If you prefer a babbling narcissist loon (Trump) over a well-spoken woman of few words and a former nuclear scientist (Angela Merkel), then just vote for him.
You left out part of Merkel's career didn't you - former Communist Party apparatchik. For a government that kept their people in a country wide prison for almost forty years. But perhaps you are too young to know of the people that risked their lives and occasionally lost them trying to get off the DDR prison planet.
If you're watching his daily briefings without mounting horror frankly, vote for him in November. But IIRC you conceded in an earlier post how he was "an ass"? I'm frankly very concerned with the problem of getting competent, level-headed men and women into positions of power.
Of course Trump is an ass. Here's a hint .... they're all asses. Almost to a man and woman. Politicians of all stripes and colors on both sides of the aisle. Trump being such an obvious ass might actually be a feature rather than a bug. A stupid man that appears intelligent (Obama for instance) is arguably more dangerous than a man who's limitations are more obvious.
He's done nothing to fight the pandemic or help the middle class. But deals have been signed behind closed doors. Feds Injected $1.5 Trillion in March to the stock market (aka Billionaires), weeks before the CARES act was approved. The CARES act was also a joke, if you look at how the money got divvied up, it may as well have been called the WHOCARES act with how the generous bailouts for big business were juxtaposed against local governments, volunteers, and small businesses being given the middle finger. They're doing precisely what I hoped the poor would do, they're using the pandemic as an excuse to further their agenda and trample on the weak. It is a uniquely Republican trait to be so averse to helping people, sometimes even when they are in legitimate need. That's why small business will barely survive here. That's why we refuse to pause mortgage payments. It's greed coming down from the top.
Let me clue you in how money is spent in the US government. Spending bills start in the House of Representatives. A House controlled by Democrats I suspect you support. They wrote that $1.5T spending bill, not Donald Trump. And they threw an additional $400B(ish) on top of that a few weeks ago. And they are talking about adding another 1 or 2 trillion on top of that. All parties involved are spending like drunken sailors. How much history do you know? Are you familiar with Wiemar Germany, circa 1923?
Do you really think we here are going to come up with a vaccine? Our job is more likely to provide commentary to scientific studies as they emerge, and lighten the mood somewhat.
No, we are certainly not going to come up with a vaccine here. But your constant berating of half the country hardly "lightens the mood". It might make you feel better. I suspect your motivation is to make yourself feel superior, whether you realize that or not. But this nonsense is tearing the country apart. How on earth do you think Trump got elected in the first place? Hint - it wasn't because so many people actually love Donald Trump. It was because of people like yourself constantly berating and hectoring the country. That and politicians on the left and the right that had not a dime's worth of difference between them.
Are you talking about how they botched testing all of February with their "new and improved" test when Germany had an approved reagent out that China had been long using? Otherwise, I don't understand what the FDA has to do with it?
Do you really imagine that Trump called down to the CDC and said "Listen guys, I know China and South Korea have a working virus test, but screw that, let's cook up our own"? I assure you he did not. That brilliant idea was nothing but a bureaucracy doing what bureaucracies do - protecting their turf and their funding. I used to design flight hardware for a well know NASA prime contractor. Waste and stupidity were the only constant in that organization and it was there through right wing and left wing governments. Bureaucracies really take a life of their own and as the famous saying goes, "No matter what the original purpose of a bureaucracy is, it's ultimate propose becomes the perpetuation and expansion of the bureaucracy". No truer words were ever spoken. Now, I blame Trump for not putting a guy in charge of the CDC with the balls and brains to have shut that nonsense down, but it's actually kind of rare that the transient political leadership of any bureaucracy, which comes and goes every 4 or 8 years, is very successful in changing it's course.
Part of the problem is it's "not" an emergency anymore. I think I heard President Trump announce the pandemic was over? Yeah, why worry about a vaccine people he was right this is just going away in April. And totally. not. coming. back. in. the. Fall.
Maybe you heard that. I don't recall it. But he says stupid things all the time.
But ..... if you look at what he's actually done in and ignore his stupid tweets - I doubt a Clinton government would have done materially better. Maybe her appointment to the CDC would have forced them to use South Korea's test, maybe not. I put that at 50 - 50 odds. She certainly would not have shut down some of the travel with China, a move for which Trump was lambasted, notably by Nancy Pelosi on February 24th. Trump was supposed to know that covid was a threat apparently at the same time key Democrats and the media were downplaying what was going on in China because the travel ban was politically incorrect. Only an ideolog would suggest that shutting down travel with a part of the world with a significant pandemic was a bad idea.
Oh I agree, the aesthetics of her press conferences would be far better. The number of infected and dead? Probably going to be about the same.
See, that list I posted earlier - the point was almost all of Western Europe and the US are in the same boat. In Europe you have mostly left wing governments, with an exception of the UK. In the US you have Trump (who actually blends aspects of left and right to the extent he has any political philosophy at all - because that what populists do). You have entirely socialized heath care over there, a hybrid system over here (Medicare and Medicaide are together about 50% of our health care system). And what do you have to show for it? Just about the same results. Germany is the outlier, but what have they done that's so different than say what France has done? Not that much. Likely the different outcomes are due to societal differences. Germans do behave different than Frenchmen because they have different cultures. Those items are actually upstream from government and nothing that Angela Merkel can claim credit for.
See, the thing is, this virus doesn't really give a damn about politics. Left wing governments, right wing government, Trump government, they're all getting about the same result. Sure, governments can nibble about the margins of what this virus is going to do, but I see no great evidence that they can make any dramatic changes once it reaches a pandemic level in any given country. South Korea shut it down before that happened. Good for them. But, that ship may have already sailed by the time anyone here realized the magnitude of the problem (which is btw why you have been so resistant to the idea that covid-19 was in the US before the current official date). Hell, even Fauci, whom everyone seems to love, was saying in February that he didn't think the new coronavirus would be a problem in the US (look it up).
Excepting of course China. What do we say about China? Can we believe their numbers? I don't, but what do I know. I haven't been to China lately. But from what we've heard, if they did shut the virus down, it was through some very draconia measures. One hears of people in Wuhan being forceably locked in their apartments without medical care, maybe without food, to live or die as the fates allowed. Now, if Trump had done that here .... what do you think your reaction would have been to that?
Now ... isn't this lovely. We've descended into a full blown political debate. Because god know we don't get enough of that on social media, television, the radio, walking the dog, talking to your neighbor, etc. etc. In fact, I think we should just be full politics all the time. 24/7. Use toothpicks to prop your eyes open and pour it in. Because this has done so much good for the world we live in.
