It’s striking how the panicked rhetoric about the Wuhan coronavirus mirrors the Iraq WMD debate in 2002/2003 and beyond. If you doubt the experts’ WMD claims, it’s because you love Saddam Hussein, or you don’t care if America gets nuked, or you just hate America.

It couldn’t possibly be because you didn’t think Saddam Hussein had WMD. And when it finally became clear the WMD the experts’ swore was there was actually non-existent, the absurd rationalizations began as a way to avoid admitting error.

No WMDs? Impossible! Hussein must’ve smuggled them into Syria. That’s the ticket! Or he just hid them really well. Or maybe he was able to dismantle and get rid of everything before our troops could find it. Yes, that must be it! It couldn’t possibly be that there were no WMDs.

The same attempts at moral blackmail, refusals to admit reality, and unwillingness to even consider costs are present in the pandemic panic, often coming from the same people who swore that there were WMDs, the war would pay for itself, and that we would be greeted as liberators.

Just replace Iraq WMDs with the insane predictions of millions of dead Americans. Could all those models have been wrong? Impossible! So-called experts are never wrong about anything, ever. And if you doubted the grim model predictions, it’s only because you wanted millions dead.

Are you worried about the spiraling costs of a never-ending and poorly defined war against the pandemic? It must mean you’re an insane person who hates science and also wants everyone’s grandmothers to die. It’s the only possible explanation.

And now you demand an exit strategy? You clearly hate America and the troops and everything this nation holds dear. It couldn’t possibly be that you’re worried about tens of millions of lost jobs and destroyed livelihoods and overnight elimination of sacred constitutional rights.

The dead-end pandemic panickers who have been dead wrong about EVERYTHING since the very beginning will be no different than the dead-end Iraq WMD moral extortionists. They will never admit error. They will never acknowledge costs. They will never accept reality.

They’ll go from swearing fealty to the models, to claiming the models were right when everyone with a brain knows they were garbage, to claiming the models actually had a moral duty to peddle nonsense to force action, to pretending that the models never mattered. Just like WMD.