COVID-19 is a partisan issue. Shocked? Hardly. But isn’t everything nowadays? Why are Red states re-opening, largely without negative consequence, while the Blue states struggle to clamp down? My (Blue) state of Virginia is trying to apply the brakes.
On 26 May Democratic Governor Ralph Northam announced that the wearing of masks is now mandatory. If you don’t submit, you could get slapped with a Class 1 misdemeanor, up to a year in jail, and a $2,500 fine. Really?
The governor's executive order came just a few hours after he himself was out roaming Virginia Beach, sans mask, snapping selfies with all comers.
When asked about the mask, he claimed he’d forgotten it. Shucks.
Democrats. If it weren’t for double standards, they’d have no standards at all.
Regardless of where you come down on COVID-19, it seems that flipping the "on" switch of our gut-punched economy has the left mortified.
Why? Because they remember how Trump turned the Obama-Biden pajama-boy economy into a Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson juggernaut in about two years.
Recall Obama’s comments during the 2016 campaign when he was out schilling for Hillary, deriding Trump for promising to bring back jobs. Obama sniffed, "Well, how exactly are you going to do that? What exactly are you going to do? There’s no answer to it," Obama said.
"He just says, 'Well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal.' Well, what, how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have?" . . .
Does President Trump have a magic wand? Yeah. A pretty big one.
Democrats won’t say so publicly, but they know this all too well. Moreover, they also know that "Evil Orange" is straining to do it again; a V-shaped recovery is lurking in our near future. Right before the election.
Uh-oh.
According to a Politico article, a group of leading Democratic Party intelligentsia were recently cyber-huddling via Zoom, opining on the 2020 election.
One of them, former Obama administration senior economic official-now Harvard Professor Jason Furman had the temerity to say "We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country."
Huh? What?
Absorbing this specter has thrown Democrats into a panic. "This is my big worry," said another ex-Obama White House official who remains close to the former president. Asked about the level of concern among top party officials, he said "It’s high — high, high, high, high." The Biden team is strategizing how to deal with it.
Think about that.
Whether or not it was the right decision to throw our robust economy under the COVID-19 bus, that’s what happened. But as Americans, shouldn’t we all be doing everything possible to get our economy safely re-started? So that Americans can get back to work, pay their bills, get kids back to school, go to baseball games, re-start medical care for normal treatment, etc? Right?
Aside from the obvious, this shutdown is birthing some pretty nasty second-and-third order effects. Evidence reveals that suicides are on the rise, along with increased drug and alcohol abuse. The average American has gained five pounds.
We’ve slathered on trillions more dollars of federal debt, with more in the pipeline.
Dropping the curtain on the economy is hurting us in long-term ways previously unimagined.
And who benefits? Our adversaries for one. Like Russia, China, and Iran. Despite having their own COVID issues, they likely see a silver lining in that America, whose economic and military dust they’ve been eating, has just been tripped up.
Who else? Apparently, the Democratic Party. This isn’t just one man’s opinion; all you need do is listen to their own words. Again, when asked about the impending economic recovery, how did Democrats react? Was it oh, thank goodness, American life across the fruited plains can start to return to normal?
Not so much.
"This [rapid economic recovery] is my big worry," senior Democrats complain. The concern of a strong recovery is, "high, high, high."
Behold the morbidity of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). Democrats would prolong American suffering if it increases the odds of ejecting Trump from the White House.
Talk about the ends justifying the means.
Here’s a provocative little sidebar: if Hillary had (God forbid) won in 2016, do you think the country would be in lockdown right now? Just Say No. See H1N1, which elicited barely a peep from the mainstream media while Obama was in the Oval Office.
Rahm Emanuel’s adage, "never let a crisis go to waste" may be slipping away this time.But Democrats haven’t given up yet. No siree. Apparently, if the Blue states can heel drag long enough, maybe that impending V-shaped rocket could be morphed into an anemic, slothful economic flatline (see the Obama-Biden economy).
Tragically, TDS impacts all Americans. Because until Democrats learn to love their country more than they hate one man, we’ll never be able to move forward together as one great nation.
Patrick Murray (colonel, U.S. Army, retired) was part of a military-diplomatic exchange program between the Pentagon and Department of State, where he served in the Bureau of Political Military Affairs in Washington, D.C. In 2005, Murray became the U.S. representative to the Military Staff Committee at the United Nations in New York under Ambassador John Bolton. After retiring from the Army in 2009, Patrick became the Republican nominee for U.S. Congress in Northern Virginia. He is the author of "Government is the Problem." For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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