Can Hypocrisy Be Undone

 

In late January 2020, then President Trump established a travel ban from China to stop the spread of the Covid virus to the USA.  On Feb 1, 2020, then candidate Joe Biden tweeted, 

"We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science — not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency."

Notwithstanding this later statement, the China related travel ban lasted until early November 2021 when it was ended by then President Biden.  Then following information from South Africa on a new Covid variant, a new covid related travel ban was established in late November 2021 by Biden. This new travel ban is set to expire on December 31 also on the order of Biden.

This issues relating to the travel bans are quite complicated and the evolution of knowledge of the virus is also complicated and I'm not going to assign hypocrisy to Biden on this, although, for example, Juan Williams, the 'leftist' counter puncher on Fox, comes close to doing this.  

What I want to do is think about whether hypocrisy can be 'undone'. That is, if we assign Biden hypocrisy for saying 'travel ban bad' in Feb 2020 and then issuing a similar ban in Nov 2021, could this hypocrisy be undone if the November 2021 ban was itself undone on December 31 2021.  It seems to me that, no it would not be undone but it would be, in effect either 'made a smaller hypocrisy' or it would be evidence that the Biden motive of the ban in November 2021 was qualitatively different than the Trump motive in January 2020.

 

Article on US lifting travel ban is here

Article on US imposition of travel ban here 

Article on the expiration of the Nov 2021 travel ban is here. 

Juan Williams comment on hypocrisy is here.

first image is people lining up for covid tests from SF Chronicle.

second image is from the third article

Tornado Relief Hypocrisy

 

Irwin sent me a CNN article essentially accusing Senator Paul of hypocrisy for opposing emergency relief for some but requesting emergency relief for Kentucky. This was subsequent to a devastating tornado outbreak (path of outbreak in first image, damage in Mayfield, KY in second image).

Many other news outlets had the same accusation.

Paul noted the charge of criticism and said that he opposed other requests because they exceeded the budget.  Paul complains that none of the criticism articles had this information. 

I recall from my days in the Federal Government that the federal budget always had an authorization for emergency relief (part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, budget) but that this authorization was frequently increased by large disasters (third image gives some cost data).  I don't know what the situation is this year and I doubt that I could figure it out. Thus I'm not going to declare it hypocrisy. 

Although it doesn't impact the hypocrisy, I will note that Paul is donating funds from his reelection campaign to disaster relief (I'm not sure if this is legal but I'm presuming it is).

Senator Paul letter to President Biden is here.

CNN accusation of hypocrisy is here.

Senator Paul donates $100k from reelection campaign for tornado relief here

 

Paul's defense against hypocrisy is here.

 

Criticism of Paul's defense against hypocrisy is here. 

The Oily Robert Reich

 

I like this one because the text and image is on the same tweet.

Robert Reich was a policy advisor and Secretary of the Department of Labor in the first term of the Clinton Administration.

After he left, he wrote a book "Locked in the Cabinet".  I read excerpts of this book (second image) and, from what I read the whole book was "Things would have been great if everybody had listed to me".

Since he left government he has had a number of professorships, been a commentator on TV, chair of various non governmental organizations, won all kinds of awards. Notwithstanding that, I've never heard any thing from him that wasn't just a more lugubrious version of a piece of conventional wisdom or a hack political response to something. 

In the twinned tweets, one could call it hypocrisy. However, what keeps me from this is that Reich probably doesn't even believe what he is saying in the second tweet.  Oil companies do not have US based 'excess capacity' that is turned down or up *the Saudi do have this). Wells are drilled and produce as much as the owners can get out of them for as long as they can (this is because of the high capital investment which needs to be recovered). At the margin, a well may produce for a few weeks more less depending on the price that day.  Also wells are taken off line because of hurricanes sometimes (e.g. Hurricane Ida in late August and September 2021 took a lot of capacity out for several weeks).

Of course it is possible that Reich is ignorant enough to believe this.  Back in 2017 he wrote for Newsweek hypothesizing that Antifa protests were organized by Trump or Breitbart.