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In a Tuesday op-ed for The New York Times, Susan Rice chalked up Republicans placing blame for the coronavirus on China as them simply playing “the China card.”
Rice, who was Barack Obama’s national security adviser, writes:
“Desperate to obscure the reality of more than 90,000 American deaths and 36 million unemployed amid Mr. Trump’s utterly incompetent handling of the pandemic, Republicans have no better strategy than to play the China card.”
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Accusing people of “playing the (fill in the blank) card,” of course, is an attempt to reduce their arguments to nothing more than cagey political ploys — and, Rice is wrong to use it here.
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After all, China does deserve a lot of blame for the situation that the world is in right now. A U.S. intelligence report found that in January, China deliberately hid the severity of the coronavirus crisis (and the danger it presented to the rest of the world) in order to selfishly hoard medical supplies before other countries knew how badly they would be needing them.
This deception deprived the United States and the rest of the world of both critical information and precious preparation time. China is indisputably responsible for this pandemic becoming more disastrous than it would have been otherwise.
That’s not, of course, to say that the American government has handled all of this perfectly. President Trump was among those to underestimate this crisis, and there are things his administration could have done differently.
The entire Democratic Party was laser-focused on impeachment as this crisis was building, so it’s absurd for them to try and peddle a narrative that they were any wiser about what was coming.
In fact, when I saw Rice’s suggestion that Republicans should be taking “responsibility” for some of their own mistakes and miscalculations in this crisis, I thought this was something she and I could agree on — if her entire piece hadn’t amounted to her doing the exact same thing she was accusing Republicans of doing.
While she hypocritically hits Republicans for “playing the China card,” her whole column is nothing more than her playing the Trump card — refusing to acknowledge any mistakes or miscalculations by members of her own party.
Think about it: The entire Democratic Party was laser-focused on impeachment as this crisis was building, so it’s absurd for them to try and peddle a narrative that they were any wiser about what was coming.
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As late as March 10 — just one day before Trump suspended travel to and from Europe — New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio was on MSNBC saying the coronavirus presented “very little threat” to most people, and that we shouldn’t be too worried about it. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo messed up when he made the deadly decision to force nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients.
Neither of these Democrat officeholders was mentioned in Rice’s piece.
The point is, there is plenty of room for criticism of U.S. officials’ response to the crisis — but it is objectively, deeply incorrect to dismiss criticism of China’s actions as nothing more than illegitimate, self-serving subterfuge. It was wrong for Rice to have suggested otherwise, and it was disgusting of her to do so while playing plenty of political games of her own.
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We’re always going to have political disagreements in this country, but being furious at China for its role in this crisis shouldn’t be one of them. Political differences should never get in the way of us joining together as Americans to stand behind those things that are indeed objective truths — and China’s irresponsible behavior is, certainly, one of them.
We are so divided over so many things already. Let’s not stoke division on the issues on which we should clearly be able to easily unite.
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