By DEXTER DUGGAN
Bad Joey stole cookies again and Mom gives him the latest swat without repeating her lecture about his misbehavior. Does Joey finally take the hint or does he go back to grabbing sweets until Mom delivers an explicit threat that his Father will deal with him?
And what if Father, patience at an end, is the creator of all the galaxies in the universe?
If the COVID-19 pandemic actually is a warning from God that the bold sins of recent generations finally are starting to be called to account, the warning seems not to have made much of an impression so far. Abortion clinics continue to rip apart babies as the daily routine, and their media cheerleaders utter not even a mild suggestion that there’s reason to reconsider.
Nor do depravity’s defenders hesitate over whether they may have gone too far with the world’s sex clinics routinely promoting mortal sin for teenagers — mortal sin!? stop being so judgmental! — or with disordered transgenderism, “same-sex marriage” — go ahead and create whatever personal moral code you please. Where does it end?
Will the message never get through until actual avenging angels with flaming swords read warning words from scrolls in the world’s biggest plazas?
It wouldn’t do any good to read them in dominant-media newsrooms, where the angelic omens would be turned on their heads. (Hmm, “A messenger from God told The New York Times that more taxpayer funding of abortion is necessary to avoid disaster”?)
If someone was to blame for the coronavirus, many U.S. leftists thought the guilt had to be laid at the feet of Donald Trump, preferably with him in ankle chains. The very possibility that the actual guilty Communist Chinese bosses covering up about diseased bats might be fingered would make the leftists go bat-crazy rabid.
However, the editor-in-chief of Germany’s largest daily paper, the flashy tabloid Bild, was an unusually bold media voice when he posted an open letter directly addressing Chinese Communist top boss Xi Jinping. It was headlined, “You are endangering the world.”
Responding to a Chinese complaint that Bild shouldn’t have demanded earlier that the Communist dictatorship reimburse Germany for its damage from the coronavirus, Julian Reichelt published a list of particulars including that Xi ruled only by surveillance of his subjects, “but you refuse to monitor the diseased wet markets in your country.”
Also, that China isn’t creative enough to invent anything because of its suppression of thought, but it gets by as “the world champion in intellectual property theft.” Its greatest export, which no one wanted, Reichelt wrote, is the coronavirus. Why, the editor asked, are Xi’s “toxic laboratories not as secure as your prisons for political prisoners?. . . . Corona will be your political end, sooner or later.”
Although one longs for the day or year when dominant U.S. media thus tell off totalitarian Communist thugs, Reichelt drew some attention, such as at The Jerusalem Post, which wrote:
“The editor-in-chief of Germany’s largest paper Bild on Thursday launched a full frontal attack on China’s Communist President Xi Jinping for his regime’s failure to come clean about the coronavirus outbreak and the massive human-rights violations carried out by the Communist Party.”
With Xi in some trouble over his awful coverup, President Trump might want to rethink his tendency to proclaim about whomever he deals with, including Xi and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, as well as the leaders of Western democracies, to be all his good friends.
But it would be hard to top the mid-April blabbering by very bad Catholic pro-abortionist and Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of California, about how much she loves the sweet treats in her luxury home refrigerators.
This, at a time when millions of Americans are newly experiencing serious deprivation, whose economic assistance was delayed by Pelosi and her Dems trying to load relief bills with left-wing priorities like abortion funding and fraudulent voting measures that would help keep them in power.
Hard to top, but Nancy probably will find a pompous way — Nancy Antoinette, as she was being called in honor of the insensate French queen whose arrogance helped bring on that country’s bloody eighteenth-century revolution.
In an interview, Pelosi, apparently with a sweater loosely tied around her neck as if she’d just skipped away from the tennis courts, was asked, “Since you’ve been isolating in your house, how much of your, of your regular diet, do you think, is ice cream and candy?”
Standing in front of her refrigerators — some people who commented on the obscene interview said they cost $24,000 — Pelosi answered, “Well, as much as possible….I enjoy it. I like it better than anything else. And I don’t know why but it seems to agree with me. I have a lot of energy. And we just got a big stock, the ice cream, like for Easter Sunday….
“I don’t know what I would have done if ice cream were not invented,” Pelosi added.
She opened a bottom drawer full of the gourmet-brand dessert and held an ice-cream bar to munch. However, apparently unlike Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s well-stocked refrigerator, Planned Parenthood pal Pelosi didn’t have any cartons of aborted babies stored there.
One Twitter feedback said, “Pelosi has more money than the entire populations of some housing projects in the U.S. Is showing off your 15-flavor ice-cream collection in extremely expensive appliances meant to be reassuring to people fighting 15 bill collectors during a pandemic & struggling to buy food?”
If Pelosi had been some conservative Republican, dominant media would have ripped her apart for weeks over this. But the left-wing team protects its teammates.
Unlike self-satisfied San Franciscan Pelosi, whose own city is falling into ruin because of left-wing policies, many thousands of Americans were turning up for demonstrations to demand that their cities and states reopen from pandemic shutdowns so they could start earning a living again instead of facing ruination not of their own making.
Indeed, some Trump supporters said a prolonged shutdown was a strategy to crash the economy and hurt the president’s re-election chances. But could leftists really want to destroy the economy and thus deprive themselves of the tax revenue they unconstitutionally can divert to schemes like enforcing “gender equity”? Or maybe they figure some revenue loss is tolerable for the bigger gain of defeating Trump.
Few people might want to go back to work if they thought their own lives seriously were at risk. But many idled Americans increasingly doubted doomsday scenarios.
Even a hostile article in the left-wing UK Guardian posted April 21 about conservative South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem’s more-lenient enforcement policies admitted, in the reporter’s own words:
“Away from the fury of the organized protests in some cities, a quieter skepticism is infusing parts of the region that have not yet been badly hit by infections and deaths, but which are bearing a severe economic cost including huge numbers of people made unemployed.
“There is not much open questioning of the science, but states such as Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska can count lives lost to COVID-19 in the dozens while unemployment has surged into the millions,” the Guardian writer added. “In South Dakota, its two biggest industries, agriculture and tourism, have taken a severe hit and do not look likely to recover for months.”
True Federalism
The Wanderer asked three sources about political officials balancing between shutdowns for safety and economic devastation prolonged.
National conservative commentator Quin Hillyer replied on April 22: “I think states should make every effort to re-open as much of their economies as possible, as fast as possible, but only based on actual, accurate data. Crowded places like New York, with massive use of subway systems that are, in effect, dangerous moving Petri dishes for the virus, will have a lot more trouble safely opening than other places.”
Victor Joecks, an opinion columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Nevada’s largest news platform, told The Wanderer on April 22: “A month ago, Americans were told that we needed to take drastic steps to flatten the curve. The goal wasn’t to limit the number of infections, but prevent the hospital system from being overwhelmed. In most states, the hospital system has plenty of capacity.
“That means it’s time to gradually reduce restrictions. These decisions should vary by state and even by location in larger states,” Joecks added. “Governors and mayors should be responding to the situation in their specific location, not worrying about the overarching political narrative.”
Constantin Querard, a conservative Arizona GOP political consultant, commented on the situation for officials like the Grand Canyon State’s Republican Gov. Doug Ducey.
“State leaders like Gov. Ducey are in a no-win position politically. Wait too long to reopen and get blamed for the economic costs. Open too early and get blamed for people dying,” Querard said on April 22. “It would be nice if politics could be left out of it, but there is no chance of that happening in today’s hyper-partisan environment.
“So I’d expect the governor to ignore the political consequences and try to make the best decisions he can, just letting the politics take care of itself later on,” he said.
“It seems like every political commentator has an opinion on how to reopen things, but they don’t have the expertise to be relied upon,” Querard said. “It makes sense to open in stages and to start the process as quickly as possible, but the details are best left to those with expertise and data.”
Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman quoted from a southern California newspaper on April 22: “‘Suicide, help hotline calls soar in Southern California over coronavirus anxieties’ is the headline on a Deepa Bharath report in the Orange County Register. ‘Financial stress, social isolation, health concerns fuel explosion of callers seeking support; teens hit particularly hard,’ notes the subhead.”
Writer Ira Stoll, posting at The New York Sun on April 15, said it’s really up to “individuals, families, businesses and religious congregations” to get the country started again.
“The best plan for re-opening America is one that sticks to American values — one that emphasizes freedom, competition, choice and diversity, not one-size-fits-all compulsion or command-and-control authoritarianism,” Stoll said.
“It’s a conception, outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, in which government’s role is protecting natural or God-given freedoms of individuals, families, businesses and religions, rather than turning them off or on a schedule, even in the service of public health,” he said.
Stoll also pointed to an April 10 editorial at the New Boston Post blog observing that, while in most of the U.S. the churches are closed except to their immediate staff due to safety concerns, “we’re all going to die, no matter how well we take care of our bodies. Our time on Earth is short, whether it’s a few days or 120 years. Eternity is forever.”
Now there’s a thought that aging, ice-cream gulping pro-abortion radical Pelosi might seriously ponder.
A separate article in the New York Sun, posted April 14, also placed an emphasis on the primacy of non-government action. It was headlined, “True federalism: It’s America’s people who will restart the economy.”
It concluded: “Until three months ago, it was called the Trump boom, and fair enough. It was, though, really the people who built it. They will be the decision-makers on when and how to bring the economy back. The most important factor will be for government at all levels to get out of their way and let the American people do what they know how to do, including weighing the risks to which government might alert them.”
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