Are furbished product is seldom as desirable as a brand-new one. Joe Biden must be assuming Americans can’t tell the difference. Even as President Trump battles uphill to overturn the results of the recent presidential election, faces familiar during the earlier Age of Obama are reappearing in President-elect-apparent Biden’s pantheon of power.
The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed another victim. In addition to the more than 256,000 dead Americans and nearly 1.4 million worldwide, the virus’ murderous grip has left a dark stain on the vaunted U.S. election system. Regardless of the eventual outcome of the 2020 presidential contest, efforts should be unsparing to restore the process so that it drips with integrity.
For millions trapped at home by state-ordered lockdowns, coping with coronavirus means endless hours of TV and video games, and, as we said, no baseball. Just beyond the windowsill, though, spring beckons with its seasonal explosion of fresh color. A morning meditation on the back porch with a song-bird serenade isn't going to provoke the ire of some finger-wagging governor. Where citizens are still allowed to roam freely -- keeping a respectful six feet of distance from others -- a hike through the park makes it easy to forget coronavirus cares. That's because even while death is visited upon human civilization, the world of nature is coming alive.
As of this writing, just about 60,000 Americans have tested positive for the coronavirus, and our death toll has surpassed 900. Given the current, inadequate resources to track and account for the virus' spread, we should -- as government functionaries at both the state and federal level remind -- expect infection rates are actually much greater than what has hitherto been reported. What this implies for the mortality rate we don't need to spell out.
Anyone who's followed the political career of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg knows he's a great one for telling other people what to do and how to live. An ex-smoker, he declared war on cigarettes and banned the "Big Gulp" and other large, carry-out soft drinks because he believed they contributed to obesity, raising the cost of public health initiatives. And, despite spending millions on efforts to keep everyday Americans from exercising their Second Amendment rights, he's usually accompanied by an armed security detail.
Change that happens day by day is to be expected. The world shifting on its axis practically overnight is not. Just as Joe Biden has apparently hit paydirt on his third try for the top of the Democratic Party's presidential ticket, the nation he hopes to lead looks like an episode of "The Twilight Zone." The coronavirus that is putting American lives in peril is also shredding the trendy notion that borders are losing their relevance, which the candidate has adopted in his winning cause. The requirements of presidential leadership have recalibrated, and progressive policies that sacrifice national security for gauzy globalism are now trash.
If Richard Burr decides to give up this whole being a senator thing, he might pitch himself as a television host for the stock-market-obsessed television network CNBC. Mr. Burr, a Republican senator from North Carolina who chairs the Intelligence Committee, made some startlingly prescient market moves before the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, which has seen U.S. indices drop some 30 percent. Unless the man is in secret possession of Warren Buffett-levels of financial genius, his moves were just a little too prescient, we suspect.
If America is to get through the COVID-19 crisis in good shape, it will largely be because of the private sector. We've already praised those organizations that — at great risk to themselves — shut down significant portions of their operations to protect public health.
No one with any sense would deny the coronavirus spread has had a deleterious effect on the U.S. economy. The panic selling on Wall Street has caused the gains created by Trump administration policies on taxes and regulation to be largely erased. Mortgage interests are creeping up despite the Fed dropping the rate at which it loans money to financial institutions to as close to zero as it can go. And people are preparing for massive layoffs, and days if not weeks without paychecks, as the push toward voluntary isolation moves forward.
Apart from the obvious, there isn't much more to be said about this week's banishment of American journalists from China. On Wednesday, the Chinese foreign ministry demanded the credentials of American citizens working for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times and seems poised to take similar measures against Time magazine and the Voice of America.
Tuesday's party balloting in three populous states went heavily for the former vice president, who has ridden quickening momentum from also-ran to leader of the pack. The most recent results were hardly a surprise: The Real Clear Politics polling average showed Mr. Biden up 56.7 percent to 33.8 percent over Bernie Sanders prior to the balloting, and the FiveThirtyEight election forecast put the odds of a Biden ticket at better than 99-1.
By the time you read this, you will have likely already felt the disruption of the coronavirus pandemic in some facet of your life. You are likely confined, for all intents and purposes, to an increasingly smaller radius that will, if we hit the point feared by many health care professionals, keep you pegged to your property except for occasional trips to the grocery store.
What's in a name? To keyboard commanders of varying stripes stuck at home, a lot, apparently.
The coronavirus isn't the only disease that endangers the health of the nation. Though it threatens to sweep everything that came before it into the dustbin of memory, the virus had a precursor that insidiously infected the U.S. justice system. When Americans rise from their sick bed in due course, they should renew their insistence in discovering who is responsible for the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. Unless the sordid details are exposed of how trusted officials trampled on the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens in an effort to unseat President Trump, there will be no assurance that it could not happen again.
There's still a lot we don't know about the FBI's investigation of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. What we do know, however, should give all of us pause. False information was used to secure the ability to employ electronic surveillance on at least one relatively junior campaign official which may have created a chain of information, obtained surreptitiously, leading to the candidate himself.
Which brings us to another private sector action. President Trump has boasted repeatedly that he "stopped flights from China." In an address to the nation Wednesday night from the Oval Office, he added that he was now banning flights from many European countries for a period of 30 days as well.
Americans have always been suspicious of centralized power and this healthy aversion has usually served us well. We didn't become the freest, most dynamic country in the world by funneling power to Washington. We have thrived because of our healthy respect for individualism and enterprise.
If only there were a vaccine for it. And the same goes for the coronavirus, as well. Like the dreaded disease, socialism threatens to infect the Democratic Party, thanks to the persistence of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in his pursuit of the presidency. Owing to the success of former Vice President Joe Biden in Tuesday's mini-match, though, the danger has eased that a plague of utopian promises would spread rapidly enough to carry off the nation. Only Americans with compromised patriotism should be disappointed.
If you were planning to cast a presidential vote this November in order to restore dignity to the White House, or install a statesmanlike temperament in the Oval Office, you might wish to reconsider your interest in Joe Biden.
Americans are a sunny people, optimistic by nature and by virtue of experience. But just because things usually work out for the best for our unusually blessed country doesn't mean that we shouldn't take big problems seriously. Consider COVID-19, the mysterious coronavirus that emerged from central China late last year and that has been marching around the globe.
If one man's trash is another man's treasure, then one man's curse could be another man's cure. While much of humanity shudders with fear of the deadly coronavirus, not everyone is. That's because a pandemic that slows civilization's activities means less damage to the global climate. For some environmental extremists, events that visit tragedy upon human beings are viewed as propitious for the planet. It doesn't take a doctor to conclude that looking for the bright side of suffering is itself a sickness.
Thursday evening, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan announced — via press conference and official release — that three residents of Montgomery County, near Washington, had tested positive for coronavirus contracted while overseas. He also declared the Free State was now itself in a state of emergency. After Mr. Hogan made his remarks, Fran Phillips, deputy secretary for public health services in Maryland, took over and then fielded questions.
