Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ opeds.

Umair Haque writes about the "largest and most hardened subset of idiots" in the world (he may want to have a conversation with Green Day about a certain term):

The American idiot is, by now, a figure that’s the stuff of myth and legend across the world. Nobody else is really quite sure: are Americans really like this? This…well…laughable? Yesterday, they were the kind of people who made their kids do “active shooter drills,” meaning masked men burst into classrooms…and pretend…to kill them. What the? Today, they’re the kind of people who happily congregate in parks and on beaches during a global pandemic…when the lunatic fringe amongst them isn’t protesting for “liberation” in the first place. What on earth? [snip]

I don’t use the term as an insult — the American idiot. I mean it in a precise way, as I try to remind people. For the Greeks, “idiot” carried a precise and special meaning. The person who was only interested in private life, private gain, private advantage. Who had no conception of a public good, common wealth, shared interest. To the Greeks, the pioneers of democracy, the creators of the demos, such a person was the most contemptible of all. Because even the Greeks seemed to understand: you can’t make a functioning democracy out of…idiots.

Now, I’m going to generalize. But I don’t mean that all Americans are idiots. I mean that, for example, more or less everyone who wants to carry a gun to Starbucks, deny their neighbours healthcare, make people beg for medicine online, and not let anyone in society ever retire…all of those people in the world, by and large, are Americans. Nobody else — nobody in the whole world at this point in history — thinks such things are remotely desirable. Hence, the American idiot. It means: the world’s largest and most hardened subset of idiots at this point, in the Classical Greek meaning of the word, is largely American.

You also can be a naturalized American idiot.  Like Elon Musk.

Fintan O'Toole writes about the importance of certain "numbers" in Trump's weak and damaged mind:

During a meeting with Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R), President Trump paused to muse about the pros and cons of testing people for the coronavirus. “The media likes to point out” that the United States has the most covid-19 cases in the world, he observed. “But we do, by far, the most testing. If we did very little testing, we wouldn’t have the most cases. So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”

The United States does not do “the most testing,” at least not on a per capita basis — not by a long shot. And if the United States did “very little” testing, that would not change the number of people infected, although it would hamper efforts to reduce that figure and limit our understanding of where the virus is spreading. But Trump’s comment revealed a great deal about how he thinks about testing and about the meaning of numbers.

Tests are perfect, in Trump’s mind, when they tell you what you want to hear — but not so great when they deliver bad news. They are useful if they lead to an impressive statistic. But if a test is going to produce an unwelcome result, why do it? To other people, it may seem obvious: It’s to produce an objective truth about what is happening to Americans. Once we know the scope of the problem in every city and state, we can plan the responses — contain the virus and gradually resume normal life. But for Trump, the purpose of testing is not to establish an objective truth. It is to generate good numbers.

Numbers are crucial to the way Trump sees the world. He cares passionately that people believe his claims that he has billions of dollars. He considered his (partly) abandoned nightly crisis briefings as TV shows whose success should be judged by the only metric for such events that matters to him: ratings. He began his presidency with an insanely obsessive row about how many people attended his inauguration. He understands the economy solely through the vicissitudes of the stock market. According to the book “Fear,” by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward, Trump’s main concern in internal discussions about tax cuts was to have memorable figures: “I like those big round numbers. Ten percent, 20 percent, 25 percent.”

Here's a number for the Giant Toddler:  zero.  It applies to so much about him.

Former CIA deputy director and acting director Michael Morell takes on the "unmasking" nothingburger that Trump is desperate to make into a fake scandal to distract from his coronavirus bungling and crashing the economy:

There was no wrongdoing on the part of Obama administration officials who, during the presidential transition in 2016 and 2017, “unmasked” the identity of Michael Flynn, who was set to become national security adviser. Indeed, the only wrongdoing is by the Trump administration, which, in releasing last week a list of officials who made the unmasking requests, has yet again politicized the intelligence community.

The Trump administration released the list to promote its claim that officials in the outgoing administration attempted to discredit Flynn and others associated with the incoming administration. But this claim makes absolutely no sense.  [snip]

The simple fact is that the list of individuals making completely legitimate unmasking requests is not news. The only news here is the continuing politicization of the intelligence community. This public release of requesters’ names is unprecedented, and there was no particular reason for it to be done now, or ever. Seeking the list in the first place, declassifying it and providing it only to Republican members of Congress — who immediately handed it to the media — strongly suggests that the intent was to create a political spectacle. We cannot allow that to happen.

It's already happening, so maybe the best every sane person can do is to understand what's really going on here and tune out the nonsensical noise.

The Washington Post editorial board is having none of it:

IN THE 2016 presidential race, then-candidate Donald Trump often deflected questions about his shortcomings by hyping those of his opponent, Hillary Clinton. The point was to make his behavior seem no more abhorrent than his rival’s.

Mr. Trump is trying the same tactic against presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, latching onto a new diversion: “Obamagate.” This one is totally untethered from reality, despite the credulous or cynical efforts of senior Republicans and conservative media to advance it.

Mr. Trump’s precise allegation is hazy. But the apparent accusation is that, following Mr. Trump’s 2016 victory, Obama officials plotted to ensnare the incoming Trump administration in a Russia scandal. [snip]

Obamagate theorizers also have no good explanation for why Mr. Flynn lied to the FBI and to other Trump officials about his discussions with Mr. Kislyak. If there had been an Obama plot to set up Mr. Flynn, it could have been thwarted if Mr. Flynn had not broken the law. His crime was serious: He endangered national security, opening himself to Kremlin blackmail when he lied.

Mr. Trump would like to rewrite history, making it seem as though the Russia investigation lacked firm grounding and that a sinister Obama administration plot explains the misdeeds that his own people committed. The more Americans hear about Obamagate, the more they should wonder why Mr. Trump is not running on his record but on a dishonest effort to drag his opponent down to his level.

Meanwhile, the pandemic bungling and subsequent crashing of the economy is having another dire effect:

As many as 43 million Americans could lose their health insurance in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute.

Up to 7 million of those people are unlikely to find new insurance as poor economic conditions drag on, researchers at the Urban Institute and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation thinktanks predict.

Such enormous insurance losses could dramatically alter America’s healthcare landscape, and will probably result in more deaths as people avoid unaffordable healthcare.

To complete the dystopia, the Trump regime is still committed to killing Obamacare at the Supreme Court, meaning even more people could be cut off from vital health insurance.  There are several ways to describe this, but let's go with sociopathic for now.

As always, please check out Infidel 753's link round- up for dozens and dozens more links to posts around the internet that he's found informative, amusing, amazing, or aggravating -- he puts in the time so you don't have to!  We found that last item on losing insurance coverage there, btw.