Month: July 2021

If you haven’t heard already, top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell surprised Washington DC this week when he voted to advance the bipartisan transportation bill. It was just a procedural vote to prevent a filibuster, but it was on one of President Biden’s most high-profile priorities. Back in May, McConnell told home-state Kentucky reporters that 100 percent of his focus was “on stopping this new (Biden) administration,” so few people expected him to act as a facilitator.

Apparently, the Minority Leader kept his intentions a tightly guarded secret, which is actually pretty strange.

Moments before the Senate took a pivotal vote on its bipartisan infrastructure deal, negotiators zeroed in on the most important undecided member: Mitch McConnell.

The Senate minority leader stayed quiet for weeks but finally tipped his hand on Wednesday afternoon on the floor to a bipartisan group of colleagues, according to senators and aides. He told them he would support moving ahead on the bill, provided that the legislation coming to a final vote was their agreement — not something written by Senate Democrats.

It was the first inkling, among even McConnell’s closest allies, that the Kentucky Republican would support one of President Joe Biden’s top priorities: a bipartisan effort to plow $550 billion in new spending to roads, bridges, public transit and broadband. No senator in McConnell’s inner circle knew that he was about to take the plunge until moments before the vote, and some didn’t know until McConnell broke the news on Twitter.

The rumbling on the floor “was the first I heard about it. And then boom, the tweet came out right after that,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), McConnell’s top deputy as the GOP whip. “The leader just kind of let everybody do their own thing, and they did. And he did his own thing.”

In Congress, there are sometimes subjects that come up that can be called votes of conscience. This was true particularly for the second impeachment of Donald Trump which stemmed from his incitement of a mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. McConnell and his whip team didn’t tell Republican senators how they should vote on that one. There are other votes that aren’t considered strategically important enough to whip. In the case of the transportation deal, it was more a matter of internal caucus politics. Almost a third of the Republican caucus was willing to vote for it, in part because a sizable group had been part of the negotiations with the Senate Democrats and the White House. It would have created a lot of tension if McConnell had lobbied against their efforts.

But that didn’t mean he was under any obligation to vote for their efforts. In truth, his behavior was an abdication of leadership.

The average on-the-fence Republican senator received no advance guidance on how they ought to vote. On one side, they had former President Donald Trump lobbying hard for them to oppose the cloture vote. On the other side they had radio silence from their caucus leader. On a politically important topic like Biden’s bipartisan transportation bill, a senator might want to explain their vote in advance. At a minimum, they’d like to have some ready talking points to use after the roll call.  McConnell’s secrecy made this difficult if not impossible.

Republican senators had to make a spur of the moment recalculation of the politics of the vote, and that’s not a welcome gift for any politician. For many of them, avoiding the wrath of Trump and his supporters was at the top of their mind.

The former president has threatened lawmakers who support the deal for giving Democrats a “big and beautiful win on Infrastructure.”

“Republican voters will never forget their name, nor will the people of our Country,” Trump said in a recent statement.

Trump and McConnell differ on many things, but never on the priority of not giving the Democrats “big and beautiful” legislative wins. Since the filibuster was going to fail with or without McConnell’s vote, it seemed like the thing to do was to criticize the bill as typical big-spending liberalism. McConnell’s support undercut that message.

It was also a departure from the Hastert Rule, at least in spirit if not in the details. The Hastert Rule comes from the House of Representatives, not the Senate, and it applies to situations where the Republicans control the chamber, which was not the situation in this case. But the idea is that the Republican leadership will not support any legislation unless the majority of the Republican caucus supports it. This avoids scenarios where a (sometimes very small) minority of Republicans join with a majority of Democrats to pass legislation. Banning this type of vote in the House prevented the Democrats from creating divisions within the Republican caucus. McConnell had no power to prevent a vote, but he still voted with a minority of his own caucus on a Democratic bill.

To say this isn’t typical of McConnell is putting it mildly, and he probably should have given his members some advance warning.

For President Biden, it represents an unthinkable victory, as no one would have believed him if he’d predicted he’d win McConnell’s support on anything of consequence. He wants the Senate to operate this way, as it used to with some regularity, but it also comes with the advantage that it does drive some deep wedges into the Republican Party. There are wedges between Trump and McConnell and between the Senate Republicans and the House Republicans. There’s also a big divide within McConnell’s caucus, with him sitting with the minority.

Even if the transportation bill stalls out and never becomes law, this has already been a significant accomplishment for the Biden administration.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Bodiam Castle, UK. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.>

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now further refined both the castle and the shadow/reflection directly beneath. Note the roof sections and towers to the right side. I have also begun the crenellations. I am happy with the reflection, the shadow a bit less so. Lots of progress but a long way to go.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

This morning I have three examples for us to explore, in each case we want to know if people are stupid or simply partisan. Another way of looking at this is to ask to what degree partisanship makes people stupid, or perhaps warps their morals.

The first example involves Medicare and Medicaid which are celebrating their 56th birthday on July 30th. Before we get started, here’s a 1961 video of Ronald Reagan explaining why a government-run health program for old folks would be socialist and very, very bad.

Reagan and the American Medical Association lost that battle, but the campaign helped conservatives take over the Republican Party and put Reagan in the White House in 1981. In the meantime, Medicare became very popular. When conservatives took over the House of Representatives in 1995 and Speaker Newt Gingrich said he had a plan to let Medicare “wither on the vine,” that turned out to be very unpopular.

Gingrich argued in a speech at the Blue Cross/Blue Shield conference on Oct. 24, 1995, that Medicare is a “government monopoly plan” with a “centralized command” bureaucracy. He said it was the kind of program that we were then advising Russian president Boris Yeltsin to move away from in favor of free market solutions. In other words, Medicare wasn’t just socialist but akin to Soviet-style socialism.

This was consistent with Reagan’s original argument for opposing a program like Medicare, but the Clinton administration knew that people would not like Gingrich’s comments and they used it as a cudgel against the Speaker and as a key part of their successful reelection campaign.

Perhaps for this reason, it was the effort to privatize Medicare that withered on the vine, and today we see a different message coming from House Republicans.

Today’s Anniversary of Medicare & Medicaid reminds us to reflect on the critical role these programs have played to protect the healthcare of millions of families. To safeguard our future, we must reject Socialist healthcare schemes. https://t.co/mOdUuX7THT

— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) July 30, 2021

It’s interesting to see Republican Rep. Elsie Stefanik celebrating the “critical role” a Soviet-style socialist centralized command bureaucracy has played in safeguarding people’s health and future. But it’s very odd that she then contrasts it to socialist health care schemes. This kind of thing can make your head explode. Is Stefanik a moron who doesn’t know how stupid she sounds? Or does she know that her argument is absurd and doesn’t care because it’s a political argument that works for her party?

Our second example involves Donald Trump’s persistent popularity with Republicans.

Trump tried and failed to execute a coup, and he remains the most admired and important leader in the Republican Party https://t.co/PnJ7XMXmCT pic.twitter.com/eIcR5CuuMR

— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) July 30, 2021

This one is self-explanatory. There’s little question that Trump attempted to remain in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election, and this ought to be very unpopular even with the people who voted for him. For some reason it is not. Do the Americans who still support Trump not care about representative government or are they truly under the spell of lies that suggest that Trump was the true winner?

Finally, let’s turn to Joe Biden and the Democrats. Biden appears to have made a breakthrough, as he convinced 17 Republican senators to sign off on having a debate on a very large bipartisan infrastructure package. It’s far from a done deal yet, in part because progressive Democrats in the House are unhappy about the concessions that were made to the Republicans.

In fact, Democratic voters are split on this issue and others that involve a choice between pursuing purely partisan solutions and seeking deals with the other side of the political aisle.

A new Associated Press-NORC poll finds 6 in 10 Democrats say they’re optimistic about their party’s future, and Democrats nearly universally — 92% — approve of the way President Biden is handling his job.

“But the party is divided over the best strategy for accomplishing its agenda. About half say Democrats should compromise with Republicans, even if it means giving up things they want. The other half say Democrats should stick to their positions no matter what, even if it means they would have to find a way to pass laws without Republican support.”

You can be sure that Republicans are universally opposed to the Democrats passing laws that have no Republican support, so if half the Democrats agree that gets us close to three-quarters of the American electorate. It’s easy to see what is popular, at least in the abstract, but that doesn’t prevent a lot of Democrats from criticizing Biden’s approach.

On the other hand, even if many Democrats are unhappy, 92 percent of them tell pollsters that they approve of the president’s job performance.  Are they being honest with the pollsters? If they’re unhappy, why don’t they say so? Could it be the case that they are less interested in giving a truthful answer than in avoiding saying anything that could lend aid and comfort to the Republicans?

Politics is treated as a team sport. But it’s a little more complicated than that. Most people, including many politicians, aren’t in on the game. They’re not fully self-aware about the distinction between what they say and how they really feel. In truth, people will easily begin to believe things that aren’t true if they sense it’s in their political interest, and they’ll even change how they feel, especially over time.

There’s no question, for example, that rank-and-file Republicans are less committed to free and fair elections than they used to be. Many Democrats who want no part of compromising with Republicans will nonetheless begin to feel differently when the see that defending Biden also involves defending his approach.  They may not realize it it happening, but before long they’ll actually see bipartisan solutions as preferable and take Biden’s side.

This is why leadership is so important. What leaders say changes how people think and eventually how they feel about the issues. One example from the Obama administration involves the black community’s opinion of gay rights. As President Obama moved to the left on LGBT issues, so did the black community.

Similarly, Trump’s attacks on the free press and our election system have moved his strongest supporters.

One measure of the health of a political movement is to look at whether or not their arguments make logical sense. Celebrating America’s greatest socialist program by saying it’s far better than socialism doesn’t meet that test. You may not agree with Biden’s approach, but at least it’s not absurd.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitition reports that Georgia Republicans are setting the groundwork to take over Fulton County’s board of elections. The county, which includes Atlanta, contains ten percent of the Peach State’s electorate. The purpose is to rig elections so that the Republicans don’t have a repeat of 2021 when they unexpectedly lost runoff elections for their their two seats in the U.S. Senate.

So far, the process follows the law.

As written into Senate Bill 202, the State Election Board can replace a county’s election board following a performance review/audit/investigation. Then, a temporary superintendent would enjoy full managerial authority of how the county counts votes and staffs polling places.

Step one is to initiate the review/audit/investigation. According to the statute, a review is authorized when there is a request of “at least two state representatives and two state senators from the county.” The senate part of this already done, and it looks like the GOP has two Republican state reps from Fulton County ready to join in the application.

Step two is to find something out of order that can be used to justify a State Election Board takeover. This is probably a low hurdle.

Rep. David Dreyer, an Atlanta Democrat and head of the Fulton House delegation, said elections are massive logistical undertakings.

“If I were to audit Chick-fil-A and Home Depot … I’d find things that aren’t done perfectly,” he said.

Step Three is to place a MAGA-friendly “temporary superintendent” in charge of Fulton County’s elections.

Step Four is to have that superintendent make decisions that disenfranchise large numbers of Atlanta’s citizens.

I don’t know what recourse the Democrats have under state law, and if it’s done carefully it will be hard for the federal government to intervene.

The Republicans say this is necessary to restore faith in the integrity of that state’s elections, but they’re the ones who undermined that faith with baseless allegations.

This is something to watch, because Atlanta’s voters aren’t going to just accept this. It will get ugly, as it should.

While I’m not a prolific poster here at the Pond, an article like the Washington Post’s “Beyond human endurance” coaxes me out of my quasi-retirement. The piece describes, in grave and alarming detail, how climate change is going to cook all of us, and what an unpleasant way we will perish.

A term we rarely hear about, the wet-bulb temperature reflects not only heat, but also how much water is in the air. The higher that number is, the harder it is for sweat to evaporate and for bodies to cool down.

At a certain threshold of heat and humidity, “it’s no longer possible to be able to sweat fast enough to prevent overheating,” said Radley Horton a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Scientists have found that Mexico and Central America, the Persian Gulf, India, Pakistan and Southeast Asia are all careening toward this threshold before the end of the century.

The article continues that heading down to the beach for some relief could be a deadly non-starter.

Proximity to water in extreme conditions could make things worse. As warming temperatures cause the water to evaporate, it adds humidity to the air.

“If you’re sitting in a city along the Persian Gulf, the sea breeze could be a deadly breeze,” he said.

The Post includes highly detailed animated visuals to show how our bodies’ natural cooling system is short-circuited in these temperatures. It’s worth scrolling through.

“The skin sweats. Evaporation of this water cools the body — as long as the surrounding humidity levels allow the evaporation to take place. If the hot air is too humid, that heat exchange is blocked and the body loses its primary means of cooling itself.”

In persistent extreme heat? “When your body temperature gets too high, it will ultimately cause your body’s proteins to break down, its enzymes to stop regulating your organs’ functions and your organs to start shutting down.” Sounds like fun!

“Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice,” wrote Robert Frost. I too am placing my chips on fire.

Because the Delta Variant of COVID-19 is spreading rabidly and even vaccinated people can get and spread the infection, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reinstituted an indoor mask rule for the House of Representatives.

The House of Representatives will once again require all lawmakers and staff members to wear masks inside, a sharp reversal of policy as growing fears about the Delta variant reach the doorstep of Congress. Senators will be encouraged to mask up, too, but are not required to do so.

In a memo late Tuesday night, Dr. Brian P. Monahan, Congress’s top doctor, said he was recommending the change based on new C.D.C. guidance and the nature of the Capitol, where thousands of people traveling from across the country mix each week.

As you can see, her decision was based on the recommendation on Congress’s chief medical official, who in turn was following the guidance of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Yet, on Tuesday night, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy ignored this and accused Pelosi of having other motives.

“Make no mistake — The threat of bringing masks back is not a decision based on science, but a decision conjured up by liberal government officials who want to continue to live in a perpetual pandemic state,” McCarthy tweeted Tuesday night.

Pelosi was then asked what she thought about McCarthy’s remarks:

“That’s the purview of the Capitol Physician … the mandate from him. I have nothing to say about that except we honor it,” Pelosi told reporters outside the Capitol.

“He’s such a moron,” she said.

Pelosi then ducked into her vehicle and was whisked away from a climate event outside the Capitol.

Part of me wishes our politics were more civil, but this is also why I love Nancy Pelosi and forgive her for many things.

The House Select Committee hearings triggered me the way most anything connected with the events leading up to 1/6 and its aftermath have triggered me. When I get triggered, this rare hit from Canadian band Red Rider is on repeat:

Like a lot of videos of its time, it’s fairly spartan. I think I first heard this when I lived in the Sacramento area back in the early fall of 1981. I’m almost certain that KZAP was playing it at that time. It was getting some college radio traction as well. The intro was almost Pink Floyd inspired, and when I first heard it on the radio, I was wondering if Pink Floyd had released some collection of out-takes to bide time in between The Wall (which I had a difficult time getting into) and whatever would come next. Then I heard the vocals, and was thinking this is something new – let’s find out more. The LP to score is As Far as Siam. They were sort of hard to peg. They were definitely a hard rock band, but they seemed to be tapping into New Wave (very broadly defined) just a bit more than your average hard rock band. If you’re going to be a one-hit wonder, make it count. This was their big international hit. It was timely in 1981, when there were some genuine concerns about a rise in fascism. It is timely now.

I’ve been very busy over the last week or so. Seeing some interaction in the comments recently made my day. Cheers!

I don’t think there’s anything about being religious that necessarily makes you more credulous than someone who is not. But that most definitely doesn’t apply to people who believe that ancient religious texts are infallible recorders of history and perfect explanations for every important aspect of human existence. The problem arises precisely because these folks take an adversarial approach to evidence that contradicts what’s contained in the scriptures.

The problem is not so much that they’re adopting an anti-scientific approach to thinking about the world but that they wind of being hostile to the scientific approach and then it bleeds into how they approach all kinds of questions that have little or no religious component. Most people with car problems will ask the advice of a mechanic rather than a pharmacist, and the opposite is true if they have a question about their medication. But once you reject this logic–that those with expertise know more than people without it–you immediately become vulnerable to bad information.

If there’s a viral pandemic, you ought to listen to experts on viruses and immunology. That’s the approach I took, because they have expertise that I lack, and because other sources are simply going to be less reliable. I would take the exact same approach if the pandemic occurred during a Democratic presidency and seemed to be hurting the Democratic president’s reelection chances. Politics doesn’t change anything when it comes to getting good solid public health advice.

Now, some people are arguing that Republicans are falling for all manner of conspiracy theories, about the pandemic and the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection, because they’re less religious than in the past. The numbers don’t back this up, because white evangelicals (or biblical literalists) are substantially more likely to subscribe to these cockeyed theories than everyone else.

Part of this is because they’ve allied themselves with Trump, and these theories all work to exonerate or excuse Trump, or to argue that he’s still the rightful president. But it’s also simply a feature of their greater gullibility. Science challenges the literal truth of their scriptures and they have therefore long discounted the value of subject expertise. A geologist cannot be correct about plate tectonics and the causes of earthquakes, and a paleontologist cannot be correct about the age of the Earth. Biologists can’t be right about evolution, and that gives them little chance of understanding how the COVID-19 virus evolves into new variants.

These folks worry that a professor will contradict their belief system and undermine their child’s faith, so academia is a threat to them. So they don’t look for experts to answer their questions. They’re searching for reasons why the experts could be wrong. This is doubly true when they see their political opponents (Al Gore on climate change, for example) embracing science.

It all begins with a simple assumption that scriptures contain inerrant facts. It’s pretty well impossible to believe that and maintain a proper and healthy reasoning ability. White evangelicals are just easier to fool than other folks. That means you can get them to doubt the moon landing, but also that you can separate them from their money.

It’s especially easy to separate them from their money if you understand their biases and what they’re trying to protect. That’s why they attract grifters like flies. There are no easier marks in America.

The Bipartisan United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack is set to hold its first hearing on Tuesday, and I admit that it will provide a kind of theater I’ve never seen in Washington DC before. I’m excited. The first thing that’s different is the committee’s makeup. Although Speaker Pelosi may still add more Republicans if any are willing, it’s presently comprised of seven Democrats and just two Republicans. The two Republicans, Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, both voted to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 coup attempt.

Bennie Thompson (D-MS), Chair
Zoe Lofgren (D-CA)
Adam Schiff (D-CA)
Pete Aguilar (D-CA)
Liz Cheney (R-WY)
Stephanie Murphy (D-FL)
Jamie Raskin (D-MD)
Elaine Luria (D-VA)
Adam Kinzinger (R-IL)

Ryan Nobles and Melanie Zanona of CNN report “a growing group of rank-and-file House Republicans wants House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and GOP leadership to punish Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for accepting a position from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to serve on the select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection.”

They are really upset that the Bipartisan United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack is actually bipartisan. Of course, they try to hide this fact by aiming their complaints in a different direction. They say their main objection is that Pelosi rejected two of the five members– Reps. Jim Banks of Indiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio– that McCarthy chose to serve on the Bipartisan committee.

This supposedly shocked Republicans in the Capitol even though there was never any chance that Jim Jordan would be acceptable to Pelosi or any other objective observer. It’s likely that he will be a focus of the committee’s investigation as they look into members of Congress who may have colluded with the insurrectionists.

Truthfully, McCarthy did not want any investigation and he instructed his caucus to vote against the creation of an independent commission on which the Republicans would have had equal representation. It was Senate Republicans who filibustered the independent commission and forced Pelosi to set up a committee of lawmakers.

Since McCarthy could not prevent this move, he chose to goad Pelosi into rejecting some of his proposed members in the hope that the committee could then be painted as a partisan witch hunt. That’s still the plan, but it’s a harder case to make when there are two Republicans who have volunteered to participate.

When the first hearing commences on Tuesday, Democratic chairman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi will make some opening remarks, and then Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Republican vice-president Dick Cheney, will follow with remarks of her own. In this way, she’ll look like the ranking member, although she’s not technically serving in that role.

First up will be two DC cops and two members of the Capitol Police who will testify to the violence and verbal abuse they experienced during the insurrection. This will set the tone. There won’t be any members of the committee arguing that the mob was acting like a typical group of tourists or were really anti-fascist protestors.

No one will be making excuses for Trump or arguing that the investigation is biased and should be looking at the violence and looting that accompanied some of the George Floyd protests last summer.

The lack of distractions will be welcome, although the news coverage of the hearings on right-wing outlets will surely include a huge dose of whataboutism and well-worn Trumpist lies.

I’m not used to congressional investigatory hearings that aren’t contentious. Maybe the 2005 investigation of steroids in baseball could fit that description, but this investigation is actually largely about how and why the Republican Party went insane, so bipartisan consensus is really remarkable.

Another welcome feature here is that the committee won’t have problems issuing subpoenas and won’t be issuing them to useless witnesses. Since the Justice Department is in the Biden administration’s control, we can also expect them to help the committee enforce their subpoenas, so we won’t have lengthy court battles involving witnesses who don’t want to appear.

Although, things could get interesting if members of Congress refuse to show up and testify.

Overall, this committee should be able to move quickly and without a lot of nonsense, and that will add to both its effectiveness and its credibility. It should be quite a show, and I can’t wait for it to begin.

There’s a theme that runs through the Bible that communities can and will suffer catastrophe if they tolerate sin or otherwise ignore the word of the Lord. This shouldn’t surprise us. When floods or famines or pandemics occur, there’s a natural human inclination to assign blame. If God is omnipotent, he must have had some reason for allowing this suffering, and if he’s just, then the victims must have had it coming. But some victims are clearly innocent, especially infants, so it must be that God (at least sometimes) administers punishment on a collective rather than individual basis.

Communal guilt therefore is a public safety principle. If your local governing body tolerates heresy or gambling and brothels or singing and dancing, this could displease God and bring down his holy wrath on everyone. If, on the other hand, you burn heretics and sinners at the stake, God will see that you are administering justice on an individual basis and refrain from punishing on a communal basis.

In the 16th Century, John Calvin used this type of reasoning to forbid an Ottoman ambassador from transiting through his territory. Tolerating a Muslim on his turf, even momentarily, could cause natural disasters. Calvin believed he was protecting his community.

There’s a pandemic ripping through Alabama and Louisiana right now, and the hospitals are filling up with COVID-19 patients who refused to get inoculated against the disease. Local health officials and politicians cannot figure out how to convince folks to get vaccinated. There appears to be two reasons for this. The first is the prevalence of disinformation about the vaccine.

Almost every public health official, local vaccine volunteer and physician in Alabama and Louisiana who spoke to POLITICO pointed to social media and the media as the main reason people in their neighborhoods are still holding out on the vaccine.

The second is based more on mood and ideology:

Many people here and elsewhere in the Southeast are turning down Covid-19 vaccines because they are angry that President Donald Trump lost the election and sick of Democrats in Washington thinking they know what’s best.

When these factors are combined, we get a very distinct result. Because the Deep South is more skeptical about the federal government, they are less inclined to believe its experts and follow their advice. They’re more susceptible to contrary information, including through their social networks online. But because there are more Trump voters in the Deep South than elsewhere, there’s also more spiteful resistance to vaccination. They won’t do it simply as an act of defiance, regardless of whether or not they believe the science.  What happens is that the pool of unvaccinated people is larger than average, and it is comprised overwhelmingly of Trump supporters and Republicans.

This means that a heavy majority of people in the Deep South who get sick or die from COVID-19 are Republicans. Since this is totally avoidable and self-inflicted, an outsider might say it’s worthy of a Darwin Award.

The Darwin Awards are a tongue-in-cheek honor originating in Usenet newsgroup discussions around 1985. They recognize individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by selecting themselves out of the gene pool by dying or becoming sterilized via their own actions.

Alabama Governor Kay Ivey seems to agree:

Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey on Thursday called out “the unvaccinated folks” for the rise in Covid-19 cases in her state, a remarkable plea at a time when many GOP leaders are refusing to urge people to get vaccinated even as Covid-19 cases surge in many parts of the country.

“Folks are supposed to have common sense. But it’s time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the regular folks. It’s the unvaccinated folks that are letting us down,” Ivey told reporters in Birmingham.

The assigned culprit here is a lack of “common sense” among the unvaccinated. In this sense, they get what’s coming to them. But it doesn’t end there. The vaccinated community suffers too. There are no spaces in the emergency rooms. Kids under the age of 12 who cannot be vaccinated are put at risk. Breakthrough cases sicken even the inoculated, and new variants could emerge that reduce the protection the vaccines afford.

This is a form of communal punishment. Someone like John Calvin would look at it and say that God is punishing everyone for the sins of a few. The solution is to go after the unvaccinated and proactively punish them. Maybe then God will be well pleased and relent.

But I don’t anticipate that Alabama’s Republican governor will burn Republicans at the stake. I don’t believe she’ll round them up and forcibly inoculate them. She might, however, make some headway by appealing to the broader community’s Old Testament way of thinking.

Why is there suddenly a disease in the land that targets Republicans? Why is God so angry with Republicans? What sins have they committed? What has stripped them of their common sense?

Have they been led astray by the devil?

If this devil worship is tolerated, will God bring his wrath down with even greater force?

The inoculated Republicans in Alabama could start asking these types of questions. They could point out to their unvaccinated cousins that they’re putting a bullseye on the whole community.

It has to work better than making a scientific argument, right?  Trump is the devil.