Victor Davis Hanson // National Review
President Trump seems increasingly ambivalent about the utility of the daily and sometime marathon press conferences. He should be — and for reasons besides just their length and frequency.
First, Trump gets bogged down into long, back-and-forth jousts with the touché Washington press corps. His impromptu skills, honed both as president and in his years on television, usually ensure him tactical victories. He is not peremptory but retaliatory in his put-downs.
Fine. Most Americans don’t especially like the Washington press corps. So they don’t mind them earning the repartee that their rude provocation deserves.
But Trump’s victories are becoming Pyrrhic.
Anyone who watches the entire press conference sees the context, and why the president is legitimately upset with the constant “gotcha” attempts while the nation has more serious concerns. But few in the nation do watch all of them. Instead the public gleans bits and pieces of them as carefully edited sound bites delivered by print and television media.
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The biggest thing I nooticed about the press conferences was a lack of serious scientific and medical questions challenging Drs Fauci and Birx. For example there was little to no challenge to model assumptions. I would like to have seen Acosta and all uninvited and more scientific and medical journals included.
Coronavirus End Game Considerations Most people who get COVID-19 will experience mild to moderate symptoms and recover without special treatment. COMFIRMED Case statistics misrepresent Total Virus Cases because many Asymptomatic Cases, which are much greater, are not reported. This also makes DEATH % statistics much worse than actual. Economic Lock Down can cause a greater losses of life than COVID-19’s toll; wrecked livelihoods, stress, substance abuse, suicides, and the inability to do elective medical issues. Previous epidemics ended when enough people developed imunities. Lockdown prevents imunity development thereby prolongs the COVID-19 epidemic. The CDC should provide a test; Covid-19 National Representative Serologic, Random Sample including asymptomatic cases to accurately determine Actual Virus Cases to correctly guide virus policies. Focus care on the Elderly who are Medically Impaired.
As a typical and bewildered American moron trying to fathom what the "media" is all about in my time on earth, I can tell you that one of the standouts in my memory is a scene on early TV of IKE telling a "journalist" in a press "conference" to "sit down and shut up" when he asked a typically Ivy-league-schooled question about something or the other that had nothing to do with anything or whatever. Frankly, I liked the style. It was a man talking to an idiot, just like Trump talking to the idiots of today, most of them fawining parasites raised in "halls of learning", ergo, academia, the rat pens of masturbating monkies."