Yyyyyyup!

Interestingly, the usually busy street bordering on our cul de sac looks just like this right now, except Gary Cooper isn’t anywhere to be seen…

1. What? The U.S. does NOT have more Wuhan virus cases than China? How can that be??? Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.), hardly a knee-jerk Trump apologist, who sits on the Senate committee that deals with classified intelligence, said the Chinese Communist Party continues to lie about the death toll from the virus. He has said information he has viewed shows the United States does not surpass China in terms of deaths. This was obvious to anyone not actively trying to use the spread of the illness for partisan advantage, but it’s nice to have confirmation.

“The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false,” Sasse said yesterday. “Without commenting on any classified information, this much is painfully obvious: The Chinese Communist Party has lied, is lying, and will continue to lie about coronavirus to protect the regime. Beijing’s garbage propaganda shouldn’t be taken seriously by the World Health Organization, by independent journalists, or by the American epidemiologists who are going to beat this terrible virus.”

This, of course, further impugns the news media. Stephen Kruiser wrote,

“Every day, they find new ways to reinforce the “Enemy of People” status that they have been earning every day in the Trump era. They’ve routinely scolded anyone who accurately refers to the virus as being of Chinese origin, screaming “RACISM!” as if they were getting paid each time they uttered or typed the word. What has been most insidious has been the parroting of whatever China reports about the virus. Almost everyone in American media has been acting as ChiCom public relations lackeys, taking everything that the Chinese government says and passing it along without questioning any of it.”

Maybe Brian Stelter can explain why that’s unfair.

I’d quote a non-conservative media source, but the non-conservative media ignored Sasse’s comments. Why is that? (It’s a rhetorical question.)

2. More on “Murder on The Fish Tank Express,” or “Murder Most Fishy” or something…When I wrote the first post about the man who died after his wife persuaded him to swallow fish-tank cleaner because, she said, the President had promoted chloroquine, one of the ingredients, as a promising treatment forWuhan virus infections, commenter Joe Fowler suggested that the story sounded she had figured out how to bump off her husband, writing,

Am I alone in finding it suspicious that the couple that consumed the fish tank cleaner is presumed to have done exactly what the wife is claiming? The husband is dead in bizarre circumstances, poison in fact…. The “Trump told us to do it!” nonsense is just too perfect a narrative for the corrupt media, they can’t help but use it.

I joked about how Joe should adapt his theory as a screenplay. Then we learned that far from being a robotic Trump-follower, the woman was, in fact, an active anti-Trump donor. The woman had explicitly blamed Trump, saying, “Don’t believe anything that the President says and his people.” Then she changed her story, saying that it wasn’t the President who convinced her that eating the non-medicinal version of chloroquine, but “media reports.” (Nevertheless, her lie became a new Trump Hate narrative, with reports like this one:

An Arizona man is died of a heart attack and his wife was hospitalized after the couple ingested a type of chloroquine, a chemical that has been hailed recently by President Trump as a possible “game changer” in the fight against novel coronavirus. https://t.co/ItBLKqac8B

— NPR (@NPR) March 24, 2020

Mission accomplished! Now, through the site Techno Fog, the plots thickens:

“Court records show the wife who fed her husband fish cleaner (poison?) has a history of mental illness (paranoia, depression) and had considered divorcing her husband as far back as 2012″The wife had significant health issues. She testified that she had “adrenal gland failure, and steroids and heart medicine are keeping me functioning”

We also learn that unlike in “Let’s see if the fish tank cleaner protects us!” episode, she regularly sought input from doctors. Transcripts in a civil showed  that she sought out an occupational health doctor and “wanted his advice.” She also has has a history  depression, anxiety, and anger. From that transcript,

Q: Did you tell your doctor in 2012 that you wanted a divorce?

A: “Probably. I’m furious all the time.”

None of this means that a woman who says that she talked her credulous husband into poisoning himself and lies about why in fact murdered him. It does mean that the news media was again made stupid by its bias, and that the case deserves further investigation.  Hanlon’s Razor still suggests that the man dies of stupidity rather than malice.

Meanwhile, the FDA has approved chloroquine for tests on human subjects suffering from the effects of the virus.

Andrea Widberg writes of the incident, “Here’s an excellent rule of thumb when navigating stories that are hostile to President Trump: assume that everything you hear is a lie, whether it’s from the media or from the anti-Trump source about which the media is reporting. ”

3. A quick and rueful personal note about double standards…While I was booted as an NPR contributer because the radio host felt that my commentary tried to excuse President Trump (it did not), CNN contributor, Sophia Nelson, referred to the President as “retarded”in a now-deleted social media post that read, “They just always got an excuse to cover for his retarded ass!”

Nice.

CNN has issued no rebuke, and the tweet has only been reported in conservative media.

She was, however, attacked by the Twitter mobs, not for uncivil and indefensible public rhetoric toward the President, but because she used the politically incorrect “r-word,” which is on the Left’s banned word list.

4. Cause and effect. College Pulse  released a survey of 2,000 college students showing that 60%  regard offensive jokes to be hate speech. This is, of course, an anti-American, anti-First Amendment attitude.  The poll found that 76% of  students who identify as Democrats “believe offensive jokes can constitute hate speech,” but only about a third of Republican students held that view. Of course, only three were surveyed.

Kidding.

Probably.

Gee, I wonder how this happened? I assume it’s because of indoctrination like this:

The Council of Chief Diversity Officers at the University of California  issued a “guidance document” telling  students to “stop” others from referring to the “Chinese virus” or “Wuhan virus.”

“Do not use terms such as ‘Chinese Virus’ or other terms which cast either intentional or unintentional projections of hatred toward Asian communities, and do not allow the use of these terms by others.”

College students are being indoctrinated by colleges that are hostile to the Bill of Rights in general and Freedom of Speech in particular. That’s how you get a survey result like College Pulse found.