Visiting Column #42 -- Nothing New, Apparently

It has been a while since the last column here, so I thought it might be a good idea to share that yours truly is still alive and well, holed up in quarantine but doing fine.  The bigger news is that there didn't seem to be a lot to write about, at least in the sense that I could share an opinion.

"What?", I hear you cry.  "But there's this pandemic, and ...".

Well, sure there is.  But alone among the masses, I don't know that there is a lot to have an actual opinion on, you know, where there is a point to be made.  The facts are what they are, which is that Red China somehow became aware of the virus and its transmission last November or so, and lied their red butts off about it while they were buying up every protective mask they could get their filthy red hands on, including ones they're now selling to the governor of California at inflated prices.

So I suppose you could have an opinion on what is the deserved punishment for Beijing, and maybe I do.  I'd like those artificial islands in the South China Sea or wherever they are to have a MOAB dropped on them, but I'd be equally OK with every penny of Chinese assets in the USA seized and held for potential civil settlements by victims of the Wuhan virus -- medical and economic.

I'd be equally OK if, instead of tying up the courts with individual cases, the USA simply confiscated the cash value of the assets to replenish the Treasury for the cost of the stimulus and Paycheck Protection bills that were necessitated by the Red Chinese lies, deceptions and actions.  That would be fine.  Or we could simply declare that the entirety of the national debt that is owed to Red China is no longer owed.  That's good, too.

But in fact, the reason I'm not full of opinions is that as a nation, we had to wing this thing.  Every step taken by every level of government, all through the process, has been based on "ground truth", i.e., what we know on that day.  For the most part, government has had to say "We know A; we project B over time C; so we think the best course of action is X."  There was no time for hindsight.

How do you criticize that?  President Trump's first major decision was very early on, and that was to stop all flights from Red China.  The left screamed "racism" because, well, that's what they do, but that really was the logical step to take, don't make the problem worse while we're figuring out what the problem is.  Even the left knew that was the right thing to do; they just couldn't admit it, because, well, Trump.

His next major decision was to delegate the rules of engagement and operation -- i.e., what to close down and when -- to the governors.  New York City was a mess, but Scott City, Kansas (where the United Nations should be, as I argue here), was not.  Thousands of such contrasts existed, the president reasoned, so the sensible tack was to let those decisions be made more locally and not have the Federal government mandate rules that were needed in some places but crippling to others.  Opinion?  Perfect sense, there, nothing to argue about.

All along the way, and that "way" has now been more than two months, Trump has been saying that we needed to focus on opening the nation for business as soon as it was possible.  That would mean stages, of course -- certain businesses first, then others; certain protections required first, then fewer -- and also that the movement to the next stage would be a local, not a Federal decision.  If the governor of Texas felt that the state could advance to stage two, he could (and would) do so, even if the governor of Massachusetts did not.

Isn't that common sense?  How does anyone not think that was the right idea?  So no, I have no real opinion to share, because there is no reason for contention.

Well, OK, so I do have an observation.  If anyone ever thought that liberalism and the left in general were not all about grabbing and holding power, I would think that they have firmly grasped the notion now that they are only about grabbing and holding power.

Note that the left and the media have taken the position that bills, intended to borrow money that we don't have to provide funds for working people to pay their mortgages and feed their families, should be gummed up with all manner of things about voting, along with giving more to the Kennedy Center, and shoveling unrestricted taxpayer money to incompetent cities.

What was it that Rahm Emanuel, Obama's sidekick and later mayor of Chicago, said?  "Never let a good crisis go to waste."  In a joint endorsement video this week, Hillary Clinton quoted him, as if it were a good thing and not a contemptible admission of the left's political tactics.

Everything the left is doing now; everything they are saying, is toward slowing the economy, keeping more government more in charge, putting a bigger stranglehold on the American citizen, suppressing freedom.  It is all in the name of adding power to the government, a government that they think they will eventually take over to the point of dictatorship with them as the dictators.  The voting laws they propose are meant to ensure that.

We are lucky that they were not able to do even worse in the first two years of the Obama presidency, when they had the House, a filibuster-proof Senate and the White House.  The voters rebelled at what they were able to shove through and kicked the Democrats out of the House majority. 

We are lucky that a no-nonsense guy like President Trump (and not a RINO type) won in 2016, not just to keep the Clintons and the rest of the power-mad left out of authority, but because he has the cogliones to tell the nation that what the left wants is power, and not governance.  He speaks truth to power, because the people are the power in the USA.

We are lucky that so far, the left has not corrupted our electoral system to where they could grab a choke-hold on our government and utterly corrupt it, too, much as the Obama types did when they loosed the FBI to try to frame Trump team members.

We are lucky.  OK, so yes, I have an opinion.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton