Daniel Greenfield, as is his wont, jacks another one right out of the damned park.
The truth about disaster relief and pandemic management is that it hasn’t changed much between administrations. The Bush administration dealt with SARS in much the same way that the Obama administration addressed swine flu. And the Trump administration is doing most of the same things.
That’s because the actual decisions are being made by bureaucrats based on existing protocols.
The best example of this was the decision to fly back infected American passengers from the Diamond Princess. This fateful decision helped spread the virus inside the United States.
President Trump had been told that nobody with the coronavirus would be flown to America.
The State Department decided to do it anyway without telling him and only made the announcement shortly after the planes landed in the United States.
According to the Washington Post, as unfriendly an outlet to the administration as there is, “Trump has since had several calls with top White House officials to say he should have been told, that it should have been his decision and that he did not agree with the decision that was made.”
Who in the State Department actually made the decision? That’s a very good question.
It was yet another Obama stay-behind, natch, one Dr William Walters—a State Dept bureau-hack who seems to be of the opinion that officeholders elected by Duh Peepul count for naught. This asshole knows where the REAL power in FederalGovCo resides. He would be correct in that odious opinion, maddeningly enough. The crux of the issue:
You can vote one way or another and the real decisions that matter will still be made by the head of a directorate that is a subsection of a bureau that you never heard of…
And who is almost impossible to fire.
This is how the country is really run. And that’s the problem.
The underlying problem with our government is that it’s too big to control. Voting in an election or even sitting in the Oval Office doesn’t mean you’re in charge. The problem goes beyond the current obsession with the Deep State. The real issue has always been the Deep Industry or the administrative state.
If the coronavirus becomes a critical problem in this country, the blame will go back to an obscure arm of the State Department, but it will never be placed there. Whatever happens a year from now, no one outside a small professional class will have ever heard of the Directorate of Operational Medicine.
The media will spend all its time bashing President Trump, Pence, assorted cabinet members, and perhaps the CDC, without ever drilling down to the facts, even though it has them at hand. The media’s rule of thumb is that natural disasters and disease outbreaks are always successfully managed by Democrats and mismanaged by Republicans. Katrina and Maria were disasters, but Sandy was a success story. The coronavirus is a catastrophe, but the Ebola virus was brilliantly handed by smart people who are handling the coronavirus response. But it’s different because the guy in the White House is.
The truth is that all of these were mismanaged by the same agencies, many of the same people, and by a government infrastructure that excels at drawing up big budget proposals, but is inept at solving problems when they actually emerge, and just follow whatever protocols will cover its collective asses.
Just as after Katrina and Maria, watch for the outpouring of lies, the claims that New Orleans had reverted to cannibalism and that everyone in Puerto Rico was dead, will be matched and exceeded.
There will be a cure for the coronavirus. But there’s no cure for the spread of viral fake news.
There is however a cure for the decisions that led to a coronavirus problem in the United States.
It’s called the Constitution.
America was meant to have a small government under the control of the people, not the bureaucrats. The real disease is bigger than the coronavirus. It’s a fatal illness called big government. Unlike the coronavirus, it has a total mortality rate. No society that has succumbed to it has ever survived.
This one won’t, either. In fact, it’s entirely safe to say that it succumbed a long time ago.
Agree that the State Dept official who did this should be fired forthwith, and then imprisoned immediately after, with forfeiture of benefits and pension. Having said that, the virus was almost certainly already here and had been for weeks. Hundreds and hundreds of airline flights from China and connecting through places like Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, and Japan had been flying to the US for weeks and weeks prior to this. It would only have taken one or two passengers who had the virus and were still asymptomatic to spread it here. And that is probably what happened, as some of the cases now being confirmed on the West Coast cannot be traced, ie – no recent travel to China and no known contact with anyone who had. This thing had already jumped containment when that Foggy Bottom traitor decided to contaminate all of us.
The ‘Top Men’ at CDC are also doing a stellar job. Seems they could have gotten test kits from WHO, they could have outsourced making more, but instead.. they decided to go it alone and screwed it up. Now the FDA and CDC are fighting each other. And Fauxchohants wants these same types in charge of drug discovery and development to bring down prices. Since when does the price of anything go down once .gov gets involved?