April 16, 2020
Mickey Friedman
I have lots of Corona Time on my hands. Unlike many of you, I don’t have kids to entertain or pretend to home school. Don’t have a dog to walk or like Bill, ducks to talk to. And with Fuel closed, I’ve got to pretend my twenty-dollar stove-top machine makes great espresso.
Sadly, as a journalist I’m watching more politicians talk longer than anyone should. Especially the daily White House Corona Task Force Revue. A side effect is I’m yelling out questions that my fellow journalists ought to be asking. Sadly, they seem not to hear me.
Amidst the rambling Presidential monologues, there’s a never-ending need to weave Barack Obama into the story. Like this oft-repeated doozy: “the word is we inherited bad tests. We really inherited bad tests. These are horrible tests. And it was broken. It was all broken. And we fixed it. And we’re doing millions of tests. Sometimes, we send out a test and it’s not used. In many cases, it wasn’t used. But we worked with the states and the testing has been pretty amazing, especially considering the fact that we inherited a very broken system.”
Not true. Only 1.67 mil tests by Sunday. When 327 million Americans should be tested. Or this: “The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we’re doing. And we undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place in a much more accurate and rapid fashion.”
In case you were as puzzled as me, Vice President Mike Pence explained: “The last administration asserted FDA jurisdiction over testing and the development of tests like this … The president changed that on Saturday so that now, as I spoke to several governors this morning, the states now have the ability to actually conduct the coronavirus test in state labs, university laboratories.”
President Trump: “it was something that we had to do and we did it very quickly. And now we have tremendous flexibility. Many, many more sites. Many, many more people. And you couldn’t have had that under the Obama rule, and we ended that rule very quickly.”
All this gets me jumping up and down. What broken tests? Obama hasn’t been President for three years. Even if there were bad tests – which no one has ever proven – there was no COVID-19 until the Trump Presidency. It’s Trump’s CDC, not Obama’s. Maybe DT’s favorite FOX reporter, John Roberts, might ask him who controls the CDC, and when that control began.
As for Obama interfering with the ability of private labs to do testing, it’s nonsense. There was no Obama rule. Why don’t the reporters demand proof?
In fact, Trump said no to the World Health Organization test that worked while his own CDC developed tests that didn’t work.
Add the lie about the state of the Strategic National Reserve. Trump’s excuse for why there aren’t enough PPE and ventilators. On “Fox & Friends” on March 30: “We started off with an empty shelf … We didn’t have very much in terms of medical product … and we built something really good.” Repeated again and again.
Factcheck reports that a few months before Trump’s inauguration, NPR science reporter Nell Greenfieldboyce toured the SNR and noted that “shelves packed with stuff stand so tall that looking up makes me dizzy.”
And according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine: “As of 2016, there were at least six warehouses holding ‘approximately $7 billion in products across more than 900 separate line items.’”
One lie after another. Then Jared Kushner pretended he knows better than the governors trying to save their citizens. They really didn’t need so many ventilators.
AP on April 5 corrected the record: “Trump during a White House briefing on March 26 claimed that he had inherited an ‘empty shelf’ from the Obama administration, but added that ‘we’re really filling it up, and we fill it up rapidly.’ Federal purchasing records, however, show the Trump administration delayed ordering additional supplies until the virus had taken root and was spreading.”
On April 1, 2020 Trump tripled the Obama lies: bad tests, empty shelves, no ammunition. A lie reporters allow him to tell over and over again: “When I took over our military … I was told by a top general, maybe the top of them all, ‘Sir, I’m sorry sir, we don’t have ammunition.’”
Elected in 2016, Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), a veteran, stated: “I get briefings as a member of the House Armed Services Committee on our munitions stockpile all over the world … We have never run out of ammunition.”
We can’t get tests. Doctors and nurses aren’t properly protected. A paralyzed Trump is more interested in punishing whistleblowers, and still won’t order manufacturers to make and sell PPE and ventilators at a fair price. He’s President, not Obama.
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DT’s Coron-o-bama was first published on April 9, 2020 in the Berkshire Record.