Have you ever seen anyone so enthralled with the idea that Stephen King’s The Stand might play out in real life as today’s Democrat Party and its allies in the mainstream media?

This week has been a nonstop orgy of doomsaying and freakouts in the mainstream media about the coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19 for short, which really ought to be known by its more descriptive name, the Kung Flu. It’s a deadly disease, to be sure, but not so much more so that it has the potential to wipe out civilization than the ordinary flu, which people catch all the time and every so often die from.

It’s a big deal in China, where it started, but mostly due to its rather dubious origins there. Anybody who’s been paying attention at least suspects this thing was cooked up in a lab there, and probably a bioweapons lab at that — though when Tom Cotton connected those dots he was called “fringe” and a “conspiracy theorist” by the same people screaming that Trump is going to kill us all with inaction on COVID-19. So far, though, while it looks like it’s highly contagious and not something you want to get, it isn’t the Ebola virus. That kills 90 percent of the people it infects. This is a lot less; in fact, the death rate so far is closer to that of the flu than of Ebola.

An Ebola outbreak is something to be terrified of. This is something, particularly if you look at the webpage the Centers for Disease Control — the people who are the actual experts about these things — put up about COVID-19, which merits a response pretty similar to that of the flu. Sure, CDC is taking greater precautions in dealing with COVID-19 than it does with ordinary flu, but the recommendations it offers to people are very much the usual stuff.

In short, for regular folks this is something to be concerned about and take normal, reasonable precautions about, and it’s a really lousy time to travel to China and now Japan, but nobody should be losing their minds about COVID-19.

CDC considers the risk it presents to Americans as “low.”

But you wouldn’t know that if you watch CNN, MSNBC, or the Democrats in Washington.

It’s so ridiculous that noted immunologist Nancy Pelosi, upon hearing that President Trump put Vice President Mike Pence, who once successfully ran the entire state government in Indiana, in charge of the federal government’s response to COVID-19, had this to say:

I spoke with the vice president this morning, made some of these concerns known to him. We have always had a very candid relationship and I expressed to him a concern that I had of his being in this position and while I look forward to working with him about when he was governor of Indiana slashing the public health budget and having some clinics, especially a Planned Parenthood clinic closed, which was the only place in that [inaudible] county where you could get tested for HIV and AIDS.

So Mike Pence cut Planned Parenthood, which kills people, and that makes him unfit to fight a disease which makes them sick? Does she know how stupid she sounds?

There is also the narrative that Pence caused an AIDS outbreak in Indiana because he got rid of a needle exchange program. The outbreak of a behaviorally spread disease was Pence’s fault, not the people whose behavior spread it.

And they want to be in charge of the whole country, these guys.

Trump’s response to COVID-19 is wholly inadequate, don’t you know, though when his administration suspended travel from China that was racist. And Trump isn’t spending enough extra money on COVID-19, even though the entire point of the CDC is that it’s funded to continuously operate against potential epidemics like this one. They don’t like Trump’s CDC head, they don’t like Pence — this from a party who thought Joe Biden was perfectly capable to take on special projects in the last administration — they don’t like anything and we’re all gonna die.

Because of Trump.

To call this fake news is to be too kind to fake news.

Some people will get sick from this thing, no matter what Trump or the CDC do, and anything they do will be attacked as too strong or too weak. It will be completely forgotten that COVID-19 is not Trump’s fault, it’s China’s fault. Why? Because it’s “racist” to criticize China for letting an infectious disease get out of a bioweapons lab, if in fact that’s what happened in Wuhan. If the Democrats wanted to play a worthwhile role they would be busily outdoing each other to question whether our entire relationship with a regime that irresponsible is a good idea, and they’d be quietly saying Trump making a trip to India recently to talk about increased trade relations, possibly as an offset to our pulling our supply chain out of China, was a pretty well-timed thing.

Oh, but no.

One would almost wonder if the ChiComs have penetrated the news media (that would be the news media not named Bloomberg; as we already know the ChiComs straight-up own the latter) to the same extent they’ve penetrated Hollywood. But that’s for another column.

Because the coronavirus has to be a Black Swan event that changes American politics and gives the Democrats a deus ex machina moment to make whichever political hack they end up screwing Bernie Sanders over to nominate over the objections of their own voters, whether at a brokered convention or through some other hook-or-crook mechanism in the remainder of their primaries, the next president while Trump drowns.

Sorry, gang, but Trump isn’t going to drown. Not from COVID-19, and not from the economic effects it’s likely going to have as the Chinese economy continues to shut down as its cramped, filthy cities become prisons for people afraid to go outside and unable to access the quality of health care Americans can get.

Because communist China’s health-care system isn’t a whole lot better than the world-class health-care system Bernie will tell you communist Cuba boasts. You wouldn’t want to be sick with COVID-19, or anything else, in either place.

The problem is that touting this as the next great catastrophe, and reading The Stand into the congressional record as a prescient forecast of our potential doom, has its downside. You’d better be right, because if you’re not you come off as a cross between Barney Fife and Chicken Little, and today’s Democrat Party is made up of far too many laughingstocks with zero credibility and even less coherence to suffer that kind of public-relations reversal.

You can’t go from Trump-Russia to impeachment to Captain Trips and be wrong every single time, all the while having no ability to beat a nearly octogenarian communist deadbeat dad, who can’t stop touting Fidel Castro’s program to promote literacy by passing out totalitarian propaganda poisoning kids against their parents when he’s not trying to destroy our entire economy with hundred-trillion-dollar spending increases, in your own primaries. It’s a hell of a lot better way to completely destroy your party than it is to put it back in power.

Don’t think people aren’t watching. The more sensible Democrats are beginning to head for the lifeboats.

And that’s the outbreak the Democrats really ought to fear.