A person can be stupid, but it is not a ‘thou shalt’ commandment

From Media meltdown, summer solstice edition: why Twitter is extremely unrepresentative of the public; NYT’s Jonathan Weisman is our Turtleboy of the Month by Nitay Arbel.  I don't know if the claimed ancestral proverb is really an ancestral proverb but it is a good proverb regardless.  

Competition for the Turtleboy of the Month award is always very crowded, but this one — the New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman pontificating that Winnie The Flu COVID-19 is more the fault of Trump than of the ChiCom regime — would have done the regime’s official “news” agency Xinhua proud.

The other actual crisis is a once-in-a-century pandemic that has killed at least 600,000 people in the U.S. The effort to spin up outrage over the Wuhan lab-leak theory — to blame China entirely for all of those deaths — is clearly an effort to try to make Americans forgive Trump for his mishandling of the coronavirus by convincing them it was all a Chinese plot. For the most pro-Trump partisans, that’s a slam dunk. For everyone else, it’s probably a stretch.

Even if it is somehow proved that the coronavirus was invented in a Chinese laboratory, its spread in the United States was far more the fault of Trump than of Xi Jinping.

Jonathan, let me quote to you our ancestral proverb, “A Jew can be stupid, but it is not a ‘thou shalt’ commandment” [mitzvat `aseh, מצוות עשה].

The modern American equivalent is from Ron White.

I had the right to remain silent — but I didn't have the ability.