COVID-19: MSM China Hysteria Gets Way Crazier & Dumber

It is never a good sign when the political/media class all across the aisle begins loudly trying to out-hawk one another, says Caitlin Johnstone. 

By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com

Hysteria about China has been kicked into high gear by the political/media class who are responsible for manufacturing support for the cold war escalations which will be necessary to prevent the U.S. from being surpassed on the world stage as a unipolar superpower.

Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro has aired a fire-and-brimstone monologue on China that looks like a fictional news clip from some kind of film noir-style movie adaptation of a really ham-fisted dystopian graphic novel. It really needs to be seen to be believed, so give it a view here when you get a chance:

“China is the one that’s out of control,” Pirro spat, punching the word ‘China’ like she was speaking a profanity at someone she despises. “We’re not going to let you destroy this country or our way of life. We’ve fought too hard and we’ve fought too long to lose it to a Wuhan – that’s what I said, a WOO-HAN virus!”

“You want to control people? You politicians want to flex your muscles?” Pirro asked, referring to government lockdowns. “Well start working on how you’re gonna punish, ostracize, alienate, and financially sanction, and make China accountable for what they did to us and the rest of the world!”

It’s a legitimately scary segment with an unbelievable amount of vitriol, and Pirro isn’t the only Fox News pundit ramping up the anti-China hysteria.

Tucker Carlson recently had on “former” CIA officer Bryan Dean Wright to tell his massive audience about the danger posed by the Chinese menace, and pitched him a question clearly geared to set up Wright to claim without evidence that leaders of the Democratic Party may in fact be members of the Chinese intelligence agency MSS.

“We reached out to Senator Feinstein and a number of other elected officials today and asked ‘Have you had contact recently since the outbreak with Chinese officials?’, and not a single one responded. What do you think we should infer from that?” asked Carlson, who is known to have himself tried to join the CIA in the past.

“I think that they’re nervous,” Wright replied. “I think there are a bunch of people who, because they’re either useful idiots, or they have some degree of knowledge and and relationships behind the scenes with the Chinese government. Some of them in fact could be Chinese agents of the MSS, their intelligence service, God forbid. They’re nervous.”

“We’ve got a lot of very nervous folks in the Democratic Party,” Wright added.

This is easily as unhinged as even the most cartoonishly ridiculous Russia hysteria we’ve seen uncorked by Rachel Maddow or anyone on MSNBC, and is not at all different in tone or content; even the use of the term “useful idiots” is right in line with the same reprehensible Russiagate rhetoric we’ve been hearing for the last four years.

The claim that rival parties have been infiltrated by communists has a very long and ugly history in US politics, and now that it’s being weaponized by the American right wing in such a shameless way we can expect it to get a whole lot uglier.

Not to be outdone the Democrats are now working to out-Trump Trump, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi demanding that Trump “swiftly begin implementing the Hong Kong Human Rights & Democracy Act”, and a new Biden campaign ad attacking the president for being too soft on China for its handling of the Covid-19 virus.

The ad attacks Trump for failing to force Beijing to allow US government officials into Wuhan to monitor the governing of a sovereign nation during a pandemic outbreak.

“Trump praised the Chinese 15 times in January and February as the coronavirus spread across the world,” says the ad’s narrator in a menacing voice. “Trump never got a CDC team on the ground in China. And the travel ban he brags about? Trump let in 40,000 travelers from China into America after he signed it. Not exactly airtight.”

Attacking Trump from the right on foreign policy has become standard practice for the Biden campaign, with whoever runs his account recently tweeting “Donald Trump says he’s a wartime president — it’s time for him to act like one.”

This is the guy that American progressives still say can be moved to the left? Hilarious.

It is never a good sign when the political/media class all across the aisle begins loudly trying to out-hawk one another about a nation which refuses to be absorbed into the US-centralized world order. And make no mistake, this is all this is actually about.

It’s not a coincidence that the two nations the US political/media class has been shrieking the loudest about lately are the two strongest nations which have refused to be absorbed into the US empire. It’s never been about “collusion” or a virus, it’s about stopping multipolarism. This has been obvious for years, but partisan narrative control masks it. More than two years ago I was writing about how Russiagate isn’t about Trump or even really just about Russia, but about hamstringing the Russia-China tandem to stop China’s rise.

Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of neoconservatism, the prevailing orthodoxy in the U.S.-centralized power alliance has been to preserve the unipolar world order at any cost. All U.S. foreign policy has been a direct or indirect result of this agenda ever since.

It’s not about Covid-19. It’s not about Uighurs. It’s not about a Putin pee tape. It’s not about terrorists. It’s not about weapons of mass destruction. It’s about world domination, plain and simple. And the oligarch-owned political/media class who controls the dominant narrative is helping to facilitate that.

I never voted for a world order where one powerful government is constantly attacking, destroying and sabotaging any nation that threatens its hegemony. I’m pretty sure you never did either. And yet here we are, forced to accept this insane paradigm, even when the targeted nations in question are nuclear armed and anything could go drastically wrong at any moment as a result of miscommunication or technical malfunction in the heat and confusion of escalated aggression.

This will continue to be foisted upon us whether we like it or not, until this way of life is locked in forever, or until we all die in a nuclear holocaust, or until we force them to stop. It’s that third option that they are working to cut off during the rapid increases in government surveillance and internet censorship we’ve seen implemented during this pandemic, so we’re going to have to want to live a lot more than the empire does.

Caitlin Johnstone is a rogue journalist, poet, and utopia prepper who publishes regularly at Medium. Follow her work on FacebookTwitter, or her website. She has a podcast and a book, Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.” 

This article was re-published with permission.

The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.

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37 comments for “COVID-19: MSM China Hysteria Gets Way Crazier & Dumber

  1. Alexander Miller
    April 25, 2020 at 18:33

    I have to wonder if the finger pointing and blame laying couldn’t be left until after the pandemic has been satisfactorily suppressed. It would seem to be a far wiser move to focus on getting it under control first. It’s just another example of human stupidity to be running around with hair ablaze screaming at other nations rather than bringing everyone together to deal with the issue.

  2. William Gruff
    April 24, 2020 at 08:44

    It is chilling reading the comments to note the numbers who don’t realize, or at least pretend not to realize, that the US is the aggressor here. The US is the “Evil Empire”. The US is now the worst of the Imperial Japanese and Nazi Germans rolled into one.

    As a not-so-tangential aside, everyone is aware that the Japanese experimented with and utilized biological weapons on the Chinese, right? The military unit at the center of those efforts was Unit 731. While many Japanese were tried and executed for war crimes, does anyone know what happened to the members of Japan’s biowarfare division, Unit 731?

    They were hired by the US government and given immunity to war crimes prosecution. I kid thee not.

    So when you start developing suspicions that the “novel” coronavirus that struck China might have been a bioweapon intended to economically cripple China to let the US win Trump’s trade war, don’t dismiss those suspicions out-of-hand. America has a long history of “secret” dastardly deeds, so it wouldn’t be out of character.

  3. April 23, 2020 at 14:10

    I adore Caitlin Johnstone. This article only highlights that anyone pretending to know which war criminal rapist is the lesser evil cannot be trusted. Thank you for your service.

  4. pame
    April 23, 2020 at 12:53

    what about “how McConnell “evolved” after he met his future wife in the early Nineties, going from being a fierce China hawk to a potent ally on Capitol Hill. Chao’s father, James — a Chinese American shipping magnate and close friend of former People’s Republic dictator Jiang Zemin — gave McConnell and his wife a huge gift in 2008 that boosted the senator’s net worth from less than $8 million to nearly $20 million.” quote from Rolling Stone September 2019
    Fox news has nothing to say about Chao and McConnell?

  5. April 23, 2020 at 11:10

    The best example yet of the slightly deranged face of America. Pirro, the face of whats wrong with America.

  6. GMCasey
    April 22, 2020 at 21:24

    Strange screaming woman on Fox News:

    Why are you so angrily screaming? YOU want to get rid of what stated this mess in the first place, do you? Get rid of Trump then

  7. April 22, 2020 at 19:01

    Plenty of ignorance on all sides, including the left minority that deflects from China’s responsibility.

    China knew definitely by December 1st, and probably as early as November 17th that there was an outbreak. They waited until the last day of the year to notify WHO. Not debatable. They covered it up, censored journalists, silenced doctors. What they did was highly suspicious and counterproductive, but that doesn’t make it into these pro-China biased articles. Where’s the full story?

  8. Guy
    April 22, 2020 at 17:45

    The media pundits truly have lost it .I always thought Janine Pirro was one of the level headed ones but she has outdone them all with this blame game on China .Totally unbelievable .Good luck to you US citizens your troubles are just starting .

  9. Jim other
    April 22, 2020 at 16:41

    Diplomacy could be used to keep us (the US) out of war with China but we have none. The war party is heating up the rhetoric toward China but the result of a war with China will not be what the war party expects. If it remains a conventional war, even though we have very fine soldiers, they will be swamped by the enormous hoards of soldiers on the Chinese side.
    If atomic or hydrogen bombs are used then it’s bye, bye humans. Radioactivity spares no one including the war party, the rich or even the super rich. Do we really want to go down that road?

  10. rosemerry
    April 22, 2020 at 15:27

    The USA always blames someone else for its mistakes/misfortunes/wickedness. Not only China and Russia, but to keep on attacking Venezuela, which dares to elect a people’s government and enact laws to help the people, or Cuba, for 60 years helping other countries in need of medical expertise, shows the meanness of spirit so commonly displayed. The USA cannot believe that anyone would act out of humanitarian motives and not out of greed and cruelty.
    All of the lies we would expect of Trump are of course on record and can be refuted by evidence if the observer is honest. US officials were in on all the meetings right from the beginning of the appearance of the virus effects in Wuhan. Of course on January 3, Trump was too busy assassinating a top Iranian general to bother with a possible health threat in China and remained as uninterested for months, blaming others when it could not be hidden.

  11. TSo
    April 22, 2020 at 14:00

    A day ago China Ambassador Cui said 1.5 bln N95 Masks was donated by China to the US. That averaged 4-5 N95 masks per American, vs. one N95 Mask per Chinese in China. What happened to those N95 masks? Did our frontliners, Doctors and Nurses, get them? Or did they fall into Jared Kushner’ hands? The US media never reported anything good from China. Americans never question their media’s honesty either. Americans’ blind trust in their media and foreign policy has never been checked against the horrible history of US endless wars since WW2. From Korean war till current middle east wars my tax payments continue to flow into our ‘national defense’ without a single audit. Shouldn’t our taxes be used to improve our schools, our infrastructure, help our students reduce their debt and create a better healthcare for all Americans? How could it be more patriotic to continue supporting our foreign policy of more than 60 years that is focused on creating enemies so we could go to war forever, when we could have used our taxes to benefit our fellow Americans life? Salaries of Americans have not increased in last 4 decades! This irrational anti China campaign stops trade between US and China at a time when both countries and the world need a strong global trade. US farmers cannot sell their pigs now, as Tyson closed down its third manufacturing site. Why is this good for us, Americans?

    • Consortiumnews.com
      April 22, 2020 at 18:02

      Mr. Cui Tiankai is the Chinese ambassador to the United States, whose opinion column was published
      in the New York Times on April 5, 2020. In that oped, Mr. Cui references 1.5 million
      masks donated to the U.S. by Chinese companies, not 1.5 billion.

  12. Randal Marlin
    April 22, 2020 at 12:54

    Jeanine Pirro is worse than Caitlin Johnstone makes out. She claims that China intentionally protected Chinese citizens but allowed that virus to be released putting the rest of the world at risk. “We’re not going to let you destroy this country [the USA]” she says.
    “Make China accountable” with sanctions, she says with all the vehemence she can muster.
    Put the focus where it should be: on evidence-based thinking, and the unpacking of weasel words.
    Did the Chinese deliberately let the virus escape or was it unintentional? Where’s the evidence for the former?
    Clearly the Chinese did not protect all its citizens. Many of them caught the virus and quite a few died.
    U.S. President Donald Trump could have raised the alarm early on and saved many American lives. Was he malevolent or just ignorant? I would put my money on ignorance, but if I were thinking like Jeanine Pirro I would be leaping to the most derogatory interpretation.
    Maybe Caitlin Johnstone’s thinking is that you should not repeat slanders, even for refutation. Because when emotions are aroused people interpret facts to accord with their emotions rather than with reason. I’m of the opinion that you should at least give reason a chance.

    • Jim other
      April 22, 2020 at 16:27

      I wish Trump would try a little reason.

    • Realist
      April 23, 2020 at 01:26

      The entire American political establishment, including President Trump, his firebrand anti-Russian/Iranian/Chinese cabinet and both right wings of the Unified War Party in Congress have come out screaming that China should be punished with enormous economic sanctions and lawsuit judgements in the multi-trillion dollar range because they deliberately created, kept secret and released the Covid-19 virus causing vast numbers of viral infections, deaths and sweeping economic damage in the United States, no evidence being necessary any more than facts supporting the accusations against Russia for purportedly stealing the election from Killary Hilton. The propagandists in Washington merely spin a narrative, saying it is supported by “intelligence” for which the evidence cannot be divulged lest our operations be compromised, but you should believe every morsel of it no matter. Seriously, who in the federal government demurs from this lineup of knee-jerk warmongering yes-men?

      The Washington regime basically created a fantasy time line of events that would have you believe that China deliberately deceived and trapped an heroic but blindsided America into the tragedy of its largest and most lethal pandemic since the Spanish Flu of 101 years ago. The American people show every evidence of being fooled yet again (in spite of Dubya’s “sage advice”) by its leadership, because I see no outcry for an accurate recounting of the well-documented course of events which may be gleaned from any review of the daily media feeds. I don’t see it coming from the MSM or from the MSM’s consumers.

      Anyone with 5th grade reading skills could discern that China hid none of the events or the expressed seriousness surrounding the spread of this virus transpiring there back in December, and that the Western media were there to record the street scenes, the hospitals, the construction of instant intensive care hospitals with thousands of new beds, the weary health care workers and the bedraggled patients. Only the dead bodies were spared the intrusion of digital photography by journalists. China and other countries in the Orient took effective lockdown and testing measures that should have served as a template for the West to use when it was stricken with the same viral disease approximately two months later.

      But the West in all its hubris chose to “wait and see” rather than act. It’s what we do when the pols need to formulate a plan for maximal concealment of @$$, or as Dubya so pithily expressed it, “to kind of catapult the propaganda.” Anyone with a functional memory will recall the confidence our leaders had that we would be insulated from the disease, many postulating innate differences in racial genetics as the anticipated reason. Asians were supposed to be the weak ones, with Caucasians perhaps completely immune. Apparently the virus disagreed and spun off a more virulent mutation for Occidentals to engage against.

      Our people in Washington blew it and are now looking for a scapegoat. Or, perhaps an American attempt at bioweaponry backfired and this projection of guilt onto China is an attempt to conceal the true origins of the pandemic. Or, just maybe the accusations, sanctions, lawsuits and promised property seizures are the always-intended next step in a long epochal hybrid war against China including components for attacking i) the health and well-being of its people, ii) the functionality of its economy and iii) the wealth of the nation… whatever it takes to maintain full spectrum dominance over an emerging peer who was looking more fit and robust than us every passing day.

  13. Bill
    April 22, 2020 at 11:31

    The US attack on China seems to me to be caused by our failing ideology of neoliberalism. Perhaps Covid 19 will bury it and I say good riddance.

  14. John Drake
    April 22, 2020 at 11:12

    Judge Jeanine seems to have anger management issues; I wouldn’t want to have been a lawyer facing her in her court.
    I read a little of her bio.; she’s another Ann Coulter, though a lot more accomplished, career wise.

    On the other hand, the virus has knocked out both aircraft carriers in the West Pacific fleet. That must really get these anti-China fanatics all buggered up, as Mao once said, “Paper tiger”.

    This all goes to show that a serious build up of America’s public health infrastructure along with health care reform, MFA would be a true advancement in national security. Multi billion dollar aircraft carriers felled by a micro organism says it all about priorities.

    • Realist
      April 22, 2020 at 16:12

      “Multi billion dollar aircraft carriers felled by a micro organism says it all about priorities.”

      Sounds like the plot of an H.G. Wells novel. Just replace aircraft carriers with Martian tripods.

  15. Jeff Harrison
    April 22, 2020 at 11:03

    Somethin’s gonna happen. I doubt that the Iranian navy will let the US navy shoot at them in their back yard free of charge.

  16. Voice from Europe
    April 22, 2020 at 11:03

    China informed the world about covid-19 at the end of January with a detailed medical analysis that was published by the WHO.
    The IHU mediterranee took notice of these recommendations and has since published preprints of the medical protocol it applied to all patients needing hospitalization. These are spectacular: 92% are declared virus-free within 10 days. Furthermore this treatment uses the cheapest generic medication possible: 10,80 € per day.
    So instead of blaming China we should blame our own arrogant politicians.

  17. Stan W.
    April 22, 2020 at 10:43

    “Peace in out time!” —Neville Chamberlain, 1938

  18. Jack
    April 22, 2020 at 10:36

    American politicians have been using China as their punching bag and bogeyman for far too long. Time to stop as they are treading into a dangerous path. They are creating a negative atmosphere of anti-Chinese sentiments across the US. Racist attacks against Asian community are common nowadays. Stop the hate-mongering and slandering! The world is laughing at the US for their hypocrisy.

  19. April 22, 2020 at 10:30

    Pirrot is product of Trumps hatred. She is a spiteful narcissistic person and a drfeadxful example of us systemic racism

  20. April 22, 2020 at 09:24

    Caitlin’s points, as usual, are powerful ones. Given China’s benevolent behavior toward other countries during the pandemic, I think the US is nervous about having someone its own size on the block. It has always been America coming to the rescue, at least until recently, and the whole world is likely to take notice. China holding huge amounts of our debt doesn’t help and one wonders if somehow in the twisted minds of the Cottons and Grahams in Congress, this might be a way of relieving ourselves of this enormous debt. It would be reckless to consider such a move, yet our increasing disdain for international law and our unilateral actions makes you wonder.

    • Sam F
      April 22, 2020 at 18:10

      Although a US default on debt to China would give it some funds to play with, it would be discredited worldwide for doing so, and would lose the low cost products and parts from China that it depends upon. That might be beneficial to its de-industrialized areas, but would cause enormous disruption of agriculture, high tech manufacturing, etc. No doubt both sides know that.

      It is hard to believe that the US right wing really fears the slight expansion of China to offshore islands, or even to Taiwan and Hong Kong. China has no reason to block the straits of Malacca, and surely knows that that would immediately set the world against it militarily. Indonesia is in the way of it seizing N Australia, which is mostly desert anyway, and it has never been expansionist.

      It appears that China simply represents the great success of a communist state much larger than the US. So the rich scammers of the US are driven to hate and lies of all kinds. If this were a democracy we would long ago have sought to blend the efficiencies of a market economy with adequate regulation and social services, as China did in the 1980s. But gold controls mass media and elections.

  21. Sam F
    April 22, 2020 at 08:44

    Beyond right-wing duopoly propaganda, I don’t see an ideology of US hegemony or imperialism, but a less organized tendency of the scammer gangs (zionists, the rich, MIC, WallSt) to simply lie that their interests are those of the nation, as their tyrant puppets pose with the flag. They know that there is no interest of the US, justice, or democracy involved, and have no concern at all with such things themselves.

    The propaganda is useful to recruit punks and bully-boys from those who have no hope of distinction beyond a myth of national glory, and must be shouted loudly and demanded as a badge of loyalty, because everyone knows that it is based upon no virtue at all.

  22. Mike from Jersey
    April 22, 2020 at 08:05

    Since I no longer listen to Corporate/Intelligence Propaganda outlets, I am only vaguely familiar with the current blame China crusade.

    What Caitlin describes is scary. It is worse than the 1930’s since, this time, the “crazy nation” has nuclear weapons.

    There is nothing that the average citizen can do except to hope more and more average citizens wake up and run these lunatics out of their positions of power, reform the system and dig out from under the wreckage.

  23. JOHN CHUCKMAN
    April 22, 2020 at 08:01

    “Unhinged,” yes, that’s exactly the right word.

    America’s elites just can’t stand the fact of China’s success and competitiveness and the recognition that it’s not very long before China assumes the position in the the world of Number One. And allied with hated Russia yet!

    But that’s how it is when you plan and work hard and invest to build for the future – all things America does not do anymore. America spends a trillion dollars a year on destroying things.

    They literally are being driven mad.

    And you know the quote:”Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

    My great fear is that US will, one way or another, start a war. That is what madmen do.

    • Guy
      April 22, 2020 at 17:55

      ”Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”
      So well said and I was thinking the same thing .

    • Dave P.
      April 25, 2020 at 03:17

      ‘They literally are being driven mad.”

      Yes. Absolutely true.

  24. David Weir
    April 22, 2020 at 04:24

    1,000,000 dead Iraq civilians over a lie, no Weapons Of Mass Destruction (WMD), 2,000,000 dead Vietnamese over a lie, unknown numbers of dead in Laos and Cambodia, all based on a lie, there was no harm done to USS Maddox , and there was no second attack (CIA Director John McCone answered matter-of-factly, “No, the North Vietnamese are reacting defensively to our attacks on their offshore islands . . . the attack is a signal to us that the North Vietnamese have the will and determination to continue the war.”28
    Johnson himself apparently had his own doubts about what happened in the Gulf on 4 August. A few days after the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was passed, he commented, “Hell, those damn, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.”29)

    The US government has been the strongest agent of multinational corporations since the 1920’s. During the Cold War it toppled at least 47 democratically elected governments around the world because those governments endangered business interests in some way. When Hugo Chavez took over Venezuela he enacted land reforms which involved taking land illegally given to multinational corporations by previous governments and distributed it to the people of Venezuela. Even worse he nationalized Venezuela’s fossil fuel industry. In 2002 the CIA attempted a coup d’etat against Chavez, but it failed miserably. Since then they’ve been messing with Venezuela in every way they can, trying to destabilize the regime. They’ve done a pretty good job too.

    Now we have the USA’s RWNJ’s, and now Australia’s RWNJ’s, beating up on China over claims China is responsible for covid-19 , do you want this mob to lead the free world into a war against China and Russia?

    Please America, bury your dead, take the blame for not acting sooner with social distancing and having enough testing, and safety equipment, and get your own house in order

    • John Drake
      April 22, 2020 at 14:12

      The figure for the Vietnam war is about 4 million; that’s both sides for a conflict that Truman started by giving the country back to the barbaric French colonialists after WWII. It’s a war that never should have happened. It happened because the rich donors and power brokers of the Democrat party wanted Truman as Veep instead of the incumbent and progressive Henry Wallace. There’s a lesson right there!

      Ironically they now love Americans; I recommend a visit highly (not right now though).

    • Erik
      April 22, 2020 at 17:45

      Very well put. But America hasn’t owned its house for generations, nor the means to retake and put it in order.

  25. Realist
    April 22, 2020 at 03:38

    My response to this article on CJ’s site, which I might as well share with this crowd.

    I get that Donald Trump has been a disaster, but Demented/incoherent/sleazy Joe will NOT be the remedy. If you’ve noticed, EVERY move by both parties with respect to formulating any policy on the corona virus has been strictly politically motivated.

    Even with the two month heads up that the rest of the world gleaned from China, along with examples of government actions that seemed to mitigate the spread of the disease, the Washington regime felt compelled to take a strict wait and see attitude before implementing any proactive policies.

    Both parties would have done the same because if timely draconian actions had worked, the public, not realising the danger, would have condemned them as pointless and wasteful. If they didn’t work, the condemnation would have been even greater. It’s the nature of the American body politic to not act until the crisis is upon us, to close the barn door only after the horse is out.

    We are primed to disbelieve any bad news no matter how qualified the source. Hence, anthropogenic climate change, the need to protect the power grid from EMP whether of natural or man-made origin, or the need to develop vaccines against conspicuously emerging new diseases, just to mention a few examples, are treated as utter bullshit by the conventional “wisdom.” So, it was baked into the cake that, in America, the Covid-19 outbreak was destined to become a raging pandemic.

    Once that happened, the second typical American response was guaranteed to kick in, the public would be made to suffer the brunt of the physical and fiscal losses, whilst, protected by the aura of media-stoked panic, the mega-banks, transnational corporations, the oligarchy and other insider elites would be given keys to the vault down at the Fed and be allowed to loot the treasury to their hearts’ desire. There’s even a name for such policy: it’s called not letting a good crisis go to waste.

    Another universal feature of American federal policy, which will be spouted as much by Sleepy Joe–should he win–as by BadOrangeMan, is that, no matter how chaotic and hopeless the situation, the American leadership in Washington always has everything completely “under control,” so you do not have to worry your little head. Moreover, everything they tell you is the complete unvarnished truth, most likely from God’s lips to POTUS’s microphone.

    One of these truths, as dependable as the axioms of plane geometry you learned as a high schooler, is that the problem–whatever it might be, whether losing an election or losing control of the economy–is ALWAYS the fault of outside agents. Somebody else will be the designated fall guy, be it Putin, Xi, some ayatollah, Saddam, Assad, Maduro, or Bill Gates, or even whole countries like China, Russia, or Iran, or even whole civilisations like the entire Islamic world, Hindus, Confucianists or especially practitioners of that vile “socialism.”

    Since the Corona Fest was inexorably allowed to get out of hand before any effective lockdown policies were put in place and that infamous “curve” was finally “bent” to some promising degree, count on the American people to once again rise up and display their love of freedom and inclination to self-destruction with their displays in the streets of our great land with their displeasure of being cooped up for the whole last three weeks! They are fed up, I tell you, and are ready to flaunt their AR-17’s on the steps of city hall to let you know this. The Daily Mail displays an on-line piece complete with dozens of color photographs to convince you of the veracity of all this.

    Both the Right Wing and Far Right Wing of the great American War & Money Party have now to decide how to make it seem like they are catering to this irrational nonsense for fear of losing the votes of its cult followers come November… assuming November arrives and voting is not a long forgotten ceremony of an extinct society.

    • Tennegon
      April 22, 2020 at 16:40

      For those who may not have seen it yet, I recommend PBS Frontline – Coronavirus Pandemic.

    • Eddie S
      April 22, 2020 at 19:48

      Good comment Realist, especially the 2nd & 3rd paragraphs, which are my thoughts exactly! Even IF, for the sake of argument, someone wanted to say (or could even PROVE somehow) that the Chinese lied/hid info about the Covid19 situation, as you so correctly noted that was a full two(2) months before it hit the US AND a month or more before it caused havoc in Italy. With the huge intelligence expenditures this country has with the 17 intelligence agencies, why weren’t they on-top of it even IF those evil Chinese (yup, every last 1.4 billion of them is evil — Faux News told me so!) were hiding the truth — especially since all they had to do was pickup a phone and call Italy and ask them about it?

      And yes, the Dems wouldn’t have done too much differently than Trump, since — as you correctly noted — most of the time it takes a tangible, DRAMATIC event to alter the political zeitgeist in this country. You can have the most air-tight, humanistic political case for something in this country and most people will either ignore, ridicule, or resent you for it because they’re wedded to the status quo. The US never lacks good ideas, but it too often lacks a majority political will to implement most of them at an opportune time.

    • Dave P.
      April 23, 2020 at 01:46

      Realist – Insightful comments , as always – and superb language. You have an amazing understanding of national and international issues and events; very objective, balanced, and fair.

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