It’s now common knowledge that the U.S. intelligence agencies Trump loves to hate and ignore warned back in November that a devastating pandemic was coming.
Just as George W. Bush brushed off warnings of impending Al Qaeda attacks in 2001, so did Trump ignore and fail to take action on the situation we now find ourselves in.
In Trump’s frantic search for a scapegoat, the World Health Organization (WHO) has become his latest piñata. And his clever and inventive propagandist, Kellyanne Conway, has come up with a creative smear against the WHO:
“This is Covid-19, not Covid-1, folks. You would think that people charged with the World Health Organization facts and figures would be on top of that. This is just a pause right now.”
The insinuation is obvious: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is called “Covid-19” because this is the 19th outbreak. Her implication is that we’re in this situation because the WHO didn’t do anything about the first 18 outbreaks.
Except none of that is true. The “19” in Covid-19, also called “novel coronavirus,” refers to 2019, the year of the first outbreak. And guess why it’s called a “novel” coronavirus? Because it’s a new, never-before-seen, strain in the coronavirus family of viruses, which include some types of the common cold. Coronaviruses are viruses that attack the respiratory system.
There have not been 18 previous outbreaks of Covid-19. Conway, of course, knows this — which means she’s knowingly and intentionally propagating a vicious lie to bolster Trump’s attacks on the WHO.
This is by no means the first time she’s attacked an object of Trump’s hatred by taking innocuous facts and spinning them into vicious smears; that’s her job, and is why she’s on the White House payroll. She’s a paid propagandist, plain and simple; she’s the Goebbels of the Trump administration. The media aren’t fooled; she’s extremely well known in the D.C. press corps as a habitual spinner and a liar. No intelligent, informed person takes her seriously, either. But that’s not her objective. This ridiculous lie, like all her other lies, is for consumption by Trump’s supporters. It reinforces what he wants them to believe. And they will swallow it whole, as they do all his lies.
If Joe Biden replaces Trump in the White House next January, and we should all hope he does, one of the many benefits of a new president and administration will be that we won’t have to listen to Kellyanne Conway or see her smirking face in the nightly news anymore. She’ll be exiled to “Fox and Friends,” sitting in a comfortable armchair and throwing out cheap shots at Biden and his administration.
Image: Portrait of a smirking liar
There is a lot of intelligence information that the worst case scenario presented four months ago never happens. More often than not. Also there is the problem of how to respond. I suppose Trump could have sent the House and Senate home in December to shelter in place, but Democrats would have had a complete apoplectic fit and called it another unconstitutional action and impeachable act by the President.
While making fun of Conway’s comments here is all well and good that was then and this is now. Perhaps the impeachment process itself endangered Americans and should not have been pursued is a fair and reasonable question. Clearly the impeachment process created unintended consequences when it came to Corvid 19. It certainly meant the President did not have the political capital to do an earlier travel ban on China or Europe or to close the Canadian or Mexican borders earlier. As did the lack of information or incorrect information from the WHO and China in November, December and January.
Sorry, Mark, but your arguments aren’t credible. Or relevant. Nowhere do you address the blatant falsity of Conway’s claim this is the 19th outbreak of Covid-19. Instead, you go off on irrelevant tangents. Your assertion that Trump “did not have the political capital to do an earlier travel ban” is flatly contradicted by his 2017 Muslim travel ban. In any case, he has as much “political capital” now as ever. You refuse to acknowledge Trump’s delayed and chaotic response to this emergency and instead try to blame others. The fact is, Trump was warned by our intelligence agencies last November but did nothing. This article is about Conway’s lying, and the absurdity of her lie; do you have anything to say about that?