We can’t say “solely”, as this lets off all those enablers. I have no trouble hanging the whole thing around his neck, pursuing him with all legal options, punishing where we can, but I want the same for each and every one of those who knowingly and willingly participated - looking at you Miller, Flynn, Stone and all those involved in all the rest of this entire sh*tshow…
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Agreed that widespread infection was likely given a number of circumstances, but I would offer S. Korea as a counterpoint - < 100K total cases, < 2K deaths with a population about 1/6 that of the US.
They had a pandemic response plan, which they executed, with drive-through testing sites and contact tracing.
A better response from the top would have made the outcome much less of a clusterfuck.
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If you’re referring to these former officials, they all have governmental immunity from civil suits arising out of their official duties.
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The scrubbing of history about the Iraq fiasco and Katrina started about 10 seconds after W was out. This is what a party of nothing but dishonesty and malevolence does. This is why no one is safe while they exist.
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But compare the death rates per hundred thousand and overall mortality - we absolutely suck, because our “leadership” encouraged so much of the population to behave like spoiled middleschoolers. As a kid, I was told I had an obligation to my fellow citizens, I should expect to serve if called, should not pollute, should not lie, cheat or steal. Today? A very large minority worship the asshat who does all that, and now that they finally admit that they’re a minority, they simply brand the rest of us as “unAmerican”.
So yeah, some suffering was in the cards, but what we’ve experienced in entirely a self-inflicted wound to “own the libs”…
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South Korea is also basically an island, given that little thing at the DMZ.
And structurally and culturally, the levels of control and expected obedience and compliance by the population makes a big difference compared to Western democracies which are much more concerned with individual freedoms and liberties.
Still fairest to compare us with Europe, and note that, while places like Germany did well at the outset, they have not at all been immune to the same pushback as happened here.
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Not a single one of these wretched and ambitious enablers chose to be on the right side of history. They thought they could slide by. They are unindicted co-conspirators to thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Clearly, none ever read/saw AN ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE (Ibsen) either.
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But, so far, their press tour doesn’t answer the basic question raised by all of this: if the White House was willing to, as Giroir said, lie about testing or, as Birx said, ignore the virus’s severity, why wait to share the truth until the end of the pandemic is in sight?
They’re just following their administration’s protocols: the most important decisions, having to do with shifting the blame, can’t be made until ya know which way the wind’s blowing.
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You left out a few people/
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Correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t class action suits heard in state courts?
You’re right, but fact-based stories like this one aren’t read by the trumpians. They live in an alternate reality.
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I mostly agree with that, and it should be pointed out that we’re leaps and bounds beyond where Europe is on the vaccination front. But it’s also fair to say that our country’s various actions and inactions got a lot more people killed than most of our European peer countries. Setting aside the former Soviet Bloc states, only Belgium, the UK, and Italy have had more COVID deaths per capita than we have. And our most obvious peer country, Canada, has done way better than us.
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Sure, but that doesn’t mean anybody has a viable cause of action against current and former government officials like Birx, even if they performed their job negligently
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Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we compare well in the first months of response in particular, just that that’s the most appropriate comparison group.
Will be interesting to see how the whole thing plays out.
This is your brain on GOP.
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What a fucking a$$hole.
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To CNN on Monday, Giroir, the COVID-19 testing czar, made a stunning admission: “When we said there were millions of tests available, there weren’t, right?”
“There were components of the test available, but not the full meal deal,” he added.
That was not the image the Trump administration conveyed. The former president himself said in March 2020 that anyone who wanted a test could get one, while Giroir himself offered rosy projections.
By May,2020, Trump decided too much testing was bad anyway.
During remarks on Thursday at the Owens & Minor distribution center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Trump tried to downplay the severity of the US’s coronavirus outbreak by arguing the country wouldn’t be leading the world in cases if it weren’t for the fact that so much testing is being done here — as if coronavirus cases simply wouldn’t exist if we didn’t test to find them.
“Don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. But why? Because we do more testing,” Trump said. “When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases. They [the media] don’t want to write that.”
That was the reason for all the cases. Too much testing. And the media must have been as gobsmacked by that unbelievable reasoning as many of the rest of us were.
Criminal.
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