Few expected Washington to face up squarely to the apparent deficiencies in the U.S. federal response to COVID-19, but fewer imagined that it would be so desperate in scapegoating others.
Within just months' time, some U.S. politicians, particularly the likes of U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, White House trade advisor Peter Navarro and U.S. Senator Tom Cotton, have set up a busy workshop to fabricate all kinds of fallacies to create a alt-reality so that they can evade responsibility.
It seems that Washington has truly made some headway in creating new manufacturing jobs, except that they do not produce smart phones or steel, but lies and excuses.
They blame China for lacking transparency, as if the regular sharing of information and experience China has been conducting with the international community, including the United States, since early January had never happened.
They blame the World Health Organization (WHO) for covering up the epidemic, although many U.S. researchers and medical experts have been working closely with the WHO at its Geneva headquarters and sending back real-time data to Washington since the early days of the outbreak.
They blame previous administrations for undermining the United States' epidemic response capacity, pretending to forget that the sitting one has been in power for more than three years.
To them, Europe is also culpable, and the list can go on. It seems that the Pompeos and Navarros are leaving no stone unturned to search for scapegoats and make sure that the blame will not be pinned on the incumbent administration.
Of course, those thick-skinned politicians are no fools. There are a string of reasons why they lie so hard this time.
The immediate one is that they have dropped the ball so hard on containing the outbreak in the first place. As a result, the United States has become the world's epicenter of the pandemic and its economy risks returning to a deep recession on their watch.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, once admitted during an interview with CNN that the United States "obviously" could have saved lives if social distancing measures and other mitigation strategies had been implemented sooner.
Meanwhile, with the election day less than seven months away, the pandemic has been turned into an arena of vehement political rivalry aimed at keeping or taking the White House.
Moreover, in the eyes of those hawkish Washington zero-summers, the outbreak offers them a chance to make more trouble for China, a country they have tagged as America's "strategic rival" and a threat to its hegemony.
The all-out disinformation and defamation campaign against China and other scapegoats has once again revealed the ugly souls of those Washington politicians. It has also indicated that no excuse or lie will be big enough to cover up their own failures.
Rather than wasting time searching for scapegoats, the United States should join hands with other countries and international organizations to search for effective ways to beat the deadly pathogen.
Cooperation is the only way out in the face of the cunning coronavirus. Only when the world is safe, can America be truly safe.
source: xinhua
