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Oh, très amusant Monsieur Trudeau! Very droll. Trump with literal blood on his hands! What truth! What power! Truth to power....
Ok, it’s just a cartoon. Except it isn’t. It’s Doonesbury…more comment than cartoon. And since he’s going at Trump let me go at Gary Trudeau.
First, I don’t really like the “blood on hands” metaphor. It’s tossed around a little too wildly for my taste. Most people are doing their best to stop this pandemic, even Orange Man Bad.
Second, to remind that I posted a piece very critical of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, way back. So I’m coming after Doonesbury and the Dems not because I think Trump did a grand job, but because of their breathtaking hypocrisy and duplicity.
The strip above is probably a reference to Bob Woodward’s latest in which he “reveals” that Trump knew the severity of the coronavirus, but downplayed it, hoping it would be magicked away. Hardly a revelation since we could all see how he was downplaying it in his Trumpian way. But the Democratic leadership all had the same intelligence from the WHO that Trump did. Every single one of them: Pelosi, Schumer, Biden, Cuomo, De Blasio. (As did the Center for Disease Control, with its staff larger than the whole of the WHO). This intelligence was widely known in senior levels of government. Do we think for one moment that these folks would have held back from criticising a hated president? Of course not. But what did they do? They didn’t simply downplay the virus; they actively encouraged people to get out and about, to enjoy themselves, to gather for Chinese New Year. We remember.
When Trump did act, first to stop travel from China then from Europe, the reaction from the Democrats was to rip him, as a “racist”, a “xenophobe” and, best of all from Biden, “hysterical”. Oddly, while hammering Trump for “racistly” restricting travel from China, some Dems criticised him for not restricting enough, for exempting some travellers from China. What they didn’t say was that that was because they were American citizens living in China and could not, constitutionally, be prevented from returning to the US.
In any case, these national travel bans aside, most of the virus control measures are at the State not the Federal level. The United States is just that, a federation of states, many the size of major nation states. The constitution gives them the obligation to take the majority of measures in emergencies like the pandemic. Had Trump stepped over the governors, you can imagine him getting ripped from here to Scranton.
Of course, FEMA has a federal role. In the pandemic, an early role was to provide ventilators. Remember Governor Cuomo banging on and on about the need for ventilators? I do. Then when FEMA began sourcing them from China, Cuomo’s own people went in and outbid FEMA! China no doubt laughing all the way to the bank. In the end ventilators were provided by the feds and many governors thanked them. The US now manufactures and exports them. One doesn’t hear much about that.
We remember watching NY Governor Andrew Cuomo give his daily press briefings. There was no doubt he was in charge and that he relished being in charge.Trump wading in would not have pleased him, no... not one little bit.
We also remember when Cuomo asked for federal help, and Trump provided the hospital ship Hope, which steamed into Manhattan to much fanfare. It wasn’t needed in the end though would have been better if Cuomo had deployed it. What he did instead was to ship off elderly Covid cases to nursing homes, a policy that killed more than half of the New York State total. Does Cuomo not have blood on his hands, M. Trudeau?
Given that states are the most responsible for Covid policies, how have they fared? Back in July I showed that the top ten worst performers in terms of death per capita were all run by Democratic governors. I had another look recently and there are now two GOP-run states in the top ten, but all the top spots remain Democrat-run, including Cuomo’s NY State.
Here is a chart comparing New York with Florida. NY run by the Democrats Cuomo and De Blasio at State and City level; Florida in Republican hands. I remember when Florida Governor DeSantis, was hammered for not locking down sternly enough and then for easing too early. How did he do? Answer: way better than New York. Florida has only one-tenth the death rate of NYC. We don’t hear anything about that now, either.
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| NY State light blue. City dark blue. Florida, green |
