Tuesday, March 17, 2020

WAPO - Okay Okay Fine, DJT Didn't Dissolve the Pandemic Response Team Like We Said After All.


For weeks now, the anti-Trump media has been beating their drum and saying the White House used to have a “pandemic response team” and that DJT in a fit of stupidity got rid of it. Because hey, we never have pandemics! Who needs them?  This has been shouted thousands of times over the course of the past weeks by the soft skulls on the tweeter, from major newspapers to fake cable news networks, and in every Democrat campaign rally.

It turns out this story originated with an op-ed in the Washington Post written by one Elizabeth Cameron, who ran the White House pandemic office under Barky Obama. Some sort of change was made to her former domain when the Trump Administration took over and Cameron was apparently butthurt DJT touched it. So she fired the off a shot that Democrats and their media leg humpers have been riffing off ever since.

Just One Problem: It’s not true.....

Silly Rabbit. Very few elements of government are ever disbanded, and it always seems a little suspect to believe that had happened in this case. What does happen, just like in the business world is that areas of responsibility are shifted, the names of things are changed and sometimes resources are redirected. Sometimes an independent entity is deemed better housed in a more established agency, not “disbanded” or “dissolved”, just moved down the hall or changed form. Happens all the time. 

Tim Morrison, former senior director for counter-proliferation and bio-defense on the National Security Council, felt compelled to offer the Post a rebuttal piece. Morrison was there and knew exactly what happened, and while I’m sure they were reluctant to do it, the Post allowed Morrison to correct the record:
"It is true that the Trump administration has seen fit to shrink the NSC staff. But the bloat that occurred under the previous administration clearly needed a correction. 
As The Post reported in 2015, from the Clinton administration to the Obama administration’s second term, the NSC’s staff “had quadrupled in size, to nearly 400 people.” That is why Trump began streamlining the NSC staff in 2017. One such move at the NSC was to create the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, which was the result of consolidating three directorates into one. 
It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented. If anything, the combined directorate was stronger because related expertise could be commingled."
SO,  the pandemic response team wasn’t dissolved at all. It was reorganized to be more efficient and allow the true experts to have a clearer path to offer their expertise to the president. The Elizabeth Cameron piece that started this whole narrative was either a complete lie or the work of a person who didn’t know as much as she thought she did about what was really going on. Either way it should have been fact-checked. 

So now that the record has been corrected does anyone really think the original narrative is going to fade away? Do you really think Democrats are going to stop running around claiming DJT “dissolved the pandemic response team” just because it’s patently false? Of course they won’t, which is why it’s irresponsible for the Washington Post to public claims like this in the first place.

They allowed a disgruntled former Obama official to publish a baseless hit piece, and that created a narrative that will long outlast the correction of the record they published yesterday. This is how nonsense takes hold in our political discourse. A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on. Especially when the media are willing to help give the lie a head start

[WAPO] 
[Dan Calabrese]
[DGR] 
~ Thank You MJA@IOTWReport for the linkage! ~

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