'Post-Truth Politics' - Collapse in Information Integrity

[Mossling]

Coronavirus live news: Trump says he 'perhaps' misled Americans as global deaths pass 900,000
The Guardian, 9 Sep 2020

US President Donald Trump spoke to Fox News’s Sean Hannity about the Woodward book revelations. He repeated that his response to the pandemic was intended to avoid panic.

“I said don’t panic (over the virus)... I’m a cheerleader for this country and I don’t want to see panic,” Trump said.

Trump also said the US had done an amazing job with regards to deaths.

“If you look at our numbers, our fatality numbers compared to other countries, it’s amazing what we’ve done. We’ve been able to do something...that especially with the country the size we have, we’ve done an incredible job.”

The US has recorded more than 190,000 deaths. It has the 7th highest deaths per 100,000 in the world at 57.97.

The only countries with higher deaths per 100,000 are Peru (93.71), Spain (63.34), Bolivia (62.51),Chile (62.37), Ecuador (62.20), Brazil (60.85).

[charon]

That's always what he was doing. Plus the subversive, hypnotic hand signs. It was obvious except to a large mass of people who promptly bought his vacuum cleaner... sorry, voted for him.

But the trouble with deception is that it's very hard to maintain for any length of time. And even Hitler had his fans right to the end and beyond.

[TheVat]

https://mobile.twitter.com/nancysantane ... 02f606d011

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/1 ... -19-412809

The CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports are authored by career scientists and serve as the main vehicle for the agency to inform doctors, researchers and the general public about how Covid-19 is spreading and who is at risk. Such reports have historically been published with little fanfare and no political interference, said several longtime health department officials, and have been viewed as a cornerstone of the nation's public health work for decades.

But since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department's new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump's statements, including the president's claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether

[toucana]

The tale of Michael Caputo gets even wilder:

The third Caputo story is, somehow, much more dramatic: In a Sunday Facebook Live appearance, the HHS official alleged that there is a seditious “resistance unit” within the CDC that is attempting to sustain the pandemic until after the presidential election—and said that he believes this unit is plotting to murder him. (Said Caputo: “They’re going to have to kill me, and unfortunately, I think that’s where this is going.”) In addition to this targeted assassination, Caputo asserted that left-wing activists are conducting “drills” across the country to prepare to kill Trump supporters in the event that Joe Biden does not win the election.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/09/trump-coronavirus-official-michael-caputo-says-the-cdc-is-conspiring-to-murder-him.html

According to another account, this same appointee is advising Trump supporters to "buy ammunition" in preparation for a Biden attempt to seize the presidency from Trump.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/9/14/1977347/-Embattled-HHS-official-claims-life-is-in-danger-CDC-has-resistance-unit-in-off-the-rails-video

In his defence, he does mention that his "mental health has definitely failed".

[TheVat]

Before 2017, it was relatively more rare to watch government officials experience mental health failures so dramatically. Now in the US, it's more like, "ah, it's Tuesday again. "

A new article in The Atlantic addresses quite cogently and sharply how the media has failed to sufficiently filter for truth and thus allowed absurd and grossly false statements to come to seem more and more the norm in politics.

Most dangerous, as has been discussed here before, is when you have an objective state of affairs (and matter of public record) on one "side" and demented lies on the other, and the press strives so hard to be evenhanded in their coverage that they provide way too much oxygen to the lies, as if they are a perspective on reality worth giving equal weight.


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... es/616222/