“Two-hundred fifty people a year die from poverty. And the poverty line is getting such that more and more people are going to fall below that, because the economy is crashing around us. And they’re doing that, because people are dying from the coronavirus. I get that,” McGraw said. “But, look, the fact that the matter is we have people dying — 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools — but we don’t shut the country down for that. But, yet, we’re doing it for this? And the fallout is going to last for years, because people’s lives are being destroyed.”

— Dr. Phil McGraw on Fox News with Laura Ingraham on April 17.

Ah, there is more dumbing down of America going on every day.

Dr. Phil McGraw (better known simply as “Dr. Phil”) has a doctorate in psychology, but is not a licensed psychologist. And he hasn’t been licensed since his Texas license expired in 2006. But Fox News apparently thinks he is qualified to give second opinions about Dr. Fauci’s advice. The above shows some of the drivel he spouted.

Let’s just pick swimming pools. I don’t know where he comes from with 360,000 deaths a year from “swimming pools”. That would be about a thousand deaths a day. If that were going on, yes, I think we’d need to outlaw swimming pools.

A quick Google check indicates that from 2005 through 2014, there were an average of 3,536 fatal unintentional drownings annually in the United States (boating accidents excluded). So he is about a factor of a hundred off, but who cares about math and facts, right?

The important point that McGraw might be missing, however, is that swimming pools don’t procreate exponentially (I am avoiding the word “viral” here on purpose). Swimming pools don’t double in count every night and attack unsuspecting citizens and kill them. Viruses do. Obviously, McGraw hasn’t got an inkling about what he is talking about, but Fox News puts him up there next to Dr. Fauci and asks us to take him seriously.

And that is what I mean when I talk about the dumbing down of America.