2020 election, Bureaucrcy, Dona;ld Trump, Science

Was President Trump Snookered by the Doctors?

In all likelihood, yes. But there’s a good reason, even an honest reason. So he can dispose of it if he handles it honestly. And quickly.

The media, especially New York Times and Washington Post, are fretting almost daily that Trump is ignoring the “experts” or that other “experts” worry about what’s happening to the “experts” that had been positioned closest to the President, now that they are no longer appearing daily on television.

Remember, it was other “experts”, military and foreign service professionals who created, then lied, gathering a few weeks headlines in the faux-allegation of collusion and a quid pro quo with the new president of Ukraine. LTC Vindman, a NSA staffer, and who is still in uniform I think, even admitted he made stuff when he testified before Congress. This tells us more about how high political corruption has seeped into the military, that these serious UCMJ offenses have still not been dealt with.

But the media cause de jour lately has been how the President has treated the medical experts our CDC, and through them, the worldwide medical expert class at the United Nations and various internationally recognized institutions, now that it is pretty clear that combined they provided the President with really iffy data and scenarios that caused him to cause the rest of the country to be shut down, now in its third month.

(To fully understand the media role here, New York Times, et al, you have to understand that they have believed since at least World War II that the unelected expert class in every agency of government should be the ruling authority, and that the perfect president and Congress will be the ones that accede totally to the advice of their “experts”.

(ALL “honest” politics, according to NYT and WAPO, is that which is played within the four corners of a playing field as I just described, with clear, easy to understand rule book. And of course they are the men in the striped shirts.

(From that viewpoint the perfect government is that which plays entirely by the rulebook as drafted by the experts so that the outcome is predetermined, and the opposing teams always plays with valor but in the end loses, much like the Washington Generals always did to the Harlem Globetrotters. Never, since Truman, has the game been played better, and more smoothly, as 2009-2017, when Barack Obama captained the team, establishing a brand new template for excellence in the marriage between the political class and the “expert” class,

(Then, just as they felt it safe to put away the iron mitts and put on a velvet glove with a lighter hand, the military even safely in their control, along comes this ringer from outside their circle, baring brass knuckles…which everyone had assumed had been outlawed, it had been so long since they had been used. But the Rules Committee has found on several occasions that no, the original rules always allowed a non-club member to play. No one had consulted the Old Rules for so long most had forgotten.)

Today the issue is medical experts; Doctors, not military, not foreign policy, although voting experts are still waiting offstage.

In the 1993 film, “The Fugitive” Harrison Ford reprised a popular 1960s David Janssen role of Dr David Kimble who was wrongly convicted of murdering his wife. In that film the killers turned out to be one of Kimble’s most trusted colleagues, another doctor, who was doing the bidding of Big Pharma. This film helped gain popular acceptance for the notion that America’s medical profession was in bed with the the corporate giant companies who pushed their new drugs…27 years ago!

Even I teetered in that camp when my cardiologist, after a serious APhib event six years ago, switched my primary medication from a $40-month tablet to a $220-month anti-stroke medication. Only it probably saved my life, as I’m still doing 5-miles a day while cursing my governor, Virginia (a doctor himself, we’re told) for keeping my gym closed.

I see that doctor twice a year and we talk about this very subject. Private-practice doctors are generally cut out of different cloth than institutional professionals. And, having having been in corporate manufacturing, in product development, I had some sense of the cost of developing one drug that made it to market for every fifty that didn’t, and which had to recoup all those costs as well, so I’ve never been religiously anti-corporate Pharma.

My first encounters with Big Pharma were during fifteen years behind the old Iron Curtain from ’91 on; seeing how well “universal state medicine” had fared, as their private sector tried to lurch forward. Private doctors and dentists set up bootleg cash-only practices in apartment complexes. State-run medicine is still king. And of course there was Ukraine, where their front line medical corps had been reduced to passing out clean bedsheets for the sick and dying after Chernobyl.

Americans had never thought much of doctors in the political sense. It didn’t fit our image of doctors. And it was largely true.

Years ago I wrote an article, and admonition actually, to the science community in general, about how hard it had been for Science in general and the medical science in particular to find popular acceptance. It was not automatic. It took science-based medicine over a thousand years of herbal remedies and preventatives to be trusted. I reminded doctors that in Germany their doctors had become gods. In the people’s eyes “Herr doktor” outranked even a field marshal. Then, Boom!, after 300 years in holding that status, they lost it all inside a decade simply by, in order to maintain that status, they began signing off on the expulsion, exportation and finally the execution of several million Jews…just to maintain their status with the State.

For you see, as with every socialist government…every action of the State had to be signed off by a professional officer inside the State.

Hold that notion.

I’m betting, if Donald Trump was hornswaggled, as he well may have been, his miscalculation of the expert wing of the government medical class since the1990s might have been where he missed the cultural clue, for most of that came about only in the past 25 years. Corporatist Big Medicine, Big Pharma, and since Obamacare, Big Insurance have created a snapshot of a world only recently poured over the peoples’ head. My own insurance company (I won’t name, but one of the biggies) is now second-guessing my own primary physician’s staff diagnoses (he complains to me) by maintaining their own medical staff at HQ…where it’s all about dollars, not care.

Remember, we already live in a new world where an Army lawyer must sign off on every rocket attack, which i discussed here in 2019, “Lawyers in Foxholes” . (I recommend the British film, “Eye in the Sky” 2009, free on YouTube as to the issues raised by having rigid rules of engagement, as “perfected” by Obama.)

I wrote that piece for a different purpose, but a small fact Donald Trump may never have known but that I was aware of (we’re the same age) in the 1970s was the extreme jealousy lawyers had for doctors. Penis envy. One of most my sentimental moments with my first wife was at a retirement party for a fellow JAG officer in Arizona. We sat across from a fellow JAG named Wayne and his status-seeking wife named Babs. Babs was nonstop about Wayne’s career after the Army. “Wayne could have been a doctor, but he chose public service.” No, really, “public service”, writing legal opinions for a brigadier. This woke my wife out of a drifting slumber, causing to peer over at me, then Babs, and then back to me, as if she were sizing up a new overcoat at Sachs, then nearly fell out of her chair laughing. I actually had to grab her.

We left shortly, but I wasn’t angry as I knew what she was laughing about…besides me. When I was a law student she worked for three medical specialists. Raised as royalty herself, her father a captain of industry, she was just trying to picture Chatty-Kathy Babs, even Wayne, and yes even me, as ever being able to rise to the status of a real medical doctor. She knew what kinds of things med students had to commit to memory and identify on the spot; anatomy, physiology, the difference between allergy snot and viral snot under a microscope, while lawyers could BS their way through most any bar exam, having to commit to memory fewer than a hatful of Common Law principles and Supreme Court cases, mostly from the Civil Rights era forward.

I passed two state bar exams on the first try. But I admit I was no match for doctors.

My law school class (1971) had fewer than 100 graduates. But the 2nd and 1st year classes behind me were three-four times our size. And would grow. But whereas my class was largely aimed at practice in state law firms, the next classes were heavy in engineering and science grads, and they were aimed at government jobs. The first Earth Day had only been the year before, April 22, 1970. Still, the greatest Russian hoax ever.

Of course, what this shift in law school meant, (and I didn’t see at the time), was the legal profession’s subliminal attempt to displace the medical profession as Number One in the hearts and minds of Americans instead of doctors, which was not far from from trying to replace the clergy with organized crime. As John Cleese pointed out, only 1 in 7 lawyers were ever any good at taking care of their clients’ interests as a first priority, which is why, beginning in 1972, so many, many lawyers began seeking careers in government, where “the people” were but an abstract mirage.

Lawyers as a class have always been denied the respect our culture pointed in doctors’ direction. And for good reason.

And I don’t even need to add 500 words to tell you why. Doctors never had to fake empathy for their patient.

I think this was what Donald Trump was missing, that modern government doctors may just be more like government bureaucrats that even he had imagined. And he may have given them a pass.

Just know, Donald Trump is an empath in the “Love thy neighbor” and the “There but for the grace of God go I” sense of empathy for one’s fellow man. I’m sorry to say even GW Bush can’t match his level of love for total strangers.

So, if I’m right, going forward, what does Donald Trump do about undoing this error?

He’s been on a 3 1/2- year roll, from 100% to 60% right on every move he’s made, by keen wits but also honest instincts. With the CDC docs his instincts failed him, as I just described, only he didn’t get to spend 15 years watching socialist-imprinted societies trying to dig out from under state-run medicine’s spell as I did in order to know better. I’ve said for many years that that it was Homo Bureaucraticus that brought the USSR down, which is a condition-precedent to any state-run enterprise, even the benign ones. To date I’ve yet to see any serious scholarship explaining this very visible cause of statism’s eventual demise…other than the fact it apparently cannot be seen from any place other than outside its orbit.

Advice to Donald Trump?

I’ve asked around and most just say “Ride it out. It will go away.”

Yes, maybe. But the media has new issues waiting in queue, to keep the pot stirred.

But to Trump’s empathy “weakness”, more than a few innocent Americans have suffered from his mistaken belief in a bunch of people who are likely not cynical crooks, (a couple maybe) but just more bureaucrats than they are medical professionals, where they have simply flipped their order of allegiance. All are members of a worldwide club of “expert” peers, exchanging information around the world with some who haven’t made an honest scientific observation or calculation what wasn’t politically inspired for over 70 years. And in 2020  only Americans are foresworn not to be political decision-makers.

I think Donald Trump would be wiser to simply suck it up and tell the world he was snookered, and why it was so easy for him to believe the docs. He thought they were purer than they actually are. “won’t do that again.”

He could fire a couple, but a public condemnation as a class, might do more to bring them around to just who is the Boss in America.

Then Donald Trump, and his successors, hopefully from “now, until the ending of the world” will be able to turn to their scientists, on behalf of the People, and know how to ask questions that will evoke honest answers.

 

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