27 July 2021 — 1420 mdt
Are GOP covid enablers DeSantis, et al,
comparable to the Butcher of the Somme?
In Churchill and the Generals, American Gen. George C. Marshall asks Winston Churchill what most concerns him about an early western front against Germany in WWII. Churchill replies, “The Somme,” the July to mid-November, 1916, western offensive that stalled after gaining only six miles.
That battle’s butcher’s bill: a million young men. The Butcher of the Somme: British general Sir Douglas Haig, whose brutal, obtuse, frontal assaults of infantry into machine guns and artillery displayed a contempt for human life matched by few in his bloody profession.
Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, reminds me of Haig, as does South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, and the rest of that party’s swaggering, “My state is open for business!” chief state executives whose conduct proves they are willing to accept any number of Covid casualties to keep the bars open and the dollars rolling in.
Now the supercharged India originating Delta variant of the coronavirus that first emerged somewhere near Wuhan, China, is rolling into their states. CV19 infections and hospitalizations are increasing, almost exclusively among the unvaccinated. Florida, with less than seven percent of the nation’s population, has more than 20 percent of the nation’s new infections. That’s a direct result of DeSantis’ contempt for mask mandates, for commonsense, effective, economical measures to slow the spread of the virus. He supports vaccination, but not vaccine passports, and is not willing to strongarm his recalcitrant devotees into getting jabbed.
Neither is Noem, another Republican governor who looks in the mirror and sees a President (if given Trump’s permission to run), and who now faces her state’s notorious annual superspreader event, the rowdy, lowbrow (and lowenbrau) Sturgis motorcycle rally:
Which brings up the bike rally in Sturgis, set to begin officially next week, but already getting underway as early birds start arriving.
If the rally-going crowd is consistent in vaccination percentages (about 50% of us have gotten shots) with the general population, we should have hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated visitors exposing themselves and each other and the rest of us to this nasty new version of Covid.
The pandemic held numbers down in 2020, with fewer than 500,000 attendees making the trek to Sturgis. The talk in the local tourism trade is that as many as a million might show up this year. Sound far-fetched? Not really. Nearly 800,000 were here in 2015 for the 75th anniversary of the event.
Last year’s rally was called a “superspreader” event by the Center for Disease Control. With twice the crowd a likelihood this year, will “superspreader” be an understatement when the event ends?
We’ll know soon enough.
Meanwhile, when does Krisit Noem wise up and realize, like Ron DeSantis just did, that we must get vaccinated? John Tsitrian, The South Dakota Standard.
Like Noem, DeSantis accepts covid butchery as the cost of doing business. It’s the cost of “liberty,” which the GOP, by its behavior, defines as personal freedom without civic responsibility. They recognize no societal obligation for citizens to take extraordinary measures to counter extraordinary threats. Their message:
If you want to get vaccinated, well and good, but if not, well, hey, that’s a personal choice: and if that means subordinating the needs of the many to the selfishness of the few, so be it. That’s what freedom is about. Just don’t try to kill someone by directly coughing in his face … unless you think you can get away with it.
Only governors with the wit and sand to convince their feckless followers that mask and vaccination mandates must be invoked and honored will emerge from this pandemic with their reputations for leadership intact. The rest will be cursed as failures who rang up a fearful and utterly unnecessary butcher’s bill.