Inevitably, the coronavirus becomes a political football

We're seeing the beginnings of coordinated action by the Democratic Party, and its allies in the mainstream media, to use the coronavirus pandemic as a means to attack President Trump and the Republican Party.  Any and every "news" report can and will be skewed to portray the latter in the most unfavorable light possible.  Headlines may bear little or no relation to the content of the report that follows, because those writing them know that many readers won't go much further than the headline;  so a misleading one, even if not supported by the details, will do its propaganda best.

Here's one example from yesterday.  The Drudge Report, a reliably anti-Trump source, headlined its main page as follows:

Fox News, a more-or-less reliably pro-Trump source, used this headline:

Fauci expresses 'cautious optimism' on coronavirus,

says lives could have been saved if US acted earlier

Which headline is correct?  Apparently the second, because what Dr. Fauci actually said was this:

He acknowledged that lives could have been saved had U.S. officials acted earlier, but still defended the Trump administration's response. “‘What would have, what could have,’ it’s very difficult to go back and say that. I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But, what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated." He continued, "If we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different, but there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down.”

No anti-Trump source that I was able to find disagreed with that content.  In other words, Dr. Fauci didn't "download on Trump";  in fact, he doesn't even appear to have mentioned his name in connection with the dilemma over when, and how far, to shut down the USA in response to the pandemic.  In this case, the Drudge headline is clearly slanted, biased propaganda, rather than news, while the Fox headline is a much more accurate reflection of what Dr. Fauci actually said and/or implied.

Looking at the headlines over the weekend, it's clear that most of the anti-Trump media (including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy [owned by the WaPo's holding company], The Atlantic, and the many other usual suspects) are all in lock-step over ascribing the pandemic's consequences to the present Administration's mistakes in handling it.  It's becoming a constant, daily drumbeat of propaganda.  They're clearly taking their marching orders from a central set of "talking points", orchestrated by the Democratic Party and/or its influential backers.

In reality, as I mentioned last week, from an historical perspective there were plenty of mistakes made, on both sides of the political aisle, that led to the problems we've experienced in our national response.  There's more than enough blame to go around - but why bother?  Our immediate task isn't to exact retribution for what was done, or not done, five months, or five years, or five decades ago.  It's to solve our present crisis.  When, and only when, we've done that, need we worry about pinpointing blame - but that won't prevent the same problems from arising again, because their basic cause is human nature.

In good times, we forget or ignore the bad, and so we're not prepared when the latter come around again.  It's been that way throughout human history.  The current pandemic is no exception.  Anyone trying to tell you that this time is different, that this time one side alone is to blame while the other is doing its best to cope despite its political opponents . . . they're lying through their teeth.  The truth is not in them.  Whoever they are, on whatever side of the political aisle, if they try to lie to you like that, consider voting against them and for their opponent.  US politics will probably be healthier for it.




Peter