Even in such a worrisome and dangerous time as the current public-health and economic crisis, there are some entertaining election-year maneuvers. The Trump-hating media have been reduced to desperate weaving back and forth in their search for a plausible alternative to the incumbent. And President Trump’s domination of prime-time television every day with a demonstrably competent executive performance, even if it has not been without its Trumpesque flourishes of hyperbole and shifts of position, is propelling the practicing, wildly-out-of-the-closet Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi to severe lapses of judgment. I don’t watch much television, but out of duty and in order to make an informed comment when necessary, I do a reasonable survey of the television, Internet, and national print news. Striding to the front of a dense congestion of thundering hooves as the media charge to the November election finish in their competition to smear the president, Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC told his viewers last week that the president had said that if the country wasn’t on its way back to work and school by Easter Sunday, it would be “dead.” By this alarmist proposition, he apparently meant that the president had said that the whole country would be on suicide watch. The president was always clear that April 12 (Easter) was “aspirational,” and all he said about suicide was that financial difficulties do increase the probability of extremely depressive and hopeless thoughts.
When the president was assuring everyone that the danger was overrated, the media magnified terror stories of the spread and possible lethality of the coronavirus. The usual opinionated talking (air) heads empurpled the airwaves with gloom and accused Trump of disregarding and scoffing at scientists, and of being a militant know-nothing who disparaged science in general. When the president executed a 180-degree turn on two wheels, they tried to shadow him by swarming the television studios and op-ed pages predicting six- to seven-month shutdowns that would bring the entire population except Bernie Sanders’s “millionaires and billionaires” (such as, in the first category, Bernie Sanders) forward to feast off the destruction of the wealth of the middle and working classes. When Trump appeared to be impudently dodging that bullet by saying that the shutdown was necessary but need not be prolonged, this was the signal for former Labor secretary Robert Reich, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, and the lamest duck in American history, New York mayor Bill de Blasio, none of whom knows enough about epidemiology to fill an eye-dropper, bravely to prepare the nation for six or seven months of quarantine, and, implicitly, grinding poverty and societal chaos. In de Blasio’s case, this descent to an economic Stone Age was to be supervised by the armed forces, though what their role, apart from contracting the coronavirus themselves, was to be has not yet been explained.
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See Also:
(1) Don’t Let States Rob COVID-19 Funds to Bail Out Pensions
(3) Trump: America faces ‘rough two weeks’ in coronavirus battle
(4) Barack Obama is Using Wuhan Coronavirus to Push Another Agenda
(5) Scaring the public with coronavirus coverage: A media fright fest
