“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984
The Trump administration on Friday changed its description of the Strategic National Stockpile on a government website after journalists noted that it contradicted a claim Jared Kushner had made about the program.
Kushner on Thursday evening offered a novel argument about the national stockpile. He said some states still had stockpiles that they hadn’t been employing for the coronavirus outbreak and that localities should go to them first. And then he suggested that the national stockpile wasn’t even meant for them.
“And the notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile,” Kushner said. “It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”
Is “our stockpile” to be used for some nation that doesn’t include the states? Who is it for do you suppose? Does this even make sense?
Kushner is a moron and doesn’t know what he’s saying any more than Dear Leader does. But that doesn’t mean the federal government isn’t working overtime to cover for him:
As reporters quickly noted, that didn’t match with how the Department of Health and Human Services was describing the program. On its website, it said, “Strategic National Stockpile is the nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out.” It continued to say, “When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.”AD
That language suddenly disappeared from the site Friday morning, as journalist Laura Bassett noted, and was replaced with something de-emphasizing the size of the stockpile and its role in helping states. The new description cast it as a “short-term stopgap.”
“The Strategic National Stockpile’s role is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies,” it now says. “Many states have products stockpiled, as well. The supplies, medicines, and devices for life-saving care contained in the stockpile can be used as a short-term stopgap buffer when the immediate supply of adequate amounts of these materials may not be immediately available.”
The Pentagon fired the Navy Captain who begged for help for his crew that was stuck in a floating coronavirus petrie dish for telling the truth. And now they’re going full Orwell by changing the definition of our long-standing federal agencies in order to comport with idiotic statements by Trump’s slow son-in-law whom he’s inexplicably allowed to use the entire Executive Branch as his personal sandbox.
Keep your eyes wide open over the next few months. It’s going to get worse.