If I got a nickel every time a Democrat slandered Texas, I’d be King Midas. They hate its low taxes and right-to-work laws that poach California businesses, and homestead exemptions and tort reforms that protect citizens from lawyers. Most of all, they hate Texans for surviving a pandemic without a national nanny. After GOP Governor Abbot rescinded the mask mandate, President Biden called the decision “Neanderthal thinking.”
Liberals sure know how to fret. Speaking of Texas, CDC Director Walensky teared up, “right now, I am scared [of the] impending doom.” Beto O’Rourke said the decision was a “death warrant for Texas.” Vanity Fair called it a “bold plan to kill another 500,000 Americans.” Greg Abbot’s response was priceless: “Texans have learned and mastered over the past year the safe practices to protect themselves and loved ones from COVID.”
He’s right. When I was in Houston three weeks ago, everyone wore masks. I am in Houston right now and they’re still wearing masks, taking temperatures, and social-distancing. It’s call “self regulation” and “common sense” in Texas. Oh, and since Abbot signed the death warrant, COVID deaths have fallen 33%, new cases are down 23%, and all adult Texans can get vaccinated (source: New York Times).
Biden promised to unite all Americans, so his cheap shots are high hypocrisy. He lectured Abbot that the pandemic “is not politics” (like when he politicized COVID to unseat President Trump). He ordered Abbot to “reinstate the mandate” and demanded GOP governors “take this virus seriously” (like his “serious” response to the border crisis was to avoid saying “crisis” in public). His bad leadership moment? Claiming Republicans “got us into this mess in the first place.”
Didn’t Red China get us into this mess in the first place, and Democrat governors let PPE stockpiles dissipate in New York and California (after President Bush had boosted them in response to SARS)? After the Trump travel ban, didn’t Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) invite San Franciscans to party in Chinatown and Bill de Blasio invite New Yorkers to gather in Big Apple bars? You got to hand it to Joe Biden; he really knows how to pick his friends.
Biden’s GOP beatdown ended with his one idea: “mask up, mask up…it’s a patriotic duty…it’s the only way to get back to normal.” Has the man been asleep? Vaccines and herd immunity are the only way to return to normal. This was the fear; that Biden would be a politician and robotic manager, rather than a statesman and flexible chief executive. He completely ignores the advantage of a 50-state republic.
America is a wide-open continent, easily absorbing 333,386 people that re-located from New York’s five cramped boroughs between March and November 2020 (source: CBS News). Size matters: 986,809 residents of tiny Delaware suffered 1,559 deaths, while 731,158 residents of big Alaska lost only 299 to COVID-19. With such diversity, the practice of social distancing is best left up to county managers, mayors, and governors. Heck, 47 counties still report zero COVID deaths.
Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman recommended the tourist mecca re-open as the “control group” to test Sweden’s “herd immunity” approach. It was a reasonable idea from a political independent, but she was over-ridden by Democrat Governor Sisolak. By the way, Sweden’s COVID death rate is 0.13 per 100,000; less than the USA’s 0.27 per 100,000. The point here is NOVEL approaches to NOVEL pandemics are not “Neanderthal” thinking.
What’s clear is that Biden wants credit for a recovery that was underway long before he entered office. Americans had cleared store shelves of PPE by the end of March 2020. Trump got Operation Warp Speed fast-tracking COVID vaccines. GOP governors preserved a sense of normality in Florida and Texas, while Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) had Jews arrested outside synagogues. Blaming Greg Abbot for slowing the recovery is divisive. Wasn’t that Biden’s beef with Trump?