When Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the national elections in 2016, people cast their votes based on known elements, whether they were personal qualities or political platforms. But given the current reality, the most important factor in choosing a national leader was unanticipated: how they would guide the United States through a global pandemic. Given that the country is gearing up for another election,
It is far easier to criticize after the fact than to have the responsibility and be in the spotlight. This is even more true when the media bears an absurd bias, even animus, against the current administration. The media and many political leaders are involved in reverse engineering their position on COVID-19, declaring opposition to anything President Trump says without considering his position. The result is that there is no Democratic plan for how to handle the crisis, only a reaction that is anti-Trump in the extreme, whether they accurately defined his position or even f his position was grossly misrepresented.
When Trump said that hydroxychloroquine might be used as part of a treatment regimen for COVID-19, the media went on a tear, claiming the medicine was ineffective and should be proscribed. Questionable studies were advance while any evidence supporting its effectivity was censored by the mainstream media and the internet companies. Hydroxychloriquine has been used for treating a range of disorders including lupus, and it was first used to treat malaria in 1930. Its effects and side effects are well-documented. Several medical organizations are currently testing the effectivity of hydroxychloroquine against COVID-1. It is absurd to think that treatments or the banning of treatments are being determined by partisan media campaigns.
The media went to an absurd extreme by claiming that a couple was so influenced by the president’s allegedly misguided medical advice that they ingested fishtank cleaner containing chloroquine phosphate in an attempt to ward off COVID -19. The couple was in their 60s and the husband died. The police announced last week that the police are investigating the possibility that the man’s death was a homicide that resulted from the wife intentionally feeding him the chemical. A quick look into her social media showed that she was a strong supporter of Democrats. She was also investigated in the past on charges she was physically abusing her husband, a retired mechanical engineer who clearly had the intelligence not to ingest toxic chemicals. But the original story, a fictitious narrative that ran counter to the facts, was widely reported. The following story of the police investigation; not so much.
Again, the president was loudly ridiculed after mentioning the possibility of using ultraviolet light, externally and internally, to treat the coronavirus. A few hours later, the social media of the company developing a UV catheter was removed from the internet.
But this reverse engineering is perhaps best illustrated by the duplicity of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In response to President Trump’s China travel ban at the end of January, Pelosi proposed the No Ban Act, claiming the travel ban was racist. In February, Pelosi made a video encouraging people to visit Chinatown en masse. She now claims the video was to discourage racism and not to encourage people to disregard social distancing, a claim the video does not support.
But this merely outlines the manner in which the president’s opponents choose their political agenda over saving lives. A closer look at their words reveals what they would have done if 2016 had turned out differently.
In a power grab, the powerful take advantages not available to the general public. While Washington D.C. was in full lockdown, Obama was photographed golfing at the elite Robert Trent Jones Country Club in Prince William County, Va., about 40 miles from his Washington home. Chris Cuomo, the CNN anchorman and brother of the mayor of New York City, verbally attacked a citizen who rebuked him for violating quarantine. Cuomo, who had been diagnosed with coronavirus, responded ‘Who the hell are you? I can do what I want!”
During a virtual town hall meeting last week with Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton lamented the gradual disappearance of the disastrous and unconstitutional Affordable Care Act pushed upon America by former President Barack Obama. She blithely noted that the pandemic that has killed over a quarter of a million people worldwide was a marvelous political opportunity for her party which could allow them to socialize medicine and push legalized abortion on the populace.
“This is a high stakes time because of the pandemic, but this is also a really high stakes election, and every form of healthcare should continue to be available, including reproductive healthcare for every woman in this country. And then, it needs to be part of a much larger system that eventually, and quickly I hope, gets us to universal healthcare. So, I can only say amen to everything you’re saying, but also to, again, enlist people that this would be a terrible crisis to waste, as the old saying goes-That this would be a terrible crisis to waste as the old saying goes. We’ve learned a lot about what our absolute frailties are in our country when it comes to health justice and economic justice so let’s be resolved that we’re going to solve those once you’re elected president.”
Clinton did not misspeak. She has referred to this cold-blooded adage for many years, using it in 2009 to describe to the European Parliament to explain how the widespread economic recession during the Obama administration could be used to leverage global compliance with a “greener” social program and to achieve “energy security.”
This view of the coronavirus, seeing the pandemic as an opportunity to make changes that democracy and normal channels of government would not allow, is not an anomaly unique to Hillary Clinton. It is endemic to the party, perhaps even a guiding principle.
Biden did not miss his cue to chime in with this credo, merging Clinton’s agenda with one espoused by Obama. On Monday, Biden told a group of Latino supporters during a livestream, “I truly think, if we do this right, we have an incredible opportunity to not just dig out of this crisis, but to fundamentally transform the country.”
His concept of “transforming the country” was a major talking point of his former boss and has become a mainstay for Biden who in recent weeks has talked about leveraging the crisis to advance progressive policies.
Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former Chief of Staff and a senior adviser to Bill Clinton, also expressed this perception of the coronavirus.
For all his faults and foibles, Donald Trump’s methods and motives are transparent. He is not a savvy politician so he does not see the political advantages of a pandemic. He is and has always been a businessman; in his own words a deal maker. Sick people do not show up for work or to buy at stores, and dead people are of no benefit to the economy.
“You never let a serious crisis go to waste,” Emanuel said recently. “And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
The concept of an advantageous crisis was first credited to Winston Churchill who used it at the end of World War II who used the post-traumatic condition of the world to forge a normally unthinkable alliance between Britain, the U.S., and Russia, resulting in the formation of the United Nations.
The media coverage is undisputably inaccurate, prejudiced, and unreliable even in matters of life and death. But even worse than the bad media coverage might be the not-so-well-hidden agenda that would have materialized
Source: Israel in the News
