Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling has thoroughly had it with Trump’s shit:
When confronted with the shockingly irresponsible behavior of himself and his cultists, here is how the President of the United States responded on (where else?) Twitter:
Donald Trump is completely indifferent to whether you live or die, if you aren’t one of his supporters. Actually, let me rephrase that: he doesn’t care whether you live or die even if you are one of his supporters.
But that’s Trump. He is a thoroughly damaged human being whom psychologists will spend the next century studying. (I think Lou Dobbs, now proving that it’s not just left-wingers who use the term “violence” to describe things they don’t like, might also be gone around the bend for real. Mike Flynn poses the chicken-and-egg problem: does he support “limited martial law” because Trump pardoned him, or did Trump pardon him on condition that he would support it? This effing year, man.)
But what about the “mainstream” Republicans running for Senate in Georgia?
Loeffler campaign spokesperson, Stephen Lawson released this statement:
Like many officials, as someone who has been the subject of threats, of course Senator Loeffler condemns violence of any kind. How ridiculous to even suggest otherwise. We also condemn inaction and lack of accountability in our election system process—and won’t apologize for calling it out. Senator Loeffler will continue fighting to ensure we have a fair, trusted, and accurate election because the future of our country is at stake.
And from Perdue spokeswoman, Casey Black:
Senator Perdue condemns violence of any kind, against anybody. Period. We won’t apologize for addressing the obvious issues with the way our state conducts its elections. Georgians deserve accountability and improvements to that process — and we’re fighting to make sure the January 5th election is safe, secure, transparent, and accurate.
When confronted with a case of an elections official screaming that he and his co-workers are in danger and that the heat must be turned down, Leoffler and Purdue took the “all lives matter” route. “Of course all violence is wrong, yada yada yada, but we have to make sure Trump’s bullshit claims about election-rigging and fraud are fully investigated because he’s the real victim here.”
As I’ve said before, I am the forgiving type. If someone is truly repentant for bad things they’ve done, they deserve forgiveness. Someday, if Purdue and Loeffler and Ron Johnson and other Republicans and Trump staffers actually feel shame for enabling Trump, give a full accounting of their sins, beg forgiveness and accept any criminal punishment to which they are sentenced, honestly, I’m inclined to give it to them.
But I’m also realistic enough to know that, if you’re still on the Trump Train at this point, you probably don’t have the capacity to feel shame. Actually, if you’re in politics at all, the part of your brain responsible for shame is likely damaged beyond repair.
Here’s a life pro tip that has served me well over the years: if you see a news story that perfectly confirms your particulars in every way, and makes your political opponents look irredeemably awful, the story is probably BS.
Wired dives into the viral story from South Dakota nurse Jodi Doering, about COVID patients going to their deaths refusing to believe that the novel coronavirus is real, insisting it’s a hoax, and cursing their medical care providers for being in on the scam:
Doering’s statement that she’s watched “so many” people die from the disease even as they deny its very existence, endlessly repeated on social media and presented by news outlets without corroboration, would seem to represent a broader phenomenon.
But other nurses who work in similar settings say they’ve seen nothing of the kind.
I called a number of hospitals in the same part of South Dakota to ask emergency room nurses if they’d noticed the same, disturbing phenomenon. At Avera Weskota Memorial Hospital, about 20 minutes from Doering’s hometown of Woonsocket, an ER nurse told me, “I have not had that experience here.” At my request, Kim Rieger, the VP for communications and marketing at Huron Regional Medical Center, one of the four medical facilities where Doering works, spoke with several nurses at Huron to get their reactions to the CNN interview. None said they’d interacted with Covid patients who denied having the disease. “Most patients are grateful, and thankful for our help,” one told her. “I have not experienced this, nor have I been told of this experience, ever,” another said.
This in no way means that Doering’s account is untrue. But it provides, at minimum, some important context that was completely absent from the CNN interview and from all the media amplification that followed. Little or no effort was made to assess the scope of the problem that Doering so memorably described. How many Covid-19 patients in South Dakota are really so blinkered by disinformation that they're enraged at their caregivers and, in their final moments on earth, still dispute what’s happening? No one bothered to find out.
[…]
…this episode has some similarities to other weakly sourced accounts of Covid denialism in states that vote Republican. In July we heard reports of rampant “Covid parties.” One version of this story had college students in Tuscaloosa hosting parties with infected guests, and then betting on who else would catch the virus. Another took the form of a second-hand account from a nurse in San Antonio. A 30-year-old patient was said to have admitted just before he died that he’d gotten sick by going to a Covid party. “I thought it was a hoax,” he allegedly told the nurse, “but it’s not.”
As WIRED’s Gilad Edelman reported at the time, none of these accounts held up to further scrutiny—yet each had been picked up from its original source and then amplified by larger publications that added little or no additional reporting. There’s good reason for these stories to be passed along, Edelman wrote. The hospital administrator who first went public with the story of the last-breath Covid-party confession is “trying desperately to get the American public to take the coronavirus seriously. If she hears a perfect cautionary tale, it isn’t necessarily her responsibility to investigate whether it’s too perfect before passing it along. It is, however, precisely the job of reporters.”
Doering’s account is similarly a perfect fit for a narrative that has already been written, and one that has been passed along by respected people and prestigious outlets with scarcely any diligence at all. Even just a small amount of additional reporting suggests that her experience of encountering deathbed denialism and fury at Joe Biden could be more of a disturbing anomaly than a window on our troubled times. Even Doering herself seemed to float this possibility at one point during her CNN interview. “We have a lot of patients who are very, very grateful for their care, and very thankful for what you do,” she said to the host. “But unfortunately that’s not what I’m remembering right now.”
Even respected mainstream news sources, when presented with a compelling narrative, will milk it for all it’s worth because it gains more viewers and clicks. On some level, people want to be outraged and simultaneously feel superior to these idiots who didn’t listen to them. (My most downvoted Reddit comments of all time questioned some apocryphal stories on /r/canada about American tourists lying to get into the country and spreading the virus.)
As a rule, an outrageous story gets way, way more attention than the subsequent correction.
A Newfoundland war hero can finally rest in peace:
The remains of a soldier of the Newfoundland Regiment, found in Belgium in 2016, have been positively identified.
Private John Lambert was born in 1900 in St. John’s. He enlisted with the Newfoundland Regiment after lying about his age and died in August of 1917.
Lambert died of wounds received in action during the Battle of Langemarck. He was buried along with other soldiers near a Field Ambulance Relay Post, and his remains were found in 2016.
He was among four sets of remains uncovered during an archaeological dig near Ypres, Belgium. Lambert was identified as a soldier of the Newfoundland Regiment by the “NFLD” shoulder badge.
DNA tests were conducted on the remains of four soldiers, positively identifying Lambert among them. This is credited as the first time a Newfoundland Regiment soldier was identified using that process.
Rest in peace, John Lambert.
We are living in odd times when a person with plain, normal common sense stands out as a breath of fresh air. It should go without saying that there is no excuse good enough to justify or ignore threats of death or violence. The degree to which Trump followers (even those who initially seemed sensible, like Raffensperger!) deny reality is breathtaking, and there seems to be no end in sight.
Disappointingly, Sterling is still voting for Perdue and Loeffler...