Repeatedly disgraced former Obama administration national security adviser Ben Rhodes stepped in it mightily Wednesday by daring to suggest without evidence that the coronavirus outbreak would have been handled better under his former boss.
Look:
Imagine how different this would be if Barack Obama was President. Then ask what the 8 year Republican-Trump meltdown about Obama was all about.
— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) March 12, 2020
While the tweet doesn’t boast a ratio, in large part because of Obama sycophants who falsely view former President Barack Hussein Obama as an infallible, majestic figure outnumbering those who view him realistically, it did attract some jarring criticism.
Why? Because during the former president’s eight year veritable reign of terror, millions of Americans were infected by and at least 12,500 died from the swine flu.
@brhodes CDC puts the Swine Flu deaths at 12,500 over a year. That’s 34 a day. As for Ben’s point, if Obama were POTUS there would be diff coverage in media and markets would not plunge. See what happened when WHO declared a pandemic under Obama: https://t.co/7sSTUK1JhO https://t.co/7sSTUK1JhO
— Yossi Gestetner (@YossiGestetner) March 12, 2020
12k dead from H1N1 in first year under Obama. https://t.co/p6IzMz1qcy
— AR-14 Lizzy (@StarChamberMaid) March 12, 2020
This idiot forgets that under Obama a thousand Americans were dead and millions infected from the swine flu before Obama took effective actions. About 61 mil Americans would get infected, nearly 300,000 would be hospitalized and about 13,000 die between April 2009 and April 2010. https://t.co/GP8Npl6HqE
— Ned Ryun (@nedryun) March 12, 2020
12k dead from H1N1 in first year under Obama. https://t.co/p6IzMz1qcy
— AR-14 Lizzy (@StarChamberMaid) March 12, 2020
Swine Flu infected nearly 61 million people in the US & caused 12,469 deaths.
The difference is that Republicans by & large rallied around President Obama in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus.
Just stop.
It’s time to rally around our @POTUS & face this threat unified. https://t.co/V1j2Xw0sMR— Sean Parnell (@SeanParnellUSA) March 12, 2020
Did you just take a giant nap during the swine flu outbreak or something? https://t.co/WIbBTjIJYP
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) March 12, 2020
It’s likely not that Rhodes took “a giant nap” during the outbreak, but rather that the media nary made a peep about the crisis because of their proven love for Obama.
And so when Obama declared that the swine flu was “not a cause of alarm,” the media didn’t raise a fuss. Instead it reported Dear Leader’s words as divine truth.
“President Obama said on Monday that the growing number of cases of swine flu in the United States and abroad was ‘not a cause for alarm,’ but he sought to assure Americans that the government was taking precautions to prepare for the prospect of a global health pandemic,” The New York Times casually reported in 2009.
This sort of matter-of-fact reporting contrasts sharply with the caustic reporting that’s been aimed at the current president.
“President Trump sought to play down the coronavirus outbreak on Friday and offered a vote of confidence to besieged federal health officials as infections spread further, markets tumbled again and the authorities scrambled to accelerate the availability of testing kits across the country,” the left-wing outlet reported last week.
The difference in style is eye-opening, particularly taking into account Obama’s exceptionally poor mishandling of the swine flu crisis.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press called the crisis “overblown.”
Typically, only in more conservative-leaning publications such as The Wall Street Journal could you learn that “criticism of the government’s swine-flu vaccination campaign has grown, with parents, pregnant women and others often being frustrated in their attempts to get the shot.”
Likewise, it was primarily in more conservative-leaning publications where the American people were able to find criticism of Obama during the Ebola outbreak five years later.
“President Obama’s Ebola problem | TheHill” https://t.co/eDJUepKrte
Would you prefer the @BarackObama approach?#CoronaVirusUpdate#Trump2020— juli (@sonicj55) March 12, 2020
“The Ebola crisis in the United States has become an anchor threatening to sink the Obama presidency,” The Hill reported in October of 2014.
“Already under fire from critics who saw the federal response to the outbreak as disorganized and timid, things went from bad to worse … when it was revealed a second nurse had contracted the disease while treating a Liberian man at a Dallas-area hospital.”
“More alarmingly, the diagnosis was made just hours after the nurse, 29-year-old Amber Vinson, had flown from Cleveland to Dallas on a commercial airliner, despite reporting to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that she had a fever. That Vinson was allowed to travel at all — along with continued questions about why federal procedures for Ebola treatment appear not to have been implemented in Dallas — have prompted serious questions about the administration’s handling of the disease less than three weeks before the midterm elections.”
CNN’s approach was instead to bash Dear Leader’s critics.
My latest–“@CNNOpinion: Blame #Obama for #Ebola? Read @Locs_n_Laughs http://t.co/j5ozbYl1iO”
— LZ Granderson (@LZGranderson) October 7, 2014
Six years, CNN is now running 24/7 stories bashing Trump for how he’s handling coronavirus and even for how he’s speaking about the deadly virus.
The fact is that the media environment Obama and his lackeys experienced differs like night and day from the one Trump must contend with.
And that most likely is the real reason why Rhodes genuinely believes his former boss would have somehow, someway magically handled the coronavirus crisis better.
H1N1 was both infectious and deadly during Obama’s term. There was no panic generated by the media then but the opposite is true now even though majority have minor symptoms. BTW, Obama likely wouldn’t have blocked China travel early so infection rate would be higher in US.
— TheGumption (@TGumption) March 12, 2020
Well 12,000 people died during the swine flu epidemic of 2009 and President Obama was not attacked by the media, nor did they try to induce panic. Compare that to 38 deaths from Covid-19 and the media is telling us the world is ending. So, there’s your comparison.
— Mark Leland (@MarkLelandMD) March 12, 2020
Just because someone can speak articulate and make you feel warm and fuzzy doesn’t justify Obama’s track record. The only difference here is that the media was very quiet when Obama was ruining the country and now if Trump eats a French fry the media freaks out.
— John Corbett (@Jcorbett710) March 12, 2020
It was this same echo-chamber mentality that once led Obama to proudly proclaim that there’s no “magic wand” capable of bringing manufacturing jobs back to the states.
Trump eventually proved that claim to be 100 percent FALSE.
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V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.
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