Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
It was pretty obvious early on that the Chinese government was initially slow to react because it's instinct was to squelch bad news instead of deal with it. Once that turned, the story was then that the Chinese government was taking sweeping, crude measures to stop the thing.
My recollection is that when Trump banned travel with China, it seemed like an effort in scapegoating because it didn't go far enough -- he did not ban travel with Korea or Japan when there clearly was community spread in both places, which suggested he was looking for an excuse to take action specifically against China rather than trying to stop contagious people from flying to this country. There were plenty of reports, too, of people flying back to the country and getting no screening or attention from the border officials. My family flew from London on February 20 (?). My in-laws flew from Rome two weeks later (!). None of us got any attention or even instructions about symptoms to look for. There is this failure of memory, by Douthat and others, that the criticism of Trump was that he did something by banning travel from China, rather than not doing enough by failing to take a number of other very obvious steps to avoid contagion.
Probably the problem is that Douthat isn't paying attention to what smart people who disagree with him are thinking and saying.
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My take is that he is engaging in false equivalence. We know the Fox News people and MAGA hat crowd were shrugging this thing off as mere flu. There's tons of recorded media out there in which they brazenly did so. And many of them continue to do so today. Douthat seems to be trying to make an argument that the Left was engaged in similar behavior -- covering up stories about the virus in a fit of political correctness.
But that simply did not happen. I'm as contrarian as contrarian gets, but even the ultimate contrarian, Michael Kinsley, could not repackage recent history to credibly argue the false equivalence suggested by Douthat. It just ain't there.
ETA: Jerry Falwell Jr. is going kill hundreds of people on the campus of Liberty University and thousands beyond its borders. Douthat should perhaps write about that.
