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| Gary Bauer |
Discussions and arguments comparing the coronavirus pandemic to the AIDS epidemic have left a lot of people bristling. I've chosen to stay out of such a controversial discussion.
That is until today because I found a sad similarity between the two. The American Family Association's online "news" source, One News Now featured an interview with conservative evangelical talking head Gary Bauer. Bauer was spinning the insane notion - without any proof - that Donald Trump's opponents and the media was exploiting the coronavirus epidemic to yank down Trump's approval rating and eventually cost him re-election:
It's just hard to know how many of the American people are buying into this Democrat media narrative that the president reacted to all of this too slowly," he tells OneNewsNow. "The whole charge is ridiculous – but nearly every media outlet in the country is promoting that idea."Bauer doesn't deny that millions of Americans are hurting financially because of the lockdown – but suggests that some of the president's opponents don't have a problem with that.
"Historically even if a president was not responsible for the economic pain, people tend to blame the incumbent of whatever party if they've lost their job, if they've lost their business," he says. "So, this is a huge challenge for the president. [But] some of these people would like to keep things shut as long as possible, because that will mean that on Election Day there won't be enough recovery for voters to reelect the president and vice-president.
By making such a statement, Bauer is spreading false information much like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. This filters down to the protests we have seen last weekend and this week by wrong-minded fools whining about how America needs to be "re-opened." And all of it serves to undermine the fight against COVID-19 or the coronavirus pandemic. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is not new to Bauer. Before making his name as a "pro-family" talking head, Bauer worked in the Reagan Administration. That was the time when the AIDS virus hit America. Reportedly, Bauer undermined Surgeon General C. Everett Koop's efforts to fight against the epidemic because he felt that it was God's judgment.
