Even without a daily COVID taskforce briefing, we’re not starving for incompetent discourse on Easter weekend. First Trump attacks the MSM hobbyhorse yet again with the usual logical fallacy about source integrity. Then Bret Stephens tries to again fill an intellectual vacuum defined by IMPOTUS*’s discourse inferno.

When the Failing @nytimes or Amazon @washingtonpost writes a story saying “unnamed sources said”, or any such phrase where a person’s name is not used, don’t believe them. Most of these unnamed sources don’t exist. They are made up to defame & disparage. They have no “source”… — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2020

….Does anyone ever notice how few quotes from an actual person are given nowadays by the Lamestream Media. Very seldom. The unnamed or anonymous sources are almost always FAKE NEWS. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 11, 2020

There’s just so much straw in Stephens’s attack on bureaucracy as he tries to suggest that the bogeyman is agencies rather than the agency of the executive branch, where implementing rather than invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA) would have addressed the chaos still roiling the COVID-19 response. The culprit, rather than where the buck stops, is big government because it shouldn’t have been in the way of… wait for it… public health.

From 2007 to 2019, the total number of employees in the Food and Drug Administration increased by nearly 80 percent to more than 17,000 employees, according to a Cato Institute report . That includes nearly 500 additional workers to review the safety of medical devices. Has it helped? In March, Julia Ioffe wrote a must-read account in GQ of the F.D.A.’s almost-comical mishandling of an effort to roll out coronavirus test kits. First the F.D.A. approved a flawed test. Then they stymied an effective test by requiring its developer to submit his request not only electronically but also mailed in paper and via thumb drive. Then the F.D.A. demanded that the developer see if his test worked against other coronaviruses. Then the F.D.A. shut down a testing regime developed by the Seattle Flu Study because it lacked the correct licensing requirements. Congress also had to overturn F.D.A. regulations in order to permit hospitals to purchase N95 masks previously approved only for industrial use. The country may need billions of such masks now. But as Reason magazine reported last month , federal regulators have told one would-be manufacturer that certification and approval might take between 45 and 90 days. And this is government operating in an emergency. On Tuesday, New York City’s Health Department sent a stern letter to health providers , warning that there are no approved blood tests for use at point-of-care facilities to check for coronavirus antibodies, and that use of such tests “may result in regulatory action.” Everyone knows tests are far from perfect. But they are urgently needed to track the disease and could have been widely available in the U.S. weeks ago . Approval is now expected in a few days, which should at least raise a question about the point of delay. Does all of this mean that we would have been better off without any government regulation at all? Obviously not. But it says something that among the most important steps taken in recent months to advance public safety has been to waive regulations enacted in the name of public safety. The effectiveness of government is rarely correlated to its size. In this crisis, the correlation has often been inverse. www.nytimes.com/…

Some obvious rebuttals here: is "big government" the problem? No.

The places with the best responses have political leadership that listened to and made use of competent bureaucracies, e.g. Singapore, Taiwan, Finland, S. Korea, NZ, Germany, Iceland. 2/ — Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) April 11, 2020

I could go through the failures of individual appointees, but they have been well-documented elsewhere. The point is the design of a federal govt dependent on this model of political leadership in integral to the same conservative approach to governing that Stephens champions. 8/ — Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) April 11, 2020

There are other aspects to the conservative approach to governing we could get into – relying on public private partnerships that failed to deliver ventilators…10/ https://t.co/VfUAZGJgWS — Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) April 11, 2020

This is stupid, but it’s a non-malicious stupid. Bret just doesn’t have the humility or mental agility to treat a world-historic pandemic as something that doesn’t comfortably fit into his existing framework.



“Government is the problem,” so government must be the problem.

(2) — dave karpf (@davekarpf) April 11, 2020

History continues to address the 70-day delay/denial/dysfunction of the Trump White House, as the facts pile up.

Azar – already on thin ice with the president over the vaping ban – saw his authority diminish in part after the task force he led oversaw a widespread testing failure https://t.co/4pgKT9vg2h — Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 11, 2020

Because it’s always somebody else outside the bounds of accountability.

Trump suggests doctors complain about lack of equipment to get on TV. Acosta said people are saying that there aren't enough masks “Do we have enough masks?"

Trump: “They are always going to say that because otherwise, you are not going to put them on.”



https://t.co/RAJRFUIGHh — 𝐃𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐭𝐡 (@essenviews) April 11, 2020

IHME: "By end the of the first wave of the epidemic, an estimated 97% of the population of the [USA] will still be susceptible to the disease, so avoiding reintroduction of #COVID19 through mass screening, contact tracing, and quarantine will be essential to avoid a second wave." — Adam Rifkin 🐼 (@ifindkarma) April 11, 2020

Apparently the Trumpian approach has other aficionados.

“Putin, who usually takes the lead with great fanfare in times of crisis, has…retreated to his country residence outside Moscow, leaving the mayor and prime minister…to take the heat for a health crisis that now looks set to get far worse.” https://t.co/pldaDX0J2O — Connie Schultz (@ConnieSchultz) April 11, 2020