Remember my observation that Erick Erickson, inheritor of Rush Limbaugh’s dubious mantle, seems to be snapping himself right off at the moral ankles in his frantic pursuit of audience? His latest post , criticizing President Biden’s vaccine mandates (employers with more than X employees, etc) suggests he’s donating his soul intellectual honesty to Satan in honor of his goal, which is to say his arguments are specious and lurid. Let’s take them one by one.
Progressives, not too long ago, championed getting rid of laws that made it a crime to knowingly transmit HIV to a sexual partner, but they want to ruin your life and deprive you of your livelihood if you choose not to get vaccinated. This is absurd. It is also far more tyrannical than anything Donald Trump tried to do. It won’t hold up in court.
His link is dated 1997 … no, 2007 … no, that’s right, 2017. Per Andrew Sullivan’s frequent comments, AIDS is no longer a death sentence. You take your daily medicine and your life expectancy is generally the same as everyone else’s.
But Erickson wants to implicitly equate a difficult to catch illness, that is easily treated, with an illness that is easily caught, hard (but not impossible) to treat, that has a death rate in excess of the flu’s, and, in combination with our health system’s fragility, pushes hospitals and medical personnel to the limit and beyond. Is it fair that non-Covid-19 patients are being pushed out of hospitals because the unvaccinated are flooding those facilities?
Glossing over key points that get in the way of retaining one’s audience is intellectually intolerable.
And, just for fun, what does tyrannical mean?
[2a] a ruler who exercises absolute power oppressively or brutally [Merriam-Webster]
And, by implication, to satisfy the selfish passions of said rulers.
My point? This is not the selfish passion of Biden, or a brutal arbitrary abuse of power, but rather Biden trying to fulfill his duty to safeguard the citizenry and economy of the United States against a known threat.
Next:
Right now, congressional Democrats are trying to pass an additional $5 trillion in spending for transgender goats, vegan burgers, and unicorn fart powered airplanes. Instead of offering financial incentives or tax credits for vaccines, they want to force you to vaccinate. …
Joe Biden could have found a way to incentivize vaccines. Instead, he will use government bullying, which is going to drive up vaccine hesitancy among the already hesitant. After all, some will claim the vaccine cannot be sound if the government is going to force us to get it.
First, along with roads, bridges, electric charging stations, and whatever else Senator Manchin will permit. Erickson’s list is intellectually dishonest, intended to roil emotions rather than provoke discussion. Is childcare really an infrastructure element?
Second, no, financial incentives do not appear to work as well as needed. See the attempts in Maryland, Ohio, Minnesota, and no doubt elsewhere. There was a lovely initial surge, but it appears to have petered out.
But, most importantly, third: Why should Biden have to offer financial incentives?
Look, American rights are not shorn of their balancing concept: responsibility. That is the word Erickson conveniently forgets. Americans, like just about any community in which people live close together and interact frequently, have a responsibility in the area of public health. That responsibility requires Americans to follow the advice of public health professionals at those times they issue same.
That substantial numbers of the unvaccinated, awash in their fallacious tales of woe and fear, often fed by ignorance, are a signal of how much Americans are acting in bad faith. The public health officials and experts have done, and are continuing to do, their duty; it’s up to Americans to do the same by taking the vaccine.
And not have to be bribed into doing so. Perhaps we need to put the hospitalized Covid-19 unvaccinated sufferers into iron lungs to vividly illustrate the public need.
Onwards:
Whatever happened to “my body, my choice?” For those saying the unvaccinated can kill others, an abortion literally and scientifically kills another human being. The double standard is amazing.
Note that Erickson is clumsily attempting to use a magic word of our era: scientifically. But he doesn’t get it right, for a fetus is not a human. Cut a fetus out of a woman, flop it on another lactating woman’s breast, and will it suckle?
Not until the eighth or ninth month. We’re not talking about a human, just a fetus. It has the potential to become a human if Mother Nature permits it. But it’s not a human by the most basic of definitions and tests.
So the comparison is a failure. On the other side of the board, yes, the unvaccinated can injure and kill other unvaccinated people, and unvaccinated people are petri dishes as well: it’s only during virus reproduction that variants are created, and it’s the variants – as we should all understand at this point – that may carry a bigger threat than the original strain. As the delta variant may be proving.
“My body, my choice” works for the mother who chooses not to carry a fetus to term. The feelings of the father might be injured, but that’s as far as damage goes. But for the unvaccinated, it’s “My body, my choice to endanger you and you and you and you …”
And then Erickson makes up, out of whole cloth, this point:
We are twenty years and a day removed from 9/11. The Taliban, thanks to Joe Biden, have reoccupied Afghanistan and put in positions of power several people previously held in GTMO. Americans are at each other’s throats. The President is encouraging the hate. We are more divided than ever. It is hard not to think the terrorists won.
So many things are wrong with that paragraph. For example, it’s Trump, not Biden, who made the agreement with the Taliban and caused to be released 5000 Taliban troops from Afghani military prisons. But the fairy tale? That hate is being engendered by this decision by Biden. Hate is a decision made by people who choose to hate. Biden has said over and over that he’s trying to get rid of a pandemic that is crippling the nation. No hate there.
But all Erickson can say, since he only wants more and more audience, is that it’s all about hate.
He also thinks this is the hill Biden will die on, but that broken logic is its own topic, and thus I’ll omit it.
