Barr, Unleashed
FRED WERTHEIMER’S WEEKLY NOTE | September 17, 2020
“Trump and Barr deserve each other. The American people deserve neither.”
Authoritarian Donald Trump and his partisan political partner, Attorney General William Barr, showed their true colors again this week.
President Trump’s deadly failure to protect the health and lives of the American people was unassailably revealed this week in the President’s own words.
Bob Woodward’s book, Rage, reveals that the President knew in January that the coronavirus virus was a grave threat to the American people and in March Trump himself told Woodward: “I wanted to always play it down” to avoid creating “a panic.”
So, Trump played the virus down and today we are at 198,000 dead Americans and counting.
Yesterday, the President asserted that Dr. Robert Redfield, head of the Centers for Disease Control, must have been confused when he testified in the Senate that it would likely be mid-2021 before vaccines are widely available and that wearing a mask may even be more important than a vaccine.
Reelection politics dripped off Trump’s words as he attacked Redfield’s testimony and falsely tried to persuade the American people that their vaccines are just around the corner. An NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll this week, however, found that “Fifty-two percent of adults say they don’t trust the president’s vaccine comments, while just 26 percent say they do.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s partner, Attorney General Barr, has apparently gone off the rails.
Yesterday, at Hillsdale College, Barr asserted absolute power in attacking his own Justice Department’s professional attorneys. Barr attacked the need to rely on coronavirus science as “nonsense” and called efforts by states to curb the deadly coronavirus by stay at home orders as “other than slavery […] the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history.”
Last week, Barr reportedly asked Justice Department prosecutors to consider bringing criminal charges against Democratic Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle for her handling of the Seattle protests. And, while campaigning in Arizona, Barr attacked ballots by mail, long used by civilian and military voters, as votes that “impinge on the historic American tradition of the secret ballot.”
Trump and Barr deserve each other. The American people deserve neither.
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