No media personality has been more exposed during the Trump era than Jake Tapper. Once considered one of the “good ones” by the right, he used to at least be the fairest voice among a sea of liberal idiocy on CNN. But like most journalists during the President’s tenure, he’s been thoroughly broken to the point where he simply can not be objective anymore.

Case in point, Jake Tapper apparently has no idea how contagious diseases work.

Tapper still doesn't understand that containment is impossible after 1% prevalence? Where has he been??? Some lock-heads are incorrigible. https://t.co/UWQWB69VZv

— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) October 25, 2020

“Why not get control of the pandemic” he cries as if that’s as simple as deploying a few bureaucrats and snapping one’s fingers. As Europe is learning right now, you can have all the lock downs you want, and you can get all the plaudits in the world, but the virus cannot ultimately be contained precisely because it’s so contagious. Even perpetual lock downs have been shown to be largely ineffective, with countries like Germany, France, and the United Kingdom now seeing massive spikes even amid strong mitigation measures, including heavy mask usage.

Here’s the thing though. Tapper is smart enough to know all this and that his question assumes an impossibility. With the virus exploding in Europe and places in South America, the talking point that the United States had some unique failure no longer exists. You can lock down and delay the inevitable for a short period, but spread is going to happen. It’s also simply irresponsible to keep a country in perpetual lock down because of all the ancillary harm and death that causes.

Joe Scarborough decided to weigh in as well, and it’s as dumb as you’d imagine.

Which is why we try to mitigate. Anything else is a gotcha.

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) October 25, 2020

You see Joe, with a war, you can simply stop fighting said war and the deaths stop. With a disease, there is no kill switch to stop a pandemic when you feel like it. These kinds of comparisons are idiotic on their face and highly intellectually dishonest. But this is Joe Scarborough we are talking about so perhaps I shouldn’t expect anymore than that.

In reality, the idea that Trump could have done some magical thing in early March after it became clear this was a more serious issue than thought is ahistorical garbage. Everyone, including many prominent Democrats, were downplaying the virus. That includes Nancy Pelosi, Jake Tapper and his network, and figures like Andrew Cuomo.

Sometimes there is no right answer, and there are certainly times when government can not solve every issue. That is what we are currently facing. We’ve developed treatments that have greatly lowered the death rate, but in the end, we can only do so much. This partisan, quasi religious devotion to the power of government is idiotic. Trump is not magic, nor are the bureaucracies that were tasked with handling this. The sooner people realize that, the sooner everyone can be more united around a real path forward.

(Please follow me on Twitter! @bonchieredstate)