It’s Friday, April 24th, 2020…but before we begin, citizens of the Empire State are beginning to experience the realities of Socialized medicine, as…

New York State issues do-not-resuscitate guideline for cardiac patients amid coronavirus

“New York state just issued a drastic new guideline urging emergency services workers not to bother trying to revive anyone without a pulse when they get to a scene, amid an overload of coronavirus patients.

While paramedics were previously told to spend up to 20 minutes trying to revive people found in cardiac arrest, the change is “necessary during the COVID-19 response to protect the health and safety of EMS providers by limiting their exposure, conserve resources, and ensure optimal use of equipment to save the greatest number of lives,’’ according to a state Health Department memo issued last week.

First responders were outraged over the move. “They’re not giving people a second chance to live anymore,’’ Oren Barzilay, head of the city union whose members include uniformed EMTs and paramedics, fumed of state officials.

Earlier this month, the Regional Emergency Services Council of New York, which oversees the city’s ambulance service, issued a new guideline that said cardiac-arrest patients whose hearts can’t be restarted at the scene should no longer be taken to the hospital for further life-saving attempts. “Our job is to bring patients back to life. This guideline takes that away from us,” he said.

City hospitals have been inundated with dying coronavirus patients to the point where there are frequently no ICU beds…”

Which is curious considering, on Tuesday the 21st…the same day New York State health officials issued their new “let ’em die” directive…Fredo’s older brother Sonny told The Donald the USNS Comfort, which had been on hand to handle overflow non-COVID-19 patients requiring ICU care, was no longer needed.

And what about areas outside “the city” where there’s no shortage of ICU beds?

Call it the…

…Sergeant Barnes method of triage.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of the WaPo via AEI, Marc Thiessen details…

What the blame-Trump crowd gets wrong about blaming China

You mean, other than all of the facts?!?

“The blame-Trump-for-everything crowd is accusing Republicans of pointing the finger at China for the coronavirus pandemic to divert attention away from the Trump administration’s response. Rubbish.

Case in point: The front-page headline in Sunday’s New York Times read: “G.O.P. Aiming To Make China The Scapegoat.” Scapegoat? Sorry, it was the Chinese Communist regime, not the Trump administration, that unleashed this virus on the United States and the world through its lies and deception. Americans of all political stripes understand this and are more than willing to put the blame where it belongs. The Harris Poll finds 77 percent say the Chinese government is responsible for the spread of the virus, including 90 percent of Republicans and 67 percent of Democrats.

By lying to the world and obstructing an earlier global response to the virus, the Chinese Communist Party started this global forest fire. Just as it would be ridiculous to say someone is trying to scapegoat a fire-starter to divert attention from the failures of the firefighters, it is ridiculous to say that President Trump is trying to scapegoat China to divert attention from his administration’s response.

The fact is, no one — including our nation’s top public health experts — knew we were facing a once-in-a-generation pathogen…

…And if we are assigning blame to politicians, then recall it was the Obama administration that failed to replenish the Strategic National Stockpile of masks, gowns and respirators after the 2009 swine flu epidemic, and that failed for eight years to implement the George W. Bush administration’s initiative to stockpile 40,000 ventilators for a pandemic. If Trump is personally to blame for our lack of preparedness, so are Obama and Biden.

Ultimately, responsibility for the costs of this pandemic rests with a Chinese regime that intentionally lied about the virus and proactively impeded the U.S. response — refusing to share samples, disappearing doctors who sounded the alarm, and shutting down a Chinese lab that dared to share the genome sequence of the virus. Today, some in the media are arguing that any effort to blame China is a plot to deflect criticism from Trump. They’re wrong. In fact, what is really shameful is that many in the media are so eager to blame Trump that they are willing to deflect criticism from China.“

To put it more accurately, if less diplomatically, they’re not simply wrong, they’re lying through their teeth…and they know it!

What’s worse is, as Jim Freeman relates at Best of the Web, the likelihood they’re pawns…willing or unknowing…of Peking:

Chinese Propaganda and the Panic

A sinister plot to suggest Trump might agree with the New York Times?

“China’s communist regime must account for its suppression of information about the novel coronavirus, which has cost thousands of lives around the world. Now the New York Times is reporting that the communist regime also directed a campaign of fake news to scare Americans about the U.S. government’s plans to respond to the virus.

Edward Wong, Matthew Rosenberg and Julian Barnes of the Times report from Washington:

The alarming messages came fast and furious in mid-March, popping up on the cellphone screens and social media feeds of millions of Americans grappling with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

Spread the word, the messages said: The Trump administration was about to lock down the entire country.

This latest dispatch has inspired a reaction from Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter who defected some years ago and has since become a leader in the community of Times alumni dissidents. He’s been having fun on Twitter comparing the panic-inducing messages secretly circulated by the Chinese regime to the panic-inducing messages openly published by the Times.

The pro-lockdown newspaper has been a leader in promoting the fear that the U.S. would run well short of needed intensive-care facilities. Fortunately this hasn’t come to pass and, if it ever does, let’s hope public officials don’t decide that the solution is to set fire to America’s economy, which generates the wealth to provide health care for all Americans…”

The MSM’s treatment of Trump ever since it became obvious he would win the Republican nomination reminds us of the scene from Hoosiers when Coach Dale (Gene Hackman) first meets Opal Fleener (Fern Parsons), who, after noting the Coach’s reception in Hickory, insightfully observed…

Which, when translated into Newspeak, means, “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose!”

In a related item, the WSJ‘s Kim Strassel records how…

Congress Has Created a Coronavirus Mess

A pandemic doesn’t excuse lawmakers from performing their most basic duties.

““There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong,” H.L. Mencken observed. Congress has found its own neat and plausible answer to the Covid-19 pandemic: spend, spend some more. Thankfully, a few elected leaders are starting to realize it’s wrong…”

Here’s the juice: absent a response to a foreign power repeating Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, additional, unaccountable government spending is NEVER the solution to ANY problem.

Editor’s Note: A number of readers have solicited our opinion as to what we’d view as an appropriate response by Trump to the Chicom’s undeniable responsibility for the largely containable…if not wholly avoidable…Peking Pandemic. Up until the entire impact of the Wuhan virus was repaid, our response would include, but not be limited to:

1. Suspension of interest on, or repayment of, any U.S. debt owned by China.

2. Increased tariffs on any imports from China, either directly into the U.S. or through surrogate states.

3. Repudiation of the idiotic, Peking-pandering, Carter-era policies which delegitimized Taiwan, and immediate U.S. recognition of the only free Chinese state as an independent nation.

4. Immediate U.S. withdrawal from any international body which refuses to recognize same.

Meanwhile, correctly in our opinion, the WSJ‘s Walt Mead suggests…

Trump’s Best Re-Election Bet: Run Against China

The public increasingly sees a threat, and he can argue the establishment was wrong for decades.

“November may still be a long way away, and the coronavirus has thoroughly scrambled American politics. But it’s increasingly clear that President Trump’s likeliest path to re-election runs through Beijing. With the economy in shambles and the pandemic ravaging the country, making the election a referendum on China is perhaps Mr. Trump’s only chance to extend his White House tenure past January 2021.

Why Beijing? In the first place, because Americans increasingly disapprove of its behavior. In 2019, before the coronavirus stormed out of Wuhan to shake the world, 57% of Americans already had an unfavorable opinion of Beijing. The most recent Gallup poll, in February 2020, put that at figure at 67%.

But Americans go beyond distrust of the Chinese government. In a recent Pew poll, 68% of Republicans and 62% of Democrats considered China’s power and influence a major threat to the U.S.

Second, the issue plays to Mr. Trump’s strengths. The core of the president’s appeal has always been his ability to portray himself as an antiestablishment outsider come to drain the swamp and put the country back on the right track. This is harder to do as an incumbent running for re-election, but the foreign-policy and business establishment’s long romance with China gives Mr. Trump something to run against.

For decades, he can say, corporations outsourced American jobs to China, while the political establishment permitted Beijing to cheat in its economic competition with the U.S. China kept its markets closed, funneled state aid to Chinese companies, even stole intellectual property—while the establishment said Beijing was democratizing and learning to play by the rules.

The result? Millions of American jobs have been lost; China has become more hostile and more communist; and, to add insult to injury, the U.S. must now scramble to produce medical supplies and personal protective equipment it previously sourced from China to fight a virus that Beijing’s deception unleashed on the world.

…Finally, a China campaign would create real problems for the Democrats. Some of this would be personal for Joe Biden—the Trump campaign is already doing everything it can to highlight Hunter Biden’s business ties to China. But plenty of other senior Democrats have made money there, supported trade policies that gave away too much without holding Beijing accountable, or praised China’s government in ways that would make painful viewing in a campaign ad today…”

Speaking of campaign ads, here’s a ready-made one you KNEW was coming:

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s these two memes courtesy of Balls Cotton…

…along with this string of Biblical humor wafting in from Breeze Gould:

Finally, we’ll call it a week with the Educated Idiots segment, courtesy today of NRO‘s John Hirschauer, who reports on…

In other words…

It’s yet another example of life imitating art…and the latest reason John Harvard must be rolling over in his grave.

Reports Professor Bartholet’s employment application listed her ethnicity as “Aleut-Eskimo Pie” remain unconfirmed…as do rumors of her relation to “Doc” of Back to the Future fame.

Magoo