Sen. Tom Cotton: Making the Commies Pay

Once we’re done suppressing the coronavirus outbreak, Sen. Tom Cotton thunders at FoxNews.com, America should turn to the business of “holding the Chinese Communist Party accountable for unleashing this plague on the world.” Given Beijing’s criminal lying and obfuscation in the critical early stages, “we should treat this pandemic not just as a war with a deadly pathogen, but as an information war with the CCP.” Our countercampaign has to start with “ignoring cynical CCP flacks and politically correct dupes who claim that referring to the China virus by its point of origin is somehow xenophobic.” Next, investigate and sanction Chinese officials who covered up the virus, restrict state-sponsored Chinese outlets’ ability to operate in the Free World, press claims at the World Trade Organization, even revoke China’s “special trading privileges with our country for threatening to cut off access to vital supplies in a time of crisis.” Bottom line: “We must treat the CCP as we would any serious disease: immediately and aggressively.”

Neocon: Left, Right Turn On China

Voters in both parties “increasingly agree that the United States needs a tougher, more realistic China strategy that depends less on the honesty and goodwill of the Chinese government,” notes The Washington Post’s Josh ­Rogin. Politicians in Washington may bicker over the issue, but a new Harris poll “shows that, outside the Beltway, the coronavirus crisis is actually bringing Americans together on the China issue.” Left and right hold Beijing responsible and say it can’t be trusted, and “majorities in both parties also believe US manufacturers should pull back from China in the wake of the crisis.” Rogin suggests that “leaders in both parties should . . . listen to their constituents and, then stop using China as a political weapon against their opponents, because that’s exactly what the [Chinese Communist Party] wants us to do.”

Foreign desk: Beijing’s Useful Idiot

On Wednesday, World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus claimed, “We don’t do politics in WHO” — and, eyerolls The Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan, “showed just how ridiculous his ­organization has become.” Tedros was responding to President Trump, who “threatened to cut US funding for the WHO” — because, as Rogan notes, America “provides the WHO nearly 10 times the annual funding that China provides,” yet the organization “idiotically advised against China-focused travel bans” during the coronavirus pandemic. Fact is, Tedros has “responded to the coronavirus not as a chief medical officer,” but as a “Chinese Communist Party poodle” with “a starring role in Chinese state-run media.” He’s “what the Russians would refer to as a useful idiot. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Leftist: Bernie the Patriot

Though liberal journos derided it “as angry, bellicose, even a Trumpism for the left,” Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, like his 2016 run, “tried to make democracy more real, and in doing so, became a movement and a generational watershed for people who have come to understand how an unequal and undemocratic country is killing them and laying waste to what they love,” argues Jedediah Britton-Purdy at Jacobin magazine. Bernie spoke of “fear of poverty,” “mass incarceration” and other “terrible problems” in a fundamentally “normal country.” Most important, “his campaign made sense only if you also believed that the United States remained a place decent in possibility” — a fundamentally “patriotic” approach. He won tremendous support for his ­vision and scored big victories in the states “where the future of American politics is taking shape.”

Ideas desk: A New, Old Philosophy for China

In First Things, Matthew Schmitz interviews Jiang Qing, a Chinese scholar who seeks to revive Confucianism as a living philosophy for China. A former Marxist, “Jiang became convinced that liberalism and Marxism were both alien ideologies.” Inspired by the Confucian classics, “Jiang argues that every government requires three forms of legitimacy: sacred, historical and popular.” Communism, he says, fails on all three counts, while liberalism has ­increasingly shown itself hostile to history and the sacred. The alternative: a new social ethic that “will preserve the spiritual depths” of China, while adapting its rites to modernity.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board