"480 Minutes" - Creeping up on 100k

May 15, 2020 Ted

As the U.S. COVID-19 death toll creeps upwards toward 100,000 it is worth noting that the so-called president spent his 2014 tweeting nearly 100 times criticizing the Obama administration's response to the Ebola crisis. One tweet stated, "I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent." In another he called President Obama "stupid" and suggested that he "personally embrace all people in the US who contract Ebola!" Fact: two American nurses who treated Ebola patients overseas died. No Americans who contracted Ebola in the U.S. died.

Today the U.S. leads the world in coronavirus deaths because the damaged unfit fool in charge was more concerned with his re-election campaign than reality. The bungled U.S. government response to the warnings we received from experts and saw in Italy can be directly attributed to the stable genius who thinks he's good at science and is certain he knows better than any expert. Others bear significant responsibility as well, including the "news" and "religious" outlets which sold his obvious bullshit messages, and of course all who are supposed to represent We The People but have instead continually enabled a clearly incompetent "leader" whose tombstone will bear his infamous quote: "I take no responsibility at all." We are where we are today thanks to those power-mad people, not Obama, not China, not "the media," not the Democrats (although they should have done more to lead).

To distract us from the daily death toll and accompanying embarrassing shit show of mendacity, miscalculations, and maliciousness, the misadministration's man at the injustice department tried to further subvert the rule of law. The Attorney General of the U.S. tried to drop the case against a traitor who had multiple undisclosed, unsavory contacts with Russian government officials, lied about those contacts to the administration and to the FBI, and by lying handed leverage over the National Security Advisor to the president-elect to a hostile foreign power leverage. And he admitted to these things. Twice.

Another favorite distraction tactic was trotted out this week, the revelation of an evidence-free whole-cloth non-scandal, has been deployed to gaslight the country. It gives the RWNJs on Twitter something to talk about and hate on Democrats together (lack of evidence or even an actual charge be damned) and most importantly diverts media cycles from the big story: Republican culpability for handling a severe global health emergency as poorly as a "superpower" can. Thus far even Faux News is having difficulty selling this nebulous, meaningless doozy (see video).

Remember the GOP's #1 re-election campaign strategy -- the fake Burisma scandal? Poof! Gone in an eyeblink! Do you know why? The Bloomberg campaign announced that if the Trump campaign didn't drop the bullshit Burisma attacks on Joe Biden and his son (attacks which laughably included Junior and Eric calling out Hunter Biden for...wait for it...nepotism!), no expense would be spared to expose the misdeeds of The Donald's offspring. Seemingly overnight there were no more calls to investigate the Bidens, no more calls for congressional hearings, no Tweets about Biden's family...nothing. Apparently the grifter's kids have some skeletons (and live bodies) they'd prefer to keep hidden. Bloomberg is an ass but in this case he did good: he called the bully's bluff and the bully melted like a snowflake in Ethiopia.

Getting back to the issue that the RNC is coaching Republicans on how to not talk about -- we are going to blow past that nearly 100,000 mostly preventable American deaths milestone. By mid-summer that number is going to look like a pie-in-the-sky dream as the consequences of the childish, selfish, ghoulish, and premature rush to "reopen America" start to flood hospitals in places already hard hit and places which have not yet experienced the pandemic up close. Forget that TrumpCo spent the first two full months ignoring the crisis. Forget that they burned the pandemic playbook left for them by the previous administration and instead got everything from preparedness to planning to communications completely wrong. As the virus spreads (because that's what infectious diseases do when people are sharing physical space and air and surfaces) and areas are forced back into lockdowns what will be front and center are the Donald "this 'pandemic' is a hoax to hurt me" Trump televised rallies he used to mislead the country with contradictory and outright false claims, confusing instead of calming people, and his utter failure to use two full months of lockdown time to educate the public, set up solid testing and contact-tracing, and produce a public health expert-defined, federally mandated set of prototcols for the initial post-lockdown period.

Today's show will be live-hosted from 9am-5pm Eastern U.S. Time and feature new music by Annie Hamilton (Sydney, Australia, @anniehamilton_), Mark Lanegan (Seattle, WA, @marklanegan), Thao and the Get Down Stay Down (San Francisco, CA, @thaogetstaydown), and Tijuana Panthers (Long Beach, CA, @tijuanapanthers).

The marathon 8-hour show is followed by 2 hours of uninterrupted music and is then rebroadcast in its entirety beginning at 7 p.m. Friday, 5 a.m. and 3 p.m. Saturday, and one final time at 1 a.m. on Sunday. That is followed by a rebroadcast of a Fuzzy Road radio show at 11 a.m. and then a couple of old 480 Minutes episodes from this week in past years, making for hosted shows all weekend long.

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Videos

480 Minutes / Year 16 - Episode 19/694 - Creeping up on 100k