After three years, Washington Post columnist Max Boot has changed his mind on the wisdom of Being Like China to fight the coronavirus.
Max Boot Can’t Memory-Hole His Covid Love Letter to the Chinese Communist Party | Mediaite - Isaac Schorr:
December 8, 2022 - "In 2020, Washington Post columnist Max Boot happily served as one of the most useful idiots in Xi Jinping’s arsenal, prematurely declaring that the genocidal regime Xi leads, the one that had unleashed the coronavirus on the rest of the world, had won the pandemic.
"'China’s success is mainly due to the application of science in a country where people are taught to respect science,' explained Boot, who found it within himself to heap praise upon the Chinese Communist Party for, of all things, separating Covid-positive children from their parents. 'If the virus were a human enemy, [Donald] Trump would have long ago run up the white flag, while China would be accepting its unconditional surrender,” he concluded, putting a bow on a staggering #Resistance artifact that boasted the jaw-dropping title: 'China is beating the coronavirus while Trump leads America to defeat.'
Max Boot in 2014.
"Fast-forward to this week, and Boot has been forced to admit that you do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to the Chinese Communist Party. His epiphany, however, came without an admission of his own error in judgment.
"'China’s response to the covid-19 pandemic is widely acknowledged as a costly failure: Its draconian lockdowns have made it hard for ordinary people to get food or medicine and are depressing economic growth,' wrote Boot under the headline 'China’s covid policy failed. But don’t get cocky. So did America’s'....
"By the time Boot put pen to paper in 2020, reporting had confirmed that Uyghur prisoners in concentration camps were being subjected to what can only be described as torture. From the Associated Press:
One middle-aged Uighur woman told the AP that when she was detained at the height of China’s coronavirus outbreak, she was forced to drink a medicine that made her feel weak and nauseous. She and others in her cell had to strip naked once a week as guards hosed them and their cells down with disinfectant, she said. “It was scalding,” recounted the woman by phone from Xinjiang, declining to be named out of fear of retribution. “My hands were ruined, my skin was peeling.”
"Only now that the Chinese regime’s pandemic-related crimes have gone mainstream — even Han Chinese citizens are being welded into their homes and forcibly shipped off to quarantine camps — can Boot see the error of the CCP’s ways. And even now, he’s ... uncritically taking China’s word for its Covid-related death count, contrasting it with the death count in the United States, and blasting Republicans for 'flocking to the misguided banner of "medical freedom."' That’s a concept Boot might be particularly ill-suited to heap scorn upon.
"Of course, officials from both major American parties have erred over the course of the last two and half years. But ... the key difference between the U.S. and Chinese response to the pandemic is not, as Boot would sorely love for you to believe, that one was worse because of the involvement of Republicans. It’s that one featured an acknowledgement of the need for tradeoffs, as well as inevitable human error, while the other has been characterized by an unwillingness to compromise and chronic inhumanity. Donald Trump left the White House close two years ago, yet Boot still can’t wrap his mind around the distinction."
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