Biden In The Debates......

[Dill]

(09-16-2020, 09:09 AM)Mickeypoo Wrote: On the disinfectant thing.  I'm not defending his choice of words at all, it was stupid, but I do not believe the narrative critics were trying to push either.  This also proves there are some pretty, um, "simple" people out there.  I don't say that to be mean.  It's just that my 9 yr old and 12 yr old would know not to do that.

On the Covid thing.  Really, it is hard to argue either way whether the Trump administration did everything they could.  There is a lot of noise from the media and critics of Trump and a lot of positives from his supporters and friendly media.  On it's face what you said would appear to make it look like they did not do everything they could, but you would have to research and examine each situation to get a true picture.  His critics were also not helping calling the Prez a racist and xenophobe for the travel ban.

Everybody says Trump did a bad job with Covid response not realizing or ignoring that there is huge amounts of info coming from all angles from many different sources during an unprecedented time.  There is so much more to just saying any Prez didn't do a good job in a certain situation and common people like us will never be able to know the ins and outs of what happened to make a fair assessment.a whole nother level to the "did he handle Covid properly" debate.  There is just way to much going on from to many different levels to ever truly know what the correct answer is.

Three points here.

1. Trump was certainly not encouraging people to self-medicate with bleach. But he did suggest researching some way to get disinfectant into the body to kill COVID, because he learned it kills the virus on external surfaces. That is thinking outside the box, but not in a good way. It means Trump didn't really know where the box was. Chemotherapy involves introducing acid-like chemicals into the body in tiny amounts to kill reproducing (thin-skinned cells), but to suppose one could get a virus that way, like cleaning an external surface--only inside the body--just means lack of basic biological/medical knowledge of cells and how a virus works on them.

2. Doesn't matter if the guy wiping my car down at the car wash doesn't know basic biology, but it may matter if the President of the US doesn't know during a pandemic. If he doesn't have a realistic idea of what can be good or bad research, can he tell good doctors from crackpots--a Fauci from an Atlas?  I fear he cannot. And that inability to judge affects the administration's policy, the direction (or not) of resources, and the messaging needed to get the country all on the same page. It affects how he sorts through those "many different sources" coming "from all angles." Remember when Trump wanted to "slow down" the testing? Spoke as if more testing CREATED more cases? Remember the Fox defenses of his touting hydroxychloroquine? And just yesterday--> https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-rebuke-of-cdc-director-sows-confusion-on-vaccine-timeline/ar-BB1990tM?ocid=uxbndlbing

When the subject is life and death medical knowledge, we should not always be debating what a National leader really meant, whether he was serious, etc.  That we are constantly doing that is itself an indication of bad leadership.

3. We common folk can and should strive to assess how well our leaders are doing--especially during a national crisis. Democracy is dead if we cannot do that successfully. Comparing the US response to that of other countries is a good place to start. That gives us some idea of what options were available to Trump and which he did or did not choose. It does look like some leaders "found the correct answer" for their countries, and communicated it clearly to the people they were sworn to protect. Others punished whistleblowers, scorned social distancing, muzzled medical experts, opened their economies, suppressed data, and attacked the press.

We can make a "fair assessment" if we want to.  But we must recognize what is at stake and want to make that assessment.