THE CONTINUING ASSAULT ON SCIENCE

"Supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting. 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 by injection inside? Or almost a cleaning?"


Since the coronavirus pandemic began around January, tt seems that each new day brings another embarrassing moment from our commander in chief.  From downplaying the threat at first, to his cheerleading the use  of hydroxychloroquine (which his own FDA has said could actually be dangerous), to the truly insane quote above in which he clearly seems to be suggesting that injecting disinfectants can quickly kill the virus, it seems that there is nothing the president won't say in his desire for a quick cure for the virus.
And this latest insanity will follow the pattern that we've seen over and over again since he first announced his candidacy: his people will say his was misquoted or misunderstood, he will blow it off as a joke (he claims he was being sarcastic) and his lackeys in the right wing media will defend him and find a way to make his insanity seem reasonable.  And then in two days he'll say some new idiotic thing and it will start all over again.  Meanwhile, around forty percent of  the country will still support him, because they stood by him after his bragging about sexually assaulting women and defending white supremacist protesters, why should this latest craziness be any different?
Should we expect anything different from the  modern Republican party?  I recently blogged about how the presidency of Ronald Reagan still casts a shadow over America in how much it moved the country to the right.  I was mostly talking about his economic policies, but he also completely changed the Republican party when he decided to join forces with the Christian Fundamentalist movement.  While not all Republicans are Fundamentalists, almost all Fundamentalists are Republicans.  Today's  Republican party has basically split into three groups: Christian Fundamentalists who oppose abortion and equal rights for LGBT people,  white blue collar workers who respond to race based arguments against non white people (especially immigrants), and rich people  who want more and more tax cuts and roll backs of environmental regulations for the companies they often run. (There is, of course, some overlap between the three). 
This alliance can seem odd at times: consider that the Fundamentalists refuse to believe in fossils as evidence of the earth being billions of years old.  Meanwhile, oil executives have gotten rich selling a product that is itself a fossil! But at the end of the day, they can all agree on one thing: they hate science. 
 A 2009 pew poll of scientists in America found that only six percent of them were Republicans.   Such an overwhelming number should be a surprise, but is it really?  Republicans are the only major political party in the entire world to deny the existence of climate change, but then, why is it hard to deny climate change when for decades they have fought against teaching evolution in schools?  They loved it decades ago when  Reagan  appointed James Watt to the secretary of the interior, even after Watt once testified to congress that "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns" while discussing national preservation.  Why would Trump be any different to them?
Trump's continuing (and confounding) popularity with the Republican party shows that he has been able to play to all three wings of the party: appointing conservative anti abortion judges here, rolling back environmental regulations there,  while also making  some racially charged statements,  and passing a huge tax cut that favored the rich, achieving the kind of crazy triangulation that means that the party will never turn on him, even when he suggests that people should inject bleach! 
If there's any kind of upside to this, it's that even Trump's people realize that his words could actually be dangerous and are considering cutting back his daily press briefings.  Given that those briefings have become nothing more than another chance for Trump to brag, lie, and bully reporters, that should be for the best.  But the only real hope that Trump can do no more damage is for him to lose and lose decisively in the upcoming election.  America has to put this mistake behind us and start trusting science over a blustering egotist and the extremist party he leads.

THE ROOT OF THE PROBLEM?

As the coronavirus pandemic continues to tear across the globe, it has ripped away the thin veneer of our modern American society and revealed the ugly oligarchy underneath.  As the mortality rate of African Americans hit much higher rates than that of white Americans, as our unemployment systems have been overloaded by the tens of millions of people now out of work, as millions of low paid workers have had their jobs ruled as "essential", necessitating their returning to work in potentially life threatening positions, the virus has shown the notion that America was the best country in the world for anyone other than the rich was nothing but a lie.   Instead we are the country with the highest number of coronavirus infections in the world (although to be fair, we do not have the highest per capita), and we are the country with a leader who wildly flails around for someone else to blame, from former president Barack Obama, to China to the World Health Organization.
Yes, it's easy to point the finger for this terrible outbreak at president Trump, and while I certainly think that's understandable, our country's poor response to what is a national crisis has its roots in  a fundamental shift that took place decades ago.   Back in the late 1970's, when Ronald Reagan first decided to run for president, he was perceived by many as too extreme.  Even George Bush, his eventual vice president, once dismissed his economic policies as "voodoo economics," while his infamous blaming of air pollution on trees was widely mocked.  Reagan, of course, not only won, he shifted both the Republican party and the entire country to the right politically.  Before him, the Republican party didn't care about abortion either way, (the last Republican president before him, Gerald Ford, was a pro choice supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment!)   but he permanently linked the party to the Christian Fundamentalist movement, making it the party opposed to gay rights along with abortion.
But it was Reagan's economic policies that really  have had a huge lasting impact:  when he took office, the top income tax rate on the wealthiest Americans stood at seventy percent.  By the time he left office it was under thirty percent.  Although it has gone up slightly since then,  it still stands today at only around thirty eight percent.  He also cut the tax on capital gains, which  similarly benefited  the rich.  The sad result of this is that we have now had several generations of rich people in this country who see their low tax rates and decadent lifestyles as a normal thing.  And the Republican party has gotten so extreme on this issue that they have been pushing to completely eliminate the estate tax, which is only used against the wealthiest two percent of the population!



This creation of a super rich upper class in America  has a devastating effect: although we are told that hard work, talent and ability are the keys to success in this country, the real advantage truly comes from being born to a family of enormous wealth and privilege.  Our last two Republican presidents have shown that you can spend the first forty years of your life being a lazy drunk (like George W Bush) or declaring bankruptcy multiple times (like Trump) without suffering ill effects because they've always had their daddy's money to bail them out.  Neither of them are an example of hard work and perseverance; quite the opposite, they're more like American royalty.
So what has this got to do with the coronavirus?  Well, when the voodoo failed and those tax cuts for the rich did not bring the increased revenue that was promised, the Reagan administration began gutting as many federal government programs as possible.  The philosophy of that administration was that any federal spending that didn't go to the enormous  defense budget was money wasted.   This had repercussions that were both immediate (a huge surge in the homeless population) and long term (a general degradation in branches of the federal government that weren't part of the military).
And what are the long term results of this defunding of the federal government?  Crumbling infrastructure, a wildly unequal public school system in which the best schools are only in the richest neighborhoods, a partially privatized prison system that has helped lead the country into having the largest prison population on the planet, an equally privatized healthcare system that has left tens of millions of Americans without any healthcare,  and a federal government unable to deal with a national crisis like the coronavirus because of decades of defunding groups like the Center for Disease Control.  Consider that after Ronald Reagan first proposed his ridiculous Star Wars nuclear missile defense program back in the eighties, the government wasted billion upon billions of dollars on it, without it ever coming close to working.  Billions more have been spent on different nuclear missile defense programs since then, without one of them ever proving successful.  Imagine if those billions had been spent on healthcare, infrastructure, or yes, some kind of pandemic response team.  It's depressing to consider how much money has been thrown into the gaping maw of defense spending in the past few decades when just a small amount of spending elsewhere could have made the country much better off.
As I previously stated, part of this mess is certainly because of the incompetence and single minded focus on the stock market that is found in the Trump administration, but another important part is the decades of conservative thought that funds our defense spending and nothing else.  A change may soon be coming: as terrible as this pandemic is, it may cause Americans to start realizing that having a healthcare system built around employer providing healthcare is utterly flawed, especially when tens of millions of Americans lose not only their jobs but also their healthcare after being laid off through no fault of their own.  Not to mention the fact that the younger generation of Americans now understand that socialism, done properly, is not a terrible thing.  The fact that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were recently able to inject left wing ideas like Medicare for all and a wealth tax into the  political mainstream shows that we may soon see a sea change into a more just society and a rejection of Reagan's "greed is good" legacy.  Personally, I don't think that it can come soon enough.

NOBODY'S SMARTER THAN ME

Shortly after Donald Trump somehow won the White House, he had a conservation with former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg.  Bloomberg told him that Trump's ascension into the presidency was not unlike his own ascension into becoming the Mayor of New York City.  He advised the soon to be president to surround himself with people smarter than him and listen to them. Trump quickly replied, "Nobody's smarter than me."
In February the president held a conference of the nations's governors at the White House, and after the opening music played, he mentioned that   "Believe it or not, a long time ago, I was told I have a great ear for music by somebody.  I took a test.  They said, 'He has a wonderful aptitude for music.'"  This kind of empty boasting is par for the course for a man who has repeatedly called himself a genius.   Recently during a press briefing discussing the coronavirus, Trump pushed his boasting even further, stating that when it came to the global pandemic  that "People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, 'How do you know so much about this?' Maybe I have a natural ability."  Yes, we have a national leader who thinks that he needs to take time during the discussion of  a virus that could kill millions of people all over the world to stop and tell everyone how all the researchers think that he's smart.
I mention these  examples of Trump's ridiculously bloated ego not just to illustrate  how narcissistic he is (that's been obvious for years), but also to show that his swaggering self confidence has become outright deadly in our new age of pandemic.   With Trump, we have a man who believes that has been and always will be right in every way.  And if his view of the world contradicts that of experts around him, well then he'll just ignore them.  And, according to eye witness accounts, if those experts persist in their opinions, he will often call them names and throw a tantrum.  (According to Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig's book,  "A Very Stable Genius", he once yelled at a room full of military personnel:  "“You’re a bunch of dopes and babies!”)
And today, after already publicly downplaying the dangers of the virus last month in a way that surely helped it spread around the country, (on February 26th. he said  "... you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero"), Trump is already saying the country should return to business as normal as soon as Easter Sunday.  This despite multiple experts, many in his own administration, who have said that that is nowhere near long enough.  It's obvious why he wants Americans to return to work: he views a strong economy as vital to his reelection effort, and in his mind, if some people have to die in order for him to get a second term, who cares?  He is putting a strong economy over human life.  If that sounds harsh, consider that he has not once publicly shown the tiniest bit of sadness or remorse over what is happening.  Think of George W Bush addressing the nation somberly after 9/11, or Barack Obama tearfully talking about the children gunned down at Sandy Hook.  And now think of Donald Trump, insulting the press and bragging about the great job he is doing while discussing the coronavirus. He is clearly incapable of caring about any other person in the world other than himself.  Even a pandemic can't change a psychopath.

A DISASTROUS HANDLING OF A DISASTER

Since 2016, I have found myself in a constant state of despair as Donald Trump has violated the norms of presidential behavior (and basic human decency) time and time again.  From his failure to condemn a white supremacist rally, shrugging off of multiple sexual assault and rape charges, to the family separations on the border or his pardon of bigoted sheriff Joe Arpaio, and endorsement of credibly accused pedophile Roy Moore,  it seems that Trump's bigotry and misogyny has no bottom.

Now we can add incompetence to that list, as a  new depth has been reached in his administration's  response to the coronavirus.  Now, to be fair, back in late January, his administration decided to prevent most foreign nationals from entering the United States if they had recently traveled to China.  That appears to have been the right move, and it's the last and only  right one he has made so far.
After that, his first impulse about the virus was to ignore it.  But as his precious stock market began to fall because of imperiled global markets, he reluctantly acknowledged that it could be a problem. But even then he tried to downplay the dangers of the virus, openly lying (as always) about the number of people infected in the country and boasting about what a great job his government has done, along with saying that there's a good chance that the virus will just fade away in the Spring (there's no way of knowing that now) and that a vaccine will arrive soon (only if by soon he meant over a year, which is how long his own experts are estimating it will take to make a new vaccine).  He's also dismissed it as a "hoax", and tried to blame the slow vaccine response time on decisions made by Barack Obama when he was president, because he would blame every sports rain delay on Obama if he could.
He also appointed Vice President Mike Pence to be in charge of containing the virus.  It should be pointed out that Pence once wrote an editorial saying that tobacco doesn't actually kill people, has questioned evolution, and as governor of Indiana  disastrously ran an HIV prevention program that wound up causing an outbreak.  So, hardly a man that can be expected to listen to and trust scientists when they tell him things that contradict the president.  And even he  admitted last Thursday that there aren't enough viral testing kits available for everyone in the country who thinks they need one.  Somehow, South Korea has managed to test thousands of their citizens, including having a drive thru test, and we don't have enough to go around.
Once again with Trump, our country has landed in a unique and terrible place: oh sure, we've had presidents before that have terribly bungled disasters, like George W Bush's horrible handling of hurricane Katrina.   But I can't think of any time before when our president has repeatedly told lies that are threatening the health and safety of the American public.  By downplaying the dangers of the coronavirus, Trump is putting his own worries about being reelected over the  lives of American citizens, plain and simple.  Considering the cult like devotion of Trump's supporters, it is entirely likely that some of them will listen to his dismissal of the danger of infection and not take precautions, which could lead to their deaths.
And Trump's media lackeys aren't helping any:  Rush Limbaugh has already said that the virus is no worse than the common cold (this after thousands of people around the world had already died from it) and Trump's son Donald Jr. has gone so far as to say that progressives are rooting for the virus to kill millions of people(!). Meanwhile Trump himself did an interview on Fox News in which he said that he thought that the estimated mortality rate of the virus by the World Health Organization was wrong and that the actual rate was much lower because he had a "hunch."
It is possible right now that Trump could be proven right about the virus not being serious, and perhaps it will be contained in a few months,.  Hopefully it will, but for now his comments are appallingly irresponsible and dangerous, to say the least. 

DENYING REALITY

Recently during his State of the Union address, President Donald Trump announced that he was giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom award to one of the audience members: right wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh.  The president's own daughter gave him the award right then and there.  The moment was timed for maximum pathos as Limbaugh had just recently disclosed that he had late term lung cancer. 
It might have been moving if not for the fact that Limbaugh has a history of making bigoted and misogynistic statements on his radio show, which in many ways paved the way for Trump's own hate filled speeches.  But beyond his politics, which I find repulsive, there is another reason that it is hard for me to feel much sympathy for Limbaugh: over the years he has repeatedly downplayed the dangers of tobacco smoking while promoting his own love of cigars. 
Limbaugh's denial of the dangers of smoking is part of a pattern that the right wing media has been following for years: the denial of reality.  Put simply, the right wing media promotes the ignoring of basic facts, pushing the notion that because whatever they (and their audience) want to believe is true, is therefore true.  While all human beings engage in some kind of self denial just to deal with getting through our day, the modern conservative movement in this country has reached the point in which it  often seems completely divorced  from reality.
Sometimes this manifests itself in the denial of evolutionary science and other times in the party's dogged faithfulness to Trump, no matter how offensive his statements or obvious his corruption.  It can certainly be seen in Trump's own behavior, from his assertion no less than six times that he was once given the Michigan Man of the Year award (no such award exists) to his claim that the leader of the Boy Scouts told him that his speech to the Boy Scouts Jamboree was the best ever given (he said no such thing). 
On the one hand, ignoring facts and going with strongly held beliefs is often harmless (and, speaking from experience, almost impossible to shake in Trump supporters).  Obviously, people have a right to believe that the earth was created in a week, and as long as you don't use the country's tax dollars to promote the idea, I'm fine with that.  Heck, you can believe the earth is flat if you really want to.
But there are other ways that it can have devastating effects on the world.  Just look at Limbaugh: while we have no way of knowing how many people took up smoking(or refused to quit)  because of him, but given how many listeners he has and how loyal they are to him, it's easy to say that he has had a definite negative effect on some people's health.  And then there are those who think that vaccines for children cause  autism, despite numerous studies to the contrary, that has caused a resurgence in certain illnesses in the country (and to be fair, this is a brand of idiocy that has landed on both sides of the political fence).  And as Nicholas Kristof once pointed out in the New York Times,  right wing denial of reality had lethal consequences  back in 2009 when, during an outbreak of swine flu, right wing commentators (especially Glenn Beck) questioned the Obama's administration's desire to get people vaccinated.  Around 18,000 people died in that outbreak, some of them surely did just out of spite against Obama.
But to me, the single most dangerous denial of reality lies in the Republican party's rejection  of climate change science.  It seems inconceivable that anyone could continue to deny the reality of climate change, given the record high global temperatures and increased droughts and wildfires happening all around the world.  But, according to The Guardian, a few years ago  Sondre Båtstrand at the University of Bergen in Norway published a study looking at conservative party platforms from around the world and found that the American Republican party is unique in its blanket denial of climate change.  Part of this is because oil and coal companies give far more to their party than to Democrats, with the billionaire oil barons Charles Koch and his late brother David spending massive amounts of money spreading disinformation on this issue.  But another reason is that Republicans have branded it as an issue only for Democrats to care about.  It's seems insane that one party in one country can single handedly move the entire world in the wrong direction on such an important global issue, but that's just how big and influential America is.   And there is no indication that the party will ever change its mind, so the only way for the country to move in the right direction on this potential disaster is to vote out as many Republicans as possible.  And that may prove difficult, and even then conservative judges that have been given lifelong appointments may strike down environmental legislation for decades to come.  I hate to just throw up my hands and say that there's nothing that can be done about this issue, but it will be hard, no doubt.  The Republican war on science and reality has been going on for decades, and for now, the party is winning.

HIGH OR LOW?

Former first lady Michelle Obama's most famous quote is a simple and powerful one:  "When they go low, we go high!"  It's a perfect illustration of how Barack Obama won two terms by ignoring the blather of the right wing media and its name calling (Kenyan!  Muslim!  Communist!) and delivering a positive message to the American voters.  But what worked so well for him didn't exactly pay off for the Democrats in 2016, and with Trump as president the wisdom of those words may be called into question.
With the impeachment trial is in the rear view mirror and the November election  looming, the country is not facing a horrifying truth:  Donald Trump may very win a second term in the White House.  With his aquittal, good economic numbers, his highest approval rating ever (49%), and a state of the union speech full of attention getting moments that tried to portray our psychopath in chief as a generous man, not to mention the Democrats chaotic campaign start in Iowa, Trump appears to be running high.  True, a 49% approval rating should be nothing to brag about, and Trump's constant stream of offensive tweets and statements could hurt him during the campaign. but all he needs to do is repeat his election performance from 2016 to win.  Quite frankly, he may go down as the first president in history to win two terms without ever winning the popular vote.

The difficult question for the Dems is how exactly to run against a man who has only run one political campaign in his life and improbably won.  How exactly should a candidate respond to a man who openly lies and spews nonstop childish insults?  There's no easy answer: during the Republican primary contest, Senator Marco Rubio briefly attempted to fight fire with fire, even going so far as to joke about Trump's genital size (no kidding!).  Needless to say that failed.  But then so did Hillary Clinton's attempt to take the Obama route and mostly ignore his bullying and braying.
This is becoming an issue again, as former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has recently entered the Democratic primary.  Trump, who ran into Bloomberg several times over the years, (and who appears intimidated by the fact that Bloomberg is a real billionaire and not  a fake one like him), clearly is worried about Bloomberg's attempt to win the Democratic nomination.  And because the leader of the free world is now a schoolyard loudmouth, he attacked Bloomberg's height, dubbing him "Mini Mike" and going to far as to claim that he wanted to stand on a box during the debates!  Rather than shrug this off, Bloomberg's campaign spokeswoman Julie Wood responded by saying, “The president is lying. He is a pathological liar who lies about everything: his fake hair, his obesity and his spray-on tan.”  This is a clear attempt to use Trump's own childish methods against him, attacking not only his honesty but also his bloated vanity.  But if he continues in this kind of attack, will it work?  Personally, I think this may help the Democrats, because while Bloomberg's candidacy is almost certainly going to fail, the billions of dollars he has pledged to spend to fight against Trump in the election means that there will be a stream of powerful negative attack ads aimed at the president while the actual candidate can take the high road, which may prove to be a winning combination.
But what of the Democratic candidates themselves?  My personal favorite is Elizabeth Warren, who has the intellect, charisma and experience to be an effective, progressive leader.  But while I think she would make the best president,  I don't think that she would make the best candidate.  In interviews, even her own supporters worry that the country may reject a female candidate yet again, finding her "unlikable" and "bossy".  The idea that a man accused of sexually  assaulting over twenty different women may beat two female opponents is certainly demoralizing.     That's why I think the best chance for the Democrats is to nominate Bernie Sanders.  Yes he's too old, and he just survived a heart attack, but there's no other Democrat in the field that fires up his base and appeals to young voters  like Bernie does. While I think his followers are often too loyal, with many so called Bernie Bros not voting for Clinton in 2016, the simple fact of the matter is that it may take a leader with a cult like following to defeat another leader with a cult like following.  The crazy thing is, big political differences aside, Sanders and Trump have a similar style on the campaign trail: they are both gruff, tough talking men who rant against a rigged system.  And the genuine desire Sanders clearly has to improve the lives of the poor and the working class in this country contrasts strongly with Trump's fake sincerity for them.  And while the overall economy is good, many districts that Trump won in 2016 are not doing so well, meaning that voters who went with him last time may want to try a different angry white guy who says he wants to upend the system.
In any event, one thing is certain: the bitter ugliness and divisiveness of 2016 is about to repeated, and this time it will be even worse as an unbound Trump will inevitably use every lever of power that he can to win, along with usual lies and insults.  The next eight months will a low point for American democracy, but then America has been sinking lower and lower ever since a reality TV star and failed businessman somehow became a serious candidate.

THE CHARADE ENDS

The impeachment trial of President Donald Trump is about to end in the Senate with the result that we all knew from the beginning: no vote to remove him from office.   While I supported the impeachment proceedings, the process has been a mess: the Republican party has so completely become the cult of Trump that there was no chance that there would ever be enough votes in the Senate.  Not even when the independent, non partisan Government Accountability Office stated that Trump broke the law when he withheld congressionally allocated funds from Ukraine.  Not even when former Trump advisor John Bolton has a new book coming out stating that Trump openly told him that he was withholding that aid until the Ukraine announced the investigation that he wanted.  Simply put, there is nothing that Trump can do as president that would cause his party to turn on him.  If multiple bankruptcies, sexual assault charges, illegal payoffs to porn stars and centerforlds  and near constant violations of the emoluments clause couldn't do it, neither will this.  Not only will they not turn on him, but they also won't even allow witnesses of his impeachable behavior to be heard in the Senate.  Why start pretending that this trial was anything other than a farce now?  To make the whole thing even more insane, Trump's defense team has made unprecedented claims of presidential power, with Alan Dershowitz asserting that basically anything the president does to win reelection is legal, because he thinks he is working in the nation's best interests.
The sad fact of the matter is that Trump, despite becoming only the third president in history to be impeached by the House of Representatives, will see the Senate vote as a vindication and a victory.  Which means we are going to suffer through months of his loud mouthed bragging about it at his horrific speeches.  But that's just the tip of the iceberg: by supporting this president the Republican party has stained the entire office of the presidency, and the country itself.  From now on,  presidents will be given almost unlimited rights to violate any law or rule of protocol (or decency for that matter).  The bar has now been set so low,  that Trump can basically move any instrument of government or say anything to help him win reelection without any kind of restriction.  Which means that the upcoming election will be even uglier and more horrible than the last one.
I hate to sound melodramatic, but this is how a democracy can die: sometimes it takes just one demagogic, messianic leader with a sizable, fanatical following to tilt a country towards open dictatorship.   The fact that Trump has repeatedly shown admiration for dictators like Kim Jong Un and Rodrigo Duterte while often calling our UN allies weak shows where his mind is.  And just look at his public statements such as  "Then I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president."  or  "I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough — until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad." shows that we now have a president that sees himself as an absolute leader that should command complete loyalty from every American. Given that his own party seems to openly agree with this assessment makes me often wonder if this country can really survive this president intact. And what will happen if we don't.