MRC's Brent Baker tweeted out the lowlights of Friday's Real Time with Bill Maher, socially-distanced but still socialist-inclined. Maher interviewed presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and insisted Trump's coronavirus response is more of an impeachable offense than previous "trumped-up" causes like Russian collusion and using Ukraine to damage Joe Biden.
BILL MAHER: I find one of the most galling parts of this is that the president is favoring certain states over the others. Governors who are nice to him, as he calls it, get a lot of attention, and all the equipment they want. To me this is even more of an impeachable offense than what he did with Ukraine or Russia. How do you stop a president who is blatantly not the president of every state equally? How do you stop a president who sends aid to Florida, for example, because he likes the governor there, but not here to California or Illinois or Massachusetts?
Maher’s implying (Pants on Fire lying) that the Trump administration isn’t aiding the blue states.
But Sanders agreed: “It is literally beyond comprehension. We have a president who has done so much harm in this entire process.”
A half hour later in the show, Maher added more Trump-loathing material, lamenting how much better South Korea's response was, and how much lower their caseload and death count is. "While Trump shut up his experts, happy-talked and lied his ass off, South Korea put a strong testing program into place."
MAHER: If this is a war, Trump lost that in January. He’s not FDR or JFK, he’s LOL. So It’s more than a little disturbing that he’s getting a bump in the polls from all this. A bump which tells us we’re once again entering into rally around the leader time. Around the guy who made it worse! I mean, come on. Toilet paper is now more valuable than the dollar.
Here's where Comrade Maher goes south on the facts. As Reuters reported, South Korea's equivalent of the CDC quickly relied on a private-sector solution, while the U.S. got trapped in a more public-sector response!
Instead of drafting the private sector early on to develop tests, as South Korea did, U.S. health officials relied, as is customary, on test kits prepared by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, some of which proved faulty. Then, sticking to its time-consuming vetting procedures, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration didn’t approve tests other than the CDC’s until Feb. 29, more than five weeks after discussions with outside labs had begun.
Meanwhile, in the absence of enough kits, the CDC insisted for weeks on narrow criteria for testing, recommending it only when a person had recently been to China or other hot spots or had contact with someone known to be infected. As a result, the federal government failed to screen an untold number of Americans and missed opportunities to contain the spread, clinicians and public health experts say.
