.
The Saga Continues: Our Story Thus Far...
Beginning shortly after the 2016 election, the American people have endured a constant bombardment from corporate owned news media as they unashamedly broadcast so-called âpress conferencesâ where the lies and misinformation from the impeached president trumpâs administration go unchallenged. Our âfree pressâ has felt free to remove fact checking from the process of journalism.
Reporting of the COVID-19 pandemic by the corporate owned media has been no different, where itâs business as usual to offer live coverage as the impeached president trump tells his lies and spreads his misinformation about the âspectacular jobâ he is doing every day and in every way. The disseminating of right wing propaganda is the singular goal of FOX Noise and the like, but with millions of lives on the line due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the American people must receive factual information as quickly as it becomes available.
However, even with the massive failure to accurately inform by corporate media, the truth and facts are available to all. Unfortunately, the impeached president trump, like most conservatives, believes he knows better than the experts. Due to this misguided belief, he overlooked or completely ignored many chances to stop or slow the spread of the coronavirus. In fact, the impeached president trump so consistently veered in the pro-death direction that itâs hard to believe heâs not #TeamCovid.
But because so very much evidence has piled up and then passed over with such regularity, hereâs a quick catalog of some of the impeached president trumpâs biggest screw ups and moments when he so tortured competence that rational Americans screamed. The nation is lurching to the end of a week from hell, and itâs headed toward months in hellâs subbasement. It only seems right to make another review of exactly who put us here and how he did it.
-The Impeached President trump Canceled The PREDICT Program
Trump administration ended pandemic early-warning program to detect coronaviruses
PREDICT was a global program bringing together American scientists and foreign scientists in an effort to spot new threats in viruses making the leap between animals and people. Among the labs that were part of the PREDICT network was one in Wuhan, China that was looking specifically at SARS-related coronaviruses as a potential source of a pandemic. Both SARS and MERS had demonstrated the potential threat behind these viruses, and it wasnât difficult to imagine a virus that was a little less deadly, and a little more contagious, turning into a massive global threat.
That program had identified over 150 such viruses, and that lab in Wuhan was the first to identify the virus behind COVID-19. But two months before that moment, the impeached president trump chopped the funding and dropped U.S. involvement, despite being repeatedly warned about the value of the programâan action that blinded the nation, just at the critical moment.
-The Impeached President trump Ignored a âBLACK SWANâ Warning From the Army
Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans
Throughout January, as the 2019 novel coronavirus exploded in China and experts in the United States and around the world warned that the threat of pandemic was becoming all but certain, various agencies took a swing at trying to explain to the impeached president trump just what that would mean. Among them was the Army, who on Feb. 3 assembled a presentation showing that COVID-19 was potentially a massive âblack swanâ event that would completely disrupt the U.S. economy and result in over a 100,000 deaths. Even though many aspects of that Army analysis have turned out to be optimistic, the impact projected made COVID-19 the biggest threat the nation has faced since the Cold War. It didnât matter ⌠because the impeached president trump completely ignored it.
-The Impeached President trump Dismissed a CDC Report Showing America Is Unprepared For the Next Pandemic
Two years before coronavirus, CDC warned of a coming pandemic
In 2018 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention commemorated the 1918-1919 flu pandemic by conducting a review of Americaâs current standing. The outcome of the seminar that capped that review: A talk co-hosted by Dr. Nancy Messonnier, warning that the U.S. was completely unprepared to face a repeat visit from a pandemic respiratory disease. Warnings indicated that the health care system would be overrun, that the supply chainsâboth for medical products and consumer productsâwould be strained, and that deaths could actually exceed what was seen a century earlier. Similarly blunt assessments got Messonnier sidelined from handling the novel coronavirus response and kept her off the coronavirus response team ⌠even though she is the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Messonnierâs co-host for that event? Dr. Luciana Borio, who was a part of the National Security Council pandemic response team that the impeached president trump told, âYouâre Fired!â
-The Impeached President trump Dismantled The National Security Councilâs Pandemic Response Team
Did Trump Administration Fire the US Pandemic Response Team?
After 9/11, it seemed only reasonable that the National Security Council (NSC) expand to look at a broader range of threats. That included threats such as biological weapons and pandemics. But the impeached president trump, and his then National Security Advisor John Bolton, werenât interested in dealing with novel threats. They were concentrated on the old-fashioned âwho can we blow up today?â sort of option. So the entire global health security team was disbanded in May 2018. That included the impeached president trump telling Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, âYouâre Fired!â. because Ziemer is an expert in dealing with both disasters and organizing a response to epidemics. However, before they were all gone, the pandemic response team produced a playbook on how to handle these emerging threats. And that playbook was ignored by the impeached president trump.
-The Impeached President trump Feared âPrayer Rugsâ Could Be Used For Biological Attacks
White House developing comprehensive biosecurity strategy: official
In 2017, the impeached president trump announced that it was âabout timeâ that the nation have a coordinated plan for dealing with biological attacksâat about the same time the impeached president trumpâs team was warning against the threat of disease spread by âCentral American caravansâ and pondering if âprayer rugsâ left on the border might be sprinkled with Ebola. However, this was a twofer âscrew youâ, to America. Because not only did the U.S. already have a plan for both pandemics and biological attack, but the guy who was supposed to be heading this effort was, yup, Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer. It was around that time when the impeached president trump told the Rear Admiral, âYouâre Fired!â (The petty and vindictive impeached president trump really gets his jollies saying that.)
-The Impeached President trump Failed To Follow the Playbook Written By Experts On How To Handle A Pandemic
Trump team failed to follow NSCâs pandemic playbook
If there is anything the impeached president trump hates more than competent experts, itâs competent experts who worked for Barack Obama, which is a large overlapping set since Obama didnât share the impeached president trumpâs fear of people who might know more about a specific topic than he does. So it didnât help that the NSCâs pandemic team completed their pandemic playbook in 2016 and handed it to an incoming and inevitably impeached president trump. That book took everything that had been learned in dealing with H1N1 flu and with Ebola and distilled it down into rules that made it dead simple to understand the weak points in the system and determine appropriate first steps when dealing with a new disease. If anyone in the impeached president trumpâs team bothered to read it, they certainly didnât use itâparticularly the part that emphasized the importance of testing, testing, testing.
-The Impeached President trump Shrugged Off His Own Teamâs Failure In A Simulated Pandemic Scenario
Before Trumpâs inauguration, a warning: âThe worst influenza pandemic since 1918â
Maybe no one on the impeached president trumpâs team read the pandemic playbook, or those who did are no longer team members, but multiple members of the incoming White House staff were brought into a simulation of a pandemic as part of their legally required training during the transition. That simulation explicitly dealt with a flu-like illness that emerged in Asia, spread around the world, and threatened the planet with the biggest pandemic since 1918. It warned that the United States could face âshortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was 'paramount.'" But the impeached president trumpâs team seemed as uninterested in this exercise as they were in every other thing that had to do with the real threats facing the nation.
-The Impeached President trump Scrapped the Annual DHS Review Of Pandemic Preparedness
DHS wound down pandemic models before coronavirus struck
Every year from 2005 to 2017, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) conducted a review that included modeling the effect that a pandemic would have on critical infrastructure across the nation. After that many years of effort, the DHS simulation was robust, and modeled not just the spread of disease but the effects on transportation, the economy, and how America could shift its workforce into work-from-home situations. In fact, it anticipated an amazing number of the issues that have appeared during the current crisis ⌠so it might have been a very good thing if the impeached president trump hadnât killed the process as soon as he came into the White House. The results of this act of the impeached president trumpâs stupidity, what information can be found, is at least three years out of date.
-The Impeached President trump Blew Off A Warning From A Simulation That Was Run Just Last Fall
Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded
Operation Crimson Contagion (CC) has to be right up there in terms of spy game coolness. But that didnât seem to help any member in the impeached president trump Whitest House team to either pay attention to the results, or even refer to the results of the pandemic simulation that happened just weeks before COVID-19 emerged. Operation Crimson Contagion was actually a whole series of exercises that tested every aspect of the governmentâs response to the outbreak of a novel disease, and the end result was a report stamped ânot to be disclosed.â But, the impeached president trumpâs Whitest House team has always had members eager to spill secrets, so the details of the miserable performance by the impeached president trump and his team in the Operation Crimson Contagion simulation have been disclosed. And whatâs inside is a report that says everything rational Americans expect it to say. It says the federal response was nothing short of terrible. It says that different agencies werenât clear on who was responsible for various aspects of the response. It said there was no clear federal guidance. It said that hospitals were short on ventilators, and protective gear, and overrun with cases. Without necessary federal coordination, states and localities were left on their own when it came to determining things like school closings and other restrictions. The whole thing was a fair description of chaos. Or an incredibly accurate simulation.
This doesnât even start to look at the ways the impeached president trump has screwed up the real thing since it started. This is just how many times someone tried to wave a flag in the face of his team and get them to pay attention to what they were repeatedly told was the greatest potential threat facing the nation. Itâs a catalog of not just failures to be expected from a totally incompetent administration, but deliberate failures and willful ignorance.
Of course, the impeached president trump and his devoted fanatics have already erased these facts from their memories, replacing them with the lies typically created by the impeached president trump, as he squats on the toidy, tweeting.
Facts offend the sensitivity of the conservatives who abhor political correctness and want everyone to understand their âfvck your feelingsâ right to say anything they want. However, as we've all seen, they snivel and whine like little girls when someone hurts their feelings.
This long list of documented facts will likely be banished to some obscure message board by the censors, or removed completely. If this happens, it will be reported in the next installment.
.
The Saga Continues: Our Story Thus Far...
Beginning shortly after the 2016 election, the American people have endured a constant bombardment from corporate owned news media as they unashamedly broadcast so-called âpress conferencesâ where the lies and misinformation from the impeached president trumpâs administration go unchallenged. Our âfree pressâ has felt free to remove fact checking from the process of journalism.
Reporting of the COVID-19 pandemic by the corporate owned media has been no different, where itâs business as usual to offer live coverage as the impeached president trump tells his lies and spreads his misinformation about the âspectacular jobâ he is doing every day and in every way. The disseminating of right wing propaganda is the singular goal of FOX Noise and the like, but with millions of lives on the line due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the American people must receive factual information as quickly as it becomes available.
However, even with the massive failure to accurately inform by corporate media, the truth and facts are available to all. Unfortunately, the impeached president trump, like most conservatives, believes he knows better than the experts. Due to this misguided belief, he overlooked or completely ignored many chances to stop or slow the spread of the coronavirus. In fact, the impeached president trump so consistently veered in the pro-death direction that itâs hard to believe heâs not #TeamCovid.
But because so very much evidence has piled up and then passed over with such regularity, hereâs a quick catalog of some of the impeached president trumpâs biggest screw ups and moments when he so tortured competence that rational Americans screamed. The nation is lurching to the end of a week from hell, and itâs headed toward months in hellâs subbasement. It only seems right to make another review of exactly who put us here and how he did it.
-The Impeached President trump Canceled The PREDICT Program
Trump administration ended pandemic early-warning program to detect coronaviruses
PREDICT was a global program bringing together American scientists and foreign scientists in an effort to spot new threats in viruses making the leap between animals and people. Among the labs that were part of the PREDICT network was one in Wuhan, China that was looking specifically at SARS-related coronaviruses as a potential source of a pandemic. Both SARS and MERS had demonstrated the potential threat behind these viruses, and it wasnât difficult to imagine a virus that was a little less deadly, and a little more contagious, turning into a massive global threat.
That program had identified over 150 such viruses, and that lab in Wuhan was the first to identify the virus behind COVID-19. But two months before that moment, the impeached president trump chopped the funding and dropped U.S. involvement, despite being repeatedly warned about the value of the programâan action that blinded the nation, just at the critical moment.
-The Impeached President trump Ignored a âBLACK SWANâ Warning From the Army
Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans
Throughout January, as the 2019 novel coronavirus exploded in China and experts in the United States and around the world warned that the threat of pandemic was becoming all but certain, various agencies took a swing at trying to explain to the impeached president trump just what that would mean. Among them was the Army, who on Feb. 3 assembled a presentation showing that COVID-19 was potentially a massive âblack swanâ event that would completely disrupt the U.S. economy and result in over a 100,000 deaths. Even though many aspects of that Army analysis have turned out to be optimistic, the impact projected made COVID-19 the biggest threat the nation has faced since the Cold War. It didnât matter ⌠because the impeached president trump completely ignored it.
-The Impeached President trump Dismissed a CDC Report Showing America Is Unprepared For the Next Pandemic
Two years before coronavirus, CDC warned of a coming pandemic
In 2018 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention commemorated the 1918-1919 flu pandemic by conducting a review of Americaâs current standing. The outcome of the seminar that capped that review: A talk co-hosted by Dr. Nancy Messonnier, warning that the U.S. was completely unprepared to face a repeat visit from a pandemic respiratory disease. Warnings indicated that the health care system would be overrun, that the supply chainsâboth for medical products and consumer productsâwould be strained, and that deaths could actually exceed what was seen a century earlier. Similarly blunt assessments got Messonnier sidelined from handling the novel coronavirus response and kept her off the coronavirus response team ⌠even though she is the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Messonnierâs co-host for that event? Dr. Luciana Borio, who was a part of the National Security Council pandemic response team that the impeached president trump told, âYouâre Fired!â
-The Impeached President trump Dismantled The National Security Councilâs Pandemic Response Team
Did Trump Administration Fire the US Pandemic Response Team?
After 9/11, it seemed only reasonable that the National Security Council (NSC) expand to look at a broader range of threats. That included threats such as biological weapons and pandemics. But the impeached president trump, and his then National Security Advisor John Bolton, werenât interested in dealing with novel threats. They were concentrated on the old-fashioned âwho can we blow up today?â sort of option. So the entire global health security team was disbanded in May 2018. That included the impeached president trump telling Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, âYouâre Fired!â. because Ziemer is an expert in dealing with both disasters and organizing a response to epidemics. However, before they were all gone, the pandemic response team produced a playbook on how to handle these emerging threats. And that playbook was ignored by the impeached president trump.
-The Impeached President trump Feared âPrayer Rugsâ Could Be Used For Biological Attacks
White House developing comprehensive biosecurity strategy: official
In 2017, the impeached president trump announced that it was âabout timeâ that the nation have a coordinated plan for dealing with biological attacksâat about the same time the impeached president trumpâs team was warning against the threat of disease spread by âCentral American caravansâ and pondering if âprayer rugsâ left on the border might be sprinkled with Ebola. However, this was a twofer âscrew youâ, to America. Because not only did the U.S. already have a plan for both pandemics and biological attack, but the guy who was supposed to be heading this effort was, yup, Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer. It was around that time when the impeached president trump told the Rear Admiral, âYouâre Fired!â (The petty and vindictive impeached president trump really gets his jollies saying that.)
-The Impeached President trump Failed To Follow the Playbook Written By Experts On How To Handle A Pandemic
Trump team failed to follow NSCâs pandemic playbook
If there is anything the impeached president trump hates more than competent experts, itâs competent experts who worked for Barack Obama, which is a large overlapping set since Obama didnât share the impeached president trumpâs fear of people who might know more about a specific topic than he does. So it didnât help that the NSCâs pandemic team completed their pandemic playbook in 2016 and handed it to an incoming and inevitably impeached president trump. That book took everything that had been learned in dealing with H1N1 flu and with Ebola and distilled it down into rules that made it dead simple to understand the weak points in the system and determine appropriate first steps when dealing with a new disease. If anyone in the impeached president trumpâs team bothered to read it, they certainly didnât use itâparticularly the part that emphasized the importance of testing, testing, testing.
-The Impeached President trump Shrugged Off His Own Teamâs Failure In A Simulated Pandemic Scenario
Before Trumpâs inauguration, a warning: âThe worst influenza pandemic since 1918â
Maybe no one on the impeached president trumpâs team read the pandemic playbook, or those who did are no longer team members, but multiple members of the incoming White House staff were brought into a simulation of a pandemic as part of their legally required training during the transition. That simulation explicitly dealt with a flu-like illness that emerged in Asia, spread around the world, and threatened the planet with the biggest pandemic since 1918. It warned that the United States could face âshortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was 'paramount.'" But the impeached president trumpâs team seemed as uninterested in this exercise as they were in every other thing that had to do with the real threats facing the nation.
-The Impeached President trump Scrapped the Annual DHS Review Of Pandemic Preparedness
DHS wound down pandemic models before coronavirus struck
Every year from 2005 to 2017, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) conducted a review that included modeling the effect that a pandemic would have on critical infrastructure across the nation. After that many years of effort, the DHS simulation was robust, and modeled not just the spread of disease but the effects on transportation, the economy, and how America could shift its workforce into work-from-home situations. In fact, it anticipated an amazing number of the issues that have appeared during the current crisis ⌠so it might have been a very good thing if the impeached president trump hadnât killed the process as soon as he came into the White House. The results of this act of the impeached president trumpâs stupidity, what information can be found, is at least three years out of date.
-The Impeached President trump Blew Off A Warning From A Simulation That Was Run Just Last Fall
Before Virus Outbreak, a Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded
Operation Crimson Contagion (CC) has to be right up there in terms of spy game coolness. But that didnât seem to help any member in the impeached president trump Whitest House team to either pay attention to the results, or even refer to the results of the pandemic simulation that happened just weeks before COVID-19 emerged. Operation Crimson Contagion was actually a whole series of exercises that tested every aspect of the governmentâs response to the outbreak of a novel disease, and the end result was a report stamped ânot to be disclosed.â But, the impeached president trumpâs Whitest House team has always had members eager to spill secrets, so the details of the miserable performance by the impeached president trump and his team in the Operation Crimson Contagion simulation have been disclosed. And whatâs inside is a report that says everything rational Americans expect it to say. It says the federal response was nothing short of terrible. It says that different agencies werenât clear on who was responsible for various aspects of the response. It said there was no clear federal guidance. It said that hospitals were short on ventilators, and protective gear, and overrun with cases. Without necessary federal coordination, states and localities were left on their own when it came to determining things like school closings and other restrictions. The whole thing was a fair description of chaos. Or an incredibly accurate simulation.
This doesnât even start to look at the ways the impeached president trump has screwed up the real thing since it started. This is just how many times someone tried to wave a flag in the face of his team and get them to pay attention to what they were repeatedly told was the greatest potential threat facing the nation. Itâs a catalog of not just failures to be expected from a totally incompetent administration, but deliberate failures and willful ignorance.
Of course, the impeached president trump and his devoted fanatics have already erased these facts from their memories, replacing them with the lies typically created by the impeached president trump, as he squats on the toidy, tweeting.
Facts offend the sensitivity of the conservatives who abhor political correctness and want everyone to understand their âfvck your feelingsâ right to say anything they want. However, as we've all seen, they snivel and whine like little girls when someone hurts their feelings.
This long list of documented facts will likely be banished to some obscure message board by the censors, or removed completely. If this happens, it will be reported in the next installment.
.