Tag Archives: Mike Pence

COVID, Trump, and Tyrants

11 Sunday Oct 2020

Posted by in Pandemic, Public Health, Trump Administration

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I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: allegations of the White House’s “poor leadership” and preparedness for COVID-19 (C19) are a matter of selective memory. At the link above, I “graded” Trump’s pandemic job performance through May. Among other things, I said:

“Many have criticized the Trump Administration for not being ‘ready’ for a pandemic. I assign no grade on that basis because absolutely no one was ready, at least not in the West, so there is no sound premise for judgement. I also view the very general charge that Trump did not provide “leadership” as code for either ‘I don’t like him’, or ‘he refused to impose more authoritarian measures’, like a full-scale nationwide lockdown. Such is the over-prescriptive instinct of the Left.”

The President of the United States does not have the constitutional authority to impose a national lockdown, though Trump himself seemed confused at times as to whether he had that power. However, on this basis at least, the ad nauseam denigration of his “leadership” is vapid. At this point, the course of the pandemic in the U.S. is less severe than in several other industrialized countries who didn’t even have Andrew Cuomo around to exacerbate the toll, and it’s still not as deadly in per capita terms as the Asian Flu of 1957-58.

Who exactly was “ready” for C19? Perhaps critics are thinking of South Korea, or parts of South Asia. Those countries might have been “ready” to the extent that they had significant prior exposure to SARS viruses. There was already some degree of immunological protection. Those countries also were exposed to an earlier genetic variant of C19 that was much less severe than the strain that hit most of the western world. These are hardly reasons to blame Trump for a lack of “readiness”.

A related charge I hear all the time is that Trump “ignored the advice of medical experts“, or that he “ignored the science“. Presumably, those “experts” include the darling of the Prescriptive Class, Dr. Anthony Fauci. On February 28, Dr Fauci said:

“Right now, at this moment, there’s no need to change anything you’re doing on a day by day basis.“

All-righty then! So this was the advice Trump “should” have followed. Oh, wait… he did! And Fauci, on March 9, said there was no reason for young, healthy people to avoid cruise ships.

Likewise, Dr. Robert Redfield, Director of the Centers for Disease Control, said the following on February 27:

“The risk to the American public is low. We have an aggressive containment strategy that really has worked up to this time, 15 cases in the United States. Until the last case that we just had in Sacramento we hadn’t had a new case in two weeks.”

Then there is the World Health Organization, which downplayed the virus in January and February, and giving a convincing impression that it servied as a mouthpiece for the CCP.

In fact, the American people were badly harmed by wrongheaded decisions made by the “experts” at the CDC in January and February, when the agency insisted that testing could not proceed until a test of their own design was ready. Then, the first version it approved was discovered to be flawed! This set the testing effort back by well over a month, a delay that proved critical. It’s no exaggeration to say this bureaucratic overreach denied the whole country, and Trump, the information needed to properly assess the spread of the virus.

But let’s think about actual policy once it became clear that the virus was getting to be a serious matter in parts of the U.S. Here’s another excerpt from my post in May:

“Trump cannot be accused of ignoring expert advice through the episode. He was obviously on-board with Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, Dr. Robert Redfield, and other health care advisors on the ‘15 Days to Slow the Spread‘ guidelines issued on March 16. His messaging wavered during those 15 days, expressing a desire to fully reopen the nation by Easter, which Vice President Michael Pence later described as “aspirational”. Before the end of March, however, Trump went along with a 30-day extension of the guidelines. Finally, by mid-April, the White House released guidelines for ‘Opening Up America Again‘, which was a collaboration between Trump’s health care experts and the economic team. Trump agreed that the timeline for reopening should be governed by ‘the data’.” 

We should give Trump credit for shutting down flights into the U.S. from China, where the virus originated, late in January. That was an undeniably prescient move. Let’s also not forget that the original intent of the “15 Days” was to prevent hospitals and other medical resources from being overwhelmed. Today, the data show a strong seasonal tendency to the spread of the virus, but medical resources are not close to being overwhelmed, our ability to treat the virus has vastly improved, and its consequences are much less deadly than in the spring. That’s good progress, whatever the President’s detractors may say.

More than anything else, what Trump’s COVID critics fail to understand is that the executive leader of a republic is not possessed of monarchical powers. And in the U.S., the Constitution provides an additional layer of sovereignty for member states of the Union, a manifestation of the federalist principals without which the Union would not have been possible. The 15-day guidelines produced by the White House, and the guidelines for reopening, were consistent with this framework. The states have adapted their own policies to actual conditions and, if their leaders haven’t worn out their goodwill among voters, internal political realities. Those adaptations were often bad from my perspective, or even tyrannical, but sometimes good. That is exactly how our federalist system was designed to work.

Fake News and Fake Virtue

28 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by in Free Speech, Propaganda

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Suddenly, since the election, “fake news” has become all the rage. Not that it’s a new phenomenon. All of us have come across it on social media. Most of us think we know it when we see it, and the recent election probably sensitized a great many of us to its cheap seduction. Some of it is satire, some is sincerely-held conspiracy theory, some is cooked-up, milli-penny click bait, and some of it is intended to drive an agenda.

Those forms of “fake news” are only the most obvious. I believe, for example, that the dangers of positively fake news are no greater than those posed by omission or demotion of news. It was rather obvious during the recent election campaign that news networks often ignored important stories that did not favor their own points of view. And since the death of the tyrant Fidel Castro, we’ve heard pronouncements that he was a “great leader” from a variety of sources who should know better; we’ve heard very little from them about his oppressive and murderous regime.

News as reported, and not reported, is often manipulated or mischaracterized to suit particular agendas. Reporters have their sources, and sources usually have agendas and stratagems in mind, which include rewarding reporters to get the coverage they desire. The manipulation even extends to news about science: grant-hungry and media-savvy members of the scientific community, and the pop-science community, know how to leverage it to their advantage.

Given the universal human capacity for bias, Roger Simon asks, only half in jest, whether all news is fake news. You can rely on so-called fact-checkers in an attempt to verify stories you find suspicious, but choose your fact checkers wisely because they are no better than the biases they bring to their duties. Let’s face it: facts are not always as clear-cut as we’d like. Simon makes his advisory on bias in reporting in the context of Mark Zuckerberg’s new-found passion to identify “fake news” and purveyors of “fake news”, and potentially to ban them from Facebook. No doubt his concern stems from accusations from angry Hillary Clinton supporters that Facebook failed to control the flow of “fake news” during the presidential campaign. He wants users to “flag” fake stories, but he knows that won’t always yield definitive conclusions. Simon quotes the Wall Street Journal:

“Facebook is turning to outside groups for help in fact-checking… It is also exploring a product that would label stories as false if they have been flagged as such by third-parties or users, and then show warnings to users who read or share the articles.

‘The problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically,’ [Zuckerberg] wrote. ‘We believe in giving people a voice, which means erring on the side of letting people share what they want whenever possible.’“

Well, that’s a relief! But what kind of chilling effect might be inflicted when the fact priests assign their marks? And what kind of fact-check/flagging escalation might be engendered among users? In the end, users and third-party “authorities” have biases. You can’t take any proscriptive action that will please them all. Better for hosts to keep their fingers off the scale, avoid censorship, and let users please themselves!

Zuckerberg should know better than to think that “facts” are always easily discerned, that “fake” news is solely the province of crank blogs and flakey “new media” organizations, or that “fake news” has any political affiliation. Consider the following examples offered by A. Barton Hinkle at Reason.com:

“The [New York] Times’ record for disseminating agitprop dates back at least to the early 1930s, when Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer for his reporting that denied the existence of famines in Soviet Russia—during a period when millions were dying of starvation.

More recently, The Times has given the nation the Jayson Blair fabrications—which it followed up with the infamous 2004 story, ‘Memos on Bush Are Fake But Accurate, Typist Says.’ It followed that up four years later with a story implying that GOP presidential candidate John McCain had had an affair with a lobbyist. (The lobbyist sued, and reached a settlement with the paper.)

Over the years other pillars of the media also have fallen on their faces. NBC News had to confess that it rigged GM trucks with incendiary devices for an explosive Dateline segment. The Washington Post gave up a Pulitzer after learning that Janet Cooke’s reporting about an 8-year-old heroin addict was false. In 1998 the Cincinnati Enquirer renounced its own series alleging dark doings by the Chiquita banana company. That same year, CNN retracted its story alleging ‘that the U.S. military used nerve gas in a mission to kill American defectors in Laos during the Vietnam War.’ The San Jose Mercury News had to denounce its own series alleging that the CIA was to blame for the crack cocaine epidemic. Rolling Stone just got hit with a big libel judgment for its now-retracted story about a rape at U.Va. And so on.“

Retractions are good, of course, but they aren’t always forthcoming, and they often receive little notice after the big splash of an initial report. The damage cannot be fully undone. Yet no one proposes to censor “the paper of record” or, with the exception of Fox News, the major television networks.

Edward Morrissey, writing at The Week, notes that the Trump election represented such a total breakdown in the accepted political wisdom that the identification of scapegoats was inevitable:

“Over the past week, the consensus Unified Theory from the media is this: Blame fake news. This explanation started with BuzzFeed’s analysis of Facebook over the past three months, which claimed that the top 20 best-performing ‘fake news’ articles got more engagement than the top 20 ‘mainstream news’ stories. …

There are also serious problems with the evidence BuzzFeed presents. As Timothy Carney points out at the Washington Examiner, the “real news” that Silverman uses for comparison are, in many cases, opinion pieces from liberal columnists. The top ‘real’ stories — which BuzzFeed presented in a graphic to compare against the top ‘fake’ stories — consist of four anti-Trump opinion pieces and a racy exposé of Melania Trump’s nude modeling from two decades ago.“

In Reason, Scott Shackford considers a proposed list of “fake news” sources compiled by a communications professor. Shackford says:

“… [Professor] Zimdars’ list is awful. It includes not just fake or parody sites; it includes sites with heavily ideological slants like Breitbart, LewRockwell.com, Liberty Unyielding, and Red State. These are not “fake news” sites. They are blogs that—much like Reason—have a mix of opinion and news content designed to advance a particular point of view. Red State has linked to pieces from Reason on multiple occasions, and years ago I wrote a guest commentary for Breitbart attempting to make a conservative case to support gay marriage recognition.“

Warren Meyer rightfully identifies the “fake news” outrage as an exercise in idealogical speech suppression, much like the left’s cavalier use of the term “hate speech”:

“The reason it is such a dangerous term for free speech is that there is no useful definition of hate speech, meaning that in practice it often comes to mean, ‘confrontational speech that I disagree with.’“

Worries about “fake” news are one thing, but perhaps we should be just as concerned about the “scourge of dumb news“, and the way it often supplants emphasis on more serious developments. Did the fracas over the Hamilton cast’s treatment of Mike Pence distract the media, and the public, from stories about Donald Trump’s potential conflicts of interest around the globe, which broke at about the same time? Here are some other examples of “dumb” news offered by Noah Rothman, the author of the last link:

“Colin Kaepernick, the Black Lives Matter movement, college-age adults devolving into their childlike selves, or pretentious celebrities politicizing otherwise apolitical events; for the right, these and other similar stories masquerade as and suffice for intellectual stimulation and political engagement. The left is similarly plagued by mock controversies. The faces printed on American currency notes, minority representation in film adaptations of comic books, and astrophysicists insensitive enough to announce feats of human engineering while wearing shirts with cartoon depictions of scantily clad women on them. This isn’t politics but, for many, it’s close enough.“

Okay, so what? We all choose news sources we prefer or discern to be reliable, interesting, or entertaining, and that’s wonderful. No one should presume to question the degree to which news and entertainment ought to intersect. I do not want protection from “fake news”, “dumb news”, or any news source that I prefer, least of all from the government. After all, if there is any entity that might wish to “control the narrative” it’s the government, or anyone who stands to gain from it’s power to coerce.

Stumbling Into the Hamilton Safe Space

21 Monday Nov 2016

Posted by in Constitution, Progressivism

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An incident at the curtain call of Friday night’s performance of Hamilton, The Musical in New York has attracted more attention than it deserves, or perhaps it’s attracted attention for the wrong reasons. Vice President-Elect Mike Pence attended the show, and the word spread to the cast. One of the actors, Brandon Dixon, read a message to Pence from the stage which had been written by the show’s producers. By that time, Pence’s Secret Service detail was ushering him out of The Richard Rogers Theater, apparently the usual protocol, but one of the producers said Pence stopped to listen. Here is the message that Dixon read, according to this Twitter link:

“You know, we have a guest in the audience this evening — Vice President-elect Pence, I see you walking out but I hope you hear just a few more moments. There’s nothing to boo, ladies and gentlemen, There’s nothing to boo. We’re all here sharing a story of love. We have a message for you, sir, we hope that you will hear us out. And I encourage everyone to pull out you phones and tweet and post because this message needs to be spread far and wide.

Vice President-elect Pence, we welcome you and we truly thank you for joining us here at ‘Hamilton: An American Musical.’ We really do. We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us. All of us.

Thank you truly for seeing this show. this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men, women of different colors, creeds and orientations.“

Donald Trump overreacted to the situation, tweeting that Dixon and the cast should apologize to Pence. This is typical Trump, making a bigger story of something that could have passed with less controversy. Pence, left to his own devices,  would have let it pass. He said later that he was not offended. And I’m sure the cast of Hamilton was under no illusion that Pence would accept their advice on anything.

Dixon’s message itself was respectful, more or less, though it was not “a conversation”, as he later claimed. It was a lecture. It seemed designed to show Pence up, but Pence listened politely. Less “respectful” were audience members who greeted Pence with boos as he entered the theater (there were cheers as well), and when Dixon mentioned his name at the curtain call. At least Dixon admonished them. However, there are reports, which I’ve been unable to confirm, that some of the show’s actors directed their lines at Pence. If true, such a confrontational delivery broke the “fourth wall” for purposes that do not elevate the show. On something of a light note, someone suggested that the incident might prompt Trump to build a “fourth wall”. Heh! No, Dixon’s lecture did not break the fourth wall — he read the statement after the show had ended.

Some artists thought the Hamilton cast went too far. Here is Steven Van Zant, guitarist for The E-Street Band and an avowed progressive who, for what it’s worth, happens to agree with Trump that the cast should apologize to Pence:

“When artists perform the venue becomes your home. The audience are your guests. It is nothing short of the same bullying tactic we rightly have criticized Trump for in the past. It’s taking unfair advantage of someone who thought they were a protected guest in your home. You don’t single out an audience member and embarrass him from the stage. [This was] a terrible precedent to set.“

I have a number of friends and acquaintances in my city’s theatre community. Their opinion is divided, but a clear majority are defending the cast of Hamilton. They stress that theatre has always been a vehicle for social commentary and social change. There is certainly an extent to which that’s true, and Hamilton is nothing if not a social statement. Of course, the lecture was not part of the show, but for what it’s worth, my view is that such commentary is more successful as art, and more likely to provoke sincere thought, when it is weaved into the art or story in subtle ways. I also believe that approach is truer to the history of theatrical social commentary. Personally, I don’t like tendentious art, and I’ve always felt that artists who make their political views too explicit cheapen their work. But that’s just me. One theatre friend thought that Dixon (and the producers) had crossed a line, using the curtain call to get on a soapbox to instruct a single member of the audience as to the proper interpretation of the art he had just witnessed.

Another theatre friend commented that theater should educate, entertain and edify, a view that probably gives the average playwright credit for more knowledge than they deserve. As it happens, there are several historical distortions in the book of Hamilton, which I covered in this post on Sacred Cow Chips about five months ago. While the show is a smashing success as entertainment, it contains some unadulterated propaganda about Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, the meaning of the Constitution, and certain events that took place around the time of our nation’s founding. It is a failure at educating.

Incidentally, Brandon Dixon is not quite the virtuous SJW that many would have us believe. His Twitter history shows a rather aggressive attitude toward women, and white women in particular:

“St. Patty’s day weekend is like Christmas for black dudes who like white chicks. Happy holidays boys.
@reesewaters
#seasonsgreetings“

Evidentally, Brandon fancies himself quite the stallion, a sure sign of his deep respect for women.

The incident at The Richard Rogers is most interesting to me because it reveals an irony: the extent to which the writer, producers and actors of Hamilton lack an understanding of our system of government and individual rights. The president (and especially the vice president) do not hold the power to strip individuals of their rights. Granted, the GOP will have a slight majority in Congress and on the Supreme Court, but that does not mean that Trump will be unrestrained. The divisions of power and the constitutional checks and balances promulgated by the likes of Jefferson and Hamilton will serve to protect the rights of diverse Americans. And in two years, control of either the Senate or the House of Representatives might swing back to Democrats.

The Hamilton cast has an insufficient grasp of another fact: one person’s constitutional rights can come into conflict with the rights of others. If they so infringe, it is not enough to assert that you must have the freedom to exercise your rights. You can try, but these are matters for the courts to decide, and those decisions usually hinge on possible accommodations and whether the government has a “compelling interest” in protecting one right at the expense of another.

One other note to the Hamilton cast: while illegal immigrants share in many of the individual rights protected under the Constitution, they do not share fully in all of those rights. In particular, Trump might not need congressional support or help from the courts to enforce existing immigration law. If it’s any reassurance, he seems to have moderated his position on illegals, focusing his rhetoric on “sanctuary cities” and illegals having criminal records.

Perhaps the “elite” Broadway theatre kids of Hamilton can be forgiven if they have the wrong impression about executive power after watching Barack Obama over the last eight years. Hamilton would not have approved. Thankfully, what can be done with “a pen and a phone” can probably be undone with “a pen and a phone”. Now get back out there and have fun, kids!