality

[LFC]

Not content with killing irony Moscow Mitch is now dry humping its corpse.

William Hazlitt: "The only vice which cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy" That's why hypocrisy cavorts with notorious cousins: fraud and knavery. Rank stupidity (like Trump's) doesn't quite compete because world-class hypocrites thrive only when inventing plausible scenarios – and Trump's fraudulence quickly exposes itself: he is manifestly the same scurrilous person inside and out. No wonder Trump and Mitch McConnell can't stand each other: they honor different devils.

Thus emerges the reigning Hypocrite-in-chief: Senator Mitch McConnell. In April the most visible GOP leader -- and icon of special big business interests -- provided this farce: he was shocked, shocked to discover that wary corporations could not abide wholesale, Republican voter suppression in Georgia. Without missing a beat a week later he coughed up that Biden's modest, 36 member (!) Supreme Court Commission "fits squarely within liberals' years-long campaign to politicize the Court." Squarely? Liberals'? Years-long campaign? Politicize? Is this a new form of self-satire?

[goldenvalley]

What would happen if a meteor hit Washington DC and wiped out the city? Would Trump then be president? Seems as plausible a hypothetical
as the OAN reporters'

[Deleted]

May 4, 2021 20:48:15 GMT LFC said:

Not content with killing irony Moscow Mitch is now dry humping its corpse.

Mitch would never do that! He doesn't do anything for pleasure, even perverse pleasure. He rarely does something just for spite. Contentment? His soul solely exists to grab power, and more power.

[LFC]

Now that companies are becoming less willing to toe the Republican line or at least shut up Ted Cruz says he is turning down their money. That's because the spigots have already been turned down quite a bit already. Now Rafael is turning to Facebook and branding himself as an outsider. It looks like he and Hawley are competing to grab Trump's ... mantle.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is investing heavily in Facebook to cultivate a network of small-dollar donors as corporate America turns its back on the high-profile senator.

The Texas Republican known for social media stunts is relying heavily on Facebook ads to rebrand himself as an outsider and build the sort of digital network that could not only help raise campaign cash for his Senate re-election campaign, but also serve as a fundraising apparatus for a potential presidential race, reported Politico.

"I'm done with these woke corporations," says a Cruz ad posted on Facebook last week. "I'm never taking their money again. I won't owe them a single thing and I'm going to spend every day stopping their radical agenda. But if I'm going to win, if I'm going to beat them, then I need patriots like you to step up and make a donation today!"

Cruz has poured $240,000 into Facebook advertising since the platform started allowing political ads again following the 2020 election and Jan. 6 insurrection, and only Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), who paid $335,000, has spent more with the social media giant.

"When tens of thousands of grassroots supporters are responding across the country to your message, you continue to increase spending to reach even more potential supporters," a Cruz adviser told Politico.

Corporate PACs have cooled their relationship with Cruz since he voted against certifying Joe Biden's win during the Jan. 6 insurrection, with just one donation from one of those groups in the first quarter of this year, but a spokesman for Lyondell Chemical Company PAC said that donation was actually made in September.

"In my nine years in the Senate, I've received $2.6 million in contributions from corporate political-action committees," Cruz wrote last month in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. "Starting today, I no longer accept money from any corporate PAC. I urge my GOP colleagues at all levels to do the same."

Yeah, I see that promise lasting until the next 5-figure check form a corporate PAC appears.

[goldenvalley]

May 11, 2021 18:49:02 GMT LFC said:

Now that companies are becoming less willing to toe the Republican line or at least shut up Ted Cruz says he is turning down their money. That's because the spigots have already been turned down quite a bit already. Now Rafael is turning to Facebook and branding himself as an outsider. It looks like he and Hawley are competing to grab Trump's ... mantle.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is investing heavily in Facebook to cultivate a network of small-dollar donors as corporate America turns its back on the high-profile senator.

The Texas Republican known for social media stunts is relying heavily on Facebook ads to rebrand himself as an outsider and build the sort of digital network that could not only help raise campaign cash for his Senate re-election campaign, but also serve as a fundraising apparatus for a potential presidential race, reported Politico.

"I'm done with these woke corporations," says a Cruz ad posted on Facebook last week. "I'm never taking their money again. I won't owe them a single thing and I'm going to spend every day stopping their radical agenda. But if I'm going to win, if I'm going to beat them, then I need patriots like you to step up and make a donation today!"

Cruz has poured $240,000 into Facebook advertising since the platform started allowing political ads again following the 2020 election and Jan. 6 insurrection, and only Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), who paid $335,000, has spent more with the social media giant.

"When tens of thousands of grassroots supporters are responding across the country to your message, you continue to increase spending to reach even more potential supporters," a Cruz adviser told Politico.

Corporate PACs have cooled their relationship with Cruz since he voted against certifying Joe Biden's win during the Jan. 6 insurrection, with just one donation from one of those groups in the first quarter of this year, but a spokesman for Lyondell Chemical Company PAC said that donation was actually made in September.

"In my nine years in the Senate, I've received $2.6 million in contributions from corporate political-action committees," Cruz wrote last month in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. "Starting today, I no longer accept money from any corporate PAC. I urge my GOP colleagues at all levels to do the same."

Yeah, I see that promise lasting until the next 5-figure check form a corporate PAC appears.

Wait I'm confused.  I thought Facebook was the evil social media that blocked all the right wing work.

[RichTBikkies]

May 11, 2021 18:49:02 GMT LFC said:

Now that companies are becoming less willing to toe the Republican line or at least shut up Ted Cruz says he is turning down their money. That's because the spigots have already been turned down quite a bit already. Now Rafael is turning to Facebook and branding himself as an outsider. It looks like he and Hawley are competing to grab Trump's ... mantle.

"I'm done with these woke corporations," says a Cruz ad posted on Facebook last week. "I'm never taking their money again. I won't owe them a single thing and I'm going to spend every day stopping their radical agenda. But if I'm going to win, if I'm going to beat them, then I need patriots like you to step up and make a donation today!"

[LFC]

This liar is the apparent front-runner to replace Cheney.

A reporter just asked Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the presumptive frontrunner for House Republican conference chair, whether she stood by claims she made in January that in Fulton County, Georgia, “more than 140,000 votes came from underage, deceased and otherwise unauthorized voters.”

“I stand by statement on the house floor in January, and I stand by my statement that there are serious issues related to election regularities in Georgia, as well as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin,” she told reporters, according to audio from a congressional pool report.

As the Washington Post pointed out recently, that sum of illegal votes would be around a quarter of entire presidential vote in Fulton County. Stefanik claimed Wednesday that the 140,000 figure was “filed in a court case.” The Post last week couldn’t find such litigation and CNN and others have debunked online chatter about a similarly false number of supposedly illegal votes, 132,000, that had its origins in an outdated voter roll data.

Asked if she still thought all those votes were illegitimate, Stefanik said, “I think there’s questions that are important for the American people to hear answers to.”

[goldenvalley]

May 12, 2021 20:34:44 GMT LFC said:

This liar is the apparent front-runner to replace Cheney.

A reporter just asked Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the presumptive frontrunner for House Republican conference chair, whether she stood by claims she made in January that in Fulton County, Georgia, “more than 140,000 votes came from underage, deceased and otherwise unauthorized voters.”

“I stand by statement on the house floor in January, and I stand by my statement that there are serious issues related to election regularities in Georgia, as well as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin,” she told reporters, according to audio from a congressional pool report.

As the Washington Post pointed out recently, that sum of illegal votes would be around a quarter of entire presidential vote in Fulton County. Stefanik claimed Wednesday that the 140,000 figure was “filed in a court case.” The Post last week couldn’t find such litigation and CNN and others have debunked online chatter about a similarly false number of supposedly illegal votes, 132,000, that had its origins in an outdated voter roll data.

Asked if she still thought all those votes were illegitimate, Stefanik said, “I think there’s questions that are important for the American people to hear answers to.”

Pure sophistry.  Hawley did this too on 1/6 and thereafter. 

[LFC]

The right-wing mouth breathers are outraged in Los Alamitos, CA over the local school board doing something that they're not actually doing. So...much...stupid.

On Tuesday evening, as the Los Alamitos, California Unified School District board convened for a virtual meeting about sensitivity training for teachers, a crowd of protesters gathered outside their vacant offices.

“This is part of a large indoctrination mess that you see going on from the progressive left, from decrepit, corrupt government entities wanting to destroy the family and push the culture of death,” one of the demonstrators, self-described anti-LGBT activist Arthur Schaper, said on a livestream.

Another demonstrator, Jesse Suave, was wearing a shirt that read “fuck antifa” and “death to antifa, free helo rides,” in reference to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s penchant for throwing leftist foes to their death from aircraft.

“That’s what I feel about Marxist communists,” Suave, a frequent attendee of right-wing demonstrations, told a livestreamer. “A good communist is a dead communist.”

Others raged against anti-COVID measures and carried Gadsden flags. On a nearby microphone, speaker after speaker slammed the school board, or the program on which it was voting, as “Marxist.”

None of what the enraged protesters were saying was even close to true.

Rather than embracing far-left political ideology, the southern California school district was simply voting on whether to approve a modest program of social-justice guidance for teachers. But a series of online rumors alleged that the school was implementing “critical race theory,” an up-and-coming bogeyman on the right. The result: escalating rhetoric around public school board meetings that eventually got so bad that police advised the district to close its meeting to the public on Tuesday, while demonstrators raged outside.

Though the in-person meeting was canceled, at least two supporters of the sensitivity training arrived in support of the new training. One of them, a woman who’d grown up nearby, told The Daily Beast that she and her girlfriend were verbally assailed almost immediately.

“The first thing I heard from anyone was, ‘That’s a real idiotic sign you’ve got there,’” the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisal, told The Daily Beast. “A woman said I was committing suicide. I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘You’re committing cultural suicide. You’re killing the white race.’”

[LFC]

A report has been released by Vice News on just how broadly the GOP is embracing conspiracy theories, especially The Big Lie, at the state and local level all over the country.

A new report from Vice News shows how conspiracy theory-spouting supporters of former President Donald Trump have been systematically taking over state Republican parties.

Although the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) from GOP leadership at the national level has drawn the most media attention, Vice News has found that pro-Trump fanatics have been taking major strides at the state level that show the former president's grasp of the party is even stronger than previously reported.

"A Vice News review of public positions of all 50 GOP state chairs shows a significant number are openly pushing conspiracy theories, spouting unhinged rhetoric, and actively undermining voters' trust in democracy," the publication writes. "Many of the most extreme chairs just won their chairmanships or have been reelected since Trump left office four months ago, a number of them with his explicit endorsement."

Many of the pro-Trump chairs reviewed by Vice are explicitly pushing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president, despite the fact that the Trump campaign's lawsuits attempting to establish such supposed fraud got tossed out of courts all across the country.

And some extreme Trumpists go well beyond just pushing false claims about the election: New Oklahoma GOP chairman John Bennett, for instance, once said the entire religion of Islam was a "cancer" that needed to be eradicated, while also declaring that Hillary Clinton be put before a firing squad.

"Oregon's state party is similarly off the rails," writes Vice News. "Its executive committee put out a statement in late January claiming there was "growing evidence" the Capitol insurrection was a "false flag operation designed to discredit" Trump and the GOP."

[LFC]

F***ing Greg Abbott. He knew what was coming days in advance, knew it had nothing to do with wind power, and STILL looked right into the camera and lied his ass off. This should be career ending news and yet the MAGAts will still vote for him.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office knew of looming natural gas shortages on February 10, days before a deep freeze plunged much of the state into blackouts, according to documents obtained by E&E News and reviewed by Ars.

Abbott’s office first learned of the likely shortfall in a phone call from then-chair of the Public Utility Commission of Texas DeAnne Walker. In the days leading up to the power outages that began on February 15, Walker and the governor’s office spoke 31 more times.

Walker also spoke with regulators, politicians, and utilities dozens of times about the gas curtailments that threatened the state’s electrical grid. The PUC chair’s diary for the days before the outage shows her schedule dominated by concerns over gas curtailments and the impact they would have on electricity generation. Before and during the disaster, she was on more than 100 phone calls with various agencies and utilities regarding gas shortages.

After the blackouts began, Abbott appeared on Fox News to falsely assert that wind turbines were the driving force behind the outages.

[pnwguy]

May 25, 2021 17:23:02 GMT LFC said:

F***ing Greg Abbott. He knew what was coming days in advance, knew it had nothing to do with wind power, and STILL looked right into the camera and lied his ass off. This should be career ending news and yet the MAGAts will still vote for him.

Vote for him?  "Owning the libs", even if through outright lying, is enough to give him minor deity status in MAGAt World.

Besides, only Real Texans rely on anything besides good old Texas Tea for any energy needs.

I wonder when Oil and Gas will join the pantheon of RW worship like Guns and Meat, which God Almighty bestowed on Real Americans as part of their divine birthright.

[goldenvalley]

May 25, 2021 17:27:58 GMT pnwguy said:

May 25, 2021 17:23:02 GMT LFC said:

Vote for him?  "Owning the libs", even if through outright lying, is enough to give him minor deity status in MAGAt World.

Besides, only Real Texans rely on anything besides good old Texas Tea for any energy needs.

I wonder when Oil and Gas will join the pantheon of RW worship like Guns and Meat, which God Almighty bestowed on Real Americans as part of their divine birthright.

Whatever it takes to Own the Libs is okay because after all the Libs don't play fair either...that's the mindset.

I wonder if learning that Oil & Gas companies are investing in alternative energy...solar, wind, other forms too...would reduce the fervor of the Abbott supporters for Big Oil & Gas.

[LFC]

Texass's general and Abbott's specific failures to provide power this winter, despite Abbott getting warnings days in advance, the Texas Dept. of state Health Services produced a tally of 151 dead from winter storms. Buzzfeed did an analysis that comes out significantly higher.

The true number of people killed by the disastrous winter storm and power outages that devastated Texas in February is likely four or five times what the state has acknowledged so far. A BuzzFeed News data analysis reveals the hidden scale of a catastrophe that trapped millions of people in freezing darkness, cut off access to running water, and overwhelmed emergency services for days.

The state’s tally currently stands at 151 deaths. But by looking at how many more people died during and immediately after the storm than would have been expected — an established method that has been used to count the full toll of other disasters — we estimate that 700 people were killed by the storm during the week with the worst power outages. This astonishing toll exposes the full consequence of officials’ neglect in preventing the power grid’s collapse despite repeated warnings of its vulnerability to cold weather, as well as the state’s failure to reckon with the magnitude of the crisis that followed.

Many of the uncounted victims of the storm and power outages were already medically vulnerable — with chronic conditions including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and kidney problems. But without the intense cold and stress they experienced during the crisis, many of these people could still be alive today.

[Deleted]

152 dead. Shouldn't forget to count Eduardo's political ambitions. Well to be accurate, the ambitions have not died at all, just his prospects.

[LFC]

It appears that Republican election lies may have hurt them in New Mexico. Here's hoping that this is a sign of things to come. I'd love it if they mostly stayed home.

Republicans went down in flames during the New Mexico special election to replace Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.

The GOP in New Mexico is pledging to win the seat back after state Sen. Mark Moores lost. "There were a number of reasons why Moores lost," the statement read. "Low voter turnout was a big factor. Republican voters were angry from 2020—many questioned election integrity—and stayed home."

[LFC]

Mark Meadows pressured the DOJ to "investigate" The Big Lie.

Former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows reportedly pushed the Justice Department during Trump’s final weeks in office, to investigate groundless conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.

The New York Times reported Saturday that it had reviewed five recently recovered emails sent at the end of December and the beginning of January, that involved requests from Meadows to then acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen. The emails asked Rosen to examine outlandish claims that supported Trump’s big election lie.

The correspondence from Meadows, which came to light through a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation, reveal an even more desperate attempt than previously known by Trump and his allies to validate baffling and implausible theories about the election before leaving office.

Among the mythology seized upon in the request for further inquiry was a theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely switch votes for Trump to votes for President Joe Biden, the Times said.

Meadows also pushed for the DOJ’s investigation of debunked claims that anomalies with signature matches in Georgia’s Fulton County could toss a win to Trump in the state. Meadows also reportedly sent Rosen a list of allegations of possible election wrongdoing in New Mexico.

According to the Times, none of the emails showed Rosen agreeing to launch an examination of the claims put forward by Meadows. Former officials and people close to him also told the Times that Rosen had not opened those investigations.

Meadows’ efforts to undermine the 2020 presidential election results have been well-documented.

[LFC]

There was a paywalled article at TPM on Trump's recent rantings in NC but the sentence that jumped out at me, with no attributed article was this:

Republicans are also reportedly planning to take the same backwards-looking COVID approach to the midterms, with some “pledging to hold congressional investigations if they win back the House majority,” per the Post.

WTF is WRONG with these people.

[pnwguy]

Jun 7, 2021 17:45:49 GMT LFC said:

WTF is WRONG with these people.

Here's a good primer

This guy speaks from personal experience of being brainwashed by a cult (the Moonies) and now works in mental health, with a Ph.D. 

[jackd]

"WTF is WRONG with these people". They are ruthless partisans whose only objective is power.

[LFC]

Josh Marshall continues with his discussion (paywalled) of the ever shifting accusations of the right-wingers concerning COVID and the media's poor handling of the entire situation. We have suspicions but actually know very little. Yes you can say it's because the Chinese are refusing to provide basic answers, which is certainly true, but that doesn't mean we can then simply make things up and proclaim them to be true. Unfortunately the right is not constrained by reality.

I posted this because it's a good summation and reminder of how Republicans just "flood the zone" with bullshit. It's impossible to keep up. The best default position is to assume whatever they say is a lie and completely wrong because that's the 98% case. As he notes even if they were right about the virus leaking from the Wuhan lab, and it's still an "if", they had no evidence at the time so they get no credit. They simply made up their stories for political gain and lied their asses off about what they knew ... which was nothing.

Probably unwisely, I have waded back into the ‘media got it wrong about a lab leak’ debate with my friends Matt Yglesias and and Jon Chait. They’re not the worst on this. But as is often the case in life you’re most ticked by people you think should know better but apparently don’t. As I’ve noted, it’s a complicated question because the informed consensus has shifted a bit. Just not that much. The best informed discussion of the state of play is here.

To the extent there’s a problem with the media coverage on this topic from last year it’s that some commentators went from saying this was a claim with zero evidence, that actual experts didn’t agree with it, that it was very unlikely to calling it a ‘conspiracy theory’ which had been ‘debunked’. These aren’t the same things. But they aren’t terribly far apart either. That is especially so when the people making the claims have a history of being chronic liars.

Still, they’re not precisely the same.

One of the dynamics about the early version of this story is that a mix of China hawks and people trying to distract from President Trump’s failures first claimed that COVID might be a bioweapon engineered by China and either intentionally or unintentionally unleashed on the world. When this claim ran into strong genomic evidence against it they made a tactical retreat to a ‘lab leak’. Over the course of 2020 these claims always played fast and loose with hints of bioweapons research or intentional leaks in the background.

This is one reason it’s so important to keep tabs on the discussions in right wing media. Today they’re not pushing the ‘lab leak’ idea. They’re on to something much more advanced: the idea that Anthony Fauci was behind the research that caused the alleged lab leak and then conspired with China to cover up the origins of virus. That’s why he should definitely be fired and possibly imprisoned, they say. Look at what Rand Paul and Tom Cotton and Josh Hawley are arguing now when they demand Fauci resign and be investigated. Most reporters don’t know the storyline so the hints and accusations fly over their heads.

But this gets us to a more general point that Jeet Heer helped clarify for me in a conversation we had this afternoon. Part of this is a bigger challenge of fact-checking in the Trump Era. If one side is constantly flooding the zone with disinformation – with a mix of straight up lies, baseless claims, highly unlikely scenarios and various kinds of defamation and character assassination – it’s actually pretty hard to keep up with that if you’re doing journalism or fact checking. It’s difficult to be litigating where each claim falls on the spectrum from willful lies, baseless claims, highly unlikely things that are presented as obvious fact. As I said above, this is the one place where I think the ‘lab leak’ contrarians have a small point – that some journalists collapsed the distinction between claim for which you have no evidence but are presenting as true to ‘conspiracy theory’. So people are going to make mistakes like that, as you’re trying to process for people what’s true and what belongs in the bucket of Trump BS.

This is even more the case because for the authoritarian right, high velocity lying is not only a tactic. It’s strategic. John-Paul Sartre captures some of this in a passage from his 1946 book Anti-Semite and Jew.

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

Right-wing authoritarians are not identical to anti-Semites. But they’re closely related. There’s a reason for the overlap. People who care about making sense of ideas, who have a basically empirical approach to the world around them, who care about language are at some inherent disadvantage against people who don’t. Not everyone uses language to understand the world as accurately as possible and then convey that understanding to others. This is the essence of Trumpism. We know this. Lying isn’t a failure of Trumpism. It’s the essence of it: a high velocity of lies and nonsense to generate confusion and demoralization, talking as a weapon.

This all gets pretty abstract. We’re back to a basic point. Trump backers made confident and aggressive claims for which they had no evidence. They did so because it was helpful politically to do so. They confused the matter by making a range of assertions ranging from the possible but unlikely to the defamatory and nonsensical. Reporters trying to make sense of this for their readers discounted these claims because experts said they were very unlikely and the accusers were known as habitual liars.

None of this is terribly surprising. And yes, some of those people got a bit over their skis by not making clear enough – I guess? – that one version of these claims with no evidence could possibly turn out to be true even though there was no evidence that it was true. There is definitely a tendency among some media commentators – having dealt with the bullshit avalanche of Trumpism – to be hyped up and on the hunt for all the things that come from the Trump bullshit mill and get them stowed away in the Trump bullshit basket. But this again is sort of par for the course when fallible people are charged with making sense of and litigating the work of liars who by design use a high volume of lies to overwhelm people and confuse them. Sometimes they’re bound to say something that is at least connected to something that might turn out to be true.

Even now they’ve managed to give a lot of people the idea that is all but proven when it at best something that knowledgable are deeply divide over and which there remains very little real evidence. It’s hardly some big black eye for the ‘liberal media’ unless you have some deep need for it to be.

At the end of the day it no seems more possible that COVID’s origin could have been through a lab and an accidental leak. There’s still very little evidence for it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true. It could be true. And if it is true there’s a good chance we’ll never know because the Chinese government would almost certainly resist disclosing the information and in all likelihood has already destroyed it.

It’s hardly some big failure of ‘liberal media’. How to deal with lying and dissimulation at scale is still something that journalists are trying to get a handle on. We should seriously examine this possibility. I personally think it’s much more likely than I once did. But we’d be fools not to be cautious because the loudest voices are still the habitual liars.

[Traveler]

Fact of the matter is that China covered up. Repeatedly, and to their own people as well. Chinese New Year's  travel and that huge dinner in Wuhan should never have occurred. They already knew that is person to person.  And then they destroyed potentially exculpatory/damning evidence. That is the real story. Which is well worth holding their feet to fire. This thread also belongs in the bug thread.

[goldenvalley]

Jun 11, 2021 18:56:26 GMT Traveler said:

Fact of the matter is that China covered up. Repeatedly, and to their own people as well. Chinese New Year's  travel and that huge dinner in Wuhan should never have occurred. They already knew that is person to person.  And then they destroyed potentially exculpatory/damning evidence. That is the real story. Which is well worth holding their feet to fire. This thread also belongs in the bug thread.

Somehow all this is used to distract from Trump Administration's handling of the situation in this country.  Why is it that people search diligently for someone/thing to blame but then ignore everything else related to the situation?  Assessing blame doesn't fix the here and now.

[LFC]

Jun 11, 2021 20:04:33 GMT goldenvalley said:

Somehow all this is used to distract from Trump Administration's handling of the situation in this country.  Why is it that people search diligently for someone/thing to blame but then ignore everything else related to the situation?  Assessing blame doesn't fix the here and now.

While I certainly agree that the Trump bungling of COVID needs to continue to be called out so we can get a functional CDC again I think the issue with China is still pretty important. It's an incubator for these kinds of diseases and if this was a lab escape, altered or natural but just being studied, then that's a big deal. Unfortunately despite all of the conjecture we still known only a few bits and pieces ... and China seems hell bent on keeping it that way.

Of course that has nothing to do with the likes of Tom Cotton making accusations with zero evidence. It still means he's a serial liar.

[Traveler]

Jun 11, 2021 18:56:26 GMT Traveler said:

Fact of the matter is that China covered up. Repeatedly, and to their own people as well. Chinese New Year's  travel and that huge dinner in Wuhan should never have occurred. They already knew that is person to person.  And then they destroyed potentially exculpatory/damning evidence. That is the real story. Which is well worth holding their feet to fire. This thread also belongs in the bug thread.

Read that Vanity Fair article I just posted on the actual thread.  The Chinese knew by January 3 that is was human to human.  Which makes their decisions for the next few weeks look really stupid.  As professor LFC notes, chances are they were just inept (as our administration was) in not taking responsible actions at the time.