Nowhere to Hide
COVID Musings
Having little recent experience with a global pandemic, political leadership in the United States can be forgiven for mistakes of judgment, especially in the absence of clear and compelling scientific evidence to the contrary. For instance, for several months at the beginning of the pandemic, there was uncertainty as to the transmissibility of the COVID virus from surface contact. Countertops across America were sanitized several times a day, and food deliveries were received with gloves and and wiped down before stowage. Few Americans these days are this assiduous, as the available information clarified the requirement.
What we see in the quotation above is the dishonesty of a fevered mind focused on misleading the American public in service to ego and re-election. Later reporting from Bob Woodward indicated that only three days before making this dishonest statement, the President had told Woodward about how serious the virus was, stating that it was many times more deadly than the flu.
It all seems like a bad dream now. As the world’s best medical minds came into alignment, America’s President routinely lied to the public, provided no real leadership, used public interest in the virus as a means to stage nightly campaign events (which backfired, God be praised), and hand-cuffed his top people in their efforts to combat the public health crisis. That we are in the relatively good position we are right now—and we are—is a credit to the durability of what was in place before Trump arrived and the talents of those who staffed that bureaucracy. We are in a reasonable position IN SPITE of Trump’s incompetence.
There is no reason to believe that the development of vaccines would have occurred any faster in a Biden (or Cruz, or Rubio, or Romney) Administration. It is also difficult to conceive of those vaccines being more efficiently distributed than they have as of this point, there always being a likelihood that such a massive logistics operation would face challenges, bottlenecks, and setbacks as it got off the ground. Where the previous administration failed—miserably—is the degree to which vanity and dishonesty served to turn simple, public health compliance into a political issue. No one honestly disputes the ability of a business owner to require shirts and shoes for service. These are nearly universally recognized public health measures, not to mention reasonable indices of civil society. This could have been the reaction to masking. This could have been the reaction to social distancing. Instead, the three ring circus on Pennsylvania Avenue fed the insatiable sense of entitlement in the mouth-breathing portion of our population who could not be bothered in their busy lives of grievance. How many lives could have been saved if simple public health measures had not become team markers? How many more people would be open to immunization if the seeds of doubt and mistrust had not been sown nightly into the public consciousness?
We will never know. Reputable agencies will estimate how greater compliance would have impacted the death count, but a third of the population will not believe it, preferring to put its trust in conspiracies involving infant-eating and pedophilia.
Impeachment (cont.)
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) took to the airwaves earlier this week to make the point that the impeachment trial in the Senate is taking up time that could be better applied by the 100 grandees of that body. Let’s listen.
Putting aside for the moment the fact that protecting and defending the Constitution is right there in the oath he took, and putting aside for the moment the fact that a President was impeached by the House of Representatives while he was still in office but the then Majority Leader delayed the Senate trial until after he left office, and putting aside the fact that the republic has an interest in the Senate holding presidents accountable for their entire terms of office, and putting aside the fact that his recognition of the abidingly serious nature of the COVID virus amped up on 20 January, there is something depressingly un-conservative about a man who once ran for the nation’s highest office believing that somehow, the Senate holding a constitutionally mandated trial is keeping someone from being vaccinated, or getting a job, or sending their child to school. All of these things are indeed concerns, but whether the Senate spends time over the next week holding our nation’s most corrupt President to account will have no impact on those events. To the extent that government is involved in the day to day lives of citizens, the conservative view is that it should be at the local level.
The House Managers put on an impressive performance on this week, mixing audio, video, Twitter, and other social media in making an irrefutable case that 1) what happened was no accident and 2) it was created and executed as part of a larger, months-long strategy telegraphed by the President openly. When Trump was rightly impeached for his shakedown of Ukraine’s leader, many Senators hid behind the cynical but “if you really squint you can see it” defense that it did not merit removal. There is no such defense here, and so they are claiming that the proceeding itself is unconstitutional. There is nowhere left to hide. The aggrieved, low-information, easily duped voter base they fear so monomaniacally that they will look into cameras and urge that the whole matter be swept under the rug, will soon re-disappear into their small lives of anger and hate. There will be no ramparts. These voters will go back to not caring one bit about policy and governing, they will go back to lives or relative political quiescence, and everything these clowns on Capitol Hill have done and said will be on the record and available to Republican and Democratic challengers alike. There will be a reckoning. Populism in America has had its moments—but that is what they are. Moments.