Clearly the Republican and Trump plan from this point forward is to simply throw so much shit out there that no one can tell what is true, what is false, that people simply stop caring about how we got into this position. Let us be clear about this: The virus is a product of nature (almost for sure), and the Trump administration could not control its emergence. But the response to the virus is on the Trump administration and the Republican senate since nothing could be done without the two branches working together.

Since that response sucked, Republicans find it imperative that blame gets tossed around to everyone but them. Today, Mitch McConnell tossed out the most offensive lie yet – that the Obama administration “Failed” to leave a plan in place for something like this.

We presume that the Trump administration is busy readying a plan for the Biden administration (given McConnell’s line of thinking)?

The reason it is so offensive is that the Obama administration actually did leave a plan in place – they left an entire department in place! In the White House! None of that matters to McConnell:

Tonight's Team Trump Livestream features Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell who, talking COVID-19, tells Lara Trump, "clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration, any kind of game plan for something like this." pic.twitter.com/tRYUn1x7mB

— DJ Judd (@DJJudd) May 12, 2020

Indeed, the Obama administration left a very very good plan, as summarized by Esquire’s essential Jack Holmes:

While the Obama administration did not leave their successors a “game plan,” they did leave them a 69-page pandemic playbook which the Trump administration then completely ignored. The Trump administration also eliminated the Pandemic Preparedness Office, established under Obama as part of the National Security Council on the basis that international plagues create national-security issues. They also nixed a pandemic early-warning program called PREDICT, also created under Obama, two months before the novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China. That program specifically sought to help researchers at the Wuhan lab—on which Republicans have grown increasingly fixated—to respond to this kind of event. And most recently, as60 Minutes reported this Sunday, Trump cut even more funding geared towards finding a cure for COVID-19 based on misinformation he gobbled up gluttonously.

Obama left a plan, Trump cut it up and spit it out because that’s what Trump does with respect to Obama. Trump doesn’t care how the country does when hit by a pandemic. His only concern is that he rid himself personally of any “taint” from the black man – call it White House segregation.

McConnell is terrified that he’s about to become either “minority leader McConnell” or simply “Mitch” since Trump is becoming an anchor upon the Republicans who continue to cover for Trump, no matter how incompetent.

Power is its own end, and the only end, for Ol’ Mitch, so he’ll happily hop on Zoom with a member of the extended Trump clan to tell baldfaced lies about why the Trump administration was completely unprepared for this event. (He also suggested Obama should have “kept his mouth shut” rather than criticize the obviously appalling pandemic response. McConnell called Obama’s critique “classless,” because if there’s one thing you associate with the current administration, it’s class.) The Trump administration was completely unprepared because the president doesn’t know much of anything, and cares less.He doesn’t read his briefings, and he doesn’t even attend the meetings of his Task Force, because he believes the job is to watch TV and tweet until it’s time to go on TV.

That’s it.

That’s all Trump does. He watches TV and tries to produce a better TV show than the one that Obama produced. The nation’s fate doesn’t matter. That’s why Trump constantly tells us that we had the “best economy in the history of the world” when it is simply not true, and now – irrelevant. But it was a better TV show, so he keeps saying it.

This lie hits deep and angers me more than most. It also demonstrates why no one likes Mitch McConnell – I mean other Republicans don’t like Mitch McConnell, which is not true of every Republican, trust me. There are Republican senators that most everyone likes. Roger Wicker from my state – most people like him, even Democrats. No one likes Mitch McConnell.

We have more reason to dislike him now. Wrongly blaming another president for 83,000 deaths is not something lightly done.

****

Peace, y’all

Jason

[email protected] and on Twitter @MiciakZoom