My dear liberal friend and fellow memo reader wanted me to post this link: https://www.cnn.com/videos/pol
What did Obama do about it after he made the speech? He was always willing to by-pass Congress.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
For the last two days The WSJ has had lead editorials suggesting what I had written in a recent memo , ie. Trump's daily meetings are wearing thin. He over talks.
As for Bernie's presidential campaign, I think Kim pretty much summed it up (See below.)
Obviously the Bernie/Ocasio virus has infected The Democrat Party. Neither radicals offer what the nation wants or needs but they have assembled enough of America's youth and disaffected "know nothings" who long for free lunches to have made a serious impact on it's direction.
I do not believe the economic recovery will be smooth and V shaped as I know Trump wishes because the decline and efforts to bring it back have been lumpy and severe. I am not blaming Trump bit this is the nature of such a severe event. Though, I agree with the president that there is huge pent up demand not all nations are, or will be, in the same position as America to return to normalcy from a consumerism standpoint.
Whether China intentionally unleashed the Coronavirus or not they have benefited mightily from the results. As Hawkins stated, they crippled our economy as it was soaring and the Democrats and mass media played politics and raised doubts,all to China's benefit.
The mass media have consistently under-served America, sided with our enemy because of their misguided need to cover their forlorn track record of failed predictions and mis-information. As for key Democrats, they placed their desire for power above national interests and should go down in flames for their behaviour but the hatred of Trump is so pervasive/intense I doubt this will happen.
In the case of Trump, he has been confronted by everything in the books and has met them head on as is his style. He has not backed down, he has been ahead of the curve in seeing the damage done by previous administrations and his policies have been designed to be corrective. Were it not for his combative personality things might have been otherwise but frankly, I doubt it because Republicans lost their will to fight, if they ever really had it, long ago. They do not know how to properly market their views against a committed adversary and the nation is poorly educated when it comes to worthy matters.
America is too far in debt. Also, we have enjoyed success beyond imagine and that, along with PC'ism, has become our undoing.
America has allowed itself to become Humpty Dumpty.
China should pray Biden is elected.
Bernie Campaigns On
He gives up on the nomination but is determined to make Biden unelectable.
By Kimberley Strassel
When it comes to “fake news,” we had a whopper this week. Voters were informed that Bernie Sanders was dropping out of the Democratic presidential contest. Joe Biden only wishes it were so.
True, Mr. Sanders announced on Wednesday the “suspension” of his campaign, noting that he trailed Mr. Biden by some 300 delegates, and that no “honest assessment” showed a path to the nomination. The Vermont senator said he could not “in good conscience continue to mount a campaign that cannot win.”
This isn’t an endorsement; it’s a threat. The Democratic Party is split, and Mr. Sanders is the undisputed leader of its progressive wing. He’s not conceding gracefully; he’s not rallying Democrats behind a nominee; he’s not going anywhere—not without extracting a significant show of fealty from Mr. Biden. Put another way, the man who was too radical to win the nomination is now determined to make Mr. Biden unelectable.
Within hours of the Sanders announcement, newspapers were reporting that the two camps were in negotiations over which Sanders policies Mr. Biden would need to adopt to get Bernie’s blessing. The New York Times reported that the Biden campaign might begin rolling out these changes as early as this week. Up for discussion: climate, health care and student loans, for starters.
Concessions on policy aren’t all Bernie is demanding. The negotiations also involve discussions about Mr. Biden’s future cabinet, including which progressives will go where, as well as who cannot play a role. The left wants a Biden administration ban on anyone who has worked on or near Wall Street, the fossil-fuel industry, the health-insurance sector and the lobbying world, to name a few.
In a sign the entire Bernie universe has already seized on this hostage-taking strategy, a coalition of eight progressive groups sent their own open letter to Mr. Biden Wednesday, explaining that a campaign pledge of a “return to normalcy” wouldn’t cut it: “Going back to the way things were ‘before Trump’ isn’t a motivating enough reason to cast a ballot in November.”
The only thing that would make them support Mr. Biden, they write, is his agreement to meet their demands, which include endorsing the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, a 50% reduction in prison populations, a wealth tax, cancellation of student debt, free undergraduate tuition in public institutions, abolishing the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, federal gun licensing, and abortion subsidized by federal taxpayers. Among the signers was Justice Democrats, the influential progressive outfit that was founded by former Sanders campaign leaders and supported the election of now-prominent voices like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
This is dangerous territory for Mr. Biden, and it highlights the party divide that Mr. Sanders has inflamed. Mr. Biden has already shifted significantly to the left, looking to attract progressive primary voters. He now favors a health-insurance “public option,” free community college, huge tax increases and forgiveness of many student loans. Sewing up a nomination is usually the moment at which a candidate begins pivoting back to the center to appeal to independent and moderate voters.
Mr. Sanders’s intention is not only to block such a pivot, but to jerk Mr. Biden further left. That sticks the putative nominee with an impossible choice. Mr. Biden can maintain a “centrist” course and risk losing Bernie’s base. Or he can cater to Mr. Sanders’s extreme agenda and risk alienating independents, disaffected Trump voters, suburban women, blue-collar workers, etc.
He can’t do both—the policy gulf is too wide. And even should Mr. Biden make a few concessions now, there’s no reason to believe the pressure will end. Mr. Sanders says he’s taking his fight all the way to the convention, recently postponed to August. Some party leaders are so worried, they are discussing the possibility that a “virtual” convention could minimize Sanders dissent. Such a move risks infuriating the progressive base.
Polls show the top priority of a majority of Democrats is defeating Mr. Trump. But a majority is not all, and in a close election, party unity and enthusiasm are paramount. For many Sanders voters, ideology matters more than victory. Is the socialist willing to act as a spoiler? By the looks of this week, you bet.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++More married humor:
After my wife died, I couldn't even look at another woman for 10 years. But now that I'm out of jail, I can honestly say it was worth it.
Got an e-mail today from a "bored housewife 32, looking for some action!" I've sent her my ironing, that'll keep her busy.
The wife's been hinting she want's something black and lacy for her birthday. So I've got her a pair of football boots.
Growing up with a dyslexic father had its advantages. Whenever he caught me swearing, he used to wash my mouth out with soup.
My wife asked if she could have a little peace and quiet while she cooked the dinner, so I took the batteries out of the smoke alarm.
Anyone got an owner’s manual for a wife? Mine's giving off a terrible whining noise!
My wife apologised for the first time ever today. She said she's sorry she ever married me.
My wife said I needed to be more in touch with my feminine side, so I crashed the car, burnt the dinner and ignored her all day for no reason
Scientists have discovered a certain food that diminishes a woman's sex drive by 90 percent. It's called wedding cake.
Things turned really ugly at my house last night. The wife removed her make up.
My wife shouted at me this morning for not opening the car door for her. I would have, but I was too busy swimming to the surface.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In his usual, in your face, method of writing, Hanson goes after three serious topics and I am repeating this posting because all need to read the other side and let it soak in if you have any desire to be objective.
David Hanson evaluates reactions of others to Coronavirus crisis:
Corona Meltdowns - Is the bad and self-negating behavior of so many of Trump’s enemies setting him up for an even more impressive victory in the fall?
By Victor Davis Hanson
As the coronavirus outbreak begins to reach its zenith, it remains unclear whether the measures taken to stem its tide will prove sufficient, insufficient, or an overreaction. What is certain, however, is that a number of individuals and entities have behaved shamefully and demonstrated no capacity for leadership or usefulness in this moment.
Nancy Pelosi: Gone are the mythologies that Nancy Pelosi was a pragmatic liberal voice of reason among the otherwise polarizing American Left, honed after years of paying her dues to the Democratic Party, as the mother of five dutifully ascended the party’s cursus honorum.
It does not matter whether her political and ethical decline was a result of her deep pathological hatred of Donald Trump. Who cares that her paranoia arose over the so-called “Squad” that might align with socialist Bernie Sanders to mesmerize Democrats to march over the cliff into McGovern-like oblivion? All concede that very few octogenarians have the stamina and clarity to put in the 16-hour work-days and transcontinental travel required by a Speaker of the House.
Instead, all that matters is that for a nation in extremis she is now puerile, even unhinged—and increasingly dangerous.
In retrospect, the public will remember how in fear and confusion she reversed course to spearhead impeachment, outsourced the task in the House of Representatives to its most incompetent and perfidious members—Representatives Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)—and wasted weeks of the country’s precious energy and time as it was on the cusp of an epidemic.
Pelosi then quickly weaponized the viral crisis in hopes that COVID-19 could do what Robert Mueller’s dream team and impeachment had not done—destroy the administration of Donald Trump before the November 2020 election. Only such an obsession explains why any sober politico would damn Trump as culpable in January for ignoring the viral dangers, while nearly a month after his necessary and controversial travel ban of January 31—that stopped perhaps 7,000 Chinese citizens entering California per day, some on direct flights from Wuhan—she was doing a photo-op tour to urge the public to get out and shop in San Francisco’s crowded Chinatown: “That’s what we’re trying to do today is to say everything is fine here“.
Such a crazy juxtaposition is not just politics or hypocrisy—it’s insanity. The night before an impeached Trump was acquitted in the Senate, and five days after Trump had controversially stopped incoming Chinese visitors, Pelosi tore up his State of the Union address before a national television audience, a level of spiteful vitriol not seen in the U.S. Congress since the years leading up to the Civil War.
When the Congress finally agreed to call a truce and pass a bipartisan “rescue bill” to stave off a depression and deliver some relief to millions of unemployed, Pelosi single-handedly delayed passage to insert irrelevant progressive treats into the authorization—until she was reprimanded by her own party to cease and desist.
She is now, in the middle of an epidemic, insanely talking about a “truth” impeachment-light commission to investigate Trump. She is absolutely clueless of the nihilistic circus that would ensue when her own previous on-the-record statements, the parasitic investment practices of U.S. senators of both parties, the bizarre behavior of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, the empty January braggadocio of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and Joe Biden’s smearing of the Trump travel ban would be fully aired.
Does she have any idea that by forcing Trump to “own” the virus—predicated on the notion of trusting in bleak but widely criticized Armageddon modeling—she is greenlighting Trump to take credit for the response, especially if coronavirus proves in the end comparable to the 60 million infected, roughly 1 million hospitalized, and 15,000-60,000 dead in the prior influenza epidemics of 2009 or 2017?
It is difficult to find one thing Pelosi has said or done that has not made the country worse off since the virus officially hit our shores in late January.
The Media: Watching the media deal with the daily White House briefings reminds the country that we have never had journalism of this low character before—not in the acrimony over the Founding, not in the furor during the Civil War, not even in the age of yellow journalism at the turn of the 20th century.
Reporters do not wish to transmit knowledge to the public that might aid in confronting the virus. They do not even wish to clarify murky statements from public officials to ensure Americans know exactly what the government wants them to do.
Instead, journalists during White House briefings fixate on two agendas.
One is to goad the president into saying something sloppy, by repeatedly suggesting that in reacting to the virus, he was in error, that he is cruel and heartless, or that he is dangerous. That gotcha obsession explains why the media can call Trump a xenophobe and racist for issuing a travel ban against China—contrary to the earlier advice of WHO, the Centers for Disease Control, the media, and the entire Democratic Party hierarchy—then silently support it. It explains why they then use doctored Chinese data and propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party to convince Americans that China—a nation that lied about the origins, spread, and nature of the virus—is admirably doing a better job in containing the virus than is their own country. Even the media cannot keep straight their own anti-Trump gymnastics.
If evidence convinces Trump to let the public know that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are efficacious in treating patients infected with coronavirus, then reporters will seek to persuade Americans that such off-label uses have no utility and are dangerous—even if they have to stoop to find some nut who drank fish-tank cleaner, clearly marked unfit for human consumption, to argue that a nonpotable chloroquine derivative cleaning agent provides proof of “Dr.” Trump’s deadly ignorance.
But the White House press obsesses over a second agenda, too. It must always prove that previously respected figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, once embraced by the liberal media in their pre-Trump days, either are in revolt against their doltish boss or brain-washed into obsequious enslavement to the president. Often the media advances both antithetical scenarios near simultaneously.
The third rail for the media is that Fauci and Birx are empirical and sound mostly politically disinterested. They seek to provide Trump with scientific data about the virus to balance his incoming streams of financial, economic, military, and cultural information.
When Trump accepts their advice over objections from other advisors with competing national concerns, the two feel it was for the good of the country. When he demurs, they press their arguments as advocates of public health. And when they rarely lose an argument the two concede the president has to balance dozens of existential concerns.
In other words, it would be hard, for anyone other than the current press corps, on Monday to paint Fauci and Birx as frustrated scientists at the mercy of a moron who refuses to listen to science, while on Tuesday writing off both as Trump toadies who have joined the forces of darkness.
But that is currently the schizophrenic state of the American media. The only constant is that whatever Trump advocated, they are against, even if lives are at stake. And whatever Trump policy seems to be working for the good of the country, they either deny or ignore it.
Another irony: While the current media is the logical culmination of the liberal biases of the more polite leftwing domination of network and print media of the late twentieth century, it is now also far more vulnerable to exposure and ridicule. After all, it was progressive Silicon Valley’s creation of the Internet website and social media that have allowed truth to emerge past even media filters, truth that has largely exposed the media as incompetent, mean spirited, and increasingly irrelevant.
Joe Biden: The virus shutdown was first seen as providing a necessary respite for the 77-year-old former vice president to go home, rest up, and recuperate after an exhausting summer, fall, and winter of campaigning—an ordeal that supposedly had explained Biden’s increasing flubs and gaffes.
Indeed, when the shutdown first began, a rested Biden, coming off a well enough debate performance against Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), was to broadcast daily out of his home. In informal fireside chat fashion, good ol’ Joe from Scranton would offer “here’s the deal” homilies and “point one, point two, point something or other” commentaries on the virus and Trump’s inadequate response to it.
But what followed was an ungodly disaster, as if the problem all along never was Biden’s weariness, but Biden himself. A rested Biden’s botched commentaries only convinced observers that a President Biden at this moment would be a veritable catastrophe. Biden seemed more confused from his home than he was on the campaign stump. He tried reading from a teleprompter script, and then talking ex tempore, and then both, and found he could do neither.
After blasting Trump as a xenophobe and racist for the January 31 travel ban, Biden hemmed and hawed and finally conceded he agreed with the ban. His staff claimed his xenophobic/racist allegations were in connection to Trump’s use of “Chinese virus”—a rubric first institutionalized probably by CNN. Yet Trump used that terminology only after, not before, Biden’s smear. Now Biden apparently is trying to argue that Trump should have issued the once “racist” and “xenophobic” ban even earlier—as Biden its former critic supposedly would have done. Once Biden decided he had to be against everything Trump was for, and once Trump was for most things that the so-called experts thought best, then Biden inevitably was in Pavlovian fashion against what was good for the country.
The truth is that Biden cannot find much to disagree with, given that most Democrats—Pelosi and DeBlasio, especially—were playing down the severity of the virus, as was Anthony Fauci himself in January.
Anytime Biden faulted Trump for belated responses, it was easy for Biden’s opponents to show that almost no one but Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in early January was alarmed about the impending danger (and smeared by the Left for his warnings), and even easier given that Trump’s travel ban met fierce opposition as not merely racist but unnecessary and exaggerated.
Biden earlier also had promised a diversity vice president and is now wedded to that commitment. But the only Democrat in the present crisis who is winning mainstream media acclaim is Governor Andrew Cuomo, despite the paradox that he was also once exaggerating his own readiness for the virus and bragging about the openness of New York to the world. So far, he governs a state with the greatest numbers of virus cases as well as deaths and per capita fatality rates—facts which according to the blame—game logic of the Left are political fodder.
Nonetheless, Cuomo is being touted both as the far more competitive candidate in a crisis than the fumbling Biden, and yet he will prove almost impossible to nominate given Biden’s long campaign and delegate lead. The best squaring of that circle in the eyes of Democrat politicos would be to have Cuomo as the vice-presidential nominee on the ticket. He could rectify some of Biden’s gaffing, and do most of the fall campaigning, while with a wink and nod reassuring voters that he would likely have to step in for a President Biden if the latter’s present disturbing lapses continue.
Now that option seems less likely given Biden’s earlier politically correct grandstanding of promising a diversity vice-presidential pick without a clue of who such a person might be.
For now, the media, Pelosi, and Biden, along with the Left in general, wish to perpetuate a sense of viral Armageddon to make it politically impossible for Trump to initiate a graduated plan of returning America to work. Their hope is for a summer and fall of continued lock down, a near depression rather than a mere recession, and enough public furor to end Trump in November—while hoping that a sudden post-election end to the lock down will allow the natural recovery of Trump’s booming economy on their watch in 2021.
Missing in all these calculations is empathy for those who are ill and the losses that such macabre expectations certainly entail. Also absent is a sense of the irony that, by unfairly scapegoating Trump in hours of darkness, they are ensuring that in the upcoming dawn, he will be credited by their same logic with owning what will likely be an impressive U.S. response to suppressing the virus and reviving the economy.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
In his usual, in your face, method of writing, Hanson goes after three serious topics and I am repeating this posting because all need to read the other side and let it soak in if you have any desire to be objective.
David Hanson evaluates reactions of others to Coronavirus crisis:
Corona Meltdowns - Is the bad and self-negating behavior of so many of Trump’s enemies setting him up for an even more impressive victory in the fall?
By Victor Davis Hanson
As the coronavirus outbreak begins to reach its zenith, it remains unclear whether the measures taken to stem its tide will prove sufficient, insufficient, or an overreaction. What is certain, however, is that a number of individuals and entities have behaved shamefully and demonstrated no capacity for leadership or usefulness in this moment.
Nancy Pelosi: Gone are the mythologies that Nancy Pelosi was a pragmatic liberal voice of reason among the otherwise polarizing American Left, honed after years of paying her dues to the Democratic Party, as the mother of five dutifully ascended the party’s cursus honorum.
It does not matter whether her political and ethical decline was a result of her deep pathological hatred of Donald Trump. Who cares that her paranoia arose over the so-called “Squad” that might align with socialist Bernie Sanders to mesmerize Democrats to march over the cliff into McGovern-like oblivion? All concede that very few octogenarians have the stamina and clarity to put in the 16-hour work-days and transcontinental travel required by a Speaker of the House.
Instead, all that matters is that for a nation in extremis she is now puerile, even unhinged—and increasingly dangerous.
In retrospect, the public will remember how in fear and confusion she reversed course to spearhead impeachment, outsourced the task in the House of Representatives to its most incompetent and perfidious members—Representatives Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)—and wasted weeks of the country’s precious energy and time as it was on the cusp of an epidemic.
Pelosi then quickly weaponized the viral crisis in hopes that COVID-19 could do what Robert Mueller’s dream team and impeachment had not done—destroy the administration of Donald Trump before the November 2020 election. Only such an obsession explains why any sober politico would damn Trump as culpable in January for ignoring the viral dangers, while nearly a month after his necessary and controversial travel ban of January 31—that stopped perhaps 7,000 Chinese citizens entering California per day, some on direct flights from Wuhan—she was doing a photo-op tour to urge the public to get out and shop in San Francisco’s crowded Chinatown: “That’s what we’re trying to do today is to say everything is fine here“.
Such a crazy juxtaposition is not just politics or hypocrisy—it’s insanity. The night before an impeached Trump was acquitted in the Senate, and five days after Trump had controversially stopped incoming Chinese visitors, Pelosi tore up his State of the Union address before a national television audience, a level of spiteful vitriol not seen in the U.S. Congress since the years leading up to the Civil War.
When the Congress finally agreed to call a truce and pass a bipartisan “rescue bill” to stave off a depression and deliver some relief to millions of unemployed, Pelosi single-handedly delayed passage to insert irrelevant progressive treats into the authorization—until she was reprimanded by her own party to cease and desist.
She is now, in the middle of an epidemic, insanely talking about a “truth” impeachment-light commission to investigate Trump. She is absolutely clueless of the nihilistic circus that would ensue when her own previous on-the-record statements, the parasitic investment practices of U.S. senators of both parties, the bizarre behavior of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, the empty January braggadocio of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and Joe Biden’s smearing of the Trump travel ban would be fully aired.
Does she have any idea that by forcing Trump to “own” the virus—predicated on the notion of trusting in bleak but widely criticized Armageddon modeling—she is greenlighting Trump to take credit for the response, especially if coronavirus proves in the end comparable to the 60 million infected, roughly 1 million hospitalized, and 15,000-60,000 dead in the prior influenza epidemics of 2009 or 2017?
It is difficult to find one thing Pelosi has said or done that has not made the country worse off since the virus officially hit our shores in late January.
The Media: Watching the media deal with the daily White House briefings reminds the country that we have never had journalism of this low character before—not in the acrimony over the Founding, not in the furor during the Civil War, not even in the age of yellow journalism at the turn of the 20th century.
Reporters do not wish to transmit knowledge to the public that might aid in confronting the virus. They do not even wish to clarify murky statements from public officials to ensure Americans know exactly what the government wants them to do.
Instead, journalists during White House briefings fixate on two agendas.
One is to goad the president into saying something sloppy, by repeatedly suggesting that in reacting to the virus, he was in error, that he is cruel and heartless, or that he is dangerous. That gotcha obsession explains why the media can call Trump a xenophobe and racist for issuing a travel ban against China—contrary to the earlier advice of WHO, the Centers for Disease Control, the media, and the entire Democratic Party hierarchy—then silently support it. It explains why they then use doctored Chinese data and propaganda from the Chinese Communist Party to convince Americans that China—a nation that lied about the origins, spread, and nature of the virus—is admirably doing a better job in containing the virus than is their own country. Even the media cannot keep straight their own anti-Trump gymnastics.
If evidence convinces Trump to let the public know that hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin are efficacious in treating patients infected with coronavirus, then reporters will seek to persuade Americans that such off-label uses have no utility and are dangerous—even if they have to stoop to find some nut who drank fish-tank cleaner, clearly marked unfit for human consumption, to argue that a nonpotable chloroquine derivative cleaning agent provides proof of “Dr.” Trump’s deadly ignorance.
But the White House press obsesses over a second agenda, too. It must always prove that previously respected figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, once embraced by the liberal media in their pre-Trump days, either are in revolt against their doltish boss or brain-washed into obsequious enslavement to the president. Often the media advances both antithetical scenarios near simultaneously.
The third rail for the media is that Fauci and Birx are empirical and sound mostly politically disinterested. They seek to provide Trump with scientific data about the virus to balance his incoming streams of financial, economic, military, and cultural information.
When Trump accepts their advice over objections from other advisors with competing national concerns, the two feel it was for the good of the country. When he demurs, they press their arguments as advocates of public health. And when they rarely lose an argument the two concede the president has to balance dozens of existential concerns.
In other words, it would be hard, for anyone other than the current press corps, on Monday to paint Fauci and Birx as frustrated scientists at the mercy of a moron who refuses to listen to science, while on Tuesday writing off both as Trump toadies who have joined the forces of darkness.
But that is currently the schizophrenic state of the American media. The only constant is that whatever Trump advocated, they are against, even if lives are at stake. And whatever Trump policy seems to be working for the good of the country, they either deny or ignore it.
Another irony: While the current media is the logical culmination of the liberal biases of the more polite leftwing domination of network and print media of the late twentieth century, it is now also far more vulnerable to exposure and ridicule. After all, it was progressive Silicon Valley’s creation of the Internet website and social media that have allowed truth to emerge past even media filters, truth that has largely exposed the media as incompetent, mean spirited, and increasingly irrelevant.
Joe Biden: The virus shutdown was first seen as providing a necessary respite for the 77-year-old former vice president to go home, rest up, and recuperate after an exhausting summer, fall, and winter of campaigning—an ordeal that supposedly had explained Biden’s increasing flubs and gaffes.
Indeed, when the shutdown first began, a rested Biden, coming off a well enough debate performance against Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), was to broadcast daily out of his home. In informal fireside chat fashion, good ol’ Joe from Scranton would offer “here’s the deal” homilies and “point one, point two, point something or other” commentaries on the virus and Trump’s inadequate response to it.
But what followed was an ungodly disaster, as if the problem all along never was Biden’s weariness, but Biden himself. A rested Biden’s botched commentaries only convinced observers that a President Biden at this moment would be a veritable catastrophe. Biden seemed more confused from his home than he was on the campaign stump. He tried reading from a teleprompter script, and then talking ex tempore, and then both, and found he could do neither.
After blasting Trump as a xenophobe and racist for the January 31 travel ban, Biden hemmed and hawed and finally conceded he agreed with the ban. His staff claimed his xenophobic/racist allegations were in connection to Trump’s use of “Chinese virus”—a rubric first institutionalized probably by CNN. Yet Trump used that terminology only after, not before, Biden’s smear. Now Biden apparently is trying to argue that Trump should have issued the once “racist” and “xenophobic” ban even earlier—as Biden its former critic supposedly would have done. Once Biden decided he had to be against everything Trump was for, and once Trump was for most things that the so-called experts thought best, then Biden inevitably was in Pavlovian fashion against what was good for the country.
The truth is that Biden cannot find much to disagree with, given that most Democrats—Pelosi and DeBlasio, especially—were playing down the severity of the virus, as was Anthony Fauci himself in January.
Anytime Biden faulted Trump for belated responses, it was easy for Biden’s opponents to show that almost no one but Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in early January was alarmed about the impending danger (and smeared by the Left for his warnings), and even easier given that Trump’s travel ban met fierce opposition as not merely racist but unnecessary and exaggerated.
Biden earlier also had promised a diversity vice president and is now wedded to that commitment. But the only Democrat in the present crisis who is winning mainstream media acclaim is Governor Andrew Cuomo, despite the paradox that he was also once exaggerating his own readiness for the virus and bragging about the openness of New York to the world. So far, he governs a state with the greatest numbers of virus cases as well as deaths and per capita fatality rates—facts which according to the blame—game logic of the Left are political fodder.
Nonetheless, Cuomo is being touted both as the far more competitive candidate in a crisis than the fumbling Biden, and yet he will prove almost impossible to nominate given Biden’s long campaign and delegate lead. The best squaring of that circle in the eyes of Democrat politicos would be to have Cuomo as the vice-presidential nominee on the ticket. He could rectify some of Biden’s gaffing, and do most of the fall campaigning, while with a wink and nod reassuring voters that he would likely have to step in for a President Biden if the latter’s present disturbing lapses continue.
Now that option seems less likely given Biden’s earlier politically correct grandstanding of promising a diversity vice-presidential pick without a clue of who such a person might be.
For now, the media, Pelosi, and Biden, along with the Left in general, wish to perpetuate a sense of viral Armageddon to make it politically impossible for Trump to initiate a graduated plan of returning America to work. Their hope is for a summer and fall of continued lock down, a near depression rather than a mere recession, and enough public furor to end Trump in November—while hoping that a sudden post-election end to the lock down will allow the natural recovery of Trump’s booming economy on their watch in 2021.
Missing in all these calculations is empathy for those who are ill and the losses that such macabre expectations certainly entail. Also absent is a sense of the irony that, by unfairly scapegoating Trump in hours of darkness, they are ensuring that in the upcoming dawn, he will be credited by their same logic with owning what will likely be an impressive U.S. response to suppressing the virus and reviving the economy.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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