“…In her statement, she slammed the Chinese government and its practices and the International Olympic Committee for choosing Beijing as the venue given the Chinese Communist Party’s egregious record of violating international norms. She reiterated the Biden administration’s diplomatic boycott of the tournament, but urged athletes to consider the ugly repercussions they could face in the foreign country for speaking out against the CCP while there.
“I would say to our athletes: You’re there to compete. Do not risk incurring the anger of the Chinese government because they are ruthless,” she added. “I know there is a temptation on the part of some to speak out while they are there. I respect that, but I also worry about what the Chinese government might do to their reputations and to their families.”…”
Two thoughts immediately come to mind. (1). What on earth does Pelosi think Xi Jinping would do to U.S. athletes who protested Beijing’s human rights abuses: Put ’em in the gulag with the Uyghurs?!? (2). We’re certain Nancy wouldn’t have exhibited the same concern about American athletes disrespecting…
…their own country.
Meanwhile, certain Republicans demonstrated a peculiar kind of courage by threatening, should any U.S. athletes go missing after condemning the Chicoms during the Beijing games, to sanction the IOC. That’s right, not the PRC…
…but the IOC:
Is it any wonder the GOP is more commonly know as The Party of Stupid, aka, The Gang Who’ll NEVER Learn to Shoot Straight?!?
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, writing at Townhall.com, Stephen Moore records…
The tally for how much the federal government spent to combat COVID-19 is now estimated to be $5 trillion. It is more than the combined costs of World Wars I and II. The left is celebrating that politicians in Washington saved us. Really? From what exactly?
Two years later, it is time for an honest assessment. Could things have worsened for the country if the government had spent nothing and done nothing? What would have happened if we had not shut down our businesses? Our churches, schools and restaurants. Our parks, basketball courts and playgrounds.
Would the public have made worse decisions regarding protecting its health and the health of its families and its employees than the politicians have made?
The left believes that it was government intervention that saved millions of lives. But even with all the federal spending, some 879,000 (and counting) have perished from the virus. (The majority of who perished with the virus rather than from the virus!)It was politicians such as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo whose awful decision-making contributed to the deaths of thousands of seniors exposed to infected patients in nursing homes. In addition, politicians didn’t shut down the New York subway system for many weeks into the virus, costing thousands more avoidable deaths.
Suppose the government is here to save us. How do we explain the shameful malfeasance of the CDC, the FDA, the NIH and other government medical agencies and programs that spend roughly half a trillion dollars each year to keep us healthy? All of that money couldn’t stop a virus from wreaking havoc on the country for two years and counting.
Why was the CDC caught entirely unprepared to fight this virus? It would be like a town spending millions of dollars a year on fire protection, and the first time there is a significant fire, the firefighters are all napping, no one slides down the poles and the fire engines won’t start. So, what were Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the experts at the CDC doing with the tens of billions of dollars we give them each year? (Besides funding gain-of-function research at an unsafe lab in Wuhan, China?!?)They studied the health effects of liberal obsessions such as climate change, racism and gun violence. What they weren’t ready to do was their job: preparing for infectious diseases.
Then there is the question of what Washington did with all the money. At least $2 trillion was given to workers and businesses to compensate them for the lockdowns that the government itself imposed. We now have pretty conclusive evidence from dozens of country and state studies that lockdowns were a highly ineffective way to combat the virus. Lockdowns may have saved some lives, but this response was the equivalent of trying to remove a tumor with a sledgehammer. Age-adjusted death rates were no lower in states that shut down their economies than states that stayed open.
The restof the money went to pay school districts even though the school doors were locked shut, to fund states and cities that closed their businesses, to fund mass transit trains and buses that operated nearly empty, and worst of all, to fund hundreds of billions of dollars of welfare programs, such as expanded unemployment benefits, that paid workers to stay off the job. And millions of workers still haven’t come back.
The one program that did work was President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. But the heart of that program was to find ways to pull end-runs around drug and vaccine regulations that hold up lifesaving medicines for many years. As a result, private companies such as Pfizer invented the vaccines in record time because the government stayed out of the way. (AND freed them of any liability for problems with their products.)
We are still paying a high price for President Joe Biden’s screw-ups as we deal with the less deadly omicron variant.(Along with The Donald’s original ill-advised initiation of a national lockdown.) Late last year, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services stopped all shipments of an effective COVID-19 treatment by Regeneron because a CDC model concluded wrongly that the delta variant had disappeared. Thanks to that blunder, many thousands died or were hospitalized because the government denied them treatment. Other promising therapies, such as by GlaxoSmithKline, have run into regulatory hurdles preventing or delaying their use.
Wouldn’t it have been more competent and more humane to let doctors and patients make these decisions rather than Washington bureaucrats and politicians?
There have been a multitude of other snafus by the government that only validate the utter incompetence of big government. Some $300 billion was stolen by fraudsters who ripped off the Medicaid and unemployment benefits programs.
Now here we are, two years from the start of COVID-19, closing in on 1 million dead and $5 trillion more in debt. (Actually more like $7 trillion.)Millions of children have suffered, perhaps irreparably, from a loss of schooling (some of which still goes on in some districts). There are some 50,000 to 100,000 deaths of despair caused by the lockdowns. And the virus is still out there, though thankfully in retreat.
Big government didn’t save us. On the contrary, big government has left us weaker as a nation in every way, and we will spend decades cursing the fact that we panicked and handed over so much power to so many incompetent people in Washington.
EDITOR’S NOTE: At the risk of incurring the wrath of any die-hard The-Donald-Can-Do-No-Wrongers out there, as noted by both the meme under the headline and our comment in green above, we cannot absolve Trump of responsibility for not only initiating the lockdowns, but providing Dr. Faux Chi the power and prominence he enjoys.
In a related item featured at White House Dossier, a study by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics stated, “We find no evidence that lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and limiting gatherings have had a noticeable effect on COVID-19 mortality”, though the lockdowns did have “devastating effects” on the economy and contributed to numerous social ills, concluding:
“They have contributed to reducing economic activity, raising unemployment, reducing schooling, causing political unrest, contributing to domestic violence, and undermining liberal democracy. Such a standard benefit-cost calculation leads to a strong conclusion: lockdowns should be rejected out of hand as a pandemic policy instrument.”
Funny, that’s what every virologist and epidemiologist concluded when shown the original lockdown plan developed under Bush II. You know, the one we reported back in May of 2020 was based on a 14-year-old high schooler’s science project developed by government doctors with no expertise in either virology or epidemiology which was never shown to a single economist.
As Best of the Web notes of the Hopkins study of utterly unnecessary catastrophe created by lockdowns:
“…This is just one analysis and there will be others, but two years after the panic few people are still willing to argue that societal shutdowns are the sensible response to Covid. The lockdowners have even lost Denmark. Research will continue on the bloody blunders of our era, but much of the staggering cost is already obvious. The Journal’s Amara Omeokwe reports from Washington:
The U.S. national debt exceeded $30 trillion for the first time, reflecting increased federal borrowing during the coronavirus pandemic.
Total public debt outstanding was $30.01 trillion as of Jan. 31, according to Treasury Department data released Tuesday. That was a nearly $7 trillion increase from late January 2020, just before the pandemic hit the U.S. economy.
Today’s kids will have to shoulder this burden along with diminished skills thanks to the distance-learning disaster demanded by so many so-called experts in public health…”
Let’s not forget the “so-called experts” in every level of government, the teachers’ unions and the MSM!
We’ll leave the last word on the subject of the WuFlu scamdemic to a video montage forwarded by Speed compiled by one Matt Orfalea, which reminds us the powers-that-be and their shills in the MSM have consistently urged everyone in unisonNOT to believe the supposedly debunked theory the Wuhan virus, which (i) bears undeniable marks of genetic manipulation, and (ii) originated in Wuhan, China…in close proximity to one of only three, count ’em, three labs in the world conducting gain-of-function research funded by grants approved by Dr. Faux Chi himself, could possibly have been released, deliberately or accidentally, from the Wuhan Institute of Virology:
Yeah, “NOT man-made or genetically modified”, they cried in one voice…until they didn’t.
Moving on, here’s a quintet of items specially selected with inquiring Conservative minds in mind:
…along with Georgetown in its entirety…and any institution like it.
(2). The WSJ‘s Kim Strassel details Eric Holder’s “democracy” con, and his campaign against gerrymandering while not uttering a word about New York’s torturously convoluted map.
(5). Is anyone really surprised, in the wake of the diminutive Jeff Zucker’s departure from CNN, his paramour was once communications director for Andrew Cuomo?!? Nah, nothing to see here, peons…please move along and be satisfied with the bullsh*t The Most Trusted Name in News finds fit to feed you.
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
This video forwarded by James Nichols details the results of Socialism’s deliberate descent into lawlessness and anarchy. You go, grandma!
Tales of The Darkside
While Tucker seems to confuse the Founders’ constitutional Republic with Athenian democracy, his point about the DELIBERATE disconnect between voters and the Dimocratic leadership is spot on.
On the Lighter Side
Courtesy of The Babylon Bee, actor Peter Dinklage has some words of warning for the usually carefully and calculatingly P.C. Walt Disney Company.
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