RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/great-coronavirus-war-stay-calm-rational-easily-defeat-enemy/

If we stay calm and rational, we can easily defeat the enemy, whose reputation is likely far scarier than its reality.

Try this thought experiment. Envision the coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, as a living, breathing enemy — which, of course, is exactly what it is.

But imagine for a moment that we are in real war with a cognizant, thinking, and clever enemy whose sole reason to live is to hurt, maim, or kill as many of us as it can.

COVID-19 may not have jets, tanks, or nukes, like our past enemies. But its arsenal, numbers, cunning, and willpower are said to be formidable.

To win its war against Americans, COVID-19 must infect and sicken lots of Americans each day. If it cannot infect enough victims to multiply and sustain a hungry army of viruses, COVID-19 will soon sputter and die. It will get trapped in just a few hosts among an otherwise victorious and healthy nation of about 330 million.

Nature has given COVID-19 some weapons that its defeated cousins — the H1N1 swine flu and the MERS and SARS viruses — lacked.

It is more clever by being less lethal — and a little tougher in its ability to live outside a host. Viral resiliency ensures that it rarely turns into a suicide bomber by dying with a terminally sick host, and that it does not perish so quickly when orphaned in the air and on surfaces.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/democrats_respond_to_trumps_oval_address_with_vicious_partisan_rancor.html

On Wednesday night, a solemn President Trump spoke for less than ten minutes to tell Americans what steps the federal government has taken and will take to address the spread of coronavirus around the world. These steps include stopping all travel from Europe, payroll tax relief, small business loans, and aide for American workers who become sick or must care for someone who is sick.

Although it was not a flowery speech, Trump reminded Americans that health crises are a fact of life. What matters is how one responds. In the face of the panic sweeping America, Trump promised us that, “This is not a financial crisis. This is just a temporary moment in time that we will overcome together as a nation and as a world.”

After detailing the practical steps he will take, Trump ended by saying that America has tremendous financial resilience, which makes his proposals possible, and incredible human capital. He also urged Americans to put aside partisan differences to provide the most robust response to a temporary, albeit severe, problem.

Within minutes, Democrats and Never Trumpers ignored the President’s request that the country works together on the problem. Instead, they swung instantly into action, castigating him for doing nothing (even though he acted quickly to restrict travel from China and quarantine travelers) and dreaming of all the horrible things that should happen to Trump and America.

Here are just a few examples of the hysteria and pure hatred that Democrats and NevertTrumpers expressed for Trump and America itself.

Garry Kasparov, a Never Trumper, voiced an elaborate fantasy that the most successful conservative president in modern American history was motivated by the fact that he’s being exposed as a “fraud”:

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/03/the_gop_chairwoman_challenges_the_leftist_narrative_that_trump_is_a_donothing.html

Epidemic illnesses are always going to be scary. That scariness is there even when we marshall the facts. One good fact is that this is the flu, with a probable top mortality rate of 4.6 percent, not the Black Death, with its 40-90 percent mortality rate. Another good fact is that the 4.6 percent rate is dropping because we can track the virus better. We’ve always known how many people died, but we’re learning that more people were sick than was first assumed. As the number of recovered sick people expands, the mortality rate drops.

What makes this outbreak exceptionally frightening, though, is the number of people who want it to be awful. Some of them are just drama queens, reveling in the horror of the moment and the even more horrific possibilities of the future. These people are toxic and need to be avoided.

Worse, though, are those people who see this as Trump’s Waterloo. The problem for them, though, is that the only way Trump can measurably fail is if lots of people die and the entire American system collapses. These people, therefore, are cheering on the possibility of death, economic collapse, and social chaos. That’s not just toxic, that’s evil.

One of the things the Waterloo-wishes are doing is attacking everything Trump has said or done. When he banned flights from China and quarantined people, he was racist. When coronavirus still made it to America, he was ineffective. And when he announced that he was closing flights from Europe, people announced, without a scintilla of evidence, that it was too little too late.

Even before Trump’s latest announcements about slowing the spread of coronavirus and securing the economy, Ronna McDaniel, the GOP Chairwoman, had put out a short thread reminding America what Trump was doing, even as the Democrats were attacking him:

https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/10/some-reality-testing-of-rosy-predictions-about-a-coronavirus-vaccine/

A Wuhan virus vaccine in the foreseeable future? Let’s get real. In spite of the rosy predictions by self-interested corporate executives, politicians, and pundits, don’t count on it.

When President Trump met with drug-company executives at the White House on March 2, at the top of the agenda was the development of a vaccine to prevent COVID-19, the respiratory infection caused by the Wuhan coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 (the World Health Organization’s designation for the virus). “We’ve asked them to accelerate” work, the president told reporters.

As the coronavirus outbreak accelerates, with cases now found on every continent except Antarctica, and the world is hit with widespread social and economic disruption, there is intense interest in the development of a vaccine, and several U.S. drugmakers have begun working on them, independently or with the National Institutes of Health.

The media are hungry for claims about vaccines—the more extravagant, the better.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15703/distorting-legal-arguments

In response to a question whether it matters “If there were a quid pro quo,” I said that would depend on “If the quo were in some way unlawful.” If the politician’s motive were “corrupt” — for example, if he were seeking a kickback, that would be an impeachable crime. But if his entirely lawful act had “mixed motives,” including his re-election, that would not turn a lawful act into a crime or impeachable offense.

“Start with the media claim that defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz said a President can do anything to further his re-election as long as he thinks it is in the national interest. This isn’t what he said. The Harvard professor said explicitly that a President can be impeached for criminal acts.” — Wall Street Journal, Editorial, January 30, 2020.

Perhaps the most disturbing consequence of distorting the so-called “Dershowitz doctrine” into a justification for any and all presidential actions, is that it may create a dangerous precedent. Because of the persistent mischaracterization of “Dershowitz doctrine,” the Senate vote to acquit may be taken as a confirmation that a president who believes his re-election is in the public interest, can do anything he wants — even commit serious crimes — to help himself get re-elected. That is not what I said or believe. Nor is it the precedent the senators who vote for acquittal intended to establish.

It has now been a month since the Senate acquitted U.S. President Donald J. Trump, but the lies persist. Democratic leaders and the media continue to put on trial what they have denominated as “The Dershowitz Doctrine”: namely that a president can do anything — even commit serious crimes — as long as he believes his election was in the public interest. Congressman Adam Schiff described it as a “lawless” variation on the “Nixon” doctrine that whatever a president does is, by definition, lawful. Senator Schumer said that under “my” doctrine, former President Richard M. Nixon did not commit any impeachable offense, despite evidence of his numerous crimes. (Ignoring my explicit statement that I supported Nixon’s impeachment.) Media pundits went even further: Joe Lockhart, former Press Secretary to President Bill Clinton, accused me of making arguments that would justify the genocides of Hitler and Stalin.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/21-words-uttered-fisa-court-change-russia-collusion-case

For much of the last three years, key law enforcement leaders have insisted they did nothing wrong in pursuing counterintelligence surveillance warrants targeting the Trump campaign starting during the 2016 election. And, they’ve added, if mistakes were made, they were unintentional process errors downstream from them and not an effort to deceive the judges.

But in a little-noted passage in a recent order, U.S. District Judge James A. Boasberg, the new chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, took direct aim at the excuses and blame-shifting of these senior Obama administration FBI and DOJ officials.

In just 21 words, Boasberg provided the first judicial declaration the FBI had misled the court, not just committed process errors. “There is thus little doubt that the government breached its duty of candor to the Court with respect to those applications,” Boasberg wrote.

The no-fault mantra has been spread by everyone from President Trump’s former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who insisted the DOJ took its responsibility to submit “admissible evidence, credible witnesses” very seriously, to the ex-FBI Director James Comey, who declared recently it was “nonsense” to suggest the bureau opened a probe without good cause.