"I hate Bill Gates" is a common expression among Windows users, based on the balkiness of Gates's signature Microsoft program.

Now he's given everyone a new reason to hate him.

According to the Daily Wire:

Left-wing billionaire Bill Gates attacked the United States during a CNN interview on Sunday while praising communist China, claiming that China "did a lot of things right at the beginning" of the coronavirus outbreak that originated in Wuhan.

CNN's Fareed Zakaria asked Gates: "How would you respond to the charge that the Chinese covered this up, they essentially deceived the rest of the world, and as a result, they should be held in someway responsible for this?"

"Well, I don't think that's a timely thing because it doesn't affect how we act today," Gates claimed. "China did a lot of things right at the beginning. Like any country where a virus first shows up, they can look back and see where they missed some things."

China "did a lot of things right at the beginning"? 

Such as throwing infected people alive into furnaces and leaving Wuhan residents screaming in despair from their balconies?  Tossing residents into collective sick pens like livestock against their will?  Throwing the doctor who sounded the alarm into prison and exonerating him only after he died of the virus in prison?

Or was Gates most impressed by China keeping U.S. medical researchers out and scrubbing down the wet markets where the virus was said to originate to paper over the evidence?

Was China's buying up of medical supplies worldwide to keep a stash solely for itself, while releasing five million people from the city of Wuhan to spread the virus around the country, and world, what Gates liked best?

Or was it China's refusal to share its lab data, and the growing suspicious that the virus was released from a lab, either incompetently or on purpose?

It defies belief that anyone could be so out of touch with the atrocious performance of China in the early days of the pandemic.  Their mismanagement, in fact, is why it seems to be the only place out there that is regularly releasing pandemics.

Whatever it was, Gates is way off base, and it's strange stuff, given that he's usually a rational center-left voice of reason on many issues.

Maybe that comes of living the billionaire life and not having to weigh the things that ordinary people do.

Maybe it's some kind of profit motive — the old "China market" argument.

Maybe it's Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Whatever it is, to praise China and then to criticize the U.S. demonstrates a profoundly strange and incompetent ability to distinguish something unpleasant from shinola.  China has much to answer for for its dishonest and inhuman response to this pandemic, and it probably will have to.

To praise China, while blasting the U.S., and then making pious noises about saving the blame for later is the height of hypocrisy.

Image credit: OnInnovation via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.