RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/woodwards-non-revelation-11599780795?mod=opinion_major_pos1

The books professing dark revelations about President Trump appear to be lined up from here to Election Day, like aircraft heading into LaGuardia. This week it’s Bob Woodward’s turn, with the big news reportedly being that Mr. Trump told him in a taped conversation on Feb. 7 that he had played down the coronavirus despite knowing it was “deadly stuff.”

This is not news. We know Mr. Trump played down the virus threat at the time because he said so publicly many times. We wrote an editorial about it on March 12, “The Virus and Leadership,” warning Mr. Trump that voters would judge his Presidency largely on how he handled the virus. Q.E.D.

Mr. Trump now says he was trying to keep people from panicking. And given his preoccupation with marketing, we believe him. We also know the President understood the virus was deadly, even if the risks weren’t fully clear, because he barred arrivals from China on Jan. 31 and Europe on March 11.

His Administration’s Covid-19 record has also been better than he makes it sound—in mobilizing private-public efforts for testing, PPE and vaccines, and preventing a financial meltdown in March. His main failing has been inconstant rhetorical leadership. He has undersold the virus risks and oversold his own achievements when what the public has wanted all along is the candid reality. This is no small failing in a crisis.

But we know all this because it is on the public record. This may be the most transparent Presidency in history, for better or worse. His faults and mistakes are on constant display, whether in his own voice or leaks to a press that wants him gone.

Democrats are now citing the Woodward non-reveal as proof that Mr. Trump is responsible for 190,000 deaths, which is contemptible even by today’s political standards.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuomo-covid-new-york-coronavirus-de-blasio-shutdown-timing-11599836994?mod=itp_wsj&mod=&mod=djemITP_h
Governor overrode mayor on shutdown timing, faced criticism for nursing home moves; ‘It’s not your call’

New York City was locking down. Gov. Andrew Cuomo wanted to say when and how it would happen.

After Mayor Bill de Blasio told residents in a March 17 news conference to prepare to “shelter in place,” Mr. Cuomo dismissed the mayor’s plan in a television interview while his aides blitzed City Hall with calls.

“The phones were ringing off the hook,” recalled Freddi Goldstein, the mayor’s press secretary at the time. “They said, ‘[The mayor] sounds crazy. He’s scaring people. You have to walk it back. It’s not up to you. It’s not your call.’ ”

The federal government largely left the coronavirus response to states. While some governors ceded power to local officials, others centralized it. Mr. Cuomo, more than most state leaders, insisted that nearly every decision come from his office, including when to close office buildings, the size of weddings and the type of air filters required at shopping malls.

Mr. Cuomo and his small team took command of the state Health Department and overrode local governments that wanted to go beyond the state’s social-distancing restrictions. That delayed the shutdown of the nation’s biggest city and slowed the reaction time as the virus spread in nursing homes, contributing to the nation’s highest death toll.

Instead of the abrupt shutdown Mr. de Blasio called for, Mr. Cuomo had his own plan: a gradual closure tailored to avoid panic and encourage public compliance. Millions of people continued to pack commuter trains and subways in the five-day span between Mr. de Blasio’s “shelter in place” comments and Mr. Cuomo’s eventual shutdown order.

By the time “New York on Pause” took effect at 8 p.m. on March 22, about 25,000 New Yorkers had tested positive for Covid-19. The virus soon would push the state’s hospital system to the brink and kill more than 30,000.

State lawmakers are still assessing whom to blame for the thousands of deaths of nursing-home residents. The Justice Department recently said it had requested data on nursing-home deaths and infections from New York and several other states to determine whether an investigation is warranted—an announcement Mr. Cuomo said was politically motivated.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/coronavirus-policy-economic-costs-scientific-approach-evaluation/

Has the U.S. incurred larger COVID losses than countries held up as role models?

The idea that America has incurred larger losses from COVID than any other nation has been widely repeated, but it’s not true. In reality, the United States has incurred smaller COVID losses than many other countries often cast as role models, once the total cost of the disease — in both lost lives and economic activity — is correctly measured and taken into account. A truly scientific approach to evaluating COVID policy relies on quantification of the tradeoffs involved, as opposed to only considering health losses.

The issue is how to measure the quantitative magnitudes of two separate strands of losses, the cost of disease prevention and the cost of the disease itself, to guide policy on minimizing the total impact. Economists routinely quantify and assess tradeoffs between health and other valuable activities to determine overall costs they impose. Doing so does not trivialize human life but acknowledges — as all of us must — that saving lives at any cost is not practical nor desirable.

Consider a somewhat extreme hypothetical example. Over 40,000 people die on U.S. roads each year, yet we don’t shut down highways. Instead of closing them — and losing all the economic benefits they provide — the government manages but does not eliminate the risks from bad drivers by regulating speed limits, enforcing DUI laws, and requiring people to have licenses to drive. Put differently, closing roads would entail a loss from prevention that would be higher than the value of the lives saved.

Tradeoffs obviously play a role in setting health-related policies. Yet some epidemiologists ignore tradeoffs when pushing for their preferred COVID prevention. They only measure one type of loss in terms of health. However, these medical scientists still drive to work like everyone else, even though their mortality would be lower if they did not. This shows how, in every other aspect of life, common sense balances the costs of prevention against its benefits in terms of lower mortality. But for COVID policy decisions, in many locales, the so-called scientists adhere to unscientific economic claims about the quantitative tradeoffs involved.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-islamists-and-wokeists-have-in-common-11599779507?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

There were many American heroes on 9/11, but the greatest were the passengers and crew of Flight 93. Not only did they avert what al Qaeda planned—a direct hit on the White House—but they also embodied Patrick Henry’s credo “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

Do those words still have a meaning in the America of 2020? For two decades, I have opposed the fanatical illiberalism of those strands of Islam that gave rise to al Qaeda. I broke with my Somali family and ultimately with their faith because I believed that it is human freedom that should be sacrosanct, not antiquated doctrines that demand submission by the individual.

So implacable are the proponents of Shariah that I have faced repeated death threats. Yet I have always consoled myself that, in the U.S., freedom of conscience and expression rank above any set of religious beliefs. It was partly for this reason that I moved here and became a citizen in 2013.

It never occurred to me that free speech would come under threat in my newly adopted country. Even when I first encountered what has come to be known as “cancel culture”—in 2014 I was invited to receive an honorary degree at Brandeis University and then ungraciously disinvited—I didn’t fret too much. I was inclined to dismiss the alliance of campus leftists and Islamists as a lunatic fringe.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/10/the-resistance-war-games-a-post-election-civil-war/

Consider yourselves warned, America.

Cancel the Election Night party and forget the long-awaited moment when George Stephanopoulos announces, in the late hours of November 3, the official winner. And buckle up for an election-year nightmare that will make the 2000 recount look like a walk in a Palm Beach County park.

A vengeful and well-funded coalition of Trump-hating insurrectionists are prepping the battlefield for a post-election civil war, threatening not only to extend the 2020 election into 2021 but to weaponize every tool at their disposal to make sure Joe Biden assumes the presidency even if President Trump legitimately wins. 

The very same sore losers on the Left and NeverTrump Right who still refuse to accept the results of the 2016 presidential contest are preparing to do whatever it takes—including promote the secession of western states—to force the removal of Donald Trump next January.

Their plan, using the intentionally misleading title, “Transition Integrity Project,” outlines alarming and wholly unconstitutional responses to a number of post-election scenarios. Once upon a time, I would’ve read such a far-fetched document through tears of laughter. But considering the desperation and depravity of the people involved, this terrifying roadmap needs to be taken seriously.

Organizers, including Clinton loyalist John Podesta and NeverTrump leader Bill Kristol, have been playing war games for the past few months, plotting how to deploy media, government, and public armies to install Biden no matter what. Their scorched earth strategy rests on two factors: the use of widespread mail-in voting, intended to delay the official result so they can manipulate the outcome while stoking civil unrest until Republicans cry uncle, and the notion that if he loses, President Trump will claim the Democrats stole the election, a legitimate possibility that this plan only serves to further validate.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/09/10/9-11-19-years-later/

For 19 years, we all lived in the long, dark shadow of 9/11. Every time September 11 rolled around again, we engaged in ritual remembrance of the events of that day and reflected on the ways in which the world had changed in its aftermath. There was pre-9/11 and there was post-9/11.

If the immediate consequence of 9/11 was a feeling of strong national unity, its long-term effect was the opening up of a huge national divide. On one side were those who loved America, cherished its founding principles, and recognized the attacks on 9/11 as an assault on those principles by totalitarian ideologues. On the other side were those who reacted to 9/11 by deciding that America’s enemies must have a point and by buying the claim that America’s legacy is one not of freedom and equality but of prejudice and exploitation. 

On 9/11, who would have imagined that Islam would soon be widely depicted as a religion not of totalitarian conquest but of innocent victimhood, and that Sharia apologists like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib would be congresswomen? 

It started with George W. Bush’s whitewashing of Islam and his use of 9/11 as an excuse for Middle East nation-building. Barack Obama, who spoke loftily of “one America” as a candidate, but took every opportunity to undermine American unity and question American greatness as president, was far worse, singing Islam’s praises even as 9/11 was succeeded by one act of jihadist mass murder after another.  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/remembering-911-woke-year-daniel-greenfield/

The 19th anniversary of 9/11 has been the nation’s darkest in this dreaded cycle.

The Black Lives Matter riots that attacked the statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, and Abraham Lincoln, did not spare 9/11 memorials.

The statue of a police officer was beheaded and toppled in  Plymouth, MA at a 9/11 memorial honoring those who had died in the attacks. But the 2,000 pound steel beam from the World Trade Center proved beyond the ability of the vandals to topple.

When Black Lives Matter racists defaced statues and memorials in the Boston Common, including the ‘Glory’ regiment, they didn’t spare the 9/11 memorial in the Public Garden.

A 9/11 memorial honoring five fallen firefighters was defaced and the American flagpole was cut down in Washingtonville, NY,.There was also vandalism at the Decatur, IL memorial site, and a red, white and blue rearing horse 9/11 memorial in Rochester, NY was smeared with red paint.

 Beyond the radical attacks on the monuments of September 11 were the attacks on its heroes.

The NYPD has suffered its worst days since 9/11 with over 400 officers injured in the BLM riots. Police and firefighters went from the heroes of a nation to being smeared as soulless monsters.

“I could see no difference between the officer who killed and the police who died, or the firefighters who died,” Ta-Nehisi Coates, an intellectual godfather of Black Lives Matter, wrote, “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/the-lefts-reaction-to-woodwards-coronavirus-scoop-is-revisionist-history/

EXCERPTS:

“It’s also fair to point out that there’s no evidence that those who want to attain power would have been — or would be — any better prepared. And the idea that we could have stopped this in February or March is risible.”

Unlike Cuomo, though, the Trump administration took all kinds of action relatively early. It’s fine to criticize Trump’s response, but I have yet to hear how Democrats could have contained coronavirus, much saved less saved the economy while doing so.

Yet we’ve now gone from “Trump said something stupid” to hysterical partisan accusations such as “Trump will likely shoulder the blame for at least 100,000 American deaths” and “200,000 Americans have died because neither Donald Trump nor Bob Woodward wanted to risk anything substantial to keep the country informed.”

Even ABC News wonders if the disease “might have been contained” had Trump said something different in February. This is unadulterated revisionism.

The day Trump tweeted that coronavirus was “very much under control in the USA,” Nancy Pelosi was imploring people to visit Chinatown in San Francisco. This was weeks after the House had already been briefed on the coronavirus by the CDC.

Can you imagine the nation’s reaction had Trump — or Pelosi — demanded that states shut down their entire economies over five infections and zero known deaths in February?

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/trumps-nobel-peace-prize-nomination-is-futile-opinion-641851

The announcement that US President Donald Trump was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize provided much headline fodder this week, but was it really that dramatic? The answer is no.

For starters, this isn’t the first time that Trump has been nominated for the coveted award that grants laureates nine million Swedish kronor ($935,366). A bit more than two years ago, a group of 18 members of Congress – Rep. Luke Messer (R-Indiana) and 17 other House lawmakers – including Mark Meadows (R-North Carolina), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee), Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), Diane Black (R-Tennessee) and Steve King (R-Iowa) – nominated him for having worked “tirelessly to apply maximum pressure to North Korea to end its illicit weapons programs and bring peace to the region.”

In their letter to the Norwegian Nobel Committee on May 2, 2018, the congresspeople stated that Trump “successfully united the international community, including China, to impose one of the most successful international sanctions regimes in history.”

They further argued that the sanctions “decimated the North Korean economy and have been largely credited for bringing North Korea to the negotiating table. Although North Korea has evaded demands from the international community to cease its aggression for decades, President Trump’s peace through strength policies are working and bringing peace to the Korean Peninsula.”

Therefore, they concluded, “We can think of no one more deserving of the committee’s recognition in 2019 than President Trump for his tireless work to bring peace to our world.”