RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/20/dont-let-washington-post-get-away-with-memory-holing-its-anti-kavanaugh-campaign/

Ruth Marcus and others at the Washington Post who led the effort to destroy Brett Kavanaugh’s life based on unsubstantiated allegations know that what they did was evil.

The Washington Post has a problem. The newspaper led the massive effort against the nomination of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by publishing and relentlessly hyping a completely unsubstantiated allegation of sexual assault against him.

Now, the paper is leading Democrats’ efforts to bury a similar, if stronger, allegation of sexual assault against Joe Biden. To accomplish this dramatic turnabout, the paper is collectively trying to rewrite history, pretending the allegation against Kavanaugh had more basis than it did while also pretending that the allegation against Biden has less basis than it does.

The Post’s anti-Kavanaugh operation had powerful divisions in both the news and opinion departments. It’s worth looking at both.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-media-stop-dancing-on-the-graves-of-trump-supporters-who-die-of-the-virus/

‘They had it coming’ is a shameful sentiment to broadcast. That doesn’t stop the New York Times.

The latest installment in the ghoulish ongoing effort to use coronavirus deaths as a tribal red-vs.-blue bludgeon can be found in a column by Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times, and in the reaction to that column on the left.

The column is framed around the death of Joe Joyce, a bar owner from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. Joyce was a Trump supporter; his son, a friend of Bellafante’s, “was at odds with his father politically.” Bellafante admits that Joyce was not the pro-Trump monster of media caricature: “He was not going to make the Syrian immigrant who came in to play darts feel as if he belonged anywhere else. . . . In his bar Joe Joyce had set the tone for what evolved into an incongruously progressive place. From the beginning there had been a quiet gay presence.” But his death is too politically useful, it seems, to resist. And with Joyce gone, his Ivy League–educated kids get the last word. Bellafante writes:

On March 1, Joe Joyce and his wife, Jane, set sail for Spain on a cruise, flying first to Florida. His adult children — Kevin, Eddie and Kristen Mider — suggested that the impending doom of the coronavirus made this a bad idea. Joe Joyce was 74, a nonsmoker, healthy. . . . He didn’t see the problem. “He watched Fox, and believed it was under control,’’ Kristen told me. Early in March Sean Hannity went on air proclaiming that he didn’t like the way that the American people were getting scared “unnecessarily.’’ He saw it all, he said, “as like, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/20/a_tiny_virus_further_sickens_the_fevered_media_mob_142976.html

In his 1898 novel, “The War of the Worlds,” H.G. Wells imagined a world changed forever by something like our dread coronavirus. In that familiar story, Martian invaders were close to total domination of the Earth when they were unexpectedly vanquished by the “germs of disease,” famously called by Wells “the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, had put upon this earth.”

In the novel, mankind is saved by germs, but in modern Hollywood science fiction viruses are usually employed to devastate human society, or change it forever. The extent to which COVID-19 will leave a permanent mark on us is yet unknown, but it is safe to declare that generations of future doctoral students will study its impact on everything from handshakes to food supply chains.

Within the sphere of politics, we have already seen short-term impacts to elections and how legislative bodies do their work, but the question of how the psychology of crisis will translate into permanent changes in the relationship between the governed and the government can only be answered with informed guesses. Is the rebellion in Michigan against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s stringent stay-at-home orders the first shot in a war against the nanny state or the last gasp of “consent of the governed”? Will the electorate become enamored of receiving “paychecks” from the government for not working, or will it chafe at adding untold trillions to the national debt and demand new austerity measures? Can the political media continue to play the role of a Greek chorus, pretending to speak for the general population and assuming a posture of omniscience despite being mainly aligned with one political party – and being so wrong so often?

It is that last question that consumes me today as I watch yet again the White House press corps savage President Trump. It’s become a daily ritual, and one that I enjoy not because the president is being attacked, but because he so deftly fends off the swarming journalistic pests like Gulliver shaking loose from a dozen Lilliputians who mistakenly thought they had the giant pinned.