Even More and More Lies my President Told Me (and you and
all of us!)
Unlike my
earlier “lies…etc.” posts, all the prevarications discussed today came from one
40 minute interview ( I prefer the term “burst of bull flatus”) which Trump was
stupid enough to do and allow to be broadcast on HBO (Axios filmed it on July
28 and it aired on HBO Aug. 3). I say stupid enough because, if one watches it
on HBO, there is no Faux News talking head to explain why the lies are really not
lies or a Kellyanne Conway to “walk the statement back” and explain that it is was
really not her moronic employer meant to say.
I’ll start with
one of the worst simply because it is vintage Trumpian dog whistle pandering to
his White Supremacist base.
"Police have killed white people. In a larger
number, police have killed white people."
This is a
vintage Trump deception, generally intended as a defense of the (factual) charge
that cops shoot unarmed Blacks at an inordinately large rate. In the absence of
context, the statement is true. It is also a favorite claim of the “anti-BLM”
folks and is even cited occasionally by Black conservatives. It is actually vintage
“ad speak,” in that you never get the contextual data which proves the lie. It’s
like the large “40% more flavor” statement on a “new and better” dog food, without
the rest of the story which is, “40% more flavor” than what? (cardboard or something
else equally bland? You get the picture)
The context
here is everything. While the raw data is accurate, the statistic, as quoted is
meaningless.What gives
meaning here is the fact that Black people account for just under 13% of all
Americans, while 60.4 % self-identify as “White.” By this metric, if these heinous miscarriages
of justice were “color blind”, we should expect to see about 4.6 times as many
Whites killed as Blacks. Statistically, that is far from the truth.
In 2019, 403
white people were shot and killed by police in the line of duty, compared with
250 Black people, according to the Washington Post tally from law enforcement sources.
But as the real numbers indicate, the rate at which Black Americans are killed
by police is significantly higher. The total number of fatal LEO involved
shootings in 2019 was 653. If lethal force had been administered evenly, one
would expect just 85, or so, of those deaths to be Black individuals. Reality
shows that almost three times that number were killed than their proportion of
society should indicate. In truth, I’m not sure Trump even understands the
depth of the deception here.
"You can test too much, read the manuals… read
the books."
Of course, Trump
is referring to CoVid19 testing here and attempting to defend the real statistic
which, as today’s (8/5/2020) news shows, is that the US leads the world in
Coronavirus deaths by a sizeable margin with over 155,000. We are just short of
5 million confirmed cases, with about 60,000 new cases repeated daily.
So where are
the lies here? First, “What manuals?”
This from the man who never reads his daily security briefs. I thought
this was merely a preference, but as I saw him struggle last night with words
like “Yosemite,” (mispronouncing it twice in two attempts) I realize he just
doesn’t read well. Trump here is doing what he does so often, which is to make a
vague reference to a generic source, the objective of which is to shift blame
to a shadowy “them,” rather than leave
it where it should reside.
The carping
about testing is primarily a ruse to divert attention from the fact that
Americans, especially Trump’s power base of deplorables, augmented by equally
deplorable Fundamentalist Evangelicals who apparently think Covid can be “blown
away,” are responsible for the rapid surge in positive cases. One quick daily
news example, AP reported: A South Dakota “Christian Youth Summer camp,” requiring
apparently little or no concession to the virus, has 96 positives (so far) out
of just over 300 attendees. OR The woman in St. Louis who pepper sprayed pizza
restaurant employees who asked her to leave because she refused to wear a mask.
When the Cheetoh in Chief shills for false cures and eschews the use of a mask
for months on end and his sycophants follow suit, it is predictable.
Of course, none
of this is due to Trump’s criminal negligence or abysmal failure to lead, while
discrediting actual skilled medical authorities. First, it was due to “The
terrible testing rule the Obama administration left us” (Trump, March 4:
I just want to add, if I might — and to go a little bit further — the Obama
administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very
detrimental to what we’re doing.” This is/was pure hogwash, but typical of Trump
“Obama shaming.” But now, it’s “that
damned testing!”
"You
don’t know" that South Korea had 300 deaths, "and they have
spikes."
To keep this to
manageable size, I’ll end with just one more of the many bullshit Trumpian statements
from the interview. It begins with a favorite Trump tactic – the implication
that he possesses information to which the rest of us aren’t privy, so we should
believe it because he says it. In the
case of Covid19 data, Johns Hopkins and others have, from before Trump even
really understood the problem, tracked world data and had it available to
anyone who cared to look. The “you don’t know” line is meant to make the
observer believe that what follows is true and significant. Neither is categorically true or, moreover, remotely
significant true in this case.
As of today,
and as shown for more than 5 months of daily updated data, South Korea’s Covid
involvement is available at the click of a mouse. South Korea has (as of today,
8/5/2020) 14,456 confirmed cases and just 302 deaths. That is a death rate per
case of .02%. The current US rate of deaths per case is over .03%, so referring
to Korea in a negative is ludicrous.
And since you know I like real data, here’s
some Trump “overlooked.”
S
Korea US
Population: 51.6 mil 328 mil
Pop. dens. per square mi.
1366/mi 92/mi
Pop. dens. largest city 42,000! 27,013
Ratio of population
328 mil/51.6 mil US 6.3 times
pop
Number of cases:
14,466 4,772,027
Number of deaths: 302
156,840
Summing up the extrapolations from these
real (as in today) figures we see some real eye openers. The first is that the
only fair way to evaluate how effectively the virus is being dealt with is to
compare apples to apples. So, taking the ration of populations of the US and S Korea,
one fact which leaps out is that South Koreans are packed much more closely in
the largest city (Seoul), and in fact in the entire nation, with a national
population density of 14 times higher
than the US. This is partially offset by the fact that we (US) have a lot of wide
open and empty space, so comparing population ratios is a far better way to
evaluate the data. On that basis the US has 6.3 times as many souls as S. Korea,
so we can apply that ratio to S. Korea’s data to legitimately compare how our two
nations are doing in combatting Covid.
Simply put, if
I multiply S. Korean numbers by the 6.3 X population ratio, if both nations are
combatting this pandemic equally well, the S. Korean numbers multiplied by 6.3
should equal or at least be close to US numbers.
Doing the
simple math analysis described above reveals a vastly different result. If we
and South Korea were having the same success rate, adjusted for population
difference, South Korea would have about the same number of deaths (in the
vicinity of 156,000), however that number is only 6.3 X 302, or 1903! Likewise, the number of cases S. Korea would
have should be about the same as the US at almost 5 million. In truth, however, applying the ratio 6.3 X 14,466
yields just 91,136!
Reduced to
plain language, even with accounting for the difference in population, S. Korea is still
doing 52 times better in controlling the number of cases and 82
times better in limiting the deaths from these cases. Like all
statistics there are caveats. For these numbers there are several we have to
acknowledge. First, the lifestyles of many Americans, from diet to fitness to
racial predispositions have an effect on the number of deaths, although not the number of cases. More important,
and this is why Trump should have never opened his mouth re: S. Korea, is the
fact that as a national policy and as a people, they have responded with
leadership and taken sound medical advice to successfully minimize the inevitable effects of this global pandemic.
There have been a large number of
variables regarding this unprecedented plague which were difficult to analyze
and control. Donald Trump and his cohort of science naysayers have failed at the
one which was absolutely controllable. If Trump had stressed masks and
distancing from the beginning and believed those who touted their necessity,
there was high probability that his followers would have complied. He failed to lead, placing the economy above
human lives. Predictably, his more doctrinally slavish political sycophants,
such as our moronic Florida governor, have followed suit. The nation is paying
the price in blood.
