The President’s Job is to Protect Us

American Thinker.com ^ | March 17, 2020 | Chrstopher Chantrill

[Kaslin]

One of my Maxims is that “the only warrant for government power is existential peril.” The problem is that most of the time there isn’t any existential peril, and so, if you are interested in power, you have to make it up.

Thus, the Commies are coming, the Nazis are coming, the world is going to end -- because pollution or climate or plastic -- unless we act now.

But occasionally a real existential peril comes along, like right now with the Wuhan Flu -- yeah, call me a racist, why dontcha -- and so the president gets up and acts like the protector of his people and declares a state of emergency.

But some idiots are arguing about whether he acted too soon or too late.

Our Democratic operatives with bylines decided it was racist to suspend air travel from China until they decided that using the wrong name for the virus was xenophobic. The technocratic cognoscenti in Europe in their wisdom reckoned that the best thing was to do nothing and let the epidemic take its course until it died out once the European population acquired “herd immunity.”

But Boris Johnson in the UK suddenly did what the Brits call a “U-turn” on this. That’s because the job of the British prime minister is to protect the Brits from existential threats, human or viral.

I suspect that when the Leader of the Nation is busily protecting the people from an existential threat it is not a good idea to be arguing about whether he acted too soon or too late. Because we herd animals will protect the leader that is acting to protect us.

[bramps]

So for now on we should expect a lock down for the entire winter season to ‘protect’ us from 60,000 flu deaths?

[wastoute]

I suspect two weeks is all were gonna get. It could be all we need.

[bramps]

Boy do I hope you are right.

[Don Corleone]

The admonition in Machiavelli's The Prince was basically to keep power over your people put an enemy at the gates even if you have to pay for him yourself.

[trebb]

Yep - and maybe close all the roads because we average 40K car deaths - 90 or so a day - and 2million or so get permanent injuries from car wrecks...

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.” ― William Pitt the Younger

[Brian Griffin]

It could be far more than 60,000 unless an effective drug is found soon.

A 51-year? old Chinese doctor died from the virus.

[wastoute]

Me, too. I would have gone for three weeks or a month out of the gate. The financial guys on Trump’s team probably vetoed that. Two weeks was probably a compromise between Mnuchin and Fauci.

[Buckeye McFrog]

I suspect two weeks is all were gonna get. It could be all we need.

Yup. Once it becomes clear that the curve has been bent and severe cases won't outstrip the ability of the healthcare system to deal with them, things will start getting back to normal. This is NOT about wiping out every last coronavirus circulating here (a virtual impossibility)

[CodeToad]

People are idiots and do not know civics. The goverment’s job is not to protect us but to protect our liberties.

[wastoute]

I’ve been trying to figure out just what it would take to overwhelm the entire system and when I guesstimate the numbers I don’t think the virus can do it. It could get messy but “hospitals being over run” will be, at worst, spotty.

The seriously ill are an order of magnitude larger than the dead and the asymptomatic seem to be two more orders of magnitude above that. Even in a month with those “slide rule” numbers we only get a million asymptomatic, 10,000 seriously ill, 1,000 dead. Not enough to produce the “seriously ill” per hour it would take to overwhelm the system.

Gonna suck to be a nurse or doctor.

[Mr. Jeeves]

The admonition in Machiavelli's The Prince was basically to keep power over your people put an enemy at the gates even if you have to pay for him yourself.

As Obama's handlers had him do with ISIS.

[PGalt]

Can they incinerate the L4 labs? Fat man, little boy, tiny germ. WMDs. Are we at
war with “them” or are “they” at war with us?

[Hiddigeigei]

The admonition in Machiavelli's The Prince was basically to keep power over your people put an enemy at the gates even if you have to pay for him yourself.
"...the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary." --- H. L. Mencken, In Defense Of Women.

[foreverfree]

Here's hoping it's all we need.

ff