Pelosi, the Media, and Biden

Victor Davis Hanson writes in part in American Greatness about Nancy Pelosi:

for a nation in extremis she is now puerile, even unhinged—and increasingly dangerous.

...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“.

...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.

...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.

...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, meanspirited, 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.

...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.

...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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