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This week on the pioneering social distanced produced podcast (we are all at least several hundred miles apart), we of course talk about the virus that went viral. And fair warning: there is some criticism of the President in this show. We also call on our old friend, Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, who in an alternate universe, is probably enjoying his second term as President of the United States. P.S. you should read Andy Ferguson’s terrific profile of him in The Atlantic.We talk to him about the virus (natch), how he’s keeping tuition at Purdue under $10K, and the challenges of running a large community in this day and age. Then, the 4th Ricochet Podcaster (as he’s now known), John Yoo stops by to talk about the legalities of governments taking over hotels and medical facilities to treat coronavirus patients. Finally, more talk about life in the Age of Corona and James gives some tips on buying toilet paper.
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1. The tendency to blame Presidents leads to more centralization, which leads to more centralized incompetence, like the CDC/FDA/test kits. See John Yoo comments for his take.
2. There is widespread panic now, not from or because of Trump, but because of media and social media.
3. Most of what you hear is an exaggeration or lie:
Funding for CDC wasn’t cut. It is bloated, it has stuck its nose into things besides diseases, and it doesn’t inspire confidence. Dems want to throw more money where the track record is poor. Funding should be cut once this passes. Leave more dollars in the states, the front line. If a CDC Director responds to budget cuts by shrinking disease control instead non-disease related efforts, fire his butt.
Eliminating the Ebola office in NSC wasn’t a bad thing. Besides, the only thing I think of when I hear NSC is Vindman.
Trump didn’t call corona a hoax. He didn’t keep people on the Grand Princess to keep numbers down so he would look good.
Is there a Dem lie I haven’t touched on? We all aren’t going to die. I might be like the Brits, develop an immune response now before I turn 70.
There were about 3,770 crew and passengers on the Diamond Princess, and I assume most of the 2,670 passengers were of retirement age. 696 tested positive. 7 died (so far). Went it hits here, I hope to be like the 3,074 who didn’t get it but accept that I could be like the 696 he caught it. But being 7/3,770 doesn’t make me hoard TP, panic, and look to the President to save me. My health would rest in the hands of the local doctors and hospitals.
I think this is a really important point.
The Republican Trump haters, I bet more than half of them don’t really get this. That’s the way it looks to me.
That was the most important point in the whole podcast.
Good podcast, it went by really fast this week.
Rob keeps harping on about failures. What failures specifically? Was keeping the virus off our shores ever possible? Does it not take time to develop tests and vaccines for a new disease?
I’m just asking what Trump failed at that wouldn’t have occurred to any other administration.
We’re looking at a few thousand known infections, less than a hundred deaths so far. I don’t see that the response is that bad. Public reaction seems to be worse than what the public/private healthcare system is doing.
They are well aware of the mute button. Getting them to use it consistently is another matter entirely.
Yes, of course, and I’m sorry his name slipped my mind. He’s a thoroughly appealing–I had the pleasure of spending an hour with him over a cup of coffee once–and a skillful and innovative governor.
I humbly thank you for your efforts, sir.
Oh yes he is. In fact, he’s probably doing the same things a President Daniels or Jindal would do. Putting Pence in charge of the response was smart in that Mike had to deal with an epidemic as governor.
I think Daniels would have been a good President, especially in fiscal responsibility (based on his successful effort to reduce tuition at Purdue). However, the MSM would have a field day with his relationship with his wife Cheri, not to mention a drug conviction in his youth.
Jindal would have been good too.
James mentioned new normals. How about the way we react to new viruses?
When somebody sneezes in Tanzania, are we prepared to shut down our economy for a couple of weeks? I am pretty sure that all the measures being taken today could have been justified on the same grounds at the outset of the H1N1. Oh, the Tanzania sneeze will be caused by a virus with different characteristics that will give the experts countless hours of compare and contrast coverage. The new virus will spread differently at a different rate and affect a different population with different symptoms and different fatality rates.
And I think COVID-19 has blessed us with a new cohort of germophobes. Previously normal people are hunkering down, fighting over toilet paper, bleaching everything in sight and avoiding crowds. It’s suddenly dawning on the general public that they live in a nasty, filthy world and that reliably isolating from all that requires vigilance and chemicals. Further, this round-the-clock coverage has fed the worst instincts of the existing germophobe community. Must be terrifying to them.
This whole business of shutting down all gatherings is unprecedented. I am not sure if the underlying reasons will live on in the memory of Americans any more than swine flu, SARS or MERSA. Which most people were reminded of only because of COVID-19. Sure, every life is precious (except in vitro, apparently), but taken to its logical conclusion, are we required to take every conceivable precaution for every outbreak? I guess so now. Are there any measures that we would deem too extreme?
Finally, I think we’ve run out of words to describe the situation. I always thought a pandemic was something that wiped out large swaths of the population, like the Spanish flu or the plague. If the next virus affects considerably more of the population and dwarfs COVID-19 in severity, is it going to be a super duper demic, or a galactic demic?
Maybe I’m just bitter over missing the best part of the sports year outside of the NFL season. Maybe.
I have an old female friend who many decades ago wailed to me: “Why do I always fall for the bas–rds?” (I translate.) In a moment of truthfulness, I replied: “Because you *like* the bas–rds!”
The gentlemanly modesty of Mitch Daniels, qualifying every single nice thing said about him, stands in such contrast to…Oh, if only!
But I am nonetheless inclined to think that there is something in the American electorate that is more than a bit like my friend. The media loathed Trump and still loathe Trump, and if Gov. Daniels had been the candidate they would have tried to demolish him too–and would probably have succeeded. But in Trump’s case, the strategy didn’t work: the more “flawed” Trump was portrayed, the more votes he received.
I am no Trumpster, but I confess that late in the evening I was in no mood to hear DT attacked, even by the most distinguished Rob Long…So I turned off the podcast and waited for 24 hours. No, we must not “keep our heads in the sand,” but stopping the ideological virus that even Sleepy Joe is carrying must be a priority.
On a sociological note: One still sees photographs (perhaps on the Internet) of Japanese train personnel pushing passengers into carriages, but all of that ceased some decades ago. I remember…In the late afternoon today my wife went shopping, wearing her usual mask. I later went off to the same supermarket myself, my face uncovered. I did an admittedly unscientific survey, noting that males tended to be like me, women like my wife. In Tokyo, toilet paper is apparently in short supply, but where we live in the suburbs, it is still readily available…The Abe government has not been without criticism, some of it perhaps justified, but there is none of the polarization that is apparent in America…(If Planet Earth were under attack from hordes of extra-terrestrial cockroaches, CNN and the NYT would attack Trump for being a tool of the insecticide industry.)
Good point. People catch colds all the time, so technically it could be called a pandemic. If anything, the regular flu is a pandemic every year because of the death toll.
Bad times can doom a Presidency – just ask Jimmy Carter. However, my guess is Trump will prevail because more people are aware of the MSM’s manipulation of the coverage. It’s in the open now . . .
I think the big problem is there is no vaccine to slow it down. You don’t want a spike in cases to overwhelm medical delivery or kill the economy.
I keep hearing how the administration (and maybe previous ones) screwed up on preparedness for a pandemic. Pace Mitch Daniels or Rob Long, except for the usual snafus and taking into account Trump’s difficulty with tone, what exactly have been the failures? I hear very few specifics. Exactly what should we have done differently? And which level of government (or private enterprise) is “we”?
I think the burden is on the @roblong s of this world to at least give us a hint of the “plan” they bemoan the lack of. What preparations should we have made? What have been “our” major mistakes so far? What should we push for in the future? Which country has had the optimal plan and response?
Also, do we know yet if the obvious errors were errors. I heard a lot about how people with symptoms could not be tested because they did not meet the criteria. Was that the usual bureaucratic nonsense, or a rational response to the shortage of test kits? And if there was a shortage of test kits, could they have been in place BEFORE the virus showed up? These things will take time to sort out I suspect.
It looks to me like someone should have thought about how you ramp up tests in such a big, geographically diverse country.
Afternoon Rufus,
Here is an interview with Dr. Morice, president, of Mayo labs, https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/03/kfan-talks-coronavirus.php
His labs began working on tests months ago. He notes how normal operating procedure, which is good in normal circumstances, filters tests through the CDC, and that for a non CDC producer of tests the FDA must insure the veracity of the test, does it accurately test what it says it tests, and that this normally takes many months if not years. So we have a system where experts, all approved by Yale graduates, check the quality of all testing, class clowns wouldn’t design a system like this, would they. Another problem Dr. Morice notes, is that although Mayo has a sister hospital in China with which they have great relations, it is against the law to send samples (virus samples) out of the China. Surprisingly a large bureaucracy run by “experts” is not very nimble when novel and fast spreading diseases appear, we deplorables are shocked, I say, shocked.
Also at “Reason” https://reason.com/2020/03/11/how-government-red-tape-stymied-testing-and-made-the-coronavirus-epidemic-worse/we read of Dr.Chu, in Seattle , who while researching the flu in Washington state, happened across the Coronavirus and wanted to test for it, the CDC prevented her, she went ahead anyway, and found that it had been in the population at large for weeks. Because the CDC blocked Dr. Chu and because the CDC’s test was flawed, testing fell behind, none of this was because of the class clown, it was because the smart kids think the world, that is us deplorables, would be better run if we just left it to the experts, just like Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson believed a couple of weeks ago. For me, I’ll take being run by class clowns to being run by Ivy League experts any day.
I think that you meant “in utero”. In vitro means “in the glass” as in a test tube or culture dish. But your point is acknowledged – to the left, every death is a tragedy, except, err, you know, those.
There are none. The only differences are when certain actions are taken, such as a declaration of emergency. There is no defined number, so Obama’s declaration at 1000 deaths is responsible, Trump’s declaration at 40 is incompetence . . .
Thanks for the correction Architectus. I meant, you know the thing…
Exactly. Apparently the CDC believes that the Second Amendment is a disease marker of some sort. I am sure that their vigilant research into a BoR-2A-2020 virus is helping us immensely right now in the current situation.
I’m pretty sure Daniels doesn’t have to deal with the same kind of House and Senate at Purdue.
All we had to do was elect Elizabeth Warren in 2016.
She has A Plan, you know.
The episode in which Rob finally jumps the shark and Peter and James gently try to help him back but the psychedelics prove too strong. Also, very disappointing to hear all the fawning over Daniels, who seems like a very nice man, but obviously does not have what it takes to weather national politics. Never again believe Rob is being sincere when he criticizes the Republicans for abandoning small government.
@mbchoe — Can you imagine how much trouble Andrew Gillum would be in, if he were a Republican …
… and how many journalists knew all about his little “personal problem” but kept it to themselves.
They’d use the old claim that they kept quiet because Democrats aren’t hypocrisies on gay rights, while Republicans are. So that’s why it was OK to out a Florida Republican like Mark Foley in 2006, while keeping whatever they knew about Andrew Gillum to themselves (of course, if they also knew about Gillum’s drug use and kept that to themselves, their double-standard justification would be a lot harder to justify, especially since the same media people view meth as the white trash flyover country drug of choice, and not something enlightened urbanite drug users would partake in…)
Probably not that soon. But one of these days!
I haven’t really noticed.
Generally, though, I can’t disagree. Don’t be too lax Rico-Men….
Tall order, apparently.
Someone who battles the Dems is automatically not a decent human being, at least according to them, and their media.
Good point. This kinda shows how interested Congress is in reducing spending – no matter who’s in charge . . .
It’s all nonsense. The debt to GDP ratios got out of whack under Ronald Reagan and we never looked back. The really smart libertarians and hedge fund guys gave up after Medicare Part D.
link