In Defense Of Bob Woodward!

Yesterday, American investigative reporter Bob Woodward and his publisher, Simon and Schuster, released several damning details of the interviews with TRAITOR Trump on which the upcoming book "Rage" by Woodward is partially based.  Those details included the fact that on tape TRAITOR Trump admitted that he had lied about how serious Covid 19 could be and as a result of those lies, at this point, nearly 200,000 innocent American victims have died.  Yet, many Americans are blaming Bob Woodward more than they are TRAITOR Trump which is completely baffling to me.  It is one of the most asinine cases of blaming the messenger I have ever seen.

Bob Woodward has gone on the record with several discussions of his reasoning for not releasing that information as soon as he had it on tape and his reasons make perfect sense from both a journalistic and political point of view. In interviews with the Washington Post and Associated Press, Woodward stated: "He tells me this, and I’m thinking, 'Wow, that’s interesting, but is it true?' Trump says things that don’t check out, right?" Woodward told AP, referring to Trump's habit of stretching or misrepresenting the truth. And he said he had to determine, "What did he know and when did he know it?" borrowing a phrase from his reporting for The Post on the Watergate break-in. The gist of that statement, based on at least forty years of the known history of TRAITOR Trump is that TRAITOR Trump always lies.  He would rather lie fifty times than tell the truth once.  No reputable journalist on earth, and especially Bob Woodward with his distinguished career of more than fifty years at the highest levels of American journalism, would stake their reputation on anything TRAITOR Trump told them without attempting to verify it from a more credible second, or even third, fourth, or fifth source.  TRAITOR Trump lies daily, hourly, just as automatically as he breaths. He has proven daily that he only hires people who will also confirm and support his most egregious lies with lies of their own. His entire life has been built on lies  His propensity to lie and to function without a moral compass has been verified by both his sister, retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, who has even been recorded by their niece on tape discussing his lack of honesty and principles.  The niece,  Mary L. Trump, a licensed doctoral level psychologist, conducted the interviews with her aunt for her book "Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created The World's Most Dangerous Man".  When two such highly credentialed members of a person's immediate family use such terms to describe the person in question, you should believe them.  You should also believe Bob Woodward when he says he was waiting for verification of the things TRAITOR Trump was telling him.

But I also believe there are other even more compelling reasons Bob Woodward was considering when he waited to disclose what he knew.  Bob Woodward rose to fame as a young reporter for the Washington Post when he and his associate Carl Bernstein cracked the Watergate case by conducting clandestine interviews with Mark Felt, the Associate Director of the FBI, which they kept secret for decades until Felt himself, whom Woodward and Bernstein had dubbed Deep Throat, disclosed that he was indeed the secret informant whose work with the two writers had led to the disgrace and resignation of Former President Richard Nixon and the successful criminal prosecution of the Watergate burglars who were all in the employ of Nixon. No one on the face of the earth has more experience or more success than Bob Woodward in handling a cooperating witness or a loquacious felon and pathological liar such as TRAITOR Trump. I believe that Bob Woodward knew full well that he already had damning self confessions from TRAITOR Trump about his refusal  to do anything about the Corona Virus pandemic.  But I also believe that Bob Woodward believed quite appropriately that if he handled TRAITOR Trump well he might also get a confession from TRAITOR Trump of his TREASON with Russia and Vladimir Putin.  Bob Woodward was after bigger fish and his fishing expeditions were fully justified.  Don't blame Bob Woodward for doing excellent work.  Blame TRAITOR Trump for having known about the pandemic and its danger and having chosen to do nothing about it simply because he has never and will never give a tinker's damn about the United States of America.  You should also understand that the United States of America will be fine so long as we send TRAITOR Trump to the federal prison cell which he has so richly deserved for so long on Bomber Row in Colorado with the other enemies of the country. And when he has completed his life sentence, we need to bury him beside Osama Bin Laden. 

Covid 19 And The Viet Nam War

Today, April 28, 2020, after only four months of the Covid 19 Pandemic in the United States, we will surpass the total number of US deaths in the Viet Nam War which lasted 20 years.  As of this morning, April 28, 2020, we have had 56,933 US deaths from Covid 19 and we are averaging about 2,000 deaths a day.  In the entire Viet Nam War, we had 58,220 deaths.  The first death in the Viet Nam War took place on June 8, 1956.  The first American soldier killed in the Vietnam War was Air Force T-Sgt. Richard B. Fitzgibbon Jr. He is listed by the U.S. Department of Defense as having a casualty date of June 8, 1956.  The last two deaths in the Viet Nam War took place on April 29, 1975.  On April 29, 1975, Charles McMahon (May 10, 1953 – April 29, 1975) and Darwin Lee Judge (February 16, 1956 – April 29, 1975) were the last two United States servicemen killed in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The two men, both U.S. Marines, were killed in a rocket attack one day before the Fall of Saigon.  The 45th anniversary of those two deaths will be tomorrow, April 29, 2020.  If you do not see the irony in that, you are incapable of understanding irony.  The first US death from the Corona Virus is believed to have been on February 6, 2020, although we cannot precisely determine who the first casualty of the Corona Virus might have been or the precise date of that first death. We are also on the verge of becoming the first country in the world with 1 million cases of Covid 19.  In three months or so, the Corona Virus has killed more Americans than died in the Viet Nam War.  

And, the great majority of those deaths and those million plus cases of Covid 19 infection were preventable if TRAITOR Trump and his co-conspirators in Washington had done anything to save the country from the pandemic when they were repeatedly advised by the intelligence and health care communities in January and February 2020.  A news story has just been published by the Washington Post, the most reputable newspaper in the country, that the White House was advised and warned many times in the "president's" Daily Briefing Book in the period leading up to the deliberately late and inadequate action, or more appropriately inactions, from TRAITOR Trump and the White House. Nearly on a daily basis, the White House was warned that a pandemic was coming which was already proving to have devastating effects in China where it presumably originated and that it would have just as serious an effect on the United States unless decisive actions were taken to prevent it entering the country.   

In addition to those 58,000 plus deaths we have seen so far, the national economy has been devastated by both the virus and the deliberate refusals of the White House to do anything decisive to stop it.  Yes, congress passed a multi-trillion dollar relief bill but most of that money went to large corporations.  The White House has refused to help states and their governors to obtain the necessary testing equipment, respirators, ventilators, and personal protective equipment.  In fact, the inactions of the White House have created a horrible bidding war between the state governments and each other along with other countries which are also searching for those same critical supplies.  This situation is getting worse in many ways.  The meat packing industry has become a center of several outbreaks across several states including Iowa, Indiana, and Colorado.  Three plants which produce about 15% of the commercial meats in America have been forced to shut down due to the outbreaks within each of them.  According to the South Bend Tribune  "More than 150 of America’s largest meat processing plants operate in counties where the rate of coronavirus infection is already among the nation’s highest, based on the media outlets’ analysis of slaughterhouse locations and county-level COVID-19 infection rates."  That statistic is likely both a symptom of problems within the meat packing industry with the dense work settings and high speed demands on workers, and on the geography of where those plants are located.  But the meat packing industry has been enabled by the White House to stretch the limits of safe practices for all of the last three years.  Now, due to the Corona Virus, livestock farmers in the Midwest and South are being forced to consider euthanizing more than a million hogs because they are now past prime killing weight and now are literally eating their owners out of house and home with no market available.  Millions of tons and thousands of acres of vegetable crops are being plowed under by vegetable farmers all over the Midwest and South because they cannot get sufficient labor to pick those crops and do not have ready markets for many of them.  Dairy farmers are being forced to flush millions of gallons of unsold milk down drains even as lines at food banks are longer than at any time since the Great Depression and those same food banks cannot obtain sufficient food products to meet the needs of the suddenly destitute families in America.  America's farmers, especially small family farms, were already in the worst economic period they have faced since the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.  Farm bankruptcies rose by 20% in 2019 and they are rising even more rapidly in 2020. 

The sad truth is that nearly everything about this disaster was avoidable if a competent, caring, legally, and duly elected President of the United States had been in office in January when the White House was first notified of the impending disaster by the intelligence and health care communities.  But, instead, we have a TRAITOR who usurped the White House with the assistance of Vladimir Putin and Russia living illegally in the White House, refusing to take any appropriate actions in the crisis, actually advising Americans to consider injecting disinfectants into their bodies, and denying state governors the assistance we must have in order to survive this crisis.  

Shopping In The Time Of Corona Virus!

Yesterday, I got up at 5am, left my house at 6am, and traveled to Morehead, Kentucky, to go to WalMart and Kroger for a long list of the items my wife and I are likely to need in the next month.  I suspect that what I came home with will not last for a month but I have never seen the time when I got as much time out of my store purchases as I wanted so this is no surprise.  WalMart and Kroger now open at 7am.  Kroger advertises that they are devoting the first hour of business to senior citizens only in order to make it easier on them to shop in the crisis which Corona Virus has caused.  WalMart does not do the same.  But most of the items on my list were intended to be from WalMart so I chose to go there first.  I was sitting in the parking lot at WalMart about 15 minutes before the store opened with what became about a dozen other people most of whom appeared to be older than dirt.  I listened to reruns from WSGS Radio's "Faron and Scott Show" which they now run all night long and it also appears they have placed the station on some form of autopilot with either a satellite radio service or having an employee come in now and then to load several hours of recordings.  As I waited, a few more cars showed up until that dozen or so others were also there when the doors opened.  

I had tried to be prepared for the possibility that a Corona Virus carrier might have touched something I was about to touch or even buy.  I took several medical grade gloves with me which we have used for quite a few years due to my wife's ongoing medical history.  First I went to the store bathroom, used it standing up without touching a single thing in the room, walked to the shopping carts, put on a pair of gloves and grabbed the cart. The usual dispenser for disinfectant wipes was empty at that time of the morning so I could not wipe the cart which I have been doing in stores lately. I realized I had not stuck a pen in pocket with my list and was actually able to borrow a pen from the checker who was manning the only live checkout aisle.  I went first to the paper goods aisle since I was aware that there has been an insane run on toilet paper in the age of Corona.  I was able to find a few smaller packages of toilet paper and none of the king size packages with 24 or more rolls which I have been buying for years. I also grabbed two large and two small bottles of Clorox since we use it for all cleaning and Candice, with her manual dexterity issues, likes the smaller bottles in the kitchen. For many years, I have used the following expression when buying non-perishable items for the house:  "It won't rot and it won't rust."  So, I usually buy the largest package of these things which a store sells.  Every room in my house has at least one closet with large ones in both the family room and the bathroom, which is a converted bedroom.  I also have a large basement.  I can store anything if I can afford to buy it.  But the catch was that in the age of Corona there was almost nothing to buy.  Luckily, I had bought several cases of canned vegetables a couple of weeks ago when the outbreak first started and I was only looking for a few specific food items.  

I grabbed toilet paper, the smaller size, and an equally small package of paper towels and headed across the store to the pet food section since we have four cats, three of which are both indoor and outdoor cats.  The fourth is thirteen years old and has never been outdoors since she was about six months old.  I needed cat food and cat litter which I buy in the large sizes always.  I was able to grab two large plastic buckets of cat litter and the cat food shelves were nearly bare.  There were no large bags of any kind of cat food.  They were also totally out of Purina which I always buy since it is higher quality and, after a lifetime of feeding cats, dogs, and horses, I am an expert on animal feeds.  So, as a fail safe if I ran out, I grabbed a three pound bag of an off brand cat food and headed to the pharmacy area to search for baby wipes, rubber gloves, and alcohol which we always use because of Candice's health issues.  I actually found rubber gloves, grabbed two boxes, a can of shaving cream, and a large bottle of hand washing solution which I was amazed they had.  They were out of alcohol and I asked a female employee who was nearby if it could be anywhere else.  We searched and found none.  Apparently, there has also been a run on alcohol.  Later, after I got home, I called a Dollar General store about three miles from my house and the manager told me he didn't have any alcohol either unless it was on a truck they were unloading.  He said, "I will know if I have it tomorrow when we get this truck all stocked."  

Then I went back to the grocery aisle to pick up a few things there including Rotel tomatoes, coconut milk, canned nuts, string cheese, and a few other items.  The shelves appeared as if a plague of locusts had descended on them just after the plagues of frogs, flies, and wild animals had left.  One woman spoke out near me that they were out of canned milk.  They were also out of canned fruit, tomato juice, pasta, and flour, all of which I needed.  A male employee who was pulling items for the lazy and overly fearful pick up crowd struck up a conversation and actually went to get me a second cart since the toilet, paper, paper towels, and cat litter had nearly filled the one I was using.  From there, I went to the produce aisle pulling one cart and pushing the other.  Unlike most areas of the store, the produce section was well stocked.   I grabbed potatoes, mandarins, onions, green peppers, mushrooms, blueberries, cauliflower, and bananas.  Close to me, I saw a young woman grabbing about a half dozen large packages of blueberries and I smiled at her and said, "you must really love blueberries.  I love them too but I can't eat that many."  She replied, "I'm shopping for a lot of people."  I am now afraid that a run is developing on blueberries.  I went to the same checkout lane where the checker had loaned me a pen.  I offered to return it and, in the age of Corona, she said "just keep it" which came in handy when I got to Kroger.  She told me there was one bottle limit on Clorox and gazed askance at the two boxes of medical gloves.  I said, "my wife has been in a wheelchair for twenty years and we use those things all the time for her medical issues."  She let me keep three of the Clorox and the medical gloves.  My ticket came to $303.00. As I started to leave, a manager asked if I needed someone to help me get it to the van.  I declined since I am still perfectly capable of driving two shopping carts at the same time.  I loaded everything in my van and put the refrigerated items in my large ice chest which I have kept in the van for years since I live thirty miles from all large stores like WalMart and Kroger.  I got in, stripped off my gloves, dropped them in the van floor, and headed to Kroger. I was out of WalMart in an hour. 

I got to Kroger a bit after 8am and started to put on a new pair of medical gloves and dropped one in the floor.  I kicked it over near a trash can but did not pick it up and put it in since I am now in the age of Corona.  The produce aisle was well stocked but I no longer needed produce.  But I got a half dozen parsnips since Candice and I both love them.  When I got the canned fruit aisle, I actually found some and grabbed several cans of peaches and pineapples for snacks, cakes, and cobblers. I thought I recognized a man in the aisle and spoke to him.  He turned out to be an ER doctor who had treated me when I had an episode of hypertension a few years ago.  We had a nice talk and I told him about my current good health and exercise program, thanked him for having treated me and another occasion when he had treated my wife.  I actually found flour and a limited selection of pasta.  I grabbed two large boxes of medium shells since they had no elbow macaroni.  I was driving my cart past the meat aisle and realized that it appeared as if a pack of timber wolves had spent the night in the store.  There was only a bit of packaged meats and literally no fresh cut meat of any kind.  I grabbed a small package of sweet Italian sausage which Candice and I both love.  We rarely eat beef or pork and keep farm raised chickens and wild caught fish in our freezer so I didn't need meat anyway.  I actually found a large sixteen pound bag of cat food in a minor brand and grabbed it.  I found the brand of butter we like, grabbed three containers and three dozen eggs which we eat in a limited manner these days.  But eggs will keep for at least three weeks in the refrigerator so I am safe with eggs now.  Then I traveled to the pharmacy aisles to search for alcohol.  They also had none.  Then I went to the frozen food aisle to try to find some Birds Eye frozen vegetable which Candice likes.  Several employees were stocking a few items in the aisle.  I found a meager selection of those vegetables and a few frozen muffins which Candice likes for breakfast and overheard one of the employees make a very favorable statement about Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear.  So I got into the conversation and we all agreed that we are incredibly lucky in Kentucky to have Governor Beshear in the time of Corona.  I made the statement that I think he could make a very good running mate for Joe Biden and the employees agreed.  We parted company and I checked out where my ticket came to about $140.00.  I loaded up my items in the van and stripped off my medical gloves and dropped them in the van floor on top of the pair from WalMart.  I will use a plastic grocery bag tomorrow like a glove and pick the medical gloves off the floor, turn the bag inside out, tie a knot in it, and trash the gloves in the age of Corona.  

On the way home, I listened to canned, talking head satellite radio or recorded stuff, whichever it was on WSGS my favorite radio station because they are apparently not running live radio in the age of Corona.  I also drove past my favorite country store which a family who are friends of mine operate and found a note on the door which stated "We will be open Saturday from 11am to 6pm."  I assume that they cannot get stock and might not have much walk in business in the age of Corona.

The Anti-Vaccine Movement In Appalachia

According to the Centers For Disease Control, there have been 1044 individual cases of measles confirmed in 28 states between January 1, 2019, and April 19, 2019.  They say that this is the greatest number of cases reported in the U.S. since 1992 and since measles was declared eliminated in 2000. far exceeding the 667 cases reported during all of 2014. The outbreak has covered nearly the entire continent with cases reported in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington.. Four of these states are in Central and Southern Appalachia, the most culturally Appalachian area within the greater Appalachian region as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission.  According to the World Health Organization, "measles is one of the world’s most contagious diseases, with the potential to be extremely severe. In 2017, the most recent year for which estimates are available, it caused close to 110 000 deaths" worldwide.So the real question is this: why in 2019 is the USA which is generally considered to be the most medically advanced country in the world suffering from any measles outbreak nearly twenty years after our health organizations considered the disease to have been eradicated in our country.  There is absolute, empirical scientific proof that measles vaccine prevents and, if used universally, can totally eradicate the disease.  

There are several reasons for this outbreak but the answer is simple.  The great majority of people who have contracted measles were unvaccinated and when measles reaches a community with a significant number of unvaccinated people it can spread rapidly, infect high numbers of unvaccinated people, cost our nation and its drastically and deliberately underfunded health care system millions of dollars, and kill significant numbers of the medically fragile including the young, elderly, medically fragile, and those with problems of the immune system.  This has been proven unequivocally in Rockland County New York where at least 225 people have contracted the disease.  Public officials in both New York state and Rockland County have acted professionally and courageously in the face of this epidemic and have taken strong actions in attempting to protect their citizens.  The New York legislature took the medically necessary step of removing the religious exemption for vaccinations.  This action should become federal law since 45 other states are still allowing such religious exemptions; the number of people who are endangering the entire citizenry is increasing; and their deliberate misinformation campaign is causing the gullible, uneducated, and paranoid members of society to fall prey to their tactics. Thankfully, legislators in several of those 45 states are now considering legislation similar to the New York law in order to protect the general population and begin work to once again eradicate this disease which had essentially been eliminated in America before this ignorance based epidemic struck. Sadly, all of the states in the Central and Southern Appalachian region with the single exception of West Virginia allow religious exemptions to vaccinations.  Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, and North Carolina all allow such exemptions.

In the research process for this blog post I have just discovered that one of the major anti-vaccine organizations constructed their website in a design which consciously copies the design and overall appearance of the websites of the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.   I am deliberately refusing to name or provide a link to that anti-vaccine organization in order to avoid assisting them in their efforts to endanger the entire human race.

Several other areas of the country have taken similar steps to those taken in New York in the face of the epidemic.  But the greatest problem in the entire epidemic has been the fact that most of the people infected have either deliberately and consciously refused to be vaccinated or, in the cases of many children, they have been denied this potentially lifesaving vaccination by parents who claim either religious exemptions to vaccinations or, in some cases, have simply expressed anti-science or anti-government beliefs to justify their refusals.  Sadly, in most of these cases, the anti-vaccine elements have been passively allowed to continue with their actions, or inaction, which has greatly increased the threat of infections in the general public, especially among the medically fragile who sometimes cannot be vaccinated.  

In Rockland County, most of the unvaccinated victims of the disease have been Orthodox Jews.  But in other areas of the country, including Central and Southern Appalachia, these unvaccinated victims have claimed nebulous opposition to the vaccine which are frequently based on completely unscientific and non-religious reasons.  These reasons are often rooted in propaganda from anti-government, anti-vaccine Right Wing Radical individuals and groups who rant and rave without one iota of empirical scientific evidence or actual law to support their rantings which greatly endangers the general public and most especially endangers the medically fragile, young, and old who cannot be vaccinated for legitimate personal medical reasons.  The likelihood is considerable that the next epidemic in this country could be for a far more virulent and life-threatening disease which would originate in one of these ill informed, uneducated, and irrational groups.  Communities ranging in size from a single incorporated community to the entire country must legislate laws to force these groups and individuals to be vaccinated.   Parents must be held responsible under existing child welfare laws for the preventable diseases which cause harm to their children due to deliberate refusals to vaccinate those children.  The voluntary refusal to vaccinate a child against such a disease is undeniably child abuse.  While I am a firm advocate of free speech, I also firmly believe that the greater good must always override any single person or small group's desire to practice some form of insanity which endangers the health and lives of others.

This is a problem which could be adequately and efficiently addressed by the US Congress in a matter of only a few days.  Federal law requiring vaccinations against all communicable and virulent diseases for which vaccines exist would save thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of lives over the next decades.  Such law would also save billions of dollars of medical expenses which are now being unnecessarily expended to treat and cure these victims of their parents' ignorance.  The overall harm to society and the economy in general of a disease outbreak such as this is stupendous and stupendously ignorant.  As a society, we must put a stop to such deliberate harm to the larger population.