A pandemic diary: Jerks gone wild
February 3, 2023
I know this isn’t pleasant, but let’s travel back to the early days of the pandemic for a minute. You see the headline, “GOP tries to harness anger over Covid,” and think it’s about the wildfire spread of the virus, the chaos, and the dying.
Not quite. That article appeared on Groundhog Day, 2023. It’s about how Republicans are fired up something fierce about mask and vaccine mandates, closings, and other actions we took to keep our society intact and our people alive.
The GOPers in Congress, who claim their voters are still stewing over such things, are throwing chiles into the pot. In the last few days, the House voted to end Covid emergencies originally declared by Trump, and repeal a vaccine requirement for health-care workers.
It didn’t matter that (a) these measures worked and (b) they’re all but gone. The White House already planned to let the public health emergency expire in May. That sounds like a bad idea when nearly five hundred people are dying every day, although case counts are falling. But today’s Republicans don’t campaign on ideas. Their platform is built on outrage, bile, snark, resentment, and revenge.
These are the folks who go to a high-school reunion for the sole purpose of telling off or showing up the kids who tormented them. You know that guy who thinks of a snappy comeback to an insult after the fact and flies across the country to deliver it, only to get zinged again? That’s right, the G in GOP now stands for George, not Santos but Costanza.
Like the Confederates many of them are descended from, spiritually if not biologically, these people can’t resist a lost cause based on lies. Last fall a lot of Georgeite* candidates took that tack regarding the 2020 election, and got stomped flat by voters with common sense. Let’s hope this sense extends to whatever’s left of the pandemic as well as the 2024 election. Take care and be safe.
*I couldn’t call them Georgian, which would be libelous to my home state and the country just north of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Originally published at http://davesswan.wordpress.com on February 3, 2023.
