Whether you approve or disapprove of how President Joe Biden is doing his job in this divided America, you have to concede that he's been a hard working, busy guy. Again, for good or ill according to your own assessment, but with that in mind, Mr. Biden's current approval rating hovers around 45 percent.
To paraphrase PBS's Yamiche Alcindor, new administrations want to set their own agenda but real life situations and crises happen to set the agenda for them, which is certainly still the case on battling the pandemic. We agree with Governor Larry Hogan (R-MD) that the messaging from the White House, the FDA and the CDC has been poorly coordinated and confusing. (Best thing to do btw is to just check the CDC website.) However, responsibility for the record cases and a death count of one thousand five hundred Americans per day falls on all political leaders, obviously, because the Biden Administration has made the vaccine widely available and free while still encouraging people to get vaccinated.
Outside of that, it's up to, frankly, Republican governors to act more like Governor Hogan and less like Ron DeSantis (R-FL). We're not going to go completely down this wormhole but Covid-19 infections and deaths will continue in this country unless we get past what Ms. Alcindor called our original sin of the pandemic, which was policizing masks and vaccines.
Speaking of both, here's what we don't get... You see clips on the news you see someone without a mask threatening a school board member about mask mandates. This seems completely counterintuitive. If you're going to threaten someone in front of a camera don't you want to wear a mask so that they cannot identify and arrest you later, which is what inevitably happens. Take it as a bit of advice, but to protect yourself and others along the way of threatening people is a nice added bonus. Bottom line is that masks aren't a big deal, get over it.
And then there are the vaccines, which according to a number of people who have taken horse dewormer to fight Covid-19 and ended up in a poison control unit. We are not good at math, admittedly, but millions of people have taken the vaccine and have stayed out of the hospital and a few thousand have taken horse dewormer and have either gotten sick and or ended up in the hospital. Hmmmm... we'll take a moment to figure it out.
But in the meantime, there's reacting to real life and then there's acting in the face of extremism, which is exactly what Texas' new abortion bill represents. First, ninety percent of abortions occur after six weeks of pregnancy because most women don't discover they are pregnant until after that time. This six week stipulation has effectively shut down women's health clinics that provide that care. This puts upon women an undue burden of access which as it stands is federally against the law. Having said all that, this column thinks of it in more base/ libertarian terms. A person, any person, has the right to control his or her own body and that should not be legislated. Men shouldn't legislate over womens' bodies and minds because they have no idea what they're talking about. If women passed a law that said men had to be castrated if found guilty of any rape or sexual assault, how do you think that would go over? None too well, we assure you.
But even if you're pro-life or pro-choice and feel that what we wrote above is a load of it, here's something else to consider. The Texas legislature took the coward's way out on enforcement, giving the task of caring out the law to citizens, which is like the Texas government saying we're too chicken to enforce the laws that we pass. Instead they've opted for vigilante justice. An 'assinine' law is what Republican strategist Brendan Buck called.
If this law is left to stand, one can only dread the consequences not to mention that surely in a year's time you'll tune into Texas Public Access Television and watch "Abortion Hunters in Texas" searching the Lone Star state for bounties, and a cottage industry is born. There you go polarized America, who said we can't contribute?
Panel: Yamiche Alcindor, PBS; Betsy Woodruff Swann, Politico; Matt Bai, The Washington Post; Brendan Buck, Republican Strategist
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