Last week’s Democratic convention sought to make four points: Joe Biden is a decent man, Donald Trump is horrible, the president bungled the pandemic and Mr. Biden would have handled it better because he grasped the threat from the start.
Whatever you think of the first three, the last is a fabrication. But the former vice president likes to say it anyway. In June he claimed President Trump “did not listen to guys like me back in January saying we have a problem, a pandemic is on the way.” In May Mr. Biden said, “If he had listened to me and others and acted just one week earlier to deal with this virus, there’d be 36,000 fewer people dead.” The early comments of Mr. Biden and his advisers, however, show little evidence he was on top of anything.
Take Mr. Biden’s first statement on the pandemic. In a 773-word op-ed on Jan. 27, he spent 292 words defending the handling of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa, 268 decrying Mr. Trump’s leadership style and 74 suggesting America faced “the possibility of a pandemic.” He devoted only 140 words to what he would do about it: ask Congress in 2021 to beef up the Public Health Emergency Fund, amend existing law to allow presidents to declare pandemic emergencies, and fully fund the Global Health Security Agenda. Mr. Biden also said he’d renew funding this past spring for hospitals that “treat people with infectious diseases,” a program Congress always reauthorizes.
Even the Washington Post later described the Biden op-ed as “more of an attack on President Trump . . . than a detailed plan of action.”
Read the whole article here.2020 08-27 Karl Rove The Left’s Covid Memory Hole – WSJ