Destroyers-II

Now that the administration has announced a set of measured and achievable guiidelines for re-opening the economy and suggested that the final decision should be tailored to each state and made the the Governor of that state, that battle has been joined. As I predicted in numerous posts, the Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media want to make this political, suggesting that only when we are 100% "safe" and have "comprehensive" contact tracing can we reopen.

Kim Strassel comments:

The shutdown came. The shutdown conquered. Long live the shutdown.

That’s the line congressional Democrats and liberal journalists are now adopting, as they set new battle lines in the pandemic debate. The Trump administration might have thought the hard call was shutting down the U.S. economy. The left intends to make reopening it far harder, lacing it with political risk by raising the bar for “success” to fantasy heights ...

By [the Democrats new and rapidly evolving] standards, no lockdown may end until the Trump administration can “guarantee” a “safe” world in which people return to “normal.” The feds must stand up a testing system capable of hunting down and snuffing out each new infection. There can be no more outbreaks, and reopening cannot “significantly add” to existing counts (and the press reserves the authority to define “significantly.”) The unsaid corollary is that Mr. Trump will be held politically responsible for reopening in any way that fails to meet these baselines—on the hook for each subsequent death.

Talk about moving goal posts. A month ago, the administration announced its 15-day plan to “flatten the curve” and “slow the spread” of the virus. Examine those phrases. The goal of the shutdown was never to eradicate the disease—an impossibility absent a vaccine. The lockdown was designed to buy the health sector time, to make sure all the cases didn’t hit at once in a crush that would overwhelm hospitals, à la Italy.

In that regard, the Trump administration has become a victim of its own success. The guidelines did flatten the curve. As ugly as the outbreak has been, even New York City and other hot spots have had enough ventilators. Numerous emergency field hospitals ended up sitting empty. The lockdown has been so effective that it has allowed Mr. Trump’s political opponents to lay out a false narrative of what counts as “victory.”

The political cynicism is extraordinary.

Consider the following data:

Any rational, caring person who examines this curve for more than 3 seconds understands that the economic devastation represented cannot be sustained for long. In fact, the damage already done is extraordinary.

It appears, however, that the Dems have decided that damaging Trump is far more important that any consequent damage to tens of millions of working people. Sure they wrap themselves in virtue signaling and tell us that all they care about is "saving lives." But that's simply not true, because if they really cared about "lives" they would recognize that their disingenuous opposition to restarting the economy has the potential to ruin the lives of the very working people they purport to care so much about. They have become destroyers.

UPDATE:
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It occurs to me that the same Democrats and other catastrophists who are now against reopening the economy became apoplectic when Donald Trump recommended a combination of therapies for COVID-19 that included hydroxychloroquine (HQC). They argued that complete double-blind testing must be done, that people's health might be damaged by HQC, that the therapy was "unproven," that reports of anecdotal success were meaningless, and on and on.

Turns out the Dems were dead wrong in their opposition. HQC therapies are now regularly used by thousands of front line doctors for COVID-19 patients worldwide. But never mind.

And yet, the caution espoused by Dems for HQC is nowhere to be found when the economic shutdown experiment is considered. The "destroyers" are perfectly willing to conduct an unproven and dangerous experiment that recommends the continuing closure of the American economy. All because the shadow goal of their experiment coincides with their overriding political objective (i.e., destroy Trump by any means necessary), there's no concern at all.

Incredible.