It’s impossible to know whether any of this is true or even if US intelligence agencies really believe it, but part of the propaganda war against Russia is spreading the message that president Vladimir Putin is out of touch, doesn’t really know what’s going on and is losing his mind after two years of COVID-19 related lockdowns. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the Russians believe the same things about American president Joe Biden.
Politics makes strange bedfellows and the enemy of my enemy is my friend but Congressional Democrats’ love of right-wing lunatic Liz Cheney has completely gone off the rails. Yes, she hates Trump but that doesn’t mean she has any integrity.
Remember when stupid people talked about stupid things like reality TV and sports? Remember how annoying that was? Covid talk makes me really miss that.
“We know where they are,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said in March 2003 about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. “They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” We found nothing. Rumsfeld knew nothing. A year after the invasion, most voters believed the Bush Administration had lied America into war.
At the core of that lie: certainty.
The 2002 run-up to war was marked by statements that characterized intelligence assessments as a slam dunk. “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us,” Vice President Dick Cheney said in August 2002. “These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence,” Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN.
Rumsfeld knew that if he said that Saddam probably had WMDs it wouldn’t have been enough. Americans required absolute certainty.
Imagine if the Bushies had deployed an honest sales pitch: “Though it is impossible to know for sure, we believe there’s a significant chance that Hussein illegally possesses weapons of mass destruction. Given the downside security risk and the indisputable fact that he is a vicious despot, we want to send in ground troops in order to remove him from power.” The war would still have been wrong. But our subsequent failure to find WMDs wouldn’t have tarnished Bush’s presidency and America’s international reputation. Trust in government wouldn’t have been further eroded.
False certainty has continued to poison our politics.
Four months into Trump’s presidency 65% of Democratic voters didn’t believe he had won fairly or was legitimate. 71% of Republicans now say the same thing about Biden. What’s interesting is the declared certainty of Democrats who decry Trump Republicans’ “Big Lie.” Biden probably did win. But it’s hardly certain.
It is not popular to say so, but there is nothing unreasonable or insane or unpatriotic about questioning election results. From Samuel Tilden vs. Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 to Bush vs. Gore in 2000 many Americans have had good reason to wonder whether the winner really won. Only an omniscient deity could know for certain whether all 161 million ballots were counted correctly at all 132,556 polling places in the 2020 election.
Democracy requires faith. If evidence indicates that our faith is unwarranted it must be fully investigated; otherwise we must assume that official results are accurate.
The Republicans’ refusal to accept the official results is only slightly less justifiable than the Democrats’ overheated “Big Lie” meme.
“We have been far too easy on those who embrace or even simply tolerate this idea [that Trump was the true winner of the 2020 election], perhaps because it has completely taken over the Republican Party, and we still approach any question on which Republicans and Democrats disagree as though it must be given an evenhanded, both-sides treatment,” Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman wrote January 6th. “We have to treat those who claim Trump won in precisely the same way we do those who say the Earth is flat or that Hitler had some good ideas. They are not only deluded, they are either participating in, or at the very least directly enabling, an assault on our system of government with terrifying implications for the future. They are the United States’ enemies. And they have to be treated that way.”
Whoa. I am terrified of the slippery-slope implication that even talking about a topic is out of bounds. If mistrust of the competence and integrity of thousands of boards of elections and secretaries of state and public and private voting machines makes one a domestic enemy of the United States, what does that say about the 65% of Democrats and 71% of Republicans who doubted the results of the last two elections?
Why not just say that we think Biden won and there’s no reason to believe otherwise? It may be easier to shout down doubters than to make a well-reasoned argument but our laziness betrays insecurity.
Every day we make decisions based on uncertainty. The plane will probably land safely. The restaurant food probably isn’t poisoned. The dollar will probably retain most of its value. Why can’t Democrats like Waldman admit that election results are inherently uncertain? Republicans know it—at least they know it when the president is a Democrat—and Democratic arguments to the contrary of what is obviously true only serve to increase polarization and mutual mistrust.
Vaccination and masking politics are made particularly venomous by rhetorical certainty that, given that science is constantly evolving and COVID keeps unleashing new surprises, cannot be intellectually justified. Those of us who have embraced masks and vaccines (like me) ought to adopt a humbler posture: I’m not an epidemiologist, I assume that scientists know what they are doing, I’m scared of getting sick so I’m following official guidance. Sometimes, as we know from history, official medical advice turns out to be mistaken. I’m making the best guess I can. Most of us are blindly feeling our way through this pandemic. We should say so.
We also need to express uncertainty about climate change. There is scientific consensus that the earth is warming rapidly, that human beings are responsible and that climate change represents an existential threat to humanity. I believe in the general principle. But it’s irresponsible and illogical to attribute specific incidents to climate change considering that extreme weather existed centuries before the industrial revolution. We will never reach climate change deniers by overreaching as when the Post described late December’s Colorado wildfires as “fueled by an extreme set of atmospheric conditions, intensified by climate change, and fanned by a violent windstorm.” Why not instead say “probably intensified” or “believed to have been intensified”?
Those of us who believe greenhouse gases are warming the planet should argue that, while nothing is ever 100% certain, it’s a high probability and, anyway, what’s wrong with reducing pollution? People who are certain that climate change isn’t real may be annoying, and given that the human race is at stake, perhaps dangerous. But the answer to incorrect certainty isn’t equal-and-opposite correct certainty.
It’s uncertainty.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the weekly DMZ America podcast with conservative fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
I became sick and tested positive for COVID-19 on December 30. Within hours, everyone was expressing a strong opinion about it. Not that anyone was changing their mind about anything.
One of my complaints about mainstream media is that they recruit reporters from inside the establishment—Ivy League colleges, expensive graduate journalism programs, rival outlets with similar hiring practices. Some staffs develop admirable levels of gender and racial diversity. But they all come from the same elite class. Rich kids believe in the system and they accept its basic assumptions.
On New Year’s Day a reporter (UPenn and Oxford, of course) published a solid piece for The Washington Post about an important issue, how America’s “fractured healthcare system” hurts our response to COVID-19. Seeking to answer the question of why the pandemic is still going on after the miraculously rapid development and distribution of vaccines, the Post identified organizational shortcomings as part of the problem, citing the need for “improvements on the delivery side.” She quoted an expert who called for “increasing staffing and funding for local health departments, many of which have been running on a shoestring. Officials in some local health departments still transfer data by fax.” Both true. I’ve been asked to fax my records recently.
But.
Nowhere in the Post piece was there any mention of what the United States is missing that most other countries in the world are not: a unified national healthcare system like the United Kingdom’s NHS.
I’m not talking here about fully-socialized medicine or a single-payer Medicare For All system like the one championed by Bernie Sanders, although I strongly believe Americans need and deserve one. This isn’t about who pays for healthcare (though it should obviously be covered 100% by the government).
It’s about data integration.
In the same way that law-enforcement agencies across the country can access criminal records from other jurisdictions via the FBI’s National Data Exchange system, public-health officials need access to a real-time, constantly-updated source of every report of disease whether it’s known or novel, the visit was paid for in cash by the patient or covered by insurance, or it was diagnosed by a country doctor, walk-in urgent-care center or a giant urban hospital system.
A fully-integrated national healthcare database would be a powerful side benefit of a national healthcare system like Medicare For All. But how likely is Bernie Sanders’ pet project to cross the mind of a writer who graduated from UPenn and Oxford and has a gold health insurance plan provided by her employer, who is Jeff Bezos?
Here in America, the nation’s top epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control are flying blind, relying on algorithmic models that estimate what’s going on rather than providing accurate, precise situational awareness.
I tested positive for COVID-19 on December 30. I notified my doctor’s office on January 1 but due to the holiday didn’t hear back until January 3. Will New York City authorities and/or the CDC be notified about my case and, if so, when?
Several friends and friends of friends also tested positive during the Omicron surge using home tests. Many, probably most, didn’t tell their doctor. You have to assume that official numbers for Omicron have been significantly underreported.
If we had a national healthcare system instead of a medical Wild West in which the ailing are jostling against each other fighting over $24 testing kits like shoppers rushing into Best Buy on Black Friday, testing would be handled through clinics and doctor’s offices in coordination with the federal government—which would instantly compile the results.
A national healthcare database could include “visualization tools to graphically depict associations between people, places, things, and events either on a link-analysis chart or on a map. For ongoing investigations, the subscription and notification feature automatically notifies analysts if other users are searching for the same criteria or if a new record concerning their investigation is added to the system… [allowing] analysts to work with other analysts across the nation in a collaborative environment that instantly and securely shares pertinent information.”
I lifted that last quote from an FBI description of their police database. Crime, by the way, kills a small fraction of the number of Americans who die from disease.
HIPAA regulations governing patient records would need to be modified by Congress, but consider the potentially lifesaving benefits even when there is no longer a pandemic. Medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States.
Decentralized recordkeeping is a public-health disaster. If you live in Wyoming, there is no good reason that your healthcare records shouldn’t be accessible to first responders driving the ambulance that responds to a call that you collapsed and are unconscious at a mall in Florida. As soon as you are identified—something that could be facilitated by a national healthcare ID card that you carry in your wallet or as an app on your smartphone—EMS workers could use your patient history to identify chronic problems. They could avoid a medication to which you might be allergic or feel confident in administering one thanks to the knowledge that you are not.
I didn’t go to UPenn and Oxford. As an independent writer, I pay my own health insurance. I am reminded of America’s crappy healthcare system every time I pay my ACA bill and every time I cough up a co-pay. Newspapers like the Post may or may not need me. But they definitely need people like me if they want to relate to the readers they’re trying to serve.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
For the last podcast of the year, Scott and Ted look back at the year that was and consider the world of politics and culture in the year ahead and beyond. From January 6 to the midterms to scary prospects for Democrats in 2024, we don’t hesitate to speculate. Also, Ted has Covid.
Not since Joe Lieberman has a single phony Democratic senator mnanaged to dupe so many naive progressive and centrist Democrats into looking like fools as he undermined a president’s not-that-ambitious agenda. Joe Manchin has killed Build Back Better and dashed Democratic hopes for the foreseeable future.
Shutting down businesses and schools felt to many people like a natural response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But the extended coronavirus lockdown of 2020 did not follow any widely-accepted standard strategy; lockdowns were sporadic and short-lived during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, the most recent historical parallel. Encouraging and coercing tens of millions of people to shelter in place in 2020 was one of the most radical social engineering experiments in modern history, as novel as the coronavirus itself.
The political impulse to cancel events and close nonessential services we experienced during the spring and summer of 2020 is reemerging as the highly contagious, albeit anecdotally less severe, omicron variant sweeps through New York City and other hotspots. Broadway theaters, rock and hip-hop performers have canceled performances, the Rockettes closed their season a week early and Mayor Bill de Blasio is considering curtailing attendance at the city’s annual ball drop at Times Square. Rumors that New York City is considering another public-school system lockdown are sparking panic among parents.
Harvard has moved back to remote learning. The World Economic Forum in Davos has been canceled. Quebec is under lockdown, joining the Netherlands. The United Kingdom is considering one.
So, clearly, is the Biden Administration. The feds can’t order lockdowns. But they can pressure states and cities to enact them.
White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci says he doesn’t “foresee” another national lockdown in the United States—yet. Students of political messaging will take note of the careful if-then conditional sentence structure in Fauci’s statement on ABC’s “This Week”: “I don’t see that in the future if we do the things that we’re talking about,” Fauci said. “The thing that continues to be very troublesome to me and my public health colleagues is the fact that we still have 50 million people in the country who are eligible to be vaccinated who are not vaccinated.” What are the odds that vaccine resisters will change their minds in the next week or two?
Americans should consider, as we stare down the barrel of a second wave of “slow the spread”-motivated societal freezes, the pros and cons of the first one last year. Spoiler alert: this is not a movie that deserves a sequel.
Co-conceived in 2005 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security and the World Health Organization, the Pandemic Influenza Plan developed to “prevent, control, and respond to…novel influenza A viruses of animal (e.g. from birds or pigs) with pandemic potential,” according to the Centers for Disease Control, was the blueprint for the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza deployed by the Trump and Biden administrations 15 years later to coordinate “all levels of government on the range of options for infection-control and containment, including those circumstances where social distancing measures, limitations on gatherings, or quarantine authority may be an appropriate public health intervention.” Federal officials turned to this Bush-era guidebook when COVID-19 came to America.
It pains this leftist to admit it, but conservatives who warned of the economic and psychological costs of the 2020 lockdown turned out to have been correct. “Lockdowns do not prevent infection in the future. They just don’t. It comes back many times, it comes back,” President Donald Trump said in April 2020, shortly before much of the country succumbed to lockdown fever. He looks prescient.
With the delta and omicron variants still raging, cost-benefit analysis of the COVID lockdown requires hard data that won’t be available for years. But one thing is clear: the lockdown experiment was far short of an unqualified success.
The economic cost has been staggering. “COVID-19–related job losses wiped out 113 straight months of job growth, with total nonfarm employment falling by 20.5 million jobs in April [2020],” according to a study by the Brookings Institute. 200,000 businesses more than average failed. Harvard economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers have estimated the total cost of the crisis, much of which is attributable to the lockdown, at $16 trillion if the pandemic were to end this fall—i.e., now.
2020-21 was the Great Lost Year of American public education. With Black students five months behind where they would have been otherwise and whites two months back, virtual instruction was virtually educational.
But what about the benefit? Some studies claimed that lockdowns prevented nearly 5 million cases in the United States; at a mortality rate of 1.6% that works out to 80,000 fewer coronavirus fatalities thanks to the lockdown. But analyses of “excess deaths” indicate that at least 300,000 Americans more than usual died last year due to causes other than the virus itself. Increased alcohol consumption, reduced physical activity and depression culminating in suicide (not last year, when fewer people killed themselves, but in future years) will claim lives years into the future. If the lives-saved column of the ledger comes out a net positive, it probably won’t be by much.
As for ordinary Americans, we are voting with our feet: 72% of respondents to a December 14th Ipsos poll said they plan to see family or friends outside of their household over the holidays.
This country can’t handle more lockdowns.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Order one today. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Liberal Democrats urge vaccine resistant Americans, particularly Republicans, to follow science and get vaccinated against COVID-19. Solid advice. But the very same liberal Democrats are willing to grant religious exceptions to vaccine mandates even though religion runs entirely contrary to science.
