Monday Reading

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

Jackson Diehl writes about why Putin needs the Lord of the Ramp to win re- election:

Putin needs help. He badly needs a win. He needs, specifically, the reelection of President Trump. In ways both more blatant and more subtle than in 2016, he is trying to make it happen. [snip]

... [C]onsider the gifts Trump has given Putin in the past 3½ years. Trump has all but wrecked Putin’s nemesis, the NATO alliance; this month he abruptly decided to withdraw more than a quarter of U.S. troops from Germany. He opened the door for Russian meddling in the Middle East, and to greater influence over Turkey, Egypt and even Israel. He has poisoned the once-close relations between Washington and Ukraine; President Volodymyr Zelensky has still not been invited to Washington.

Most importantly, Putin has learned that, as Bolton put it in a television interview last week, he can play Trump “like a fiddle.” The whole world watched as Putin induced Trump to announce at their 2018 Helsinki summit that he believed Putin’s denial that Russia intervened in the 2016 election. In private communications, according to Bolton, Putin managed to persuade Trump that Venezuela’s opposition leader was comparable to Hillary Clinton, and thus not worthy of support.

A reelected Trump could be expected to continue his campaign to restore Russia as a member of the Group of Seven nations, providing Putin with an enhanced global platform. He could pull the United States out of NATO once and for all. And he could advance Putin’s most important geopolitical goal, returning Ukraine to Russia’s sphere of influence, while opening the way for the lifting of U.S. and European sanctions on the Russian economy.

At his sparsely- attended campaign kickoff Nuremberg rally in Tulsa, the Lord of the Ramp made plenty of racist, ignorant and inflammatory comments, as is his wont.  But one comment in particular made the biggest splash:

President Trump’s Saturday night remark that he asked officials to “slow the [coronavirus] testing down” sparked harsh rebukes from experts and frustration from his own staffers, who say it undercuts their efforts to reassure Americans as the disease surges around the country.

The president’s comment, which came on the same day that eight states reported their highest-ever single-day case counts, drew a chorus of criticism from congressional Democrats and public health officials, who worry the president is more concerned with saving face than combating the pandemic.

“Looking at it as a scoreboard is the wrong way to think about it,” said Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “To think of it as something you can manipulate or slow down based on what the numbers look like speaks to a complete misunderstanding of what an infectious-disease response should be.”

As they always do after a gaffe or particularly inane comment by the Lord of the Ramp, his toadies were out quickly, claiming he was only joking.  He is, after all, known for his sense of humor.

The Lord of the Ramp also declared in Tulsa that his response to the coronavirus pandemic saved "hundreds of thousands of lives."  Reality says just the opposite:

More than 120,000 Americans have now perished from Covid-19, surpassing the total number of U.S. dead during World War I. Had American leaders taken the decisive, early measures that several other nations took when they had exactly the same information the U.S. did, at exactly the same time in their experience of the novel coronavirus, how many of these Covid-19 deaths could have been prevented?

That isn’t a hypothetical question. And the answer that emerges from a direct comparison of the fatalities in and policies of the U.S. and other countries — South Korea, Australia, Germany, and Singapore — indicates that between 70% and 99% of the Americans who died from this pandemic might have been saved by measures demonstrated by others to have been feasible. (our emphasis)

The entire piece details how what the Lord of the Ramp and his toadies in state governments did made matters worse and cost more lives than otherwise would have been the case.  Meanwhile, the world just saw its largest daily increase in coronavirus cases yet, with the U.S. among those seeing cases surge.

Infidel 753 has an essay on "Hard Reality" and why the reliance by some on a shared, tribal rejection of science- based reality is a serious problem for all of us:

This has become a serious practical problem for our country's response to the covid-19 pandemic because much of the right wing has decided that precautions such as masks, social distancing, and lockdowns are markers of political tribal identity.  To them, adhering to such practices is not a pragmatic effort to minimize danger, but evidence of one's membership in the secular left.  Such delusions come naturally to the religion-dominated mind.  After generations of being taught to disregard or deny evidence in order to reject the theory of evolution, and instead interpret the theory as an ideological assault on religion, it was easy to apply the same response pattern to anthropogenic global warming, and then to anything else that came along.  The end result is a mental state insulated from the real world, in which every new assertion is judged not by whether the evidence supports it, but by whether it is being asserted by "our side" or by the Godless libtards.

The problem is that reality is unaffected by such attitudes.  The pandemic does not care whether somebody believes it's a hoax or not.  The laws of physics that govern the trajectory of infectious micro-droplets when somebody coughs do not care why the person isn't wearing a mask.  Amidst a group of people, the virus does not care whether the gathering is a church service or a BLM rally or a Trump rally.  It simply spreads to new hosts more or less easily depending on whether certain objective conditions are met, as impersonally as a magnet jumps toward a bar of iron if you bring it close enough.

We conclude with our usual strong recommendation that you drop into the same Infidel 753's link round- up for a comprehensive array of links to posts around the internet.  If you can't find something worth your time there, it's probably not worth finding.