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October 14, 2020

It's 'pigs flying' time for CNN viewers and New York Times readers

By Andrea Widburg

If you thought 2020 could not get any weirder, you were wrong.  This week, two of the most radical, Trump-hating media outlets in America acted out of character, so much so that I glanced outside my window, expecting to see pigs flying by.  On Monday, the New York Times published an optimistic article saying the Wuhan virus is coming to an end.  It even praised one of the Trump administration's initiatives.  And then, if that wasn't crazy enough, on Tuesday, the CNN talking heads went out of their way to praise Amy Coney Barrett.  Sometimes, weird is good.

Let's start with the New York Times piece, "A Dose of Optimism, as the Pandemic Rages On."  The first thing to know about it is that the body of the piece is more optimistic than the title would suggest.  The second thing to know about it is that the author, Donald G. McNeil, Jr., a staff writer who covers science and health, takes all of the obligatory potshots at Trump.  But hidden behind the carping and sniping are weird moments of genuine optimism and praise, if not for Trump, then for his policies.

To appreciate how peculiar this article is, you have to remember that the left, especially its media mouthpieces, has been working overtime to instill extreme fear into Americans.  It's succeeded, too, especially with Democrats:

The left's original goal wasn't hard to guess: tank the economy, go to easy-to-cheat mail-in voting, and make people fearful enough that they'll embrace change, with "change" coming in the form of a human fossil who's spent 47 years in the federal government.

However, it may be that the left has realized that it stoked fear too hard.  Current projections on mail-in voting are that up to 1 million mailed-in ballots could be rejected.  There are also stories such as the one about U.S. Postal Service special agents finding eight large garbage bags full of undelivered mail outside a postal worker's home in Pennsylvania.  Add to this the reality that the mail service routinely cannot deliver 4.7% of America's mail and has no idea how much is lost annually, and you can see why Democrats may want to get voters out of their houses and into the polling stations.

That leads me to McNeil's flying-pig statement, buried in the middle of a list of potential cures, possible immunity, and statistical data about viruses:

Events have moved faster than I thought possible. I have become cautiously optimistic. Experts are saying, with genuine confidence, that the pandemic in the United States will be over far sooner than they expected, possibly by the middle of next year.

(I believe that the pandemic will be over on November 4, but I'm cynical.)

While McNeil won't name Trump specifically, he concedes that part of his optimism comes from Trump's "Operation Warp Speed" program:

Despite the chaos in day-to-day politics and the fighting over issues like masks and lockdowns, Operation Warp Speed — the government's agreement to subsidize vaccine companies' clinical trials and manufacturing costs — appears to have been working with remarkable efficiency. 

Will wonders never cease?

While the Times may have had pragmatic reasons for its unusual article, I'm at a loss to explain the CNN talking heads praising Amy Coney Barrett after she testified today:

Seeing this rare moment of honesty from the CNN panelists made me check if I'd wandered through Alice's Looking Glass or had entered Superman's Bizarro World.  As best as I can tell, though, I'm still here in America in that utterly strange year of 2020.  I guess the only thing left for me to say is MAGA!

Image: CNN's talking heads like Amy Coney Barrett.  Twitter screen grab.

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