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Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Tuesday, May 12, 2020. I am John

Putthord. It is the editor of commentary magazine, the 70-odd year-old monthly of intellectual

analysis, political property and cultural criticism from a conservative perspective. We invite

you to join us at commentarymagazine.com. Where we give you a few free reads and then ask

you to subscribe with me as always, senior editor Abe Greenwald-Hi Abe.

Hi John. Associate editor Noah Rothman, Hi Noah.

Hi John. And senior writer Christine Rosen, Hi Christine.

Hi John. So guys, 80,000 deaths have

never recorded in the United States from Corona. And today Anthony Fauci is appearing before

the Senate Health Committee and told Cheryl Stolberg of the New York Times in an email that

he was going to warn against to early reopening of the American economy. Thus indicating that

we are getting precisely two contradictory messages from the administration, not that

Fauci is a, you know, particularly, you know, it's not a political appointee of the Trump

administration, but Trump is obviously leaning heavily on the need to reopen and Fauci is

warning against the danger of reopening prematurely. And so basically, I guess this provides

the ultimate in plausible deniability in any direction, which is to say that if a reopening

happens too early and is disastrous, then the administration can say, look, we warned

you, Fauci said to reopen too early. And if the reopening happens and is okay, then Trump

can take credit for the reopening. So that's, I mean, you know, when people look at these

things and say, this is crazy. This is no way to make policy and all of that. But if you

look at it from the perspective of blame shifting or credit taking or, you know, political

...