Three last words about the Obama pandemic playbook debate: it doesn’t matter.

A reliable source of quarantine-era annoyance arrived in the form of President Donald Trump and his team, who straddled weeks of mounting news about American deaths resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, sluggishly following through with additional public health protection measures beyond executing the delayed and scattered thinking of travel bans (here’s one big reason out of several why the stream-of-consciousness bans didn’t work), and calling COVID-19 the “new hoax” (still), while spending a fair amount of time lamenting the preceding Obama administration’ failure to leave behind no pandemic support — no personal protection equipment, no medical machinery, No tests (laughing), and no playbook for fighting pandemics. Trumps allies maintained this story up to last week. Obama officials insisted that they left behind a playbook (pdf).

Meanwhile, the mainstream media seemed to be pandering to Trump as he acted every bit of a senile old man with anger management issues, while alternatively treating Obama as some Black boy who once again needed to prove he owns a US birth certificate.

The playbook debate appears to be over (laughing), I think, as if observing the current administration’s incoherent crisis management skills on television offered no clue of the white-collared shit show that wants to wrap around this country’s potential death spiral.

Anyway, I’ve been over the playbook debate for quite a while.

Because it doesn’t matter.

And if the mainstream media didn’t defer to Trump’s sense of privilege, they would’ve been over it too and shut down this brainless argument.

Let’s say the Obama team left ABSOLUTELY NOTHING behind. Y’know, like the way Trump lied described.

Let’s assume that not even a playbook was left to fathom.

Are we going to ignore the fact that Trump and team failed to produce and follow a playbook of their choosing for nearly four years?

This is yet another strike in Trump’s managerial malpractice ledger.

Assuming I take Trump’s lies for truth, he can’t complain for nearly four years about a playbook that someone else should’ve written before his arrival, and yet do nothing about that deficiency from his first day on the job until now, without most knowing leaders calling him an idiot.

And I’m not counting Team Trump’s junior high school trick of flashing two immaculately-published playbooks for the first time last week while claiming to the press they existed all along.

Trump calls himself a “successful businessman” so I’ll pass judgment in terms he’ll understand (I hope): no Fortune 100 company would tolerate such executive incompetence from a CEO for this long and leave that person in the same position to further harm the company and the public ad infinitum. 

Doubters should face reality. Until this spring — and despite warnings from others with experience — neither protecting the public health of Americans, nor collaborating with global partners to do so for the benefit of all, appeared on Trump’s list of priorities.

Corporate tax cuts, defense spending, stock market prices, and configuring public education and housing to the benefit of private interests, seem more important to him …

song currently stuck in my head: “the night has a thousand eyes” herb ellis & remo palmier