"Blame Trump"

In the American Spectator, Dov Fischer writes in part,

George W. Bush — someone whom the Left and their Corrupt Journalist Corps labeled as an idiot — built up a strategic stockpile of N95 respirator masks and other protective medical equipment, warning that America had to build and maintain a national strategic stockpile to deal with a pandemic that, sooner or later, one day again would strike the United States. Obama — someone whom the Left and their Corrupt Journalist Corps labeled as messianic, brilliant, and cool — made use of Bush’s national strategic stockpile and never replenished it during the Wasted Obama Decade. He left his successor with a mess:

An energy policy that saw us buying oil from Arab Muslim dictators who butcher even their own people, even as Obama did his most to prevent us from exploring and extracting our own natural energy resources. He fought hydraulic fracturing, fought the Keystone XL pipeline, fought the Dakota Access Pipeline, and signed Paris Climate Accords that punished our own energy producers but that did not impose similar burdens on the world’s main polluters, China and India. Meanwhile, Obama sank nearly a billion dollars in Solyndra and wasted more in other Green Energy pipe dreams when we needed pipelines.

A worn-down and demoralized military. Obama mocked Mitt Romney in debates when the GOP standard-bearer warned that we are not properly armed to stand up to Russia. He allowed the Navy to float, military pay to stagnate, veterans care to waste, ISIS to grow from a junior varsity to a near-caliphate. Putin and China both saw the weakness and took advantage while the going was good. So Putin took Crimea and gained a foothold in eastern Ukraine. China expanded into artificial islands they built. Putin gained new footholds in the Middle East and elsewhere. All while Obama brandished his pretty Nobel Prize for stopping the oceans from rising and healing the Earth.

A run-down medical infrastructure. While he focused great effort on socializing American medicine with his Obamacare, which forced people to pay to insure for birth control that violated their consciences and forced men to pay to be insured for pregnancy coverage that violated their common sense, he allowed the nation’s medical-emergency stockpile to dwindle and dissipate.

...Word was spreading in late 2019 that something nasty was going on in China. But something nasty always is going on in China. And yes it gets really nasty, these China-bred pandemics, the inexorable offshoot of people at wet markets eating limbs of living creatures, eating snakes and dogs and rats and bats. So we have seen them before, and often. H1N1/Swine flu. Avian/Bird flu. SARS.

Asian flu came in 1957 out of China’s southwestern province of Guizhou. Guess where the 1968 “Hong Kong flu” came from. Uh-huh. Bird flu came in 1997 out of Hong Kong, too. Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) came in late 2002 from the southern Guangdong province. It started with bats, moved to civet cats — and then to the Chinese people who eat those cats. Swine flu hit in 2009, getting its name for its particularly deadly impact on pigs in China. Each of these miserable illnesses killed tens of thousands — and more — and no one initially saw coronavirus 2019 as being all that different.

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