Political Irony

This post probably isn’t about what you think it might be about from the title. It is about the curious fact that countries and US states with conservative leaders are doing a better job of getting people vaccinated than countries with progressive leaders.

This comes from an interesting article in (of all places) the NY Times, titled “The Left’s Vaccine Problem“. The problem seems to be that progressive governments are spending too much effort worrying about who should get the vaccine, instead of just focusing on getting shots into arms. In some cases, vaccine has been thrown away because they didn’t have enough of the “right people”, and there were penalties for giving it to the wrong people. Sheesh.

I’m fine that we got front-line healthcare workers vaccinated first. Not only do they need it more than anyone else, and it would be an even worse disaster if we lost doctors and nurses during a pandemic, and it was easy to identify these people and get them shots quickly (after all, most of them work in hospitals!)

But after that, it seems like the best way to fight the pandemic is to get it to everyone as quickly as possible. It really doesn’t matter who “deserves” it more. We need to get to herd immunity quickly, and that will benefit everyone.

Rather than spend our time deciding who can’t get the vaccine, let’s spend any extra time and effort identifying people who are having problems getting it (for example, older people in nursing homes) and get them some help.

This is no time to worry about being politically correct.

The Republican Party is destroying itself. Here are the results of a survey comparing the net favorability of several GOP congresspeople.

That’s right, Marjorie Taylor Green is the new congresscritter who is racist, Islamophobic, and anti-Semitic, believes in QAnon and that the presidential election was stolen, blames the wildfires in California on Jewish laser satellites, and endangered and threatened other members of Congress. But her favorability is way higher than that of Liz Cheney, pretty much because Cheney voted to impeach Donald Trump.

And Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader of the House and a Trump supporter, is much more popular with Republicans than Mitch McConnell, who recently has been ambiguous about Trump’s impeachment.

The GOP is a sinking ship. Their leaders are now nut cases and liars.

[Side note — I love the use of Groucho in the second panel.]

This is a fascinating video listing 12 things (or accomplishments) that Trump supporters like about him. It also adds two additional things. Watch until the end to see how it all turns out.

After you watch the video, here’s the link he talks about. But definitely watch the video first.

First, Trump had a very hard time finding lawyers to defend him in his impeachment trial. Now he is bleeding the few lawyers he was able to find. Five of his lawyers quit on Saturday night. And the Senate has a deadline of Tuesday for Trump’s lawyers to submit a memo laying out his defense, and it is not even apparent if Trump has any lawyers left.

But the really ironic thing is the reason Trump’s lawyers quit — Trump is insisting that they focus on the completely insane and discredited claims that the election was stolen from him. In other words, focus on defending him based on the very same lies that caused the insurrection in the first place.

Yeah, I would love to see the Senate Republicans vote to acquit Trump based solely on claims that the election was unfairly stolen. That argument didn’t go over very well with the voters in Georgia, and I doubt it would play all that well in other, future elections.

Continuing on the theme of people leaving, I somehow neglected to post this video from Jimmy Kimmel from just after the inauguration.