Presented for your consideration, columnist Bret Stephens, who used to be a conservative: New York Times columnist Bret Stephens declares coronavirus is Trump’s ‘Chernobyl’
Not even close, you NeverTrump moron.
Chernobyl was preventable, not only in hindsight, and could easily have been seen barrelling down the highway toward disaster, but the Soviet system didn’t work that way. Result: Meltdown. (Something that’s never happened in the US, not even at Three Mile Island, where so little radiation was released, it almost couldn’t be measured. And certainly not at Hanford-N, which was the closest thing we had to a Chernobyl-style reactor, and which was engineered properly with plenty of safeguards so it would not have done what Chernobyl did.)
Conversely, nobody saw Covid-19 coming. And if anyone is to blame, it’s the Red Chinese for not reacting appropriately. (I’m not giving any credence to the conspiracy theories, so don’t look for that here — but even if they were true, the Red Chinese still did not react appropriately.)
The fact is, totalitarian regimes do not handle disaster well. On the other hand, I can’t see where Trump has set a foot wrong on this to date. Yeah, he tweets a lot of BS and says a lot of things that might or might not be true, but that’s not indicative of what’s going on behind the scenes. You solve a pandemic by closing borders, stopping flights, advising people to increase social distance, and telling those who are exposed to go home and stay away from other people for a couple of weeks unless they develop symptoms, in which case you call the hospital and tell them you think you have the virus so they can be ready to handle you when you get there (like Community North handled the case that landed on their doorstep last week). These things are all being done, despite the seeming inability of the CDC to get their sh*t together until they were prodded to do so.
Other than throw a ton of (borrowed) money at the problem, I don’t see what Trump’s detractors in Congress have done to slow down what WHO is finally calling a pandemic (as if we didn’t all know that weeks ago). Mostly his Congressional detractors have simply lied through their teeth about Trump’s response to the problem. The media, for their part, have gone into full panic mode and the markets are just following the panic. (The markets will be fine. The media, not so sure of that.)
We’ve finally seen universities telling students to stay home after spring break and not come back to classes; they’ll teach classes online for a few weeks and hopefully prevent the virus from running rampant through their hallowed halls. Strangely enough, some of their students are protesting this, which only points up once again why the voting age should be raised to a minimum of 21 (I would be more comfortable with 40) and why children should, by and large, be seen and not heard. Even IU is going to do this. Talk about cats and dogs living together. IU never closes. Ask my wife.
So in many ways, the crisis is being handled well, and Dr. Benton Quest Trump (and his Race Bannon look-alike sidekick, Pence*) are due a lot of credit for that, even if the nutbags at the New York Times and the Washington Post are near to committing seppuku over the failure, once again, of their anti-Trump narrative.
And the NeverTrumpers are showing their true colors as usual, so angry and spiteful (and out of government) from TDS they need double windscreens on their microphones to keep from spitting all over them. Believe it or not, Bret Stephens used to be a fairly smart guy. Now he’s just another soi-disant “conservative” fool who’d rather burn down the country than save it. To the devil with him, and the rest of all NeverTrumpers.
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* Come on. Admit it. If you grew up watching Jonny Quest, you want Race Bannon handling this kind of thing.