As Ferris Bueller said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

It looks like the American mainstream media is missing pretty much everything, as while the Trump administration is trying to get the word out about what they’re doing to ramp up the capacity of the health-care system to handle the Wuhan coronavirus, the clowns attending these press briefings are too busy focusing on attempts to play “Gotcha!” with the president.

For example:

1. Nobody cares if some smart-aleck on the president’s staff called it the “Kung Flu.”

Would it be politically correct to use the term “Kung Flu” to describe the Wuhan virus? Who gives a damn?

“Kung Flu” is funny, and if you don’t allow people to use humor at a time like this you’re a miserable human being who doesn’t deserve the attention of others.

But a CBS News reporter named Weijia Jiang, who was born in China and now calls herself a West Virginian (and, in the famous words of Sean Connery, who would claim to be that who was not?), tweeted out an accusation earlier this week that someone on the White House staff used the term “Kung Flu” to her face, which prompted her to wonder what term they were using behind closed doors.

Jiang refused to say who the staff member was and got a good calling-out from Trump’s senior adviser Kellyanne Conway.

There are two things going on here. The first is the pettiness and stupidity of the clowns in the mainstream media. Honestly — who cares if somebody in the White House cracks a joke here and there? It’s a workplace just like the rest of us have, and people tell jokes in workplaces. Playing the Perpetually Offended game poisons workplaces; we’ve all seen that. It used to be that jokes like “Kung Flu” were a means for people of different ethnicities to come together; the Irish had the best Irish jokes, the Italians had the best Italian jokes, and nobody had better Jewish jokes than the Jewish people. Somewhere along the line this became “racist,” and we’ve been needlessly walking on eggshells ever since. Dave Chappelle is funny as hell, but what Chappelle says is what every comedian in America used to say at every comedy club in America in the 1980s when this country had an actual sense of humor. He’s just the only one with enough sand to continue saying it.

If there’s a Dave Chappelle in the White House, that likely means he or she is a lot better at his or her job than Weijia Jiang is at hers.

The second thing is, of course, the fact Weijia Jiang isn’t fooling anybody. We know this is all partisan hackery. She isn’t offended by “Kung Flu”; what she’s offended by is the fact Donald Trump is the president and her party and political persuasion is in no particular condition to dislodge him. So she throws “Kung Flu” at the wall, hoping it sticks.

But there’s a problem: by turning this into a big media event, Jiang and the rest of the Democrat propagandocracy are only offering us a nice window into something we’ve seen in other venues — who they’re carrying water for.

Yes, the Democrat Party, to be certain, but it’s worse than that. They’re carrying water for the Chinese government.

This is all bound up in the fact we’re suddenly no longer permitted to call the Wuhan virus the Wuhan virus, or to refer to its Chinese origin at all, because to do so is evidence of racism.

I don’t need to go into the geographical basis of infectious diseases; we all know that it’s a convention to call them by the place they first appeared — Marburg, Ebola, West Nile, Lyme, and so forth. This thing came from Wuhan, so it’s the Wuhan virus. If you don’t like it, then deal with it.

Calling this racist is the same tired crap as calling everything else racist. That accusation had lost its meaning long before this episode, and it’s completely nugatory now.

But the proper context for this sudden claim that referring to the virus’s origin, namely the disgusting “farm-to-table” wet markets where bats, snakes, civet cats, pangolins, and other nasty critters are slaughtered and served up in unsanitary fashion in Wuhan and other southern Chinese cities, when it’s been known for more than a decade those barbaric culinary practices were a time bomb for the spread of infectious disease, should sit with another China-related controversy which brewed up late last year.

Remember the NBA–Hong Kong item? The Chinese government got its nose out of joint over the Houston Rockets’ general manager supporting Hong Kong protesters and threatened to disassociate the league from its realm if such heretical speech continued. Americans watched slack-jawed as LeBron James proceeded to spout the ChiCom party line and league commissioner Adam Silver tried to straddle the issue from an impossible position.

Ironically, there are no NBA games on Chinese TV right now, or anyone else’s TV — because of a virus that brewed up in China.

But the NBA controversy was of a piece with China’s bullying and control of Hollywood, in which Chinese investment money and its giant potential movie audiences controlled by the government have dumbed down and strangled American cinema to the point at which most offerings are unwatchable. Remember when the Red Dawn remake was forced into a presentation of North Korea as an invading enemy, as ridiculous a premise as that is? Did you notice the recent movie Skyscraper, starring The Rock, in which the Hong Kong billionaire good guy was under assault by various white-dude villains? None of that happens without Hollywood doing the bidding of their new overlords and paymasters.

And now it’s American mainstream news, owned by some of the same Chinese-influenced media conglomerates, doing the same thing.

Which is a hell of a lot worse development, given China’s most recent export to America and elsewhere, than some Washington wiseass calling it the “Kung Flu.”

2. Pay attention to who’s responsible for foisting the Wuhan virus panic on us.

Here we’re not talking about the media, per se, though obviously they’ve played a monumental role in building this runaway train. Instead, there are two players driving the decision-making of policymakers across the West.

First is the World Health Organization, which waited a very long time to call the Wuhan virus a pandemic and was exceptionally slow to do its job. It turns out there might be a reason for that:

The World Health Organization (WHO) last week finally declared the coronavirus from China that rapidly spread across the world a pandemic. Now, with more than 150,000 confirmed cases globally and more than 5,700 deaths, the question is why it took so long for the WHO to perceive what many health officials and governments had identified far earlier. We believe the organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, like China’s Xi Jinping, should be held accountable for recklessly managing this deadly pandemic. Tedros apparently turned a blind eye to what happened in Wuhan and the rest of China and, after meeting with Xi in January, has helped China to play down the severity, prevalence and scope of the COVID-19 outbreak. From the outset, Tedros has defended China despite its gross mismanagement of the highly contagious disease. As the number of cases and the death toll soared, the WHO took months to declare the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic, even though it had met the criteria of transmission between people, high fatality rates and worldwide spread. When President Trump took a critical step to stop the coronavirus at U.S. borders by issuing a travel ban as early as Jan. 31, Tedros said widespread travel bans and restrictions were not needed to stop the outbreak and could “have the effect of increasing fear and stigma, with little public health benefit.” He warned that interfering with transportation and trade could harm efforts to address the crisis, and advised other countries not to follow the U.S. lead. When he should have been focusing on global counter-pandemic efforts, Tedros instead was politicizing the crisis and helping Xi to shirk his responsibility for a series of wrongdoings in addressing the outbreak. Tedros used the WHO platform to defend the Chinese government’s gross violation of human rights. For example, from its first case discovered in November to its Wuhan lockdown, and even until today, China has been dishonest about the coronavirus’s origin and prevalence. People who tried to uncover it were detained or disappeared, their online reports and posts deleted. China has misinformed and misled the world, and Tedros joined this effort by publicly praising China’s “transparency” in battling the spread of the disease.

Tedros, the head of the WHO, is not a medical doctor. An Ethiopian, he’s a former health minister from that country’s Marxist regime, and he’s essentially China’s puppet. For some reason, the WHO is being listened to.

It’s also said that a main mover and shaker in setting coronavirus policy is a WHO data-modeling team based at Imperial College London, which produced a report the circulation of which throughout Western capitals has led to the shutdown of our economies.

The report comes off like a Hollywood movie script, predicting that if the Wuhan virus was treated like a flu epidemic, some four million Americans would die out of 80 percent of the country becoming infected. If hard suppression of the virus — meaning the current shutdown of the economy — were to be the policy, the death toll shrinks to 1.1 million. But to accomplish this hard suppression, the report suggests a shutdown lasting as long as 18 months.

It goes without saying that forcing Americans to live as prisoners in our homes for a year and a half will engender consequences much, much worse for the future of this society than the worst-case Wuhan virus scenario. People die of lots of things, you know, and practically every one of them is likely to be exacerbated in such circumstances.

But obviously this report convinced people. Trump himself did a bit of an about-face on the virus, going from trying to tamp down the hysteria to suggesting no groups of 10 people or more get together. The British government, which initially was focusing on attempting to build herd immunity and protect those especially vulnerable, also changed its approach.

By contrast, there is this retort by John P. A. Ioannidis, professor of medicine, epidemiology and population health, biomedical data science, and statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center. Ioannidis considers the Imperial College wildly off the mark. And like Ioannidis, British–American Nobel prize-winning chemist Michael Leavitt looks at the evidence from the Diamond Princess, the cruise liner on which the disease spread, to conclude that most people already have immunity from this virus and that it will peter out long before turning into the apocalyptic event Imperial College predicts.

Except who are the folks on this data-modeling team at Imperial College London? There are a whole lot of them, and it’s likely a far larger project than we have time for here to go through the backgrounds of the individual researchers.

One thing we can note, however, is that institution has an entire institute devoted to climate change, with a vision of “a sustainable, resilient, zero-carbon future.”

It does not necessarily follow that because the coronavirus data modelers are housed in the same institution the zero-carbon global warming crusaders are that the work product is of the same quality.

But it doesn’t necessary not follow, either. There probably should be a good deal of scrutiny laid on Imperial College London to make sure we’re not taking public policy advice from crackpots who want to be Greta Thunberg when they grow up. Because if we are, and their models turn out to be completely off-the-rails wrong, there will rightly be hell to pay.

3. Be like Sean Payton, if you can.

The New Orleans Saints head coach, who years ago had been one of the plaintiffs in that massive product liability case involving Chinese drywall, revealed Thursday that he’d tested positive for the Wuhan virus.

The good news for Payton is he isn’t a serious case. He said he was feeling lousy on Sunday, got himself tested Monday, and got the results back three days later. Payton said he’s “feeling better” and self-quarantining right now. He’s going to be just fine.

The guess here is Sean Payton is less of a fan of China than he otherwise might be. Bad experiences can produce such attitudes, though were Payton to give public voice to any feelings of negativity toward the Middle Kingdom, he would surely be savaged as “racist.”

Well, he isn’t. So there.

4. Boy, are the politics bad in Chicago.

Did you notice what happened in Tuesday’s elections? Probably not, as they’ve been completely overshadowed by the Wuhan virus.

But a couple of results in Chicago were notable. And by notable, we really mean laughable.

First, there was the fact Kim Foxx, the crooked Cook County prosecutor who tried to cover up the Jussie Smollett case, won the Democrat primary. You would think people would want to punish this horrendous woman after her conduct, but … nope.

Then, one of the last holdouts among the non-insane Democrats in Congress was also beaten:

Rep. Dan Lipinski, a Chicago congressman known for his staunch opposition to abortion and his votes against Obamacare and same-sex marriage, finally succumbed to a liberal challenger Tuesday in a primary held in the throes of the burgeoning coronavirus pandemic. The eight-term Illinois Democrat fell to businesswoman Marie Newman, who led 47 to 45 percent with nearly all the votes tallied, a resounding victory for the party’s progressive wing, which has struggled so far this year to capitalize on its 2018 success.

Marie Newman is a wacko Bernie/AOC loon who’s for the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, and she’s also completely in thrall to NARAL and Planned Parenthood. In other words, she’s a regular Democrat. Lipinski, who’s a Chicago machine hack, found himself estranged from the party he and his pals thought they controlled.

Times are changing. One wonders what’s going to be left of the Democrats when all this is over.

5. Finally, Andrew Gillum.

We don’t have to do a lot on the Andrew Gillum story, as by now everybody knows the former George Soros–funded fair-haired boy who nearly went from the crooked, failed mayor of Tallahassee to the surprise governor of Florida, got caught up in a meth incident in a Miami Beach hotel room with a male prostitute who had overdosed amid what looked a lot like a sex orgy. Gillum was found by police after Miami Beach Fire Rescue was called when the male prostitute went into cardiac arrest, too inebriated to communicate.

Everybody in the hotel room was reportedly naked.

Gillum responded to the incident, once he’d sobered up, by claiming he was going into rehab and withdrawing from public life. He said he was drunk but he’d never used meth, and he claimed that when he lost that election to Ron DeSantis he fell into a depression.

The kind of depression that gets cured with booze, meth, and male prostitutes in Miami Beach hotels, apparently.

It makes you wonder — where do they find these people? Why is it that the Left’s “rising star” politicians so often turn up as badly broken human beings whose financial dealings, sex lives, and sobriety don’t quite add up? Can’t they foist any normal people on us when they insist on controlling our lives?

You don’t have to answer. Just make sure the Gillums of the world don’t win elections, and that’s enough.