When your signaling mechanism is visual, such as the naval use of flags, smoke is often a useful way to break up communications. So I’m a little surprised that Steve Benen is surprised at Republican outrage over planned retraction of certain restrictions on public life:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered floor remarks yesterday, rebuking Democrats, not for scaling back Covid restrictions, but for scaling back Covid restrictions for the wrong reasons.
“Now, obviously, the scientific facts have not changed in the last few weeks…. The only science that’s changed in the last two weeks is the political science. The only data that’s changed in the last two weeks is Democrats’ polling data.”
As a quantitative matter, the Kentucky Republican is clearly wrong. Two weeks ago, according to The New York Times’ tally, the daily national average for new infections was over 425,000. Now, it’s about 155,000. Hospitalization numbers have also improved dramatically. …
But even putting the data aside, what’s surprising is the fact that Republicans who want to see a rollback on restrictions are admonishing Democratic officials who are rolling back restrictions. As Jon Chait recently noted, this has become especially common in conservative media.
“This is not about science — this is about Democrats looking at polls and panicking at their diminishing midterm prospects,” claims the Washington Examiner. “Why are we seeing this shift now? The science has not changed, but perhaps the internal polling has,” surmises the American Spectator. “Only one circumstance has changed, and it has nothing to do with science and data — unless the science was an experiment to test parents’ patience and the data is the number of infuriated Americans calling B.S. on Democrats’ twisted games,” charges the Federalist. “The thing that’s changed is the calendar year. It’s 2022, and Democrats are beginning to evaluate the numbers: the number of months left until November.”
As I’ve noted before, we have competing world-views here. The conservatives, possessed of the inferior theory of reality, in which they have pastors & prophets running around proclaiming themselves and their flocks immune to Covid-19 because, well, God loves them, and then becoming ill and even dying a few weeks later, and the hucksters and grifters out in force, focused on shearing the flock through hoax treatments, are faced with a problem.
The other side is winning.
The decision to begin retracting restrictions is based on a reduction in numbers, as Benen notes. No one should be surprised at the caveat that politics has a role to play, too, but the Democrats are going to be hyper-sensitive to the possibility that we see yet another run-up in numbers, which would be a disaster for them. That’s why I’m not too worried about a retraction, because most Democrats are committed to the science and the advice of public health professionals.
But this also means the traditional, even conservative, approach to public health worked: get the professionals’ advice, follow it, and wait for the pharma to come up with a solution using the latest in development and testing tools. And hope none of the variants of Covid-19 become deadly, like its cousin MERS. Yeah, click on the link and see what we were risking every time someone turned down a vaccination.
And it proves the somewhat incoherent world view of the far-right to be utterly wrong. Ivermectin and its ilk did not work. Praying did not work. Being dumb assholes at town council meetings and school board meetings did not work. People still got sick, overloaded the health system, sometimes died, sometimes ended up with long-Covid, and sometimes had to attend funerals.
And that’s political poison for Senator McConnell and the Republicans. If the liberals (read: traditionalists!) were right about public health, what else might they be right about?
Maybe some of the far-right will think about that.
And McConnell can’t have that. So he accuses the Democrats – the conservatives in this case! – of corruption, while the folks on his side have been sick, dying, and straining a health system to the limit, all while risking the mutation of one of the Covid-19 family of viruses into something far more deadly. They’ve been mislead and endangered the nation.
Who’s the corrupt one here, Senator McConnell?
And that’s why this is not surprising.
