The COVID Diaries – 148 28th August
The Guardian’s summary of the Republican’s convention:
“There are lies, there are damned lies – and then there was this week’s Republican national convention: a four-day cavalcade of brazen falsehoods from the president and his enablers. Wild distortions and exaggerations are hardly new to politics. But Donald Trump’s mendacity is in a class of its own, as his closing speech on Thursday underscored.
“Facing grim unemployment figures that have holed his plan to run on the economy, he is an incumbent still campaigning as an outsider, and relying on race-baiting, fearmongering and slandering his rival. Joe Biden, previously dismissed as a creature of the Washington swamp, is now portrayed as a Trojan horse for radicals bent on tearing down the American dream. Yet the lies about Mr Biden and the Democrats pale beside those told about Mr Trump’s own record. Empathetic. Feminist. Most remarkably, in Melania’s telling, a man of “total honesty”.
“When he announced: “I say very modestly that I have done more for the African-American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln,” it was hard to know whether the adverb or the rest of the statement was the more misleading. The most glaring falsehood is that he took “swift action” to protect his country from coronavirus , instead of effectively abandoning it to its grim fate – 181,000 deaths to date. The Republicans want America to believe that the worst is over, though more than 1,000 people are dying a day.”