Do As I Do, Not As I Say: Vaccine Edition

Endorsed by Steve Doocey. What could be better?

Ben Shapiro, Mitch McConnell, Sean Hannity, Steve Scalise, Steve Doocey all have one thing in common (besides being horrible people) they've suddenly all come out and admitted they were (or are about to be) vaccinated and are encouraging others to get the shots.  

This is after several of them, and the organizations they work for and with, have been spreading mass disinformation about the vaccines. Some are now even praising Biden's vaccine rollout. Color me stunned. You even get Bill Hemmer on Fox News dragging out Marc Siegel, one of their top medical contributors, and allowing, practically begging him, to rhapsodize about the efficacy of the vaccine.

“The vaccine works, right? We haven’t budged on that, have we, doc?” Hemmer asked.

“The vaccine works extremely well even against the delta variant, preventing infection in 90 percent of cases,” Siegel reported.

He had been set free to tell the truth without hedging around it, or Trump’s precious feelings, or insulting politics. Free at last! Of course, Fox has a vaccine mandate for their staff, but they don’t tell you about that.

What is going on? They could have been doing this months ago, helping their viewers and followers get the protection they needed. But they didn’t. Why now?

It's like the bat signal went up, and the word went out. It reminds me of the threats of lawsuits that made the networks change their tune on the Dominion voting machines, issuing awkward apologies read on air. Are they covering their asses against class actions? Are they spooked by the Dow crashing as it did this week? Worried about voters blaming the GOP for more deaths, more shutdowns and more economic pain to the country? 

Or maybe they're just trying to do the right thing.

Nah.

It's probably a combination of the money and the votes, and fear of being held even more accountable than they already are. The GOP has a lot of blood and violence that can be directly attributed to it; the mismanagement of the pandemic that resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, the stupid and selfish misinformation designed to politicize the virus which is still adding to the death toll, the encouraging of  far right violent groups and militias which have led to hate crimes against people of color and the deaths of protestors and law enforcement, bringing us the January 6th insurrection, where this has all been leading for the past several decades.

Up to now (and I doubt the right’s new community spirit will last before being shouted down by their own brain-scrubbed supporters) the right has been like people trying to kill safety inspections after major crashes, like someone decrying the use of life boats after a cruise ship sinks, or mocking the installation of fire alarms after a school burns. At every point in this pandemic they have mocked precautions, complained about the least of them, refused to cooperate when that cooperation would help save lives, and refused to acknowledge the danger their behavior was not only to themselves, but to everyone around them.

And they were proud of it, even as bodies piled up in refrigerated trucks in parking lots.

But hey! That’s in the past!

The problem, of course, is that no one will believe this nervous about-face. The people who can, who have been following the science and keeping up with the news have already gotten the vaccine. There are some who can’t because of medical reasons, and some communities who have a justified mistrust of a mostly White medical community who have not always acted in their interests in the past. Hopefully that can be overcome.

But the people these Republican leaders are talking to are the same ones who they’ve been working on hard to spread their own viral pandemic of lies since February of 2020. And it worked. Too well it worked. The GOP realized they’re losing the voters they need to keep sticking it to America. Now they’re trying to undo the done.

At this point, they've got people so worked up that only God coming down out of heaven and telling them to take it would work.

Of course, several would ask who God thinks he is to trod on their rights. Their God-given rights.

I wish it was only them that they were screwing, but we’re all on this planet together.

We’re all stuck in the Eagle’s Hotel California, on pandemic lockdown:

Welcome to Feb, 2020, we didn’t miss you but we’re not allowed to leave.

Don’t Cry For Liz Cheney

Boom goes the dynamite. The Republicans continue their relentless march to turn Trump lies into the GOP reality, no matter who is in the way.

And just like that, Representative Liz Cheney is gone. If not in body, in power. She was the 3rd most powerful Republican in the House leadership and she lost that position for taking an odd, and at odds position to her colleagues; she insisted on telling the truth about the former president.

Nothing is punished so much as being right in a wrong world.  

She went down shooting though;

“We cannot embrace both the big lie and the Constitution," Cheney said on her way out the door. She says she'll do "everything I can" to ensure Trump never gets near the Oval again. "We cannot be dragged backward by the dangerous lies of a former president."

And then the door slammed on her, as a victory howl went up from Mar-a-Largo. High fives all around!

And she’s out, by a non-recorded voice vote, McCarthy and the House GOP were on-brand cowards to the end. This is what happens in today’s Republican party for daring to put your head up and say, “Hey, wait a minute, this isn’t right…” You get that head chopped off. Dare to admit Trump actually lost the election by 7 million votes (which he did) and you’ve suddenly got Donald Sutherland pointing and screaming at you.

This is also what happens when a party becomes not a political entity of like-minded people, formed with the goal of governing, but a personality cult huddled around one god-like (or maybe, ‘god-claiming) person from whom all favor flows. To speak against that person, to poke that bear, gets you the fate of most who do venture their hand into the den; you get eaten.

Trump has consumed the GOP, well, since he’s lazy as hell, they consumed themselves for him, re-making the party from the ground up in gold plate, velvet curtains, and long red ties. They had their chance to walk, and almost did so after Trump incited the riot on January 6th, even McCarthy briefly grew a spine and blamed the President for his actions… and then went to Mar-a-Largo to kiss his ass and tell him how sweet it tasted. He was quickly followed by Cruz (who never misses a chance at humiliating himself, seems to enjoy it in fact), Lindsey Graham, (who literally has no shame, probably born without it) and others who have made the journey in spirit if not action.

"We cannot be dragged backward by the dangerous lies of a former president." Cheney said.

Sure we can. It’s happening right now, aided and abetted by the entire Republican party. The GOP is already there. They took that one little step, that toe-in-the-water after 1/6, shivered and went back in the Trump cave, never to venture out again. “Dragged”? Hell, they’ll happily march in lockstep by Trump. They like it, they want it, and have for decades. Trump, and everyone who has eyes and a keyboard (hello!) has said this; Trump did not spring up suddenly and unexpectedly, and this is true. The GOP arrived at Trump. Trump had his arms opened wide, and welcomed them… home. You can finger-trace the curve from the John Birchers in the 50s, to Goldwater in the 60s, though the Nixon ‘Southern Strategy’ in the late 60s-70s, to Reagan (a darling of the far-right from his time as governor of California) and his embrace into the GOP of far-right Christianity, to the demagoguery of Newt Gingrich and the rise of far right media in the 70-80s, all of these elements joining together with Fox News and Rupert Murdoch in the 90s to drive the right’s narrative ever farther and farther right to end at the warm embrace of… Trump.

End of the line. Everyone out.

Trump became the vessel for all the worst of the GOP; all the bile and hate and grievance and paranoia had found an umbrella to shelter under, a home to put their feet up, relax and plan/plot. They had seen each other across a crowded room and it was love at first sight.

Yeah. Ick.

Do not cry for Liz Cheney, I know I won’t. She is a person who supported torture, and threw her own lesbian sister under the bus to advance her career. She is an extremist in her own right, and is now enveloped by the hate her party has been nurturing for decades. The burning to the ground of the GOP has been coming for decades and it’s not over yet. Just as the Reagan/Gingrich movement purged anyone thought of as ‘liberal’ from the party, they will now also be purged for the sin of blasphemy, the sin of pointing out the nakedness of their own emperor. The purge is had been going on in the states for the past couple months, Cheney is just the most public national example of it.

No, Liz will be fine. She might lose her seat in the next election, but she will be seen as a martyr to the cause, and have many high paying speaking gigs and consultancies with the old guard Republicans (the true GOP) to tide her over before her inevitable run for president as the ‘Sane Republican” ™. She’s good.

The problem isn’t her, the problem is the GOP, once again, straining to reshape reality to a more comfortable (for them) environment for them to thrive. They’re trying to terraform democracy by getting rid of the ‘democracy’ part and forcing the country to accept it, basically trying to ‘Cheney’ the entire country until the only votes that count will be theirs, the only laws they obey will be the ones they pass and force on the rest of us, backed by the judges they appointed.

Don’t cry for Liz, she helped make this bed, She’s snug.

Cry for democracy.