Always ask; Cui bono? and Compared to what?

The gaslighting, the telling of deliberate lies in order to exert control, is accelerating.  Not so much an increase in the cycle of lies, though that is happening.  Rather, what has shrunk is the time between the event and the lie.

If you tell me a lie now about Mueller's Russia Collusion investigation, it will likely take me a few minutes to orient and identify the lie.  It finished up more than a year ago and began more than three years ago.  It involved hundreds of people.  There was a ton of misreporting even as it was occurring.  I remember the outcome but all the details?  Tell me a lie now and I will have to reconstruct the events from memory, probably have to do some googling to check details.

If I am busy or distracted or focused on other issues, I may have a strong suspicion I am being lied to but not get around to confirming it and the issue becomes more clouded.

But Woodward's "bombshell" about Trump not wanting to panic the country back in February is an example of the shortening of the gaslighting cycle-time.  Things that happened six to nine months ago?  Those are still pretty fresh in mind.  You always want to confirm a memory but I don't really need to go and check whether we were talking about the delicate balance between alerting people and panicking people in January to March.  Trump himself was talking about that balance as well as many talking heads.

I can remember the abuse rained down upon Trump for "prematurely" closing flights from China and then other countries in late January.  I can remember his political opponents dismissing the dangers of Covid-19.  I have a recollection of DeBlasio and Pelosi both back in late January going on TV and telling people that it was not so serious that they should stay away from Chinese New Year celebrations.

Ambiguity about the degree of danger of the virus, the potential to spread, etc., all these remained highly debated for the first several months.  Despite the best efforts, panic did spread.  We saw panic buying of staples.  Supply chains still haven't recovered from that; nine months in and toilet paper, paper towel, and cleaning agent aisles still remain pretty barren.

We wasted hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars on a panicked effort to stock up on ventilators which turned out to be unneeded.  We shut down the economy out of panic and many states still have their states substantially locked down long past the point of peak danger.  Many school districts remain closed out of panic about dangers we now know to be pretty close to zero.  Cases up, certainly, but virtually no deaths among the millions of 5-25 year old population.  

In August there was a lot of hype about the holocaust that would occur if we sent children back to school.  Many districts did resume many remain virtual.  Most countries have resumed in-class teaching.  In August we had many talking heads arguing that a holocaust of deaths was about to occur.  They have not occurred and now no one talks about the fervid and apocalyptic forecasts of just a month or two ago.

In all the blather about Woodward's supposed bombshell revelation that Trump was trying to prevent a panic back in February, there are a couple key questions little discussed.  Compared to what?  And, Cui bono?  

Trump's political opponents are trying to weave a case that had Trump sounded a louder alarm than he (or they) had in February, tens and hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.  We know that not to be true because we still don't know who has had the best approach.  No cure or vaccine is available or likely to be available for a couple of more years.  We are getting better at some of our treatments and responses.

But overall, who has had the best response compared to the conditions they experienced?  New York and New Jersey were clear disasters largely owing to bad policy decisions but in part because they were among the earliest exposed.  What we are seeing everywhere is that everyone follows the same pattern, whether their nation is infected sooner or later.  Each country or state or region eventually gets to some minimum critical mass of cases.  Deaths then shoot up for a couple of months, then plunge, then level off at a low but still persistent level.

But in terms of absolute numbers, not the form of the curve but its size, the death toll does vary for reasons we cannot yet fully identify or quantify.  Temperature, latitude, population age profile, percent of foreign born, volume of international travel, robustness of health system, urbanization and density, pre-existing population health and morbidity conditions - all these and other variables affect the absolute number of deaths in a given population.  And of course bad policy like putting infected patients in among elderly and the comorbidly ill. 

We still don't know which is better, on balance, taking into account both lives and economic damage (which ultimately equates to lives), whether the Swedish model of limited and voluntary shutdowns has worked better or worse than hard lockdowns.  Georgia, heavily criticized for a late and partial shutdown and an early reopening compared to New York, has a Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 one third that of New York.  Whose policy choices were better?  We won't know for a while.

So what was the obvious thing Trump, or any other leader, could have confidently done in February that would have made a difference?  If we cannot in September know what the best approach should have been, how do we expect any leader or talking heads to have known in February?

This is both fallacious and anachronistic thinking on the part of today's political opportunists.  They fail to ask the critical "Compared to what?" question.  We know that Biden and Pelosi and DeBlasio, and innumerable others were encouraging people to get out and eat, drink, and be merry in February and as late as March while Trump was both acting to implement prophylactic policies to protect the population while downplaying panic and explicitly talking about the need to not panic in the face of the unknown virus.

What could have been done better then given what we knew then?  Virtually nothing, other than the obvious things that were known then - like not putting the infected in among the elderly.

I had not really considered the obvious additional question till this morning and the light it can shed.  Cui bono?  

From Bob Woodward's Own Reaction Shows His Big Trump Virus 'Scoop' Is Total Nonsense. And It Gets Worse … by Victoria Taft.  She recaps Woodward's claim that Trump was downplaying the virus and that that was a consequential policy.  She asks:

If this so-called lack of information cost American lives, then why did Bob Woodward withhold this life saving information till just mere weeks before the election?

She goes into some questioning now being directed at Woodward along the lines of "If you thought this was important when you had it in February, why did you keep it secret till September if lives might have been saved?"  

Woodward's answers, and that of his supporters, regrettably come down to something like "it was useful to support my book sales and I did not think it to be consequential in terms of lives lost." 

So, another week of storm in a tea cup sputtering which turns out to be much about nothing.  The outrage and posturing over nonsensical stuff is the very nature of partisan politics.  But the meagerness of the claims is more and more attenuated and the gaslighting cycle time is accelerating making the lies more and more transparent.