The Blame Game Continues

For the past week, the internet and the press have been buzzing about a possible treatment for COVID-19. The treatment combines the anti-malarial medicine hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic Azithromycin. The former has anti-viral properties and the latter has anti-inflammatory properties. The combination of the two has shown some promise. Another medication getting praise is chloroquine, a similar drug to hydroxychloroquine.

The President entered the conversation, more than once hoping to be able to get the drugs to people. The medical community has urged caution and the need for clinical trials.

Naturally, some people have gotten their hands on chloroquine and a few have died. Naturally, the media is now blaming the President for this. It is rather pathetic to see just how eager various press outlets are to blame the man for stuff. These stories have been spreading out on the internet for over a week. Doctors have been touting the success of the drug combination. Andrew Cuomo has authorized doctors in New York to start on the drug combination today.

But it is the President’s fault that some idiots decided to get their hands on the drugs and take them. The President has flaws and could do better at times, but blaming him is a cheap shot from the press.

The arguing continues

We are seeing something similar down Pennsylvania Avenue. The New York Times editorial board is blaming Mitch McConnell for the failure of the stimulus plan to pass. This directly contradicts the New York Times’s own headline that first noted the Democrats killed it before it was quickly revised to partisanship killing it.

Why can’t the relief package pass? Nancy Pelosi wants to add in money for a performing arts center, demands for jet engine efficiency, and she wants some language dealing with retirement plans for some newspapers.

These people are not serious. But they are. They are willing to hold up this plan to get what they want. They know the press will cover for them and make excuses for them and blame the GOP for them.

I told you yesterday that before the sun set the media would be in full “Nancy Pelosi Protection” mode. Before noon, Politico ran this headline: “GOP dusts off anti-Pelosi playbook as stimulus negotiations drag on.”

Press coverage of these things has become that predictable.

China

The other area of predictable press coverage is the defense of China. I think this is the thing that makes me the angriest. The press protecting Democrats is something they’ve been doing for years.

But the press running interference for China is horrifying to see. An American press that treats the First Amendment as their exclusive right, should not be protecting and defending China.

Yes, it is true, there are absurd racists who will stir up anti-Asian sentiment. But the press seems unwilling to acknowledge a difference between the racists and the people who legitimately call the virus the “Wuhan virus” to note it came from China. Ironically, that makes the Chinese anti-Asian racists because the Chinese media internally continues to refer to it as the “Wuhan virus.”

A day of reckoning is going to come with China and I am afraid much of the American press corps will be rooting for that side. It’s all about money.

Money

I need to depart on the sad note of this piece at First Things. It is sad to see a religious publication try to cast the extraordinary effort of stopping a global pandemic “demonic.” But that is what it does. It cheapens the effort to save lives as sentimental and essentially advances a materialistic approach of wanting to make money and let people die because people are always going to die. Now, of course, the writer knows he is doing this so he chooses to denounce materialism while essentially advocating for it.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn resolutely rejected the materialist principle of “survival at any price.” It strips us of our humanity. This holds true for a judgment about the fate of others as much as it does for ourselves. We must reject the specious moralism that places fear of death at the center of life.

Fear of death and causing death is pervasive—stoked by a materialistic view of survival at any price and unchecked by Christian leaders who in all likelihood secretly accept the materialist assumptions of our age. As long as we allow fear to reign, it will cause nearly all believers to fail to do as Christ commands in Matthew 25. It already is.

Sounds fine until you realize he is advocating death for about a million people just so he can get back to the office. That’s the thing all these preening jackasses who hate being stuck with their families are missing on this. And you’ll have to forgive me, but I put the ignorance as intelligence columnists in the category of rank jackassery here.

If this virus spreads like the seasonable flu, it will kill several hundred thousand, if not a million, Americans. The people who write these things have their heads in the sand. They ignore that Great Britain and the Netherlands decided to go with the very approach they advocate of letting people just live their lives. These countries are now rushing to shut down everything as hospitals become overwhelmed and people cannot get access for basic medical needs because there is no space.

He writes

That older generation that endured the Spanish flu, now long gone, was not ill-informed. People in that era were attended by medical professionals who fully understood the spread of disease and methods of quarantine. Unlike us, however, that generation did not want to live under Satan’s rule, not even for a season. They insisted that man was made for life, not death. They bowed their head before the storm of disease and endured its punishing blows, but they otherwise stood firm and continued to work, worship, and play, insisting that fear of death would not govern their societies or their lives.

There was this little thing going on called World War I. You might have heard of it. The war didn’t stop for the flu, but two percent of the world’s population did — they fell over dead.

In San Francisco, the situation got so bad the San Francisco government ordered everyone to wear masks and literally arrested people who refused to wear them.

The situations are not really comparable and the “back when men were men” crap puts a Potemkin village worth of gloss on a revision of history.

Look, if you want to go back to work and claim we need to get on with our lives, please go first to your local hospital and talk to the doctors and nurses who are seeing first hand what’s happening. But this rank jackassery with a healthy dose of contrarianism where you pretend it is demonic to stop the spread of a virus is just a bit too much for me.

Yes, the cure should not be worse than the disease. But the cure is sitting on your couch, so shut the hell up.