There’s no excuse for dismissals of GOP claims about covid’s origin

The Democrats and the mainstream media have a lot of explaining to do when it comes to their dismissal as a “conspiracy theory” of questions as to whether the Wuhan coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab. It was clear all along that the questions were legitimate, and now, finally, the media and the Dems are asking them too.

In doing so, they recognize the need to explain their earlier dismissal of the subject. And you’ll never guess the explanation they have come up with.

Just kidding. You know exactly where they place they blame. It’s Donald Trump’s fault.

Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s fact checker, started the ball rolling in that direction. He wrote that “the Trump administration’s messaging [on the origin of the virus] was often accompanied by anti-Chinese rhetoric that made it easier for skeptics to ignore its claims.”

Three Post writers pick up the ball and carry it with a vengeance. Anne Linksey, Shane Harris, and David Willman quote Democrats as saying that “the departure of Donald Trump, who often talked about the pandemic in racially charged terms, makes it easier to consider the theory [that the virus came from a lab]. . . .” (Emphasis added)

Kessler was honest enough to characterize Trump’s rhetoric as anti-Chinese (which it was, but why was that a problem?). His three colleagues peddle the Democrats’ talking point that Trump’s rhetoric was “racially charged.”

They cite no such rhetoric, and there was none. China is a country, not a race. It is no more racist to use anti-China rhetoric than, say, to use the anti-Cuba or anti-Venezuela kind. For that matter, it’s no more racist for a white politician to criticize China harshly than it is for a black politician to blast America for what occurred here when the country was overwhelmingly White.

If scrutinized at all, what the Democrat/media excuse really amounts to is an admission against interest. They are confessing to the rankest kind of partisanship — the dismissal of important and legitimate questions based on the political orientation of their source.

Democrats hate Donald Trump and Tom Cotton so much that they refused to entertain the possibility that what the two were saying about an important subject that is (or should be) non-partisan — where did a virus originate — might be true.

Talk about Trump derangement syndrome.

Jamie Raskin is the hyper-partisan Democrat who represents my congressional district. He says, “like everything else it [the question of where the virus started] became politicized very early on.”

Raskin speaks misleadingly in the passive. Tom Cotton didn’t politicize the issue early on (or later). Saying that a virus might well have come from a Chinese lab isn’t a partisan statement — not unless Raskin accepts the view that Democrats are apologists for China. It was Democrats who politicized the matter by mindlessly rejecting a theory simply because Republicans presented it.

I agree that Trump didn’t help matters. Characteristically, his statements were less careful than Cotton’s and might have gone further than the intelligence at the time warranted. We’ll see.

But that’s no excuse for falsely claiming that Cotton’s concerns had been “debunked.” It’s no excuse for accepting China’s claims about the origin of the virus and ripping Americans who didn’t buy them.

The explanation for this sorry behavior must be either a pro-China mindset or blatant partisanship. I’m going with the latter.

And I’m keeping it in mind the next time the Washington Post or some other tool of the Democratic Party talks about bipartisanship. The Democrats and their media allies act in bad faith. Always. Even when we’re trying to get to the bottom of the source of a pandemic.