Pun Salad

Over at The Bulwark, Richard North Patterson offers a fairly  pristine example of a genre of left-wing anti-conservative scolding when it comes to science. Now before I go on, I should say upfront that I agree with the gist of many of his criticisms of some right-wingers and their response to the pandemic. For instance, I think the surge in anti-vaccine talk in some fevered corners of the right is dangerous, disappointing, and embarrassing. 

But on the whole, I detest this sort of argument because it takes a natural human (or even American) phenomenon and turns it into a partisan cudgel. Polls and studies have consistently showed that anti-vaxxers exist on both sides of the political divide. But ask yourself, who has more cache with the mainstream media and elites: Robert Kennedy Jr. or Michelle Malkin? Who did more in the last two decades to promote anti-vaccine theories?

How lovely it is to have a high-profile job in our major media institutions. Let’s say you completely, hideously muck up a huge story. Let’s say you spend three years wildly misleading the public. Let’s say that, at the outset of the worst public-health crisis in a century, you mock people for being afraid and tell them to go about life as usual. When you’re proven wrong, you get to tell the next chapter of the story anyway. And if you feel like saying, “No fair noticing we were wrong!” you know other members of the mainstream-media cartel will rush to support you.

Media observers are today noticing how strange it is for reporters to juxtapose panic about Florida, where the virus has done relatively little damage, with robust defense of New York, the coronavirus death capital of the Western world.

Democrats take it as a matter of moral certainty that Donald Trump and his political allies can only do wrong and cannot be wronged. Trump and his colleagues insist that they have been wronged in a very serious way: by the Obama administration’s abusing federal counterintelligence tools as an extension (and a post-election extension) of the 2016 presidential campaign. That is a perversion of political power that should command the attention of all Americans irrespective of their assessment of President Trump.

The original decision to target Flynn in the counterintelligence probe was based on a pretty flimsy pretext. And it was driven by the White House, not by the top bosses at DOJ. When acting Attorney General Sally Yates heard about the investigation — from President Obama himself, not from her own department — she “had no idea what the president was talking about,” as she told investigators. The New York Times, not exactly the house organ of the Trump administration, reports that at every turn Obama aides were involved in the investigation even as the acting AG was in the dark.

Government bureaucrats first told us, inconsistently, that 1) masks were useless, and 2) we should save them for medical personnel. Now that advice has changed: on the theory that wearing a mask might prevent an asymptomatic person from passing on the virus, we are being pressured to wear masks of some kind when in public.

This has created an interesting sociological picture. Last week, my family went up North for a few days on a big lake near the Canadian border. We noticed that once you got outside the Twin Cities, hardly anyone was wearing a mask. On the other hand, after we returned I drove to downtown Minneapolis for the first time in a couple of months. The streets were nearly deserted. I saw around a dozen people, on the average one per block. The majority were young men, maybe 25 years old, generally walking along with no one within 50 yards of them. Every single one wore a mask.

Mask wearing has become a form of virtue signaling. Do they do any good? Who knows? But wearing one shows that you are a slavish adherent to authority. Not wearing one suggests that you might be a rebel.