Topic: Newsmax
The first indication that Conrad Black's Dec. 22 Newsmax column -- headlined "The Clouds of Political Madness are Gathering" -- would be quite the trip was the tag that "The author is a non-clinician." We know what that means: lots of COVID misinformation. And, by golly, he didn't disappoint on that front:
Joe Biden and the Democrats are embarking on a new campaign of terror over the Omicron variant, (“a winter of ... death” for the unvaccinated), which is, in fact, a Christmas blessing. There are fewer than 10 fatalities reported in the entire world as a result of this new variant on COVID. It is like a conventional flu, except that 90% of the people afflicted have mild or no symptoms and all of those afflicted benefit from the reinforcement their immune systems are getting against all variants of the disease.
No greater gift to herd immunity from the COVID family of viruses could have been sought or imagined. Yet it is being used to justify a renewed campaign to transform Americans into a nation of cowardly, paranoid, and hypochondriacal moles.
Yeah, that's not the way omicron worked out. And, no, omicron is not the flu. It also turns out omicron is a detriment to herd immunity.
Black also labored to spin the news that Fox News personalities were texting White House officials demanding Trump do something about the Capitol riot he helped incite:
The January 6 commission and Trump-hating nightly media commentators professed to find in the fact that Donald Trump’s family and Fox News Trump personalities Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity warned the then-president of backlash if he didn’t take a strong line against the trespassing and vandalism at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, proof that the melee was a pre-planned insurrection and that Trump’s complaints of election fraud were unfounded. (It confirms merely that like almost everyone, they disapproved of the attack on the Capitol, but did not deny Trump’s and his law-abiding supporters’ grievance.)
After several paragraphs of Biden-bashing, Black returned to sucking up yet again to the guy who gave him a presidential pardon for his financial crimes:
After blithely assuming the swift demise of Trump’s support, they now see the dangers of a Trump/Republican return in 2022 and 2024. But they appear to have an airtight mental block against contemplation of their own role in elevating a U.S. administration that is destabilizing the world by the self-mutilation of America.
They are incapable of contemplating the fact that Trump achieved great successes in sharply curtailing illegal immigration, unemployment, oil imports, Chinese and North Korean provocations and bringing greater prosperity to low-income minorities than any president in history. They are as blind to his accomplishments as to the fraudulence of their claim that he threatens democracy.
The same people who falsely accused Trump of colluding with Russia during the 2016 election, and claimed that an unexceptionable telephone call to the president of Ukraine to ask what happened in the Biden family’s commercial activities there — not to try to dictate the condemnation of the Bidens — was an impeachable offense, are still raving that Trump is a fascist and even putschist mountebank.
As he has before, Black once again attempted to deflect blame from Trump over the insurrection:
For these purposes such hysterics cling more fervently than ever to the myth of the January 6 “insurrection.” There is not a scrap of evidence that Trump approved any illegalities or had any notion of overthrowing the government.
[...]
But the blame for this indignity resides clearly with the egregious mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who were repeatedly warned (including by Trump) that some hooligans might attach themselves to the large gathering of Trump voters and try to breach Capitol security, something which Trump himself admonished his supporters to avoid.
Black concluded his column with a vague threat: "The anti-Trump Republicans, or NeverTrumpers, are the most inexcusable wrong-doers: They pretended to support a president they actually conspired to defeat, by illegal means. All who righteously engaged in defamation and skullduggery to remove Trump share in the guilt for the abject failure of Biden. They have sown and they shall reap." Written like a guy who's still trying to justify the pardon Trump gave him.
