It’s quite obvious to me that the Deep State and the Democratic Party that staffs it never got over the fact that their nefarious misuse of our intelligence agencies and hoodwinking the media didn’t work any better than their constant efforts after his election to remove Donald Trump from office and continue their autocratic grifting. This week was no exception. Indeed, I have to agree with Roger L. Simon that “In the aftermath of Trump’s contracting Covid-19, they are reelecting him.”

The Debate

Any sentient viewer of this week’s debate had to be disgusted. The moderator, the questions, the format all combined to make this an upscale version of an old-time “Saturday Night Live” debate. I have believed for a long time that there should be a timekeeper and no moderator. That the debate should be on one national policy question with each candidate given 20 minutes to make his case and the remaining time left for rebuttal. Instead, Chris Wallace used his role to interrupt the president, prop up the failing Biden, and ask questions about “white supremacy” long answered -- even to him in 2016 -- in an effort clearly to smear Trump.

Ben Domenech correctly places the blame for this format on the out-of-date debate commission, tweeting:

The Commission on Presidential Debates is a relic. Its board contains mostly people born in the 1930s and 40s. It is the reason there are no internet based debates. Its executive director has led it since before the end of the Cold War. It must end. The Commission's approach creates debates that are unintelligible and with moderators who cannot effectively extract the truth. They are asking 1980s questions in a 1970s format. This must end.

Even with the assistance of Wallace’s entire body on the scale, Biden failed utterly on any level of credibility. Within days after saying in the debate that he did not support the absurd Green New Deal, his staff said he did. This is par for the course of his entire political career. (From March 13 to April 3, even his strong propaganda outlet, the Washington Post, gave him 11 Pinocchios respecting his claims about the President’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis.) He has lied about virtually everything, including having attended Delaware State (a black college), to attributing the death of his first wife and daughter to a drunk driver; to his academic career. (I mention these things out of a lifetime of dissembling because they are so easily determined false that he either cannot distinguish fact from fantasy or thinks no one else can.) Among other things in the debate, he misquotes FBI Director Chris Wray as having said “Antifa is an idea, not an organization.” In fact, as a conservative trans woman who went undercover with Antifa in Portland reports, Antifa is not “an idea”, it is real and seeks to rule by terror. They operate by “affinity groups.” It is “guerrilla warfare.”

Basically they’re baiting the police into overreacting. [snip] If you just go in public and pick someone and start pushing them, if you keep pushing then, they’re going to slug you; it’s just how it’s going to work, at the individual level but also at the group level, too. [snip] what they want to do it make it difficult for people they don’t like to organize.

She explains that their tactics either force people to back down or slug them, and to them, either way is a win. (Especially so because they block from viewing any press which is not sympathetic to them. And some prosecutors are with them, if you want an explanation of why Kyle Rittenhouse who was clearly defending himself against these street thugs is being prosecuted.)

They are sophisticated operationally, coordinated but not like their predecessor the Weather Underground was. It includes hackers “who never hit the streets,” a “loose-knit network of people" in their twenties to thirties, intoxicated by the lure of violence and struggle.

COVID runs through the White House

The President, First Lady, Kellyanne Conway, campaign manager Bill Stepien,  three White House reporters, and three key Republican Senators (Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Thom Tillis) have all tested positive for COVID-19. So just as the slugging match about who “won” the nondebate debacle was dying down, the perfervid reporting and pontificating about how this happened and what it means took flight.

Because the  term “cases” has been so misstated by a media that loves to create panic when none is called for, it’s worth examining what this means. 

So what do these headlines really mean? What exactly is a COVID "case"? 

Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, most US media outlets have been exceedingly credulous and complicit in their reporting. Journalists almost uniformly promote what we can call the "prolockdown" narrative, which is to wildly exaggerate the risks from COVID-19 to serve a political agenda. They may be motivated to hurt Trump politically, to promote a more socialist "new normal," or simply to drive more clicks and views. Bad news sells. But the bias is clear and undeniable. 

This explains why media outlets use the terms "case" and "infection" so loosely, to the point of actively misinforming the public…

Take a perfectly healthy person with no particular symptoms and swab the inside of their nose. If the culture shows the presence of staphylococcus aureus, do we insist they have a staph infection? 

-- A virus is not a disease. Only a very small percentage of those exposed to the virus itself -- SARS-CoV-2 -- show any kind of acute respiratory symptoms, or what we can call "coronavirus disease." 

The only meaningful statistics show the incidence of serious illness, hospitalizations, and deaths. The single most important statistic among these is the infection fatality rate (IFR). Data collected through July shows [4] that the IFR for those under age forty-five is actually lower than that of the common flu. The COVID-19 IFR rises for those over fifty, but it is hardly a death sentence. And the data does not segregate those with preexisting health issues caused by obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. If we could see data only for reasonably healthy people under fifty, the numbers would be even more reassuring. 

Yes, the media was dishonest in covering the health issues of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, so it’s not unreasonable to be skeptical of health reports on any president, but by his appearance as he left for Walter Reed Hospital, his tweets, and the reports of his physicians and those on the spot, the President’s “case” is asymptomatic or mild, so the fact that he has tested positive “is essentially meaningless.” People in this stage are sick for a few days and then they are not. 

If this were more widely known and understood, the lockdowns by Democratic governors would never be justified, and there is every reason to note the harm caused by the eight months of  lockdowns outweigh the harm from the virus. As author Jeff Deist concludes, “we have had nearly eight months of life and liberty stolen from us by politicians and their hysteria-promoting accomplices in the media. How much more will we accept?”

(As a footnote -- when Obama was president 60 million Americans got the H1N1 swine flu. Did you know that? How widely was it reported? And did you know that once tests indicated how widely it was spreading that White House halted the testing?)

The hypercoverage of COVID-19 has tipped a lot of hands. Nancy Pelosi is already measuring drapes for the Oval Office she hopes will be hers, the Democrats are cheering:

According to the newly released poll, 41 percent of Democrats are “indifferent” about Trump’s positive COVID-19 diagnosis, while a staggering 40 percent responded that they were “happy” about it. Republicans, however, were mostly “sad” (55 percent) and “worried” (51 percent).

Thirty-one percent of Democrats actually claimed to be “excited” at the news.

Excited? Is Trump Derangement Syndrome in the Democratic Party so bad that many Democrats are happy and excited about his diagnosis?

Twitter was full of so many tweets wishing Trump would die that it first said they would strike them and suspend the posters, and then backtracked on the suspension threat, deciding to just strike the death-wishing tweets.

The satire site Babylon Bee notices the party that wants to run your healthcare roots for its political opponent to die. (Let that one sink in. It’s satire but true.)

MSNBC’s execrable Joy Reid suggests the President is faking it to get out of the next debate. More class is shown by North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, who, according to Reuters says he “sincerely hopes” Trump recovers soon. 

Will having to be quarantined for a while in a presidential suite in Walter Reed, instead of madly racing to rallies around the country harm his re-election chances? Kurt Schlichter doesn’t think so any more than Roger L. Simon does:

He can still talk to the press if he feels like it, he’ll just have to be in a plastic bubble. But if he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t have to, and then you have a press with no one to talk to, so maybe the pressure grows on Joe to fill the void. And when Joe fills a void, it’s like when Nadler fills his trousers.[snip]Their[The Democrats] dancing around hoping that Donald Trump will die, and that his wife will die too, is repellent to normal human beings. Since normal human beings are not a key liberal demographic, they probably don’t understand what psychos they sound like. The Democrats had to put the message out to their legions to stop rioting because that was freaking out the squares, and then stop trashing Amy Coney Barrett for liking Jesus and not being a barren, whiny, feminist shrew, because that was also freaking out the squares, and now publicly cheering on the death of the president and his wife will further freak out the squares. 

He will garner sympathy from normal people, his condition will now dominate the news cycle, and he will, Schlichter notes, “get the best medical care in the world; he’s going to be just fine, and after burning up a couple of weeks in the White House he’s going to close the election with a barnstorming tour across the United States the likes of which we haven’t yet seen which will highlight his potency and contrast it with Oldfinger’s decrepitude.”

It’s not going to be like Mimi slowly perishing of tuberculosis in La Boheme. More like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings who returns more powerful than ever.