White House Econ Crank Peter Navarro Icing His Balls After Unsuccessful Ventilator Evasion On CNN

And then, the murders began.

Do you want to watch CNN's Brianna Keilar kick the White House's pet China loon in the dick this morning? Of course you do! It's the next best thing to wielding those steel tips yourself. And if there's ever anyone who deserved it, it's Peter Navarro, the economics crank Jared Kushner dug up by Googling "China + GRRRR + ARRRRGHH." Yes, really . (Well, mostly really.) The guy whose ideas are so mindbendingly stupid he had to invent a learned professor to endorse them, a professor whose name is an acronym of Peter Navarro. Yes, again, really . (Totally really.)

The subject was ventilators, of course, and how the Trump administration has been KILLIN' IT with its coronavirus response .

Keilar to Peter Navarro: You are wasting everyone's time    www.youtube.com 

"Peter, look, we know you are working with the private sector. It is heartening to see Hanes making thick fabric so apparel workers can make that into non-surgical masks. GM is partnering with Ventec. All of that is good news," Keilar began. "But why do you have prisons competing with the postal service and hospitals, and Kentucky competing with Illinois and Louisiana, FEMA, the VA, in order to get a lot of these supplies. The federal government is not stepping in to coordinate the purchase and allocation of this?"

As a threshold matter, no, they are not. Donald Trump has made it entirely clear he doesn't want to be the "shipping clerk" for the states, he's refusedto actually use the Defense Production Act to conscript business, preferring to use it as "leverage" — whatever that means — and, oh, by the way, his administration spent weeks blocking states from using their own COVID-19 test kits.

Take it away, Ron Vara.

NAVARRO: I reject that theory that we're not stepping in or stepping up. What I do is not just work with the full power of private enterprise but, hourly, I am working with HHS and FEMA, which have a partnership to make sure that we are surging the protective equipment we need for health care professionals and ventilators in real time.

And it is a triple track in terms of the kinds of things we are doing. We got HHS working to get as much into the stockpile and out of the stockpile as possible.

We got FEMA efforts going on to distribute things and also require new materials, both in the US and around the world.

My office is also helping to coordinate with the power of private enterprise to mobilize and repurpose factories around the country to get what we need.

And we certainly have been working very hard to surge equipment and equipment to New York, to New Orleans, to Detroit, to Chicago, to Seattle, to California. I personally helped direct shipments there over the last several weeks.

There will be pictures of people that you're citing or whatever with garbage bags or whatever, but that's going to be the exception.

 Woooooooooooooooords. Although the invocation of "garbage bags or whatever" to describe Mount Sinai West Hospital in Manhattan, where 48-year-old nurse manager Kious Kelly died this week of coronavirus amid a widespread shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) that forced staff to repurpose trash bags as hospital gowns, is truly vile.

And then that asshole scolded Keilar for scaring the poor viewers by "sensationalizing" the well-documented scarcity of ventilators.

NAVARRO: Let's not sensationalize this crisis at a time where we create more anxiety or panic behavior with people. So, please, as you report this crisis, please keep in mind that, to the extent that it is done, it makes our job here harder and it makes the health care professionals' job harder, please.

Ask me your question.

KEILAR: I am not sensationalizing anything. I am trafficking in facts here because governors are saying that their states are calling up these suppliers and FEMA's already purchased everything. So they are sort of siloed from things being allocated and coordinated.

And they're trying and spending all of this time and energy trying to acquire some of these things and they can't get it. There's no way they're able to get anything more. We've seen that in New York and other states as well. We have seen it in the prison system as well.

How dare you scare the viewers with facts, little lady? Mr. Vara thought this was a NEWS PROGRAM!

Navarro attempted a pivot to filibustering about price gouging, as if the Trump administration's refusal to invoke the Defense Production Act to centralize the supply chain hadn't directly caused the states to compete against each other, driving up the price of a $100 box of respirators to $26,900 . Which, by the by, is not price gouging, since it's an open auction.

Then it was on to blaming The Black Guy: "Let me bring you up on the history here of what we inherited. In '09, when the Obama administration had he H1N1 flu crisis, that should have been a wake-up call."

At which point, Keilar hit her mansplaining limit.

KEILAR: Peter, you're wasting everyone's time. You're wasting everyone's time with this. It's 2020. The president was elected in 2016. Can you get to a million ventilators?

NAVARRO: First of all, that number is way, way, way out of proportion.

KEILAR: What can you get to?

NAVARRO: We're going to do our best to get the ventilators we need as quickly as possible. And we have G.M. and Ford repurposing factories.

Spoiler Alert: No, they can't get a million ventilators. So they're going to lie and say, "That's like, wildly over what we would need." It's not. 

But don't worry, guys, because Navarro says, "We've got 43,000 ventilators at least that are coming from Phillips. We work with GM and Ventec and they may be able to produce as many as 80,000 by the end of the year."

By December? Maybe? That's fuckin' great.

[ CNN Transcript ]

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