It's Almost Like The GOP Is Committed To Making The Pandemic Worse!

The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is as far right as the typical Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham show. Not the news coverage, the editorial page. Yesterday, the editors asked about a Trump comeback and noted that Biden wants to make the campaign a referendum on Trump. He’s succeeding with Trump’s help. The story of this election will be how Biden won because he succeeded in not getting in the way of it being a referendum on Señor Trumpanzee. In conservative circle, there is still hope-- despite the polls-- that Trump is "going to stage a comeback, and not become only the fourth incumbent in a century to be denied a second term" but to do that, warns the editors, "he will have to make the race about policy differences and Mr. Biden’s indulgence to the Democratic left." In other words, he has to paint a picture of Biden-- a career-long conservative-- that makes him into a socialist!!!! and a puppet of AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Nancy Pelosi, 4 of the Democratic women the far right media has worked so hard to demonize with only the most modest success outside their own bubble.

The editors admit that "If the race comes down to a character contest, Mr. Trump will lose. This isn’t a repeat of 2016 when Hillary Clinton was almost as disliked as Mr. Trump. Voters may have doubts about Mr. Biden’s capacity, but they don’t dislike him. Americans have also seen Mr. Trump in office for 42 months, and even millions of his supporters dislike the way he conducts himself. This isn’t merely a normative judgment. It’s a political fact as measured in the polls. Mr. Trump’s job approval rating rests at about 43%-44%, and his personal approval is lower. [These jerks need to take off their right-wing blinders; Trump's job approval average is actually 44.2% approval, 53.0% disapproval-- and that is even with averages that include fake GOP polls by Rasmussen and Trafalgar.] He hasn’t been able to sustain his job approval above what it was on Inauguration Day. Unlike Richard Nixon or George W. Bush, who won with pluralities the first time but majorities the next, Mr. Trump has failed to expand his coalition."

Wringing their hands because in reinforcing "the intensity of his core support," the Orange Menace "has shed support in the suburbs, especially among college-educated voters and women. This has been the case in nearly every election since Mr. Trump’s narrow victory in 2016. The Trump GOP is a smaller but more intensely loyal coalition."

Trump’s Labor Day press conference... was intended to play off the strong August jobs report to drive the theme of economic recovery. Mr. Trump started out on message by citing the facts, but soon he was careening from grievance to attack or anything that popped into his head.

• “His [Joe Biden’s] son, “Where is Hunter?”-- Where is Hunter?-- I call him ‘Where is Hunter?’-- walked away with one and a half billion dollars to manage, even though he never did that before.”
• “And Biden is a stupid person. You know that.”
• “I was never a fan of John McCain because he wanted the endless wars, and I didn’t.”
• “They spied on my campaign. And if they were Democrats, they would have been in jail two years ago. They would have been in jail-- literally, if this side were the Democrat side, they would have been in jail two years ago for 50-year terms for treason and other things.”
• “And the dirtiest fight of all is the issuance of 80 million ballots, unrequested. They’re not requested; they’re just sending 80 million ballots all over the country. Eighty million ballots, non-requested. I call them unsolicited ballots. That’s going to be the dirtiest fight of all.”
• “But I watched Kamala’s poll numbers drop from 15 to almost zero, and then drop out even before she ran in Iowa because people didn’t like her, and I understand why. She will never be President-- although I have to be careful, because Obama used to say that about me. So I have to be a little bit careful.”

This tower of babbling is entertaining in its Trumpian way, but his economic point was washed away like an irrelevance. The press barely reported it.

Voters have heard this riffing for three years, and one campaign question is whether there are enough undecided voters who are still listening. The country deserves a debate over policy because Mr. Biden is proposing the most left-wing agenda of any major party candidate in our lifetime. The Democratic strategy is to keep Mr. Trump talking about Donald J. Trump.

And in the midst of a deadly pandemic the Trump regime and it's allies are trying to deny exists-- even if it means killing people-- Trump's raucous campaign style doesn't read well outside of his low-IQ base. Yesterday, Josh Dawsey, Michael Scherer and Annie Linskey, writing for the Washington Post that the morons who support Trump think being anti-mask = being pro-Trump. When an announcer at a recent Trumpanzee rally in an airplane hanger New Hampshire "urged a packed airplane hangar of supporters to don their masks, a cacophonous round of boos erupted, followed by defiance. No matter that the attendees’ chairs were inches apart, their temperatures had not been taken and masks were required by the state." The contrast with Biden's campaign style couldn't be starker. His small, outdoor events are all social-distanced and, unlike Trump's, none his voters are going to be too sick-- or dead-- to vote on election day. "These are more than just competing messages for a country riven by a pandemic less than two months before an election," wrote The Post trio. "The two sides don’t even agree on what constitutes campaigning. And Republicans and Democrats each say their opponents are making a fatal error-- with the Trump campaign attempting to cast life as largely normal, while Biden and his campaign largely stay at home... If Trump is showcasing his brand of defiant individualism, Biden is seeking to demonstrate his rationality and willingness to heed experts. Democrats say Trump is scaring away swing voters alarmed by the pandemic while appealing to a core base that sees public health measures as going too far." What pity!

In North Carolina-- a must-win swing state for Trump-- he was running around campaigning live in Winston-Salem, endangering his supporters and himself and staffers. Dave Plyler, the Republican chairman of the Forsyth County Board of Commissioners, told him to wear a mask in North Carolina, where a second spike is going badly. On Tuesday, when Trump was in his county, the state reported 651 new cases, bringing North Carolina's total caseload to 179,068, or 17,073 cases per million residents. On top of that-- 9 new deaths to mark Trump's visit with a total of 2,937 for the state.

Instead of wearing a mask, Trump decided to use the occasion to mock pandemic restrictions, a popular position among his moron-base, but not with normal people. "But when the president emerged Tuesday evening to address a cheering group of supporters, his face was fully exposed, a likely violation of the state’s coronavirus rules.”

“The same was true of many of the supporters behind his podium, especially those high up in the stands and out of view. And in fact, the whole event appears to have defied restrictions from North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D), who has limited outdoor mass gatherings at 50 people under the state’s current phase of reopening."

Two super-spreaders, Donald and Shannon

And, obviously, this Republican rebellion against public health isn't just a problem in North Carolina. In every state with Republicans, this has been a problem, a problem that prolongs and worsens the pandemic. Take California. The minority leader of the state Senate, Trumpist crackpot Shannon Grove of Kern County is supposed to be in quarantine because of her close contacts with another lunatic fringe Republican state senator, Brian Jones, who has COVID. "Instead," reported the Washington Post Grove took the stage on Sunday and spoke at length-- maskless-- to thousands of religionists "packed shoulder-to-shoulder outside the Capitol "and promised the huge church event would have a real impact. But state leaders are warning the event’s impact could actually be a mass coronavirus outbreak. Although Grove’s permit allowed 1,000 people and required social distancing, the California Highway Patrol said three times as many showed up; videos showed virtually no social distancing or masks in the crowd."

If Gavin Newsom had any balls-- he doesn't-- Grove would be sitting in a jail cell right now. California reported 3,409 new cases yesterday, bringing the state's total to 744,895 highest in the nation-- along with 13,835 deaths. There are 18,852 cases per million Californians. Grove's own area is a COVID-shotspot with 30,202 cases across Kern County (6th worst in the state), 16,546 of those cases active (4th worst in the state). And up in Sacramento County, where Grove was doing her super-spreader event on Sunday there were 114 new cases reported, bringing the county's total to 19,460.

And if conservative politicians won't mislead you about the pandemic, there's a good chance your own brain will. That's what Lia Kvatum reported for the Washington Post yesterday. "More than six months into a pandemic in the United States," she wrote, "we know a few things. We know that the novel coronavirus can be fatal, that it's passed via respiratory droplets, that masks and social distancing help stop its spread. And yet many Americans, weary of lockdowns, seem determined to return to social gatherings and other "normal" activities, even though experts have warned against this. The question is, why? Why do some take the threat of the virus more seriously than others? Your risk of contracting covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, depends on a number of variables: where you live, how old you are, whether you work indoors or out, whether you have high blood pressure or other so-called co-morbidities, how many people in your community have been tested, and so on. But ultimately, the difficulty of grasping the threat of this virus may have less to do with data and more to do with fundamentals: Humans are not that good at it." And especially not if you were stupid enough to buy into Trump's bullshit from the beginning. Those are really the brains in trouble.

Howard Kunreuther, co-director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania, studies why people tend to be poor judges of whether they will experience a natural disaster and the policy implications of that. In the 2017 book The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters, which he co-wrote, he explains that people often don’t like to think too far in the future; they also misunderstand threats and are influenced by those around them. Kunreuther sees parallels between the way people downplay the threat of natural disasters and the way they dismiss the threat of the coronavirus.

According to scientists, risk assessment involves two basic types of thinking: intuitive and deliberative. The intuitive kind is “thinking without thinking,” explains Ralf Schmälzle, a biological psychologist at Michigan State University, and “is rooted in the evolutionary need to survive.” By contrast, deliberative thinking, he says, is “mostly conscious” and “effortful ... whereby one reflects about reasons and weighs available evidence, perhaps comparable to comparing options in a chess game and deciding which move is best.”

...In the instance of a threat like the coronavirus, information without feeling is largely ineffective. “Knowledge alone is not enough to motivate,” explains Schmälzle. So, even though we hear that hundreds of thousands have died of covid-19, that risk may feel distant if we don’t know anyone who has had it. Our unwillingness to change our minds based on information alone can lead in the opposite direction, too: Many humans remain fearful of flying, even though statistically it’s incredibly safe.

...Our judgments are also shaped by those around us. “The communities that we are a part of play a huge role in how we interpret information. Oftentimes, the things that we believe connect us to certain communities,” says Meghan Moran, an associate professor of health, behavior and society at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “We are more likely to believe things that fit in with our existing worldview or value system, so information that does that becomes more appealing.” This can contribute to a belief in conspiracy theories or a disdain for expert advice.

Scientists can do only so much to persuade us, and it doesn’t help that they’re frequently hesitant to speak in definitive terms. Schmälzle, for instance, is excited by the findings from his 2013 study but also cautioned against reading too much into them because of the small sample size and other limitations. This is how evidence-based science works. With a new threat like covid, experts’ understanding is rapidly evolving, and so are their recommendations. Take masks. In February, before widespread lockdowns, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said healthy people didn’t need to wear them in public. By April, as multiple studies began to show people can spread the virus without knowing they have it, the CDC reversed that recommendation, angering some and confusing many.

“In general, folks who are not scientists are seeking certainties, so they want to know what’s going to happen, and it will always be that way,” Moran says. “I think we get into trouble when we rely on terms and phrases that are a little more ambiguous than what the public is comfortable with hearing. It can be misinterpreted that scientists don’t know what they are doing. It can result in a lack of trust when it’s not conveyed in a way that’s clear to the public.”

So, what’s the solution? There are no magic bullets. But until there is a vaccine, perhaps recognizing our inherent cognitive limitations is one more way to protect ourselves.