This story may be the most misleading, poorly written, agenda driven pile of nonsense I have read yet. It’s from Newsweek which I realize has long since stopped being a serious news outlet, but it nonetheless is poor even by their current poor standards.
The headline:
Anthony Fauci Loses Trust With Americans as Confidence in CDC Plummets—Poll
“OK,” says my brain, “Polling data to back up the current working hypothesis,” this should be worth the effort of reading it. The first paragraph:
Conservative media attacks on the country’s top infectious diseases expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, have eroded the confidence that Americans have in what he says about COVID, a poll has found.
WHOA! Back up the truck here a minute. That’s not quite what the headline implied was in the piece, but maybe that’s what the polling said? Let’s keep reading….
Unfortunately, no such luck. The piece then goes on to kind of report the findings of an Annenberg poll, without link or footnote or even formal title of the poll, that reports on confidence in the public health agencies. Followed by an accounting of a few instances where conservative media has questioned the credibility of the public health establishment, supported only by links to other Newsweek pieces. No evidence from the poll of a causal relationship between the two things and no way, short of a lot of googling, to verify anything the author represents in the piece.
This is a bad blog post, but it in no way represents journalism.
It is also blame shifting. Being so, it makes plain that the Left has aligned itself with bureaucratic overreach – the administrative state. And the question that continues to plague me is, “Why?” What kind of person, other than the rule makers and enforcers, find life in this maze of arbitrary, pointless and oppressive rules an improvement? How have we gone from being a nation founded in an effort to escape precisely such a regime to having a significant portion of our society panting for it?
There is, of course the “churchy” answer – we lost our faith in God and therefore placed our faith in the nearest thing we could grab onto. There is a lot of truth there and I think I will explore it tomorrow.
But this morning I am thinking about how this state of affairs has arisen because we simply want the complaining, whining and kvetching to stop. Think about this for a minute. The “soft lockdown” that is being experienced in some parts of the country right now is mostly about teachers unions. They refuse to work without some set of “covid protections” which then limits the availability of schooling, which then limits the parental ability to go to work and it all just spins out from there. Our current state of affairs exists because we are unwilling to say, unequivocally, “Sorry, you’re upset, but your fear is not my problem – Get to work!”
Let’s be honest. For quite some time now conservatives have simply wanted to go about their business and have found it easier to give the liberals what they want so they will go over to the corner and play by themselves. But liberals have caught on, so they whine for more and they whine louder, and we give them more, and their corner grows until now it threatens to fill the room.
In yesterday’s Hillsdale Dialogue, the host and Matthew Spalding carried on about the current session of the Supreme Court. The host is quite optimistic that the current court will start to once again set some reasonable boundaries around the Left. One would hope so, but I fear for what will happen next. Conservatives will just go back to work, but the Left is going to throw a major temper tantrum – maybe even violently major.
SCOTUS has no enforcement power for its decisions – that’s up to the executive branch. The court has moved left over my lifetime and the Left has relied on it as the imprimatur of its desires. Should the Left lose that legitimatization of its agenda, I fear it will not respect it. I also fear that the current administration will concede to the tantrum and simply refuse to enforce the rulings.
The result of SCOTUS making the decisions any decent conservative hopes for might not be a restoration of reason to our nation – it might be the kind of erosion of confidence in government generally we are seeing in the public health arena as mixed messages and inconsistency abound. The result could be more confusion, not less.
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