OK. I read the Atlantic piece from former GW Bush speechwriter David Frum. It reads like a scorned wife’s affidavit for divorce court, filled with obsessive detail and an ‘oh-so-certain-ness’ that the arguments are air tight and damning. Please.
Frum scorches Trump for not reacting earlier in January. Here’s Nancy Pelosi on February 24th strolling around Chinatown in San Francisco, telling everybody to come and buy stuff because “we’re on top of it.” On March 4, Dr. Sanjay Gupta and Anderson Cooper said Corona was less dangerous than the flu. When Trump issued his travel ban from China, there were only six confirmed cases in the U.S. SIX. Clearly, a lot people didn’t know much early on. As data became available, it changed opinions.
Conservatives were skeptical at first because we’re used to leftist hysteria about health and environmental issues (vaccines, genetically modified food, global warming, overpopulation, dead polar bears, etc.) Our bias probably caused us, (me) to underreact for a while. Not anymore. But now, conservatives are pushing to reopen the economy because, while the left takes wealth for granted, conservatives believe a good economy requires good policy. The longer the quarantine, the more likely we trigger a depression. Economic harm causes real harm: suicides, alcoholism, domestic violence, child abuse, etc. We will not know for a while, may never know, whether anybody’s actions were the right ones. We should be somewhat generous in judging people’s motives. I think both liberals and conservatives are doing their best and are genuinely scared of the consequences, just different ones.
Frum criticized Trump for bureaucratic problems like the CDC sending out defective testing kits. NEWSFLASH: Conservatives love talking about bureaucratic ineptitude. The leftist argument is always that more money will make bureaucracy work. Sure. One thing Frum mentioned might be legitimate, however, the fact that states were in bidding wars for ventilators and Trump should’ve used his emergency powers to end this. Maybe. It’s always more complicated but this is legitimate to debate.
Frum, typing furiously in a miniskirt and red heels, proved he’s a prostitute when he argued that the powerful economy under Trump was Obama’s. After a historic drop, the economy was teed up to rocket back to good times. Obama deployed liberal policies and got the most anemic recovery in history. Trump channeled Milton Friedman (mostly) and, as conservatives would predict, the economy boomed. An alleged conservative, Frum used weak Democratic talking points to counter the best modern case for long-standing conservative dogma. What a shill. The lesson? Trump Derangement Syndrome kills brain cells. And honesty.
Trump is slimy. He is also a trolling savant, and the press’ Pavlovian, epileptic fits show they are eager to wallow in the same filth. They are reactive and dishonest. Lounging on the weekends in their Harvard sweat shirts, they are mediocrities.
FromJonah Goldberg: Lots of people I know have convinced themselves to play the Trump game—pro and anti—because it is so vitally important to be “relevant.” Some of the folks who’ve ridden the Red vs. Blue horse for so long have cut a groove in the earth so deep that it’s now a trench they can’t climb out of…They have to blame the media or Trump for everything, reading from a script that no longer fits the plot or the actors on the stage. And one of the funny things about trenches is that, when you’re in one, it becomes all the easier for people to see over your head.
