It’s Wednesday, May 20th, 2020…but before we begin, Nassau County executive Laura Curran learns what happens when you try to micromanage the lives of healthy people rather than just keeping the sick and at-risk in isolation:
You end up looking like a complete and pompous ass.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
Speaking of pompous asses, we kick off the mid-week edition courtesy of NRO, as Tobias Hoonhout highlights how a recently…
“In a newly declassified email that Susan Rice sent to herself on January 20, 2017, the former national-security adviser said that former FBI director James Comey had “no indication” that Michael Flynn had passed along classified information to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, but stipulated that Comey was nevertheless wary about sharing sensitive information with Flynn because of the frequency of his contact with Kislyak.
The document, reportedly declassified by acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, says that Comey said he was “proceeding ‘by the book’ as it relates to law enforcement,”…”
Two thoughts come to mind: (1) We KNOW that last sentence to be a bald-faced lie, as Comey and his co-conspirators broke every rule an FBI trainee learns in Law Enforcement 101 in their January 24th interview with Flynn; and, (2) In other words, all Jim Comey had as proof of his “suspicions” was a…
It’s good to know Comey’s faulty precognitive abilities were responsible for him permanently disgracing what was once perhaps the premier law enforcement organization on the planet. Guess we owe Jim an apology; here we thought it was because he was involved in a treasonous conspiracy to overthrow a duly-elected President!!!
Since we’re on the subject of conspiracies, consider this headline from FOX News…
…then join us as we analyze what Trump actually said, and, more specifically, the responses of those FOX chose to quote; our thoughts, as always, are set forth in the green-highlighted parentheticals. SPOILER ALERT: said responses are akin to the degree of derangement exhibited by those who attempted to blame Trump for the Arizona wife poisoning her husband with aquarium cleaner:
“President Trump stoked a flurry of reaction Monday after revealing to reporters that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine, a controversial malaria drug, to stave off the novel coronavirus, with many experts urging Americans to consult with doctors before taking such a step.
…Trump has spent weeks pushing the drug as a potential cure for COVID-19, despite there being no consensus on its effectiveness or safety.Dr. Sean Conley, the president’s physician, announced in a statement Monday night, “After numerous discussions he and I had about regarding the evidence for and against the use of hydroxychloroquine, we concluded the potential benefit from treatment outweighed the relative risks.”
Still, many doctors urged Americans that theirbest sources for medical information are medical experts, not the president.
“You have to have a discussion with your doctor to decide if it is best for you,” Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, a Fox News medical contributor, warned. “It is not going to be good for everyone but it may be beneficial and potentially life-saving for others.”(Two thoughts come to mind: first, it’s not like Dr. Neshwiwat’s comments…
…and second, ‘TANKS…
…!!!)
Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious diseases specialist at the Vanderbilt Medical Center, went a step further.“I certainly would not recommend that people in the U.S. ask their physicians to prescribe hydroxychloroquine for the prevention of Covid,” Schaffner told The Wall Street Journal. “Its use is entirely speculative.” (While there are those who likely seek out the good doctor’s advice, The Donald ain’t one of ’em, and Schaffner’s is just ONE opinion!)
Former Planned Parenthood President Dr. Leana Wen said there was “NO evidence(“NO evidence”? REALLY?!?)for hydrochloroquine being effective in treatment of #covid19 or prophylaxis to prevent the disease.”
She continued, “This medication has serious side effects. I am very concerned about @realDonaldTrump continuing to model behavior that could harm many Americans.”(Coming from the former president of an organization that slaughters hundreds of thousands of infants every year, “Doctor” (so much for doing no harm!) Wen certainly knows what DOES harm “many Americans”…many UNBORN Americans!!!)
Dr. Rob Davidson, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Medicare, advised his followers to ignore the president. “There is no evidence of benefit(Again, “NO evidence”? REALLY?!?)and there is evidence of harm,” Davidson tweeted.“Trump is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands.Let’s not add to that number.”(Gee, HE certainly doesn’t appear biased in any way against The Donald!)
Trump said his doctor did not recommend the drug to him, but he requested it from the White House physician. “I started taking it, because I think it’s good,” Trump said. “I’ve heard a lot of good stories.”(Sounds like an individual taking charge of their own well-being!)
Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., tweeted that repeated studies have shown hydroxychloroquine doesn’t work for COVID-19 patients.(“Doesn’t work”? REALLY?!?)
(“You may want to check with your physician”: did Ted even bother to read or listen to what Trump actually said?!?)
Others cast doubt on whether Trump was telling the truth.
“If Trump has really been taking hydroxychloroquine for the past ‘week-and-a-half’ as he just blurted [out] at a press conference, do we really think he would have been able to keep his mouth shut about it?” tweeted Glenn Kirschner, a legal analyst for NBC and MSNBC. (Ya gotta love when a legal analyst offers facts nowhere in evidence!)
Following the president’s comments, Fox News’ Neil Cavuto told his viewers, “If you are in a risky population here, and you are taking this as a preventative treatment to ward off the virus, or in a worse-case scenario you are dealing with the virus and you are in this vulnerable population, it will kill you. I cannot stress this enough. This will kill you.”(Thank you, “Dr.” Cavuto!)
To be clear, we’re not emphasizing such idiocy because the sources disagree with The Donald; we’re underscoring said senselessness because, in the best tradition of the Charlottesville fable, those who wrote or uttered it are either ignorant of, or willfully disregarding what Trump actually said. And THAT, friends, constitutes a sharp and clear departure from the truth, at least for Neil Cavuto. C’mon, Neil: you’re better than that…or at least you were at one time. For FOX, it’s a bad habit; when it comes to most of the others, lying is all they do.
Next up, courtesy of his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty suggests the Socialist leadership in the House…
“Now begins the grand effort, on display in thousands of articles and news broadcasts daily, somehow to normalize the lockdown and all its destruction of the last two months. We didn’t lock down almost the entire country in 1968/69,1957, or 1949-1952, or even during 1918. But in a terrifying few days in March 2020, it happened to all of us, causing an avalanche of social, cultural, and economic destruction that will ring through the ages.
There was nothing normal about it all.We’ll be trying to figure out what happened to us for decades hence.
How did a temporary plan to preserve hospital capacity turn into two-to-three months of near-universal house arrest that ended up causingworker furloughs at 256 hospitals, a stoppage of international travel, a 40% job loss among people earning less than $40K per year, devastation of every economic sector, mass confusion anddemoralization, a complete ignoring of all fundamental rights and liberties, not to mention the mass confiscation of private property with forced closures of millions of businesses?
Whatever the answer, it’s got to be a bizarre tale. What’s truly surprising is just how recent the theory behind lockdown and forced distancing actually is. So far as anyone can tell, the intellectual machinery that made this mess was invented 14 years ago, and not by epidemiologists but by computer-simulation modelers. It was adopted not by experienced doctors – they warnedferociously against it – but by politicians…”
Again, the facts of this article are so compelling they don’t lend themselves to editing, let alone condensing, but we’ll give it a go.
What’s makes the scenario scarier still is, as we hinted in the meme accompanying the headline, the key contributions to the lockdown theory came from a 14-year-old girl’s high school science project, assisted by her father, a complex-systems analyst at Sandia National Laboratories with no medical training whatsoever, along with the efforts of two government doctors, an intensivist and an oncologist, neither of whom had any experience in epidemiology or pandemics, tasked by Bush II in 2006 to come up with a plan to combat a possible future pandemic.
“In other words, it was a high-school science experiment that eventually became law of the land, and through a circuitous route propelled not by science but politics.
That explains why Dr. D.A. Henderson, “who had been the leader of the international effort to eradicate smallpox,” completely rejected the whole scheme…”
Along with every other doctor with epidemiological or pandemic expertise who perused it. Perhaps more noteworthy is, according to Tucker, the fact that at no time during its formulation or implementation was the plan reviewed by experts in either economics or the law. Hey, what could go wrong?!?
For those doubting the accuracy of Mr. Tucker’s account, consider this 2008 article from Reuters detailing a study by a Dr. Robert J. Glass and of Sandia National Laboratories and his daughter, Laura M. Glass.
Here’s the juice: even were we to grudgingly grant the advisability of a two-week lockdown to “flatten the curve” so as to not overwhelm our hospitals…hospitals which had never been overwhelmed in any prior pandemic…our current condition has nothing to do with saving lives; to the contrary, it’s all about controlling lives and the Dimocrats’ overarching desire to derail The Donald’s reelection.
Still, like most of Dubya’s broad-stroke policies, the devil was in the details. And, just as with his invasion of Iraq, what’s missing in his lockdown plan is an exit strategy. Which is yet another reason why, like a 12-month subscription to the Jelly-of-the-Month Club, the Bush family’s…
…provided you’re a prevaricating Progressive. And yet another reason we’ll dig our own eyes out with a rusty pop-top before we vote for another Bush…unless of course they’re running against a Clinton…and then…
P.S. That is NOT Laura Glass pictured below the headline.
For more on what it’s going to take to dig America out of the hole her “leaders” are digging, we recommend the latest installment of Best of the Web, in which Jim Freeman accurately asserts America’s economic revival cannot be accomplished through federal spending.
And here’s a real shocker courtesy of NRO‘s Zach Evans, who informs us the…
“…The reports come after investigators were able to decrypt Alshamrani’s two iPhones…”
Think about it: Alshamrani was screened, however imperfectly, prior to entering the U.S.; then consider the state of our Southern border and our inability…or lack of will…to track foreigners who overstay their visas who are already inside.
Which brings us, inappropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s this meme from Shannon…
…along with this string from Ed Hickey…
…as well as two more from Balls Cotton…
…and one more from The Penguin:
Finally, we’ll call it a day with a particularly infuriating story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, as, thanks to the ineptocrats running Houston, FOX News informs us a…
“A Texas career criminal who was recently released from jail despite being arrested nearly 70 times is accused of fatally stabbing an 80-year-old woman out shopping Saturday, police said. The suspect, 38-year-old Randy Roszell Lewis, was shot and killed by a responding officer who was flagged down by witnesses at the scene. Police said the man was armed with a 6-inch blade.
Lewis allegedly stabbed 80-year-old Rosalie Cook in the chest as she returned to her car after shopping inside a Walgreens in Houston. She was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
The incident sparked outrage from the Houston Police Officers’ Union, which blamed the “total failure” of criminal justice reform for his release weeks earlier — without paying bail…”
…A mental examination conducted in October 2019 deemed Lewis “temporarily incompetent,” and he was committed to a psychiatric hospital, KTRK reported. In March, a judge approved a request from the head of the mental facility that Lewis’ stay be extended by 60 days.
On April 30, a judge waived two bonds — one for felony theft, the second for assault on the peace officer – and approved his transfer to a private residential care facility. By May 1, he was released to the Royal Personal Care Home. He somehow escaped before Saturday’s incident, but few details were released by authorities.
“The defendant had a history of mental illness and he should have been kept off the streets. He recently absconded from the personal-care facility where the judge ordered he live instead of being held in jail,” the Houston District Attorney’s Office said in a statement. “The judge had not issued a warrant for his arrest even when he had absconded, so police did not even know to look for him and unfortunately this tragedy occurred before he could be returned to court.”…”
So now, instead of one career criminal with severe psychological issues safely hospitalized, there are two corpses in the morgue. Another all-too-predictable result of Progressive social justice activism in action.
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