Trump: What’s up, Doc?American Thinker, Apr 19, 2020, Clarice Feldman
A Facebook friend likened the President to Bugs Bunny, chomping on his carrot and making fun of his enemies. And this week it certainly seems that way as the page flips from "everybody’s–an-epidemiology expert" to "we are now all constitutional scholars."
On April 14 Trump said he was the “absolute authority†on when to relax the shutdown and two days later, based on fact, he noted that the virus seemed to have peaked, circumstances were different in different places of the country, and it was up to the governors of each state to determine mitigation strategies appropriate for their states following some national guidelines. [...]
"You’re going to call your own shots," Trump told the governors Thursday afternoon in a conference call, according to an audio recording obtained by the Associated Press. "We’re going to be standing alongside of you."
I know it won’t surprise you to know that people like New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo who pegged the earlier statement as dictatorial now accuse Trump of passing the buck. Actually, it’s a bit late for civics lessons, but we still live in a federal republic, a form of government best suited to such a vast country with disparate needs and circumstances.
[...]
The most persuasive arguments I can find for opening up the country are those of Jeffrey A. Tucker. I urge you to read it all. He notes:
The lockdowns were presented to us under the need to “flatten the curve†for hospital capacity, but there isn’t one curve and we didn’t have enough information even to say where one city was on any curve. There were some days of difficulty in hot spots but many hospitals in the country, due to the order that they not do elective surgeries, started furloughing workers. The reality of many empty hospitals in the middle of a pandemic was too much to process. So we spent the next two weeks searching for new justifications to keep the lockdown in place. Those started to sound affected and even fraudulent very quickly.
What’s important about the three-phase process that Trump enumerated with no set time timetable is that it flips the burden of proof. We have suddenly gone from a world in which governors have presumed that cracking down, forbidding, suppressing, denouncing, shutting down, arresting, and jailing are presumed to be good medicine, to a world in which we treat a virus as a disease to mitigate and the suppressors have to justify their actions else face the wrath of the tens of millions of victims. In many ways, it was a brilliant move. In short, the hounds have been called off. Let us not underestimate what this could mean.
Another important point about the three-phase plan: it is focused on the facts of the case. Not model-based predictions. Not someone’s ideology. Not political posturing. Not the fallacy of authority. The opening is based on the on-the-ground realities. The facts have never justified the suppression. Nor do they justify continued suppression for one hour more. The facts will set us free.
Read more:
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/04/trump_whats_up_doc.html
