Murphy Stumbles

Blumenthal and Murphy

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has been roughly cuffed by some news outlets, but not by Vox, which published on April 16 a worshipful article on Connecticut’s Junior Senator, “The Senator of State: How Connecticut’s Chris Murphy, a rising Democratic star, would run the world.”

On April 15, The Federalist mentioned Murphy in an article entitled “Sen. Chris Murphy: China And The World Health Organization Did Nothing Wrong. The lede was a blow to Murphy’s solar plexus: “Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy exonerated China of any wrongdoing over the global pandemic stemming from the novel Wuhan coronavirus on Tuesday.

“’The reason that we’re in the crisis that we are today is not because of anything that China did, is not because of anything the WHO [World Health Organization] did,’ said Murphy during a prime-time interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.”

The Cooper interview may be accessed in a RealClearPolitics piece that appeared on April 15.  Referring to an early February closed door briefing he had attended featuring President Donald Trump’s Coronavirus experts, Murphy said to Cooper, “We told them that they needed money and they needed money fast in order to buy supplies, in order to hire more staff and they told us that they didn't need any funding, that they had everything that they needed. And I walked out of that closed-door briefing just with chills running down my spine, because many of us on both sides of the aisle knew what this virus had done in China.

“We knew it was a matter of time before it arrived here and it was shocking how cavalier the Administration was. This was at a time when the President really, you know, viewed this as a hoax. He said so on TV and the reason that we're in the crisis that we are today, is not because of anything that China did.”

Murphy will perhaps agree that subsequent actions taken by Trump, including an early travel ban, cannot reasonably be viewed as indicating that he regarded the danger presented by Coronavirus as “a hoax.”

Closed door meetings offer partisans like Murphy irresistible opportunities to let loose on the general public what Mark Twain used to regard as “stretchers.” But it was Murphy’s concluding barb that stuck in the craw of many commentators: “…the reason that we're in the crisis that we are today, is not because of anything that China did.”

Just as closed meetings open to partisans a wide but politically useful field of data manipulation, so the one party Communist state in China, a closed and increasingly impervious political universe in which the movement of populations and data are closely guarded and truth is fashioned into ideological shape, is able to loose upon the world manufactured data that advances the long term political ambitions of the communist overlords of China’s quasi-fascist regime.

Is China pulling Murphy's nose? At the very least, curious-yellow reporters in Connecticut should be asking pertinent questions: Qui Bono? What does Murphy receive from Xi Jinping by throwing bouquets at his feet? The Chinese data-castle, it turns out, is -- on rare occasion, though not often enough – a semi-permeable membrane from which the murdered truth leaches in glowing blood-red drops.

A recent Fox News Exclusive report cast a frigid shadow over Murphy’s sunny assertion that the Coronavirus pandemic “is not because of anything that China did,” but rather the result of the President peddling a hoax.

Relying upon “sources” who have accessed “classified and open-source documents and evidence,” Bret Baier of Fox News reported on April 16, “There is increasing confidence that the COVID-19 outbreak likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory, though not as a bio-weapon but as part of China's attempt to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States, multiple sources who have been briefed on the details of early actions by China's government and seen relevant materials tell Fox News.”

Murphy has not yet told CNN that he regards the exclusive new report as a “hoax” perpetrated by the same incompetent Trump advisors that presumably mislead Murphy and others during a closed door briefing at a time when the extent and lethality of the Coronavirus was as yet unknown, largely because China was just then kneading and manipulating its data while, at the same time, inviting people into an area corrupted with the virus.

Confronted with the Fox News exclusive, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper told America’s Newsroom on Wednesday, “’Even today, I see them withholding information and I think we need to do more to continue to press them to share,’  referring to China. Esper added that he wouldn't speak to ‘intelligence reporting,’ but that "most people believe it began naturally — it was organic, if you will. I think in due course, once we get through the pandemic we're in right now, there'll be time to look back and really ascertain what happened and make sure we have a better understanding so we can prevent this in the future.’"

One can only pray that the truth concerning China’s role in the spread of the pandemic, when it finally emerges cut from the Gordian Knot of Chinese disinformation, will be relayed by Murphy to Vox and CNN.