Current US COVID-19 deaths: 209,208
Yesterday: 208,483
And for those
of you who think the current pandemic has been handled well, this is a
thoroughly frightening read (I know it’s long, but well worth it):
Months
before Bob Woodward’s book “Rage”
documented President Trump’s efforts to deceive Americans about the peril posed
by covid-19, Robert F. Kennedy’s twenty-six-year-old
grandson tried to blow the whistle on the President’s malfeasance from an
improbable perch—inside Trump’s coronavirus task force.
In April,
Max Kennedy, Jr., despite having signed a nondisclosure agreement, sent an
anonymous complaint to Congress detailing dangerous incompetence in the
Administration’s response to the pandemic. On the phone recently from Hyannis
Port, Massachusetts, Kennedy explained why he’d alerted Congress. “I just
couldn’t sleep,” he said. “I was so distressed and disturbed by what I’d seen.”
How did a
Kennedy end up in a sensitive role in the Trump Administration? After
graduating from Harvard, in 2016, Kennedy did some time at consulting and
investment firms; he planned to take the LSAT in March, but the pandemic
cancelled it. At loose ends, he responded to a friend’s suggestion that he join
a volunteer task force that Jared Kushner was forming, to get vital personal
protective equipment, such as masks, to virus hot spots. Kushner, he was told,
was looking for young generalists who could work long hours for no pay. “I was
torn, to some extent,” Kennedy, a lifelong Democrat, said. “But it was such an
unprecedented time. It didn’t seem political—it seemed larger than the
Administration.” And he knew people who’d been sick. So in March he volunteered
for the White House covid-19 Supply-Chain
Task Force, and drove to Washington.
On his
first day, he showed up at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency and joined around a dozen other volunteers, all in their twenties,
mostly from the finance sector and with no expertise in procurement or medical
issues. He was surprised to learn that they weren’t to be auxiliaries supporting
the government’s procurement team. “We were the
team,” he said. “We were the entire frontline team for the federal government.”
The volunteers were tasked with finding desperately needed medical supplies
using only their personal laptops and private e-mail accounts.
As the days passed, and the death count climbed, Kennedy was
alarmed at the way the President was downplaying the crisis. “I knew from that
room that he was saying things that just weren’t true,” he said. Trump told the
public that the government was doing all it could, but the P.P.E. emergency was
being managed by a handful of amateurs. “It was the number of people who show
up to an after-school event, not to run the greatest crisis in a hundred
years,” Kennedy said. “It was such a mismatch of personnel. It was one of the
largest mobilization problems ever. It was so unbelievably colossal and
gargantuan. The fact that they didn’t want to get any more people was so
upsetting.”
Kennedy
believes that the Administration relied on volunteers in order to sidestep
government experts and thereby “control the narrative.” He said that Brad
Smith, one of the political appointees who directed the task force, pressured
him to create a model fudging the projected number of fatalities; Smith wanted
the model to predict a high of a hundred thousand U.S. deaths, claiming that
the experts’ models were “too severe.” Kennedy said that he told Smith, “I
don’t know the first thing about disease modelling,” and declined the
assignment. (A spokesman said that Smith did not recall the conversation.) To
date, nearly two hundred thousand Americans have died.
The
volunteers were also instructed to prioritize requests from the President’s
friends and supporters. According to Kennedy, the group paid special attention
to Jeanine Pirro, the Fox News personality. Pirro, Kennedy said, was
“particularly aggressive,” and demanded that masks be shipped to a hospital she
favored. The volunteers were also told to direct millions of dollars’ worth of
supplies to only five preselected distributors. Kennedy was asked to draft a
justification for this decision, but refused. “Hundreds of people were sending
e-mails every day offering P.P.E.,” he said, but no one in charge responded
effectively. “We were super frustrated we couldn’t get the government to do
more.”
In the
end, the task force failed to procure enough equipment, leaving medical
workers, including Kennedy’s cousin, to improvise by wearing garbage bags and
makeshift or pre-worn masks. States were left to fend for themselves, bidding
against one another for scarce supplies. Kennedy was disgusted to see that the
political appointees who supervised him were hailing Trump as “a marketing
genius,” because, Kennedy said they’d told him, “he personally came up with the
strategy of blaming the states.” The response was in line with what Kennedy
calls the White House mantra: that government doesn’t work, and “that the worst
thing we could do was step on the toes of the private sector.”
Kushner
came by the fema office a few
times, once to ask the flailing volunteers what three things they most needed,
and promising fixes by the end of the day. He had “an air of self-importance,”
Kennedy recalled. “But I never saw a single thing that Kushner promised
change.” After two or three weeks of growing distress, Kennedy wrote his
complaint, addressing it to the House Oversight Committee, hoping that Congress
would step in. Meanwhile, the task force stopped meeting in person, because a
member tested positive for covid-19. In April,
Kennedy quit, and he has since gone to work on the Democrats’ 2020 election
efforts. He decided to defy the N.D.A., which he does not think can legally
stifle him from expressing his opinion, and he is featured in a new
documentary, “Totally Under Control,” from the director Alex Gibney. Kennedy
said, “If you see something that might be illegal, and cause thousands of
civilian lives to be lost, a person has to speak out.” The Administration’s
coronavirus response, he said, “was like a family office meets organized crime,
melded with ‘Lord of the Flies.’ It was a government of chaos.’’ (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/28/a-young-kennedy-in-kushnerland-turned-whistle-blower?fbclid=IwAR146u4ezfGzerubDa4I7DRhPDhHFqTNWdwrlEDyDfFy9anJUYJ_i2szpRM)
*******************************
I think it was
still dark when Michael left for golf on Saturday (9/26). I picked up my last free bagel and then
settled in to get my blog out. Once that
was done, I finished off the second half of my customer quilt. Due to the pattern of quilting, I had a lot
of ends to tie in for such a small quilt, but by mid-afternoon, it was done:
The back is almost as pretty as the front…
and
for such a simple pattern, I think it is a beautiful quilt.
I got the wire for quilt hanging threaded through
the library quilt and it is now hanging in my front hall. And you know something? The more I look at this quilt…the more I like
it! You know, I had someone ask me why I
continued to collect reading sayings when I didn’t think the head librarian at
Indian Land would go for a quilt. Well,
my brain finally woke up and remembered something. Originally, I never intended a reading quilt
for the library…I wanted to make it for the 2nd or 3rd
grade class at Clinton School. Then the
teacher I was working with left….and after many tries over a couple years…no
one from the school ever seemed interested in the quilts I was sending…or anything
else….so I moved on. With all of those
embroideries, I guess I started then to think about a library quilt….and here
we are several years later. Maybe
someday there will be one in our Del Webb library….who knows.
My honey came home from golf with a score of
86 and one birdie, but he had also had heart flutters yet again, so he sacked
out on the couch for about an hour until he felt better. Cookie kept playing with her 'blankie' trying to entice him to get up (see videos at end).
By then it was 4 PM and we were both hungry,
so we decided to start our date night a bit early. We did puffy things:
and saved our champagne:
to go with popcorn
and Mrs. Maisel. We were celebrating the
completion of the library quilt, surviving another week….and a serendipitous
moment of ‘quelle horreur’ in the car :~).
Cookie saying 'dad!!! get up and play with me!!!'
