#Extremist epidemiologists and other commentary

Libertarian: Extremist Epidemiologists

A New York Times survey of 700 epidemiologists reveals that several believe it will never “be safe for normal life to resume,” Robby Soave notes at Reason. And in their own lives, “only 29 percent were willing to get a haircut, even though the most infamous case involving two hairstylists who had COVID-19 resulted in not a single infection among their 139 clients.” And “for too long,” these specialists’ “pessimistic dictates have provided cover for politicians and government employees to make people’s lives miserable.” Notably, “schools are still closed in many major cities, even as new scientific information has generally found that resuming in-person education would be perfectly fine.” Especially “as the population becomes vaccinated, and we move past the crisis point of the pandemic,” each of us has the right “to dissent from the epidemiologists’ contentment with the way things are now.”

Conservative: Biden’s Great Reset Support

Joe Biden has been “relatively quiet” about whether he intends to support the Great Reset, an international plan “increasing the power of government through expansive new social programs like the Green New Deal and using vast regulatory schemes,” Justin Haskins worries at The Hill. But former Secretary of State John Kerry, whom Biden named special presidential envoy for climate, confirmed last month that the Biden administration will support the Great Reset, saying it “will happen with greater speed and with greater intensity than a lot of people might imagine.” Kerry’s admission makes it “crystal clear” that Biden’s team will try to use COVID-19 as an excuse to join radical causes, and “if they are successful, the country will never be the same.”

Iconoclast: Don’s Righteous Self-Pardon

The Week’s Matthew Walther declares: “I would be astonished if Donald Trump left office without a presidential pardon” to shield himself from Democratic attempts to “lock him up.” That he can do so is beyond doubt. Nothing in the Constitution bars a president from issuing a preemptive pardon for himself. And he’d be morally in the right, too: “The idea that Trump the television star and real-estate mogul would have found himself facing federal or state prosecution if he had never sought, much less won, the presidency beggars belief. Any such charges — and I fully expect them to come — will be politically motivated recrimination, spiteful acts of revenge.” No one should “pretend that he is in any sense obligated to take it lying down.

GOP senator: Don’t Blame Us for Payback

After President Trump’s 2016 victory, most Democrats vowed to “obstruct” nominees and “shatter precedent,” recalls Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) at The Wall Street Journal — and they followed through: While Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton “had nearly all of their Cabinet confirmed in January,” Trump had only three. Dems also tried to block 79 lower-level nominees in the first two years, while Trump’s “six predecessors combined faced the same obstruction only 18 times.” Sen. Chuck Schumer even voted against Elaine Chao as transportation secretary, though she had been thoroughly vetted for other posts. All that “hamstrung” Team Trump. If Republicans hold the Senate next year, they’ll “treat mainstream nominees fairly,” Barrasso promises. But those “out of the mainstream will face a gantlet.”

From the left: Bernie Betrays Himself

At a crucial moment in the Democratic primaries, deep-state spooks leaked to The Washington Post that Moscow supposedly wanted Bernie Sanders to win — a story calculated to damage the Vermont socialist. That, says Glenn Greenwald at his Substack blog, makes it all the more “jarring to see him on Thursday mock the idea that there is such a thing as ‘the deep state’ — the very entity that did so much to help sink his 2020 campaign. . . . It’s somewhat difficult to understand how one can wage a ‘revolution’ against the political establishment,” as Sanders claims he wants to do, “while delegitmizing the obviously true claim that establishment news outlets disseminate fake news against establishment enemies” at the deep state’s behest.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board