Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
--First Amendment of the United States Constitution
The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom is the compact majority. Who are the people who make up the biggest proportion of the population: the intelligent ones or the fools?
--Henrik Ibsen, "Enemy of the People," 1883
How many of you have ever heard of a government publication called "Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports"?
Show of hands.
How many of you know where that phrase, "Enemy of the People" comes from?
No, the answer to this one is not, "Donald Trump."
The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, known in the trade simply as MMR, is a product of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and also the NIH, and it is a dry and technical pamphlet doctors across the country, particularly infectious disease doctors, use to track trends in infections like influenza, COVID, measles, the whole spectrum of communicable diseases. It is as essential to the medical profession as weather reports are to the airline industry.
Now, Donald Trump has closed the presses for the MMR. We don't talk about Bruno and we don't talk about infectious diseases.
The MMR is where the first report of a disease without a name at the time, what turned out to be AIDS, surfaced. Of course, during COVID, it became like the daily weather report on the pandemic's raging progress across the country.
Donald Trump clearly grew to resent the MMR because it reported, quietly, persistently and with great determination, the truth about what the virus was doing to America. If you lived in Iowa or Mississippi or Arizona, you did not walk past those long 18 wheel rigs parked in front of the hospitals, outside Bellevue, Mt. Sinai, or The New York Hospital, which were filling daily with bodies which had overflowed the morgues in those hospitals and were needed simply to receive and haul away the dead.
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| The New York Hospital E 68th Street |
Those images were not widely disseminated.
But the MMR kept grinding out the numbers, with graphs and tables, and President Trump, who lives in the fantasy world of professional wrestling, could not affect the reality of the pandemic, so this time around, he's killing off the government organs of information dissemination.
Ironically, Mr. Trump called the press, the fake media, "The Enemy of the People."
But that title was from a play by Ibsen in which the town doctor who announced the contamination of the town's water supply was called "The Enemy of the People," because that announcement threatened the town's lucrative trade in a water spa. The economy of the town was threatened, so the doctor became the enemy of the people through his efforts to save the town and spare them from exposure to bacteria and toxins in the water coming from a leather tanning company, also a source of money for the town. The man who sought to save his townsmen with the truth, was seen as and called the enemy.
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| The New York Hospital |
Of course, Mr. Trump will argue that freedom of speech does not apply to government workers and government publications which should be under the control of the government, which employs the publication's workers, and which pays for the publication.
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| Canadian discovers of Insulin |
But we all know what is happening here: scientists working for the government insist on telling the truth, even if the truth hurts.
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| Iron Lung Ward: Polio 1950 |
That is something which Mr. Trump will never allow.
It would be like saying Hulk Hogan is not a true champion. It would be like saying Ryan Koss did not really beat his opponents.
It would be like saying injecting bleach into your veins would not kill COVID.
It would be like saying vaccines do not cause autism, that measles vaccines are preferable to measles, that polio vaccines are preferable to paralysis and iron lungs, that AIDS is caused by a virus not by lifestyles, that fluoridation of the water supply might prevent dental cavities, that doctors may know more than the President, that Tony Fauci got us past COVID, not Mr. Trump, that no matter where COVID came from--lab or bat--we should continue to study viruses like COVID in every lab wherever that lab is closest to the source of viruses, and in the field, in bat caves and around the world so we can head off the next pandemic.
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| Dr. Fauci |
It would be like saying truth should be spoken, and progress depends on it.
Some truths are just stubborn things.
MMWR is only temporarily suspended. Corruption in government is finally being exposed and addressed. Listening to Dems complaining is tantamount to a patient with political dysphoria arguing that political reality is an illusion. Rachael Maddie just spect 30 minutes trying to push a narrative that Trump is now failing at pushing his agenda. Really? Denial of reality is a psychiatric disorder is it not Mad Dog?
ReplyDeleteAnd BTW Trump approval rating is at an all time high and Dem approval is at an historical nadir. That is fact. According to Maddow this is evidence that the public does not approve of the Trump agenda, She is paid millions of dollars by fake news to spit out this nonsense.
ReplyDeleteOh, those approval ratings! Just solid fact, that.
ReplyDeleteAnd shutting down MMWR is only momentary. But why stop there?
Corruption finally exposed!
Nobody has ever exposed government corruption in the past!
The Depot Dome scandal was just so yesterday, and Watergate, too, not to mention a President extorting the Ukrainian Zalensky for a "personal favor" like a Mafia don.
That epidemiological report, don't you know, was just so corrupt! Kept reporting all those fake deaths and fake infection during COVID.
This is just a wake up slap to the CDC!
And shut down the Dept of Education. We should embrace the uneducated, not try to change them.
And shut down the Veterans Administration with all those employees on the dole, and a lot of them veterans themselves, who are, you know, losers. Just like John McCain who got captured and then we had to pay for his rehabilitation.
And that AID office full of lunatics trying to vaccinate kids against polio and Ebola.
And the EPA, who needs that? Trying to save some fish in California the whole state just about burns down.
And the Dept of Energy, which maintains all those missile silos and after all these years has not finished cleaning up the nuclear soil in the State of Washington near the Columbia River, what a waste of money!
Where is that troll bot when you need it?
ReplyDeleteAnd where is that troll bot when you need it?
ReplyDeleteMad Dog