I've had it. I'm done with Republican voters and politicians who cater to their ignorance.
Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and all the rest of them. I'm finished.
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The grim race to the grave.
If we ever had any doubt that Republicans and Democrats are producing markedly different COVID numbers, that doubt has been put to rest. Today the New York Times reported that “the political divide over vaccinations is so large that almost every reliably blue state now has a higher vaccination rate than almost every reliably red state.”
In Tennessee, presided over by Republican governor Bill Lee, 55 percent of residents are unvaccinated. In Alabama, overseen by Republican Kay Ivey, that number is 58 percent. In Texas, Greg Abbott’s home state, 49 percent are unvaccinated. In Ron DeSantis’ Florida, 43 percent haven’t been vaccinated, but its lower number is only because the state has such a large percentage of senior citizens.
The blue state with the worst rate is Nevada, with 50 percent unvaccinated. All the rest are below, or well below that number.
That’s not all. “Covid deaths are also showing a partisan pattern,” the Times reported. “Covid is still a national crisis, but the worst forms of it are increasingly concentrated in red America.” Over the last seven days, an average of 70 people died every day in Tennessee. In Texas, an average of 300 a day died. Alabama averaged 116 COVID deaths a day. Florida averaged 335 deaths each day.
In blue states, the numbers were much, much lower: Maryland averaged 17 COVID deaths per day; New Jersey, 20; Connecticut, 8. Even blue states with large populations all averaged under 100 deaths a day, with New York at 41, Illinois at 38, and even California, the bluest and largest state of them all, with nearly 39 million residents, averaged only 93 deaths from COVID each day.
The COVID differences between red and blue states have held steady for the entire time the disease has ravaged the country. The Times cited Charles Gaba, a health care analyst who has kept track of the figures: “In counties where Donald Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote, the virus has killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June,” Gaba found. “In counties where Trump won less than 32 percent of the vote, the number is about 10 out of 100,000.”
Earlier this month, the CDC released its finding that unvaccinated people are about 11 times more likely to die of COVID than vaccinated people. For some reason, the CDC hasn’t calculated what the percentage of COVID deaths are for the unvaccinated, but in June, the Associated Press analyzed CDC data and found that less than 1 percent of people who have died from COVID have been vaccinated. And that was before the spike in cases in early September, when new cases rose to 175,000 a day. (The average over 7 days last week was 120,000.)
I’ll bet the percentage of people dying from COVID who are vaccinated is below a half percent by now. And here’s the thing: all these figures are out there. You can google “COVID deaths,” or “COVID cases” and easily find the figures for every state in the Union. People who live in Texas and Florida and Tennessee and Mississippi and Alabama know a lot of people around them are dying. Hell, they live there. The local papers run the obits. Some of them even run news stories from the AP and other reliable sources that have covered the incredible increase in COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths over the last two months.
The paleo-conservative website Breitbart, which used to be owned by the pardoned Steve Bannon, published a story on September 10 that…wait for it…blamed it all on the libs. According to Breitbart, “the left has us right where they want us.”
You can take your fist out of your mouth you’ve been using to stifle that scream. But I’m not kidding. Breitbart’s theory is that libs like Howard Stern and Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Fauci and of course Joe Biden “are deliberately looking to manipulate Trump supporters into not getting vaccinated.” And how are they doing this, you might ask? Why, they’ve all gotten together and conspired to encourage people to get vaccinated because they know it will have the opposite effect on Trump voters. If you don’t believe me, listen to the Breitbart “logic:”
“If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what Stern and the left are doing… I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated!”
Got that? It’s all a big conspiracy by the libs to kill off Trump voters! “The push for mandates is another ploy to get us to dig in and not do what’s best for ourselves because no one wants to feel like they’re caving to a mandate,” according to Breitbart.
So it’s not Republican governors’ fault. Noooooo, not governors like DeSantis of Florida, Abbott of Texas, Lee of Tennessee, Reeves of Mississippi, and Ivey of Alabama – all of whom have passed laws or issued executive orders banning mask mandates and vaccine mandates. They’re looking out for the well being of their constituents, that’s what they’re doing! Because, you know, the way to get people vaccinated is to ban the stuff that’s trying to get them vaccinated. And the way to keep them alive is to make fun of mask wearing and encourage turn-out by rednecks at local school board meetings so they can yell at all the libs in their “Nazi” masks, as one lunatic screamed at a school board meeting last week.
This shit isn’t just upside down and backward, it’s turned inside out and on its way to being reverse-engineered. The guy who wrote the Breitbart article is so tied in knots he can’t make up his mind what’s going on. “Right now, a countless number of Trump supporters believe they are owning the left by refusing to take a life-saving vaccine — a vaccine, by the way, everyone on the left has taken. Oh, and so has Trump,” he writes.
“If the left is all vaccinated and we’re not, who’s winning?” he asks. “When you learn that almost everyone dying is unvaccinated, that’s a come to Jesus moment. I could be wrong. Maybe the left isn’t that evil and sly. Even if this isn’t the left’s plan, who’s owning who?”
Duh.
Of course it never occurs to him that “the left” might just be interested in saving lives, among them, some of their own, because not everyone on “the left” is vaccinated, so there have to be at least some libs out there dying of COVID. But I think the Breitbart guy, for all of his confusion and generalized numbskull-ness, is just beating on a door that’s already closed, and you know who slammed it shut? The Republican Party and the aforementioned governors who are out there speaking at rallies and riling up the loons to scream at school boards and passing bans on mask and vaccine mandates so they can get the people they have identified as Trump’s base to vote for them, and for him if he runs in 2024, which to a Republican Party member they seem to have assumed he will.
This shit isn’t just a race to the bottom, it’s not even a race to the basement. It’s a race to the grave. And according to them, it’s all the libs’ fault.
Well, this lib is happy to take the blame, because I’m finished with them. I’m sick and tired of their anger, I’m sick and tired of their ignorance, and if they want to ride their “freedom” and “liberty” right into the ground and shovel dirt in on top of themselves, I’ve got a shovel, and I’m ready to help.