I’m endlessly fascinated (and frustrated) with the US media reports on “China”. Here I’d like to consider what it would be like if they covered “America” in the same way. Take this comment, in an otherwise very high quality essay:

China is certainly engaged in an English-language propaganda campaign to depict its response as an effective deployment of high-tech authoritarianism that rapidly contained the virus and bought the world time. It’s buttressing the message by sending medical equipment and experts to other countries, and spreading a false story that the illness originated as U.S. military bioterrorism.

The article links to a NYT story:

The insinuation came in a series of posts on Twitter by Zhao Lijian, a ministry spokesman who has made good use of the platform, which is blocked in China, to push a newly aggressive, and hawkish, diplomatic strategy. It is most likely intended to deflect attention from China’s own missteps in the early weeks of the epidemic by sowing confusion or, at least, uncertainty at home and abroad.

Mr. Zhao’s posts appeared to be a retort to similarly unsubstantiated theories about the origins of the outbreak that have spread in the United States. Senior officials there have called the epidemic the “Wuhan virus,” and at least one senator hinted darkly that the epidemic began with the leak of a Chinese biological weapon.

“The conspiracy theories are a new, low front in what they clearly perceive as a global competition over the narrative of this crisis,” said Julian B. Gewirtz, a scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard.

Which conspiracy theories? The Chinese theories about America or the American theories about China?

Sen. Tom Cotton keeps airing a long-debunked theory that the deadly coronavirus is a Chinese biological weapon that was leaked from a government lab in Wuhan.

And who is “they” in that final sentence of the NYT quotation? China and America? Or just China?

I’d guess that 99% of NYT readers would assume that “they” means just China, even though the evidence clearly suggests that people in both countries are spreading conspiracy theories.

I can already hear you complaining about moral equivalence. “One wacky Senator from Arkansas is not equivalent to a Chinese ministry spokesman. We all know that individual Americans are free to speak their minds, whereas the Chinese move in lockstep.”

You mean like the Chinese ambassador to the US?

In a rare interview, China’s ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, told “Axios on HBO” that he stands by his belief that it’s “crazy” to spread rumors about the coronavirus originating from a military laboratory in the United States.

I guess China’s ambassador to the US never got the memo.

As far as I know, “China” never accused the US as having created the virus, nor did “America” accuse China. But our media seems to have a double standard regarding which countries to anthropomorphize.

Here’s Politico:

While we often think of those jobs as focused on protecting against terrorism, both agencies have critical public health roles, too; U.S. intelligence spent the winter racing to understand how serious a threat Covid-19 truly was and deciphering the extent of China’s cover-up of its epidemic. Just last week, news broke about a special report prepared by U.S. intelligence documenting China’s deception about the disease’s spread—information that, had it been more accurately captured and understood, might have caused a faster, harder response and lessened the economic and personal toll of the epidemic at home.

Apparently spending “the winter racing to understand” did not include asking our close allies in Taiwan if there was a problem in Wuhan. More importantly, even after the Chinese admitted the severity of the problem (in January) and closed down Wuhan, the US government spent the next 6 weeks twiddling its thumbs. And we are supposed to be upset that we weren’t given an extra two weeks to twiddle our thumbs?

Is China now the country to blame for all our inadequacies? We have 4% of the world’s population and nearly 30% (and rising) of the coronavirus cases. That’s China’s fault? I guess if you believe that the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt was China’s fault, it’s not such a stretch to blame them for Mardi Gras or our lack of testing and surgical masks.

Here’s just a small portion of the failures documented in the Politico piece:

Yet Trump has churned through officials overseeing the very intelligence that might have helped understand the looming crisis. At Liberty Crossing, the headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the government will have been without a Senate-confirmed director for eight months as of next week; last summer, Trump accepted the resignation of Dan Coats and forced out the career principal deputy of national intelligence, Sue Gordon. Coats’ temporary stand-in, career intelligence official Joseph Maguire, then served so long that he was coming close to timing out of his role—federal law usually lets officials serve only 210 days before relinquishing the acting post—when Trump ousted him too, as well as the acting career principal deputy. In their place, at the end of February—weeks after the U.S. already recorded its first Covid-19 case—Trump installed U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell as his latest acting director, the role that by law is meant to be the president’s top intelligence adviser. Grenell has the least intelligence experience of any official ever to occupy director’s suite.

This Friday, the role of Homeland Security secretary will have been vacant for an entire year, ever since Kirstjen Nielsen was forced out over Trump’s belief she wasn’t tough enough on border security. DHS has numerous critical roles in any domestic crisis, but its acting secretary, Chad Wolf, has fumbled through the epidemic; in February, Wolf couldn’t answer seemingly straightforward questions on Capitol Hill from Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana about the nation’s preparedness—what models were predicting about the outbreak, how many respirators the government had stockpiled, even how Covid-19 was transmitted. “You’re supposed to keep us safe. And you need to know the answers to these questions,” Kennedy finally snapped at Wolf. Wolf has been notably absent ever since from the White House podium during briefings about the nation’s epidemic response.

Yeah, it’s all China’s fault.

I predict that when Trumpistas read this story . . .

In phone calls with outside advisers, Trump has even floated trying to reopen much of the country before the end of this month, when the current federal recommendations to avoid social gatherings and work from home expire, the people said. Trump regularly looks at unemployment and stock market numbers, complaining that they are hurting his presidency and reelection prospects, the people said.

. . . they’ll think the important point is when should the economy restart, not the criterion that Trump uses when making this decision.

PS. It’s been a couple decades since I heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio. When did he become a conspiracy nut? Do millions of conservatives still listen to this man? I’d like to see Rush go speak to the overworked doctors and nurses in NYC and tell them that California faced a far more severe coronavirus epidemic last November, and none of their doctors and nurses complained about being overworked.