The branding of the Associated Press used to be just-the-facts news. But today, they uncork snotty commentaries without even slapping the word “News Analysis” on it. Get a load of this headline today:
Coronavirus shakes the conceit of ‘American exceptionalism’
Reporter Calvin Woodward uncorked nothing but editorializing about "cascading failures and incompetencies" under Trump:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- What if the real “invisible enemy” is the enemy from within — America’s very institutions?
When the coronavirus pandemic came from distant lands to the United States, it was met with cascading failures and incompetencies by a system that exists to prepare, protect, prevent and cut citizens a check in a national crisis.
The molecular menace posed by the new coronavirus has shaken the conceit of “American exceptionalism” like nothing big enough to see with your own eyes.
A nation with unmatched power, brazen ambition and aspirations through the arc of history to be humanity’s “shining city upon a hill” cannot come up with enough simple cotton swabs despite the wartime manufacturing and supply powers assumed by President Donald Trump.
The crisis turned doctors in the iconic American shining city, New York, into beggars with hands outstretched for ponchos because they couldn’t get proper medical gowns. “Rain ponchos!” laments tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen. “In 2020! In America!”
Woodward should have just used the headline “SHAME ON ALL OF YOU.” Or “THIS COUNTRY SUCKS.” AP's editorializing tweet claimed America only leads today in coronavirus deaths (forget the per-capita stuff):
This so-called Objective Reporter had more editorializing to do:
At the time of greatest need, the country with the world’s most expensive health care system doesn’t want you using it if you’re sick but not sick enough or not sick the right way.
The patchwork private-public health care system consumes 17% of the economy, unparalleled globally. But it wants you to stay home with your COVID-19 unless you are among the minority at risk of death from suffocation or complications. It wants you to heal from anything you can without a doctor’s touch and put off surgeries of all kinds if they can wait.
In the pandemic’s viral madhouse, the United States possesses jewels of medical exceptionalism that have long been the envy of the world, like the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.
But where are the results?
For effective diagnostic testing, crucial in an infectious outbreak, look abroad. To the United Arab Emirates, or Germany, or New Zealand, which jumped to test the masses before many were known to be sick.
Or to South Korean exceptionalism, tapped by Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, who accepted a planeload of 500,000 testing kits from Seoul to make up for the U.S. shortfall. The aid was dubbed Operation Enduring Friendship and annoyed Trump, the “America First” president....
That is one iteration of American exceptionalism now — a national government responding to a national crisis by getting out of the way.
The cavalry isn’t coming.
