YOU DON’T SAY: China’s aggressive approach to coronavirus criticism ‘not working.’

It was a huge contrast to China’s later high-profile propaganda campaign when it started shipping medical products to Europe and other countries in dire need as the coronavirus spread, the businessman pointed out, and had contributed to growing negative perceptions of Beijing’s approach to the pandemic. “The situation is getting worse day by day,” he said.

China’s critics have accused the country of playing up its political system as superior in containing the virus and highlighting its role as a world leader, while ignoring early missteps including cover-up and disinformation in the initial stages of the outbreak in December.

Observers have also said the aggressive – and sometimes unprofessional and undiplomatic – remarks by Chinese diplomats in defending the county’s handling of the virus had led to fading sympathy for China. An article in Chinese state media suggesting the US and the world owed China “an apology and thanks” for its efforts against the pandemic did not improve perceptions.

It’s one thing to be an asshole, but it’s another to be an asshole demanding gratitude for being such a jerk.

HEY, JOURNALISTS: IF YOU DON’T WANT PEOPLE TO THINK OF YOU AS GARBAGE, TRY NOT BEING GARBAGE. Surprise: The Mask-Shamers in White House Press Corps Turn Out to Be Hypocrites. Plus, a Karen named Kaitlan.

LIKE MOTHER LIKE DAUGHTER: Rep. Omar’s Daughter Accuses U.S. Soldiers Of ‘Actively Killing Innocent Children Abroad.’

WHAT BUSINESSES WILL REOPEN TODAY IN TEXAS?

REMINDER: Obamagate Is Real and It’s Spectacular.

The reason that the scandal has come to be known as Obamagate is because if the allegations are true the stink is all over Obama himself. Sure, he may revert to form and find someone to throw under the bus, but it looks as if he may not be able to completely deflect this time.

The Obama faithful are no doubt on psychological overload trying to remain in denial these days. Thou shalt not speak ill of their Holy One, but — deep down inside — they all probably know that he isn’t that holy.

Nope. Just another dirty Chicago pol. I mean, he got his start by unsealing private divorce papers to get dirt on his opponent. Some lightbringer.

COPYCAT: Ubisoft Sues Apple, Google Over Alibaba’s Rainbow Six ‘Ripoff.’

“Area F2,” created by Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd.’s Ejoy.com, is a “near carbon copy” of Rainbow Six: Siege, and that can’t be “seriously be disputed,” Ubisoft said in a complaint filed Friday in federal court in Los Angeles.

Rainbow Six: Siege, or R6S, has 55 million registered players around the world, according to Ubisoft’s copyright infringement lawsuit and is played by more than 3 million people every day. R6S also is played as a competitive “esport,” with professional and semi-professional teams competing for millions of dollars in prizes.

“R6S is among the most popular competitive multiplayer games in the world, and is among Ubisoft’s most valuable intellectual properties, the French company said. “Virtually every aspect of AF2 is copied from R6S, from the operator selection screen to the final scoring screen, and everything in between.”

Alibaba is based in Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China.

ENDORSED: Coronavirus May Finally Be the End of the Open-Plan Office.

YES. Karol Markowicz: For our health and economic survival, we need to get outside.

BOMBSHELL: Mike Flynn’s Name Might Never Have Been Masked In The First Place.

ED LINKED THIS THE OTHER DAY, BUT I WANT TO BREAK OUT SOME BITS FROM MATT TAIBBI’S Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties. First:

Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge in the case of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is refusing to let William Barr’s Justice Department drop the charge. He’s even thinking of adding more, appointing a retired judge to ask “whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.”

Pundits are cheering. A trio of former law enforcement and judicial officials saluted Sullivan in the Washington Post, chirping, “The Flynn case isn’t over until a judge says it’s over.” Yuppie icon Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker, one of the #Resistance crowd’s favored legal authorities, described Sullivan’s appointment of Judge John Gleeson as “brilliant.” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Americans owe Sullivan a “debt of gratitude.”

One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus.

Dems never minded the U.S. being like Belarus, so long a they were in charge, or felt like they were.

Plus:

I can understand not caring about the plight of Michael Flynn, but cases like this have turned erstwhile liberals – people who just a decade ago were marching in the streets over the civil liberties implications of Cheney’s War on Terror apparatus – into defenders of the spy state. Politicians and pundits across the last four years have rolled their eyes at attorney-client privilege, the presumption of innocence, the right to face one’s accuser, the right to counsel and a host of other issues, regularly denouncing civil rights worries as red-herring excuses for Trumpism.

I’ve written a lot about the Democrats’ record on civil liberties issues in the past. Working on I Can’t Breathe, a book about the Eric Garner case, I was stunned to learn the central role Mario Cuomo played in the mass incarceration problem, while Democrats also often embraced hyper-intrusive “stop and frisk” or “broken windows” enforcement strategies, usually by touting terms like “community policing” that sounded nice to white voters. Democrats strongly supported the PATRIOT Act in 2001, and Barack Obama continued or expanded Bush-Cheney programs like drone assassination, rendition, and warrantless surveillance, while also using the Espionage Act to bully reporters and whistleblowers. . . .

Democrats clearly believe constituents will forgive them for abandoning constitutional principles, so long as the targets of official inquiry are figures like Flynn or Paul Manafort or Trump himself. In the process, they’ve raised a generation of followers whose contempt for civil liberties is now genuine-to-permanent. Blue-staters have gone from dismissing constitutional concerns as Trumpian ruse to sneering at them, in the manner of French aristocrats, as evidence of proletarian mental defect.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in the response to the Covid-19 crisis, where the almost mandatory take of pundits is that any protest of lockdown measures is troglodyte death wish. The aftereffects of years of Russiagate/Trump coverage are seen everywhere: press outlets reflexively associate complaints of government overreach with Trump, treason, and racism, and conversely radiate a creepily gleeful tone when describing aggressive emergency measures and the problems some “dumb” Americans have had accepting them.

On the campaign trail in 2016, I watched Democrats hand Trump the economic populism argument by dismissing all complaints about the failures of neoliberal economics. This mistake was later compounded by years of propaganda arguing that “economic insecurity” was just a Trojan Horse term for racism. These takes, along with the absurd kneecapping of the Bernie Sanders movement, have allowed Trump to position himself as a working-class hero, the sole voice of a squeezed underclass.

The same mistake is now being made with civil liberties. Millions have lost their jobs and businesses by government fiat, there’s a clamor for censorship and contact tracing programs that could have serious long-term consequences, yet voters only hear Trump making occasional remarks about freedom; Democrats treat it like it’s a word that should be banned by Facebook (a recent Washington Post headline put the term in quotation marks, as if one should be gloved to touch it). Has the Trump era really damaged our thinking to this degree?

Yes, for some values of “our.” (Bumped).