Free-for-All Friday

AFTER PEARL HARBOR

"After Pearl Harbor, Americans did not stay neutral, wait for government assistance or expect other nations to protect them."  Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online, 5/14

CORONAVIRUS

"The media must stick to reporting on the virus and the ailing economy. Their often-petty obsessions with destroying President Trump are long past monotonous.

"Trump himself must keep working with any Democratic governors who realize they must put their states back to work in order to have the money to pay for the fight against the virus.

"Interest rates are low. Gas is as cheap as it’s been in years. Inflation remains moribund. People are tired of being housebound. They want to get back to work to make and spend money.

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"All that is missing is confidence — or rather, the conviction that the coronavirus is no more dangerous than were the Axis powers and can be beaten far more quickly if we show the sort of will our grandparents had."  Victor Davis Hanson, NRO, 5/14

"As a breed, epidemiologists tend to focus on the worst case. They don’t want to be wrong and contribute to some deadly pathogen getting loose when their entire job is to keep that from happening. So, they are naturally cautious. This, too, is as it should be. You probably don’t want a risk-taking epidemiologist any more than you want a highly creative, envelope-pushing accountant."  Rich Lowry, NRO, 5/15

HARD TRUTHS

The biggest story of this pandemic is how quickly we can come to terms with some very hard truths. Among them:

• There is still quite a bit that we don’t understand about this virus.
• The virus may do lasting damage to some of those who do not succumb to it.
• While it’s not impossible that a vaccine is discovered by the end of the year, it is unlikely. The White House is attempting a secretive project called “Operation Warp Speed” to get a vaccine ready by the end of the year. If it works, it will be miraculous. But we cannot count on it working.
• While our potential options for treatment are steadily growing and improving, we do not have a way to treat the infected that is certain to save their lives.
• Any economic activity involves human interaction, which is likely to at least modestly increase the spread of the virus.
• Extended lockdowns and quarantines carry their own ill effects for human health, physical, psychological, and emotional.
• As Stanford University professor Keith Humphries observes, “Testing programs depend on people being so compliant that they will stay home for 14 days because a health worker told them to.”
• As Avik Roy observes, “People are way overestimating the willingness of 2 million Americans per day to get 6-inch nasal swabs sent up their nostrils to comply with a population testing regime.”

"The challenge before us is to figure out a way to live with these hard truths. “Everyone stay in your homes until further notice” is not really living."  Jim Geraghty, NRO, 5/14

GENDER IDENTITY

"The fact is that, “on the basis of sex” (the words of Title IX, around which the case revolves), there is no plausible, material basis for describing as “female” any individuals who have wholly and unambiguously male bodies, from their chromosomes to their reproductive organs. Arguments premised on “gender identity” are altogether different: They are metaphysical, not material. In “gender identity” theory, instead of a person being a body (as with the argument of biological sex) a person’s true self is located in a body, the nature of which they are free to declare. Because subscribers to “gender identity” theory believe that language is reality, describing a person (however accurately) as belonging to the sex opposite to the sex with which they identify is, they claim, a literal threat to the individual’s existence. But taken apart, this prohibition on “misgendering” (a word coined only in the last decade) is merely a new form of blasphemy. What it really comes down to is I find that offensive! "  Madeleine Kearns, NRO, 5/14

SERIOUS CORRUPTION

"Those sharing #Obamagate hashtags on Twitter would do best to avoid the hysterics we saw from Russian-collusion believers, but they have no reason to ignore the mounting evidence that suggests the Obama administration engaged in serious corruption.

"Democrats and their allies, who like to pretend that President Obama’s only scandalous act was wearing a tan suit, are going spend the next few months gaslighting the public by focusing on the most feverish accusations against Obama. But the fact is that we already have more compelling evidence that the Obama administration engaged in misconduct than we ever did for opening the Russian-collusion investigation."  David Harsani, NRO, 5/14

ELECTION 2020

"Biden has been trying to achieve the presidency since 1988. Even in his best days, he was not a strong candidate. And he’s much weaker today. Are Democrats just going to pretend that Biden didn’t look the other way while family members leveraged their connections to him to go into places like Ukraine and collect large paychecks? That Biden offers a coherent vision of where to take the country other than hokey nostalgia and bromides? That he wouldn’t be, on the day he takes office, older than any chief executive has ever been on the last day of his presidency? That his unscripted speech isn’t rambling, nonsensical, and bizarre? That he isn’t already showing signs of incipient dementia, ten months before his term would even begin? That he doesn’t make Grandpa Simpson look like a sage?"  Kyle Smith, NRO, 5/14

"Joe Biden on Thursday again addressed allegations of sexual assault from former staffer Tara Reade, saying that voters should not choose him in the November elections if they believe Reade’s claims.

"Voters “should vote their heart and if they believe Tara Reade, they probably shouldn’t vote for me,” Biden said on MSNBC’s The Last Word. “I wouldn’t vote for me if I believed Tara Reade.”   Zachary Evans, NRO, 5/14