Will Coronavirus Change the World?

Roll out the great minds. Our elite intellectuals are having a moment. They are training their sights on the future, predicting the ways that the coronavirus will change the world. After all, they love to think about what isn’t, and they are waxing prophetic about how our world will never be the same again.

From philosopher John Gray to Henry Kissinger himself, they all agree that the 2020 pandemic will mark a decisive turning point in human history. For those who possess a healthy cynicism this means that very little will change.

After all, the American Democratic Party, sustained by our greatest media intellectuals, have been working the virus for political advantage. They have done everything in their power to blame it on Trump, no matter what happens. Now they want to investigate the Trump administration. Because the best way to help the administration deal with the virus is to tie it down with subpoenas. 

Naturally, the media is the worst. Not one of them can even feign any interest in eliciting factual information. Their goal in life is to undermine Trump’s authority, in a practice that continues to feel like sedition. The free press, exercising its constitutional rights, has become a propaganda organ, its sole purpose being to score points against the president.

Kurt Schlicter describes these great minds (via Maggie’s Farm):

We Americans are truly blessed by having a mainstream media full of brilliant renaissance men, women, and gender non-specific entities who are masters of so many varied and intermittently useful skills and who are eager to share their knowledge with us benighted souls. The pandemic has revealed that every urban Twitter blue check scribbler, MSNBCNN panelist, NYT/WaPo doofus, and barely legal “senior editor” of a website you never heard of, is a Nobel Prize-winning epidemiologist, a master logistician, and a diversity consultant too boot.

They may all be lousy journalists, but damn it, they are also lousy at other jobs that they didn’t even pretend to train to do.

It’s awesome to see people with zero life experience in any relevant field weighing in as if we shouldn’t just laugh in their pimply faces. 

And then there are the labor unions. It is worth noting that unions are now doing their best to try to extract concessions from their employers… because that’s what unions do. Witness what is happening in New York State. Victoria Taft describes the situation at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York:

And the middle of a national emergency, in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a time when everyone is making sacrifices, union members are threatening Amazon: Do what I say. Or Else.

New York's far-left collection of socialists, unionistas, and lawmakers have sent letters to Bezos and his top executives to dictate to them how they should run the warehouse that is bringing food and other necessities to Americans who can't go out and get them.

To be clear, they're not just threatening Amazon, the unions have threatened everyone who has come to rely on the ubiquitous company.

As PJ Media's Tyler O'Neil reports, it all started with a warehouse worker who was fired when he declared the Amazon warehouse unsafe for the employees during the COVID-19 outbreak and decided to organize a strike. Well, that's how the unions tell it. 

The backstory is a bit more, ah, interesting than that. It turns out that the wannabe unionist was under orders not to come to work because he'd been exposed to COVID-19 and was on fully PAID medically-ordered quarantine. He came to his strike anyway and potentially exposed other people to the virus. That's why he was fired. He broke the company's COVID-19 protocols.

Be that as it may, the imbeciles who we have elected to govern New York State have decided to threaten the jobs of Amazon employees in Staten Island. After all, led by a certifiable imbecile named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they already persuaded Amazon to change its mind about its Queens hub. Will the Staten Island warehouse be the next to go?

If you like, while we inveigh against the Chinese Communist Party and their own influence on factory unions, we should all watch the Oscar winning documentary, American Factory. There we learn that American labor unions, along with excessive red tape, are far more intrusive and obstructive than is the Chinese Communist Party. It is not an accident that only 6% of the private sector workforce is now unionized. 

Anyway, it’s one thing to say we want other countries to practice free enterprise and democratic governance, if we expect other countries to adopt our political system we should at least make it work over here. We do not make it work if we have a seditious press and labor unions who would rather shut down a factory than to work for the common good. And if we have government officials who place their party good ahead of the national good.

A threat like the corona virus ought to unite the country. It ought to bring us all together in a common purpose, toward a common end. It’s one thing to say that we need vigorous public debate. It’s quite another to say that we should undermine the authority of the executive in the midst of a war.

Of course, some of those who see a brave new world emerging from the pandemic are more interesting and intelligent. Consider the case of philosopher John Gray, writing in the New Statesman. Gray is a notably pessimistic soul, but an uncommonly intelligent one too.

He begins by saying that the pandemic has put an end to globalization. It has told us that we should not be reliant on other nations for essential goods. It has exposed a crack in the free trade foundation.

Naturally, now that we know how much we rely on China for medication and for techno gadgets, our great thinkers have decided to declare rhetorical warfare against China… the better to persuade Chinese companies to cease relying on America. And besides, everyone ought to know that China counterpunches. If you threaten it, it will threaten back. Hopefully, those who are beating the war drums against China have a way of countering any counterpunch… with something other than empty rhetoric.

Gray writes about the end of globalization and the end of wistful hopes for international community:

The era of peak globalisation is over. An economic system that relied on worldwide production and long supply chains is morphing into one that will be less interconnected. A way of life driven by unceasing mobility is shuddering to a stop. Our lives are going to be more physically constrained and more virtual than they were. A more fragmented world is coming into being that in some ways may be more resilient. 

Universalism is giving way to nationalism. Suddenly, we have discovered the virtue of borders and boundaries. 

But, Gray suggests that we are not going back to mercantilist policies, to a world where everything is produced locally. It is nice to say that we are going to bring manufacturing back home, but whatever makes anyone think that American factories can produce the same quality products at a feasible price point.

It’s the end of Davos. In Gray’s terms:

Human numbers are too large for local self-sufficiency to be viable, and most of humankind is not willing to return to the small, closed communities of a more distant past. But the hyperglobalisation of the last few decades is not coming back either. The virus has exposed fatal weaknesses in the economic system that was patched up after the 2008 financial crisis. Liberal capitalism is bust. 

He continues:

With all its talk of freedom and choice, liberalism was in practice the experiment of dissolving traditional sources of social cohesion and political legitimacy and replacing them with the promise of rising material living standards. This experiment has now run its course. Suppressing the virus necessitates an economic shutdown that can only be temporary, but when the economy restarts, it will be in a world where governments act to curb the global market.

Surely, America is suffering from a lack of social cohesion. You might believe, as I do, that America’s progressive left, what with its disdain for patriotism, has effectively sabotaged America’s sense of national purpose. For that we must give credit to the Obama administration. 

Surely, Gray makes an interesting point when he suggests that liberalism has recommended that we replace social cohesion with rising living standards. If you watch American Factory or observe how nations in Asia are dealing with the coronavirus, you will have noticed that they extol the value of company and national loyalty. These civic virtues are on life support in today’s America.

While America’s liberal journalists bemoan the end of their liberal order, Gray points out sagely that there is no global authority that can manage the crisis:

There is no world authority to enforce an end to growth, just as there is none to fight the virus. Contrary to the progressive mantra, recently repeated by Gordon Brown, global problems do not always have global solutions. Geopolitical divisions preclude anything like world government. If one existed, existing states would compete to control it. The belief that this crisis can be solved by an unprecedented outbreak of international cooperation is magical thinking in its purest form.

A nice note to end the post. 

What's in a Maiden Name?

What’s in a name?

You are familiar with the old saw: when a feminist marries she strikes a blow against the patriarchy by keeping her father’s name.

So, yesterday a woman who is engaged to be married wrote to Carolyn Hax about a disagreement she is having with her fiance. She wants to keep what she calls her maiden name. Her fiance wants her to change her name when she marries.

So, Hax tells her to call off the engagement, to walk away from her commitment because she must get her way. It is genuinely bad advice, offered by a woman who ought at the least to tell us whether she, being married, has kept her name. By my understanding she has, but she is a writer, so her maiden name is now a nom de plume. 

As it happens, Hax is behind the times. Women today, by my decidedly unscientific sampling, are more likely to accept their husbands’ names. They have seen the kinds of confusions that are produced when a woman does not have the same name as her husband and children. They also understand that a married woman and an unmarried woman are treated differently. Thus, they want the world to know their new status. And they want men to treat them accordingly.

I also know that some couples choose to connect their names, so that each partner will henceforth be known by a hyphenated name, something like: Fauntleroy-Rubinofsky. It is, as the example suggests, positively idiotic, if only because, a child who bears such a ridiculous concatenation of syllables will undoubtedly be mocked by classmates on the playground. Besides what happens when Fauntleroy-Rubinofsky marries Teagarden-Postefowich. One does better to accept custom, and to understand that the custom is there for a reason. People who make up their own customs subject themselves and their offspring to ridicule.

Anyway, here is the letter:

My fiance and I have been butting heads regarding changing my last name. I have the typical arguments for not wanting to change it, for my career, but it is complicated by the fact I work for a large multinational organization and have spent close to a decade building my career in this organization under this name. I am also the last in my family to have my maiden name, and we believe it will die off with me.

My fiance does not sympathize and believes it is because I don't want to go through the hassle of going to court, changing all my documents, etc., and he argues that if society forced the male to change their name, he would do it, no questions asked.

He acknowledges that short of putting a gun to my head, he can't actually make me do anything, but he is quite upset we will not "look like a family" on paper. I am unsure of what else to tell him. Help?

The woman is obviously not very bright. She is worried that her father’s name will die out if she changes her name. In truth, if she does not name her child with her father’s name, it will obviously die out, either now or eventually. And why, after she is married does she insist on remaining a maiden… because this is what the maiden name suggests? 

So, Hax considers the man an anachronism and sets out to wreck this woman’s engagement. We cannot call her a home wrecker, but we can see in her attitude the kind of thinking that has destroyed many relationships.

Here are her thoughts, such as they are:

[I]f society forced the male to change their name”? Wha?

“Society” isn’t forcing you to do it, either. And it’s disheartening that he’s okay with your paying a significant personal price to feed an “on paper” standard that is decades past being standard anyway.

It’s even more disheartening that he treats you as disingenuous — you gave your reasons! He has decided you’re not telling the truth. Wow.

If he doesn’t think you’re honest, then why is he marrying you? And if he doesn’t think you’re honest, then why are you marrying him?

His problem-solving skills aren’t so hot either: His taking your name would make you “look like a family” as surely as your taking his would.

Whatever you decide about the name is your business, but please don’t budge on his accusations of dishonesty. Right now he’s a no-go — as in, no-marry. There’s no happiness in a marriage to someone who doesn’t trust you or take you at your word — because it’s never just about this one thing you’re fighting about.

Of course, this has nothing to do with trust or with keeping one’s words. Hax is not thinking very clearly here.

Besides, wouldn’t we like to know the attitude of the couple’s families, to say nothing of their entourage. And what would the world think of her if she busted up her engagement because a muddle-headed advice columnist advised her that it was the moment to make a statement of feminist principle? Would it advance her career? If she acts in the office as though she is still single, doesn’t this change the way people relate to her.

Would her friends and family rally to her defense or would they look on her as a pathetic sap for still wanting to make a feminist statement, long after most women, Hax notwithstanding, have discovered that bearing a husband’s name is convenient and economical. 

Politicizing the Pandemic

Here’s some interesting news from the coronavirus treatment front.

First, from Gateway Pundit (via Maggie’s Farm).Dr. Stephen Smith attested to the value of a treatment regimen including the anti-malarial drug  hydroxychloroquine with an antibiotic on the Laura Ingraham show:

[No] person has received five days or more of the hydroxychoroquine-azithro combination has been intubated.  The chance of that occurring by chance according to my sons Elan and Hunter who did some stats for me are .000 something.  It’s ridiculously low. It’s ridiculously low however you look at it. We were looking at selection bias in this situation.  But I cannot think of a reason why. If all else is equal why people that received 5 days or more or even four days or more of this hydroxychloroquine-azithro regimen wouldn’t get intubated… It’s a game-changer.    An absolute game-changer. I think this data goes to really support the French data… Laura, I think this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic.

These results are nearly identical to those reported from Marseilles, France, on this blog.

And then, a poll of physicians around the world suggested the same, via the New York Post:

An international poll of thousands of doctors rated the Trump-touted anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as the best treatment for the novel coronavirus.

Of the 6,227 physicians surveyed in 30 countries, 37 percent rated hydroxychloroquine as the “most effective therapy” for combating the potentially deadly illness, according to the results released Thursday.

The survey, conducted by the global health care polling company Sermo, also found that 23 percent of medical professionals had prescribed the drug in the US — far less than other countries.

“Outside the US, hydroxychloroquine was equally used for diagnosed patients with mild to severe symptoms whereas in the US it was most commonly used for high risk diagnosed patients,” the survey found.

The medicine was most widely used in Spain, where 72 percent of physicians said they had prescribed it.

You would think that physicians in New York State would be embracing this treatment. You would be wrong. They might want to do so, but Governor Andrew Cuomo, he of the soaring poll numbers for his handling the crisis, has banned it from New York. Dr. Mehmet Oz called on Cuomo yesterday to lift the ban:

Dr. Mehmet Oz urged New York Governor [Andrew] Cuomo to lift restrictions placed on anti-malaria drugs that have been raised as a possible solution to combat the coronavirus.

Last week, ... Cuomo issued an executive order barring doctors in New York from prescribing chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to COVID-19 patients in state-approved clinical trials. The pair of drugs has previously been advertised by President Donald Trump as a promising method to help infected patients recover.

Let’s see. For Democrats the mere fact that President Trump touted the possible efficacy of this drug is sufficient reason to ban it. Doesn’t this tell us far more than we want to know about their willingness to politicize everything, even the pandemic?

The American Mind in Disarray

It’s a slice of American life. Or better, it’s a glimpse at the American mind… in complete disarray. Happily a woman wrote this letter to Miss Manners, who is eminently qualified to shame her into good sense.

It shows what happens when a woman decides to live her life and to fashion her verbal expressions according to the rules of political correctness, or wokeness.

Here is the letter:

Is it normal to make decisions in your current relationship based on the fact that you might not be together in the future? Example: I don't want to have my tubes tied in case this marriage does not last, and my next husband wants to have kids with me.

I was having this discussion with my significant other, and they said I was being sensitive and I should not take it negatively — that "it's just real life."

Fortunately, Miss Manners is not woke. She responds:

Say what? Miss Manners was still following you through the example. Certainly, if you do not think a relationship is going to last, no one can blame you for thinking about different possible futures.

A fair point indeed. And yet, what kind of fool expresses such thoughts to her husband… unless she is opening a negotiation about separation. Worse yet, by the time letter writer arrives at her second paragraph, husband has become a significant other: Worse yet, said significant other has also become a they. Polyandry, anyone? I will note what you are thinking, that perhaps the significant other is not her husband, but her paramour.

Expressing those thoughts to a husband you are not so sure about is another matter. Miss Manners got lost when the husband was demoted to a significant other and chided you for being overly sensitive.

If you were the husband on the receiving end of your wife’s unpleasant expression of doubt, it would be reasonable to be upset and concerned that you were being pushed out the door — in thought, if not yet in deed.

Letter writer would do well, in this age of promiscuous empathy, to consider the effect her conjectures might have on her husband. (Assuming that she was talking about it with her husband.)Would he not reasonably imagine that she is on the lookout for her next husband? So says Miss Manners, and she is surely correct.

Besides, we do not know whether the letter writer has or does not have children, or anything else that would help us to understand her predicament. Though, I would sympathize with anyone who asserted the he, she or it did not want to understand her predicament.

The Climate Apocalypse Postponed

Yes, I know that none other than President Obama himself warned us all against not taking climate change seriously. Tom Friedman, writing from a bunker somewhere, even suggested that the failure to respect the dogmas peddled under the name of climate science was of a piece with the failure to understand the dangers of the coronavirus. 

They should all take a deep breath and recognize that predictions are not facts. They are hypotheses.And many of the world’s leading climate scientists believe that the apocalyptic hoopla over the end of the world is seriously overblown. Aside from the fact that scientific truth is not established by taking a vote, that is, by consensus, we might, with our climate hysteria, have been distracting ourselves from the real threats.

 Besides, all the time and money we have spending trying to control the climate might have been spent on pandemic preparations. And, let’s not forget the money we have been spending to provide medical care for the transgendered. Does it all seem quite so urgent right now?

Anyway, it seems that climate change hysteria is taking a back seat to the pandemic. This has produced the following: the world’s most important climate change confab, a meeting that would have gathered together the world’s leading climate change hustlers, is going to be postponed for a year. Which puts it in the same class as the Summer Olympic Games. Apparently, it’s not quite as much of an emergency as people think.

The New York Times reports:

This year’s United Nations-sponsored climate talks, widely regarded as the most important climate meeting of the past four years, were postponed on Wednesday because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The session, known as the Conference of Parties, had been scheduled to take place in Glasgow for a week and a half in mid-November. It was postponed to 2021, the world body’s climate agency and the host government, Britain, confirmed late Wednesday.

“In light of the ongoing, worldwide effects of Covid-19, holding an ambitious, inclusive COP26 in November 2020 is no longer possible,” the British government said in a statement.

The conference venue in Glasgow, an arena where tens of thousands of delegates from around the world were to have gathered, is being turned into a field hospital for people with Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Covid patients are also being housed in the convention center in Madrid where the Conference of Parties took place last December; Spain has one of the world’s largest outbreaks.

The decision to postpone this year’s conference, known as COP26 because it’s the 26th such annual meeting, was made at a virtual meeting of the rotating decision-making board for the conference.

The conference is vital to the world’s ability to avert the worst effects of climate change, including fatal heat waves and flooded coastal cities.

Apparently, it’s not quite as vital as all that. 

The story remarks that it took 26 meetings of this group to forge the Paris climate accord, the one that allows the world’s most polluting nations to continue polluting but that punishes Western democracies.

And let’s note a salient point, one that the Times neglected to mention, namely that the United States is no longer party to this accord-- largely because President Obama did not submit it to the Senate for ratification as a treaty-- and because President Trump withdrew from it. Do you think it will be a big issue in the presidential campaign?

Crisis Leadership: New York City Style

Credit to the Washington Post for undertaking the arduous and thankless task of collecting Comrade Bill de Blasio’s comments on the coronavirus. Over the past few months, until rather recently, Comrade Bill was offering some seriously wrong-headed information. 

Did that contribute to the fact that New York City is now the epicenter of the American pandemic? We report. You decide.

So, the Washington Post:

Throughout the crisis that has now hit New York City harder than any other area of the country, de Blasio offered comments that, like Trump’s, downplayed the threat and suggested that the city was ready for what lay ahead. The mayor also repeatedly told people that transmission of the disease was very unlikely in casual encounters and in public places.

The mayor said Feb. 26 of the city’s 1,200 hospital beds: “We’ve got a long time to ramp up if we ever had anything like that [kind of crisis]. So, the capacity we have right now is outstanding given the challenge we’re facing right now.”

How is that one working out?

Today, a little more than a month later, the resources of New York City hospitals are stretched, and both de Blasio and New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) are pleading with the federal government for more ventilators and other medical equipment.

In the weeks in between, de Blasio repeatedly said the coronavirus was transmitted through prolonged, close exposure and played down the idea that it could travel via casual encounters or touching surfaces that an infected person had touched.

“Occasional contact, glancing contact, temporary contact does not, from everything we know about coronavirus, lead to transmission,” he said March 3. “It needs to be prolonged, you know -- if not intimate, at least prolonged, constant contact.”

Amazingly, few news outlets have called out the mayor for offering dangerously unscientific nonsense.

As a sidelight, David Goldman offers this testimony from Ground Zero-- that would be the New York Subway system. Under the aegis of Comrade Bill, the subways have become what Goldman calls a “squatter’s paradise:”

The clerk at the last local grocery that delivers fresh produce told me she was quitting. She was afraid to take the subway to work, because New York’s homeless have taken over the trains, as daytime temperatures hover around 6 degrees Centigrade. Homeless men living on subway trains were a nuisance before the epidemic as well as a health hazard. In January the corpse of an indigent man was found covered in bedbugs in a subway car.

With normal ridership down more than 90%, the Metropolitan Transit Authority is depending on a $4 billion bailout under the federal government’s aid package to pay interest on its bonds, and the homeless have turned the subways into a squatter’s paradise. New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio has a soft spot for the homeless and police don’t interfere. But that crowds out low-wage supermarket workers and puts the city’s food distribution at risk.

The Free Press Is Now a Propaganda Organ

In some cases logical thinking does not require empirical verification. That’s why ideologues love it. If you say that it will either rain or not rain tomorrow, the weather cannot verify or falsify your statement. The same is true of the statement, when referring to the current pandemic: it might have been better. This should be coupled with the statement: it might have been worse. Empirical evidence can neither prove nor disprove either statement. 

This means, when deciding how to judge leadership in a time of crisis, it serves no useful purpose to say that things might have been better. Because they might also have been worse.

Neither statement requires that we dispense with all considerations about fact. You can certainly find facts to demonstrate the truth of either statement. 

You know and I know that if our president was a Democrat in a time of pandemic, and if he had done exactly the same things that President Trump had done, the media would be rising up with hosannas, to praise his brilliant leadership. Same leadership, same results, different judgment.

If Bill de Blasio and Nancy Pelosi were telling people to go out and have a good time a few weeks ago, this has had no impact on the number of virus cases in New York City. The media tells us that the fault lies entirely with President Trump. 

For media intellectuals and politicians, everything is politics. Everything is about getting a few shots in at the president. This becomes more urgent when your own doddering fool of a candidate cannot utter a sentence without sounding demented.

You know and I know that if Obama were the president, the media would be blaming everything on Fox News. As of today, they are still doing so, because they blame everything on Fox News. The same is true of President Trump. We can only hope that the general public, having tired of the folks who cried wolf, would have seen through the fraud. One hopes, but one still retains some doubt.

Anyway, the media is hard at work spinning the virus as a condemnation of the Trump administration. It began its work explaining that the virus in China was a clear sign that the government of Xi Jinping had lost the mandate of heaven. The media said the same thing in 1989, and...how did that work out. Now that China seems to be on the path to returning to normalcy, the current media narrative is that the coronavirus is an indictment of the Trump administration.

Writing on Real Clear Politics, Richard Benedetto collects some Washington Post headlines, to give us the flavor of propaganda. (via Maggie’s Farm) I would note in passing that we often denounce countries in Asia for not having a free press, for exercising dictatorial control over the media, but have we also measured the extent to which our own mainstream media, guaranteed first amendment freedoms, has been abusing that freedom to be the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party?

The Page One banner headline, splashed across the full six-column width in bold type, read: “Death toll surges past 2,000 in the U.S.” To dramatically illustrate that point, the paper carried a photo of face-masked military police carrying a coffin.  But the caption tells us the coffin was not in the U.S., but in Italy where the death toll has surpassed 10,000.

Other apocalyptic March 29 headlines on the Post front page:

• “The U.S. economy’s downturn has exposed preexisting flaws”
• “Inside Trump’s risky push to reopen the country”
• “World’s poor face grave new hardships while in isolation”
• “States’ needs overwhelm unprepared stockpile”

At the least, they are spinning as fast as they can. They no longer even pretend to be doing objective reporting.

Benedetto turns over the pages and discovers these headlines:

Turning inside the A section, a reader seeking solace would have found, well, none. The headlines included the following:

• “Underfunding, command changes hamper allocation of supplies from stockpile”
• “Major New York City hospital system is at a tipping point”
• “Lack of water is stumbling block for many Americans amid pandemic”
• “Loneliness, poverty grow in isolation”
• “Trump sows confusion as he invokes wide-reaching presidential powers”
• “Battle to reopen U.S. pits Trump against multiple governors”
• “Urban centers across the nation brace for devastating outbreaks”
• “Latest sign recession is intensifying: White-collar workers are being laid off”

Let’s gin up the anxiety. Let’s induce panic. Let’s manipulate emotion to turn the nation against the president in a time of crisis. 

Have any of these crack journalists and editors considered the damage they are doing by undermining Americans faith in their institutions? I doubt that they have. 

But, the Post has found leaders to love: those would be Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. The fact that Pelosi larded the latest stimulus bill with a raft of leftist projects, thus delaying passage, was not noted. The fact that Schumer has been doing everything in his power to prevent the Trump administration from governing effectively-- by holding up confirmations of government officials-- was surely not noted.

To the Post, it does not matter:

Yet, the Post’s  editorial page staff figured their readers could use a pick-me-up after wading through all that woe, so they furnished an oasis – at least for readers who are partisan Democrats -- in the form of  three full pages of opinion extolling the leadership skills of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

 It opened with a nearly full-page color portrait of the speaker, the likes of which are rarely seen in print newspapers these days, let alone the Post, except maybe on inauguration days of new presidents.  (This followed a news section puff piece on Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. Its headline reads, “After years as partisan brawler, Schumer takes leading role to help his country.”)

The Post would have done well to read my post of March 24, wherein I demonstrated that the Democrats had become stupid and malicious. The initial Democratic proposals were so awful that they had to beat a quick retreat and voted for the stimulus bill. 

Of course, the Post editorial pages are rife with suggestions that Trump resign, or, if not resign, get out of the way. People who extol democracy while violating the first rule of democratic decorum-- that would be, to respect the result of fair elections-- are still consumed by their impeachment mania.

But wait, we haven’t come to the editorials and opinion columns yet.  They were uniformly dripping with negativism and criticism of President Trump’s handing of the coronavirus crisis. The Post’s lead editorial bears the headline “We need wartime leaders.” The editors don’t mean an elected chief executive. “The president should hand over the task to others,” they assert. “Then he should get out of the way.”

The editorial does not name who those “others” should be. All the writers seem to be sure of is that Trump should not be in command.  The editorial cartoon by Tom Toles, never a friend of Trump’s, shows a corpulent, pig-like president (his usual depiction by Toles) wearing bunny ears and rolling dice instead of eggs at the 2020 Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn.

“His plan is to roll a fourteen,” Toles writes in the cartoon. I guess Toles assumes savvy Post readers all know you can’t roll dice higher than 12. How clever. It’s a joke on Trump’s candlepower. Get it?

Benedetto concludes:

This is not to say that the media should be painting rosy pictures of a very dangerous situation. At the same time, they should not be using the crisis to frighten people and further their own political agenda.The American public, which is anxious enough in these perilous times, doesn’t need its trusted news sources to be playing political games.

For my part, I would make a small suggestion. The media is not playing political games. It has become a full-on full-throated propaganda machine. It has given up on reporting the news and has definitively broken down the wall between reporting and opinion. 

Just think, we want other countries to adopt our liberal values, when we cannot even practice them ourselves.