The patience and empathy of healthcare workers, as expressed in the post just below, is one response to the idiots who remain unvaccinated and who will therefore, with great certainty, end up with COVID and likely become quite ill. But my own feelings are much closer to those expressed in this blog post by The Rude Pundit.
Why We’re So Fucking Angry at the Unvaccinated
…We’re furious. We’re furious at adults who made adult decisions that fucked it all up. We’re furious that, after all the shit they’ve done to fuck up this country by voting for Trump, they won’t do this one goddamn thing by getting the vaccine that Trump is legitimately partially responsible for getting developed so quickly. So this was your win, and you refused to take the W….
We’re fucking angry because we were legit so fucking close to being over this virus. If vaccinations had continued at the rate they were going in the first part of the year, we’d be at herd immunity. But rather than that actual freedom, you fucknuts think that you have the “freedom” to go around spreading Covid to whoever the fuck gets in your ignorant way and you call that a constitutional right. No, it’s not. It’s not your right to spread a disease that might kill even 1 out of 100 people who get it….
But most of all, we’re angry at how easy this could have all been. The vaccines were done. They were rolled out pretty damn smoothly and quickly. I can’t get past how such a simple, common thing like getting a vaccine became a war. It’s so ludicrous. It’s so goddamn ludicrous. How can you look at case after case of people who were against the vaccine who now are sick or dead and still cling to that belief? That makes you such a fool. You’re wrong. You’re just so fucking wrong about everything here….
Alabama doctor on treating unvaccinated, dying COVID patients
…“I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID infections,” wrote Cobia, a hospitalist at Grandview Medical Center in Birmingham, in an emotional Facebook post Sunday. “One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late.”
…“[The families] cry. And they tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a certain skin color they wouldn’t get as sick. They thought it was ‘just the flu’. But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But they can’t. So they thank me and they go get the vaccine. And I go back to my office, write their death note, and say a small prayer that this loss will save more lives.”…
Read the whole thing. I don’t know if I could summon the patience and empathy this doctor has for her dying patients and their families, but I certainly do feel that empathy for the heathcare workers now being forced back into the COVID wards because these people refused a free, life-saving vaccine.
Liz Cheney states it all clearly here. And for doing so consistently since the insurrection on Jan. 6, the GQP is going to toss her out of her leadership position, and replace her with a more obedient Congresswoman, Elise Stephanik.
I would oppose all of Liz Cheney’s policy preferences, I am sure of it. Someone on cable news last night described Stephanik as “more liberal” than Cheney, which is a strange thing to say about any Republican today. But her voting record is clearly more moderate than Cheney’s.
Nonetheless, Cheney insists on reality, on the rule of law, and believes in our democracy in a way that Stephanik clearly does not. Which makes Cheney not only a better Representative, but a better human being, in every way. This is a terrible decision by Kevin McCarthy and his caucus, and a dangerous day for the U.S.
Edit to add: And in a spineless voice vote, the Republican caucus removes Cheney from the leadership. Afterwards, she came out and said this:
Liz Cheney immediately after she was ousted from House leadership: "I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office." pic.twitter.com/mxrPHqtRup
Let’s start with this bit from Chris Hayes last night in the intro to his show.
I’ve transcribed his words below, because I think they are important. If you can find his follow-up discussion with Stuart Stevens it’s worth listening to, as they go deeper into the very anti-democratic moves of the Republican Party today.
Of course, now Donald Trump is no longer in office. He lost badly. Republicans lost both houses of Congress under his watch. He spends his days entertaining guests at Mar-a-lago. But Kevin McCarthy is still standing, the last Young Gun, because he is still debasing himself for Donald Trump. And he is now fielding calls from the former President about Liz Cheney, telling him that Cheney will be on her way out soon.
Now, at one level this is all a compelling if embarrassing psychodrama, right? The bigger issue is that Donald Trump tried to pull off a great crime, one of the greatest crimes ever committed against American democracy, certainly by a sitting President, arguably, which was to attempt to reverse the results of a democratic election, to install himself in power over the will of the people. And he had a lot of allies in that, but not quite enough of them. And now what he is doing from his perch at Mar-a-lago, like a crime boss issuing his orders from prison, is going back through the obstacles that stood in his way and trying to get rid of each of them.
In Georgia a Trump loyalist has launched a primary challenge against Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger who you will remember refused Trump’s demand to find enough votes to overturn the outcome of the election. In Arizona, the Republican State Senate is running a ludicrous outsourced conspiracy-theory-laden ballot audit, trying to create ex post facto fictitious ballot fraud.
And his biggest target now is Congresswoman Liz Cheney, because she voted for impeachment, because she has been outspoken about The Big Lie. And because unlike the majority of the Republican caucus, she voted to seat the electors on that fateful January 6th day.
So ask yourself this, what happens when that faction takes over the Republican Party, and they have a majority in the House in, say, the Presidential election. What happens when the House of Representatives, maybe under Speaker Kevin McCarthy, refuses to simply pro forma ratify the election results of January 6th, 2025.
That’s where this is headed, make no mistake.
Greg Sargeant was also thinking about 2025 in his column yesterday. The whole thing is worth reading, but this is the most relevant part.
Time to worry about Jan. 6, 2025
Imagine a 2024 election decided in one state, where a GOP-controlled legislature sends electors for the GOP candidate in defiance of a close popular vote. The same House Republicans who punished Cheney — many of whom already voted against President Biden’s electors, but now control the House and have continued radicalizing — could vote to certify that slate.
There are many possible scenarios here — a lot would turn on whether the governor in that state was a Democrat, on what the Senate did, and on how the Supreme Court sorted out the mess.
But as Foley told me, it’s plausible that “you could have an outcome that is inconsistent with what the voters themselves wanted.” However it turned out, Foley added, the dispute itself “would be a major crisis.”
Do not doubt that this is where Republicans are headed. They don’t intend to lose again, no matter what they have to do, no matter what norms they need to shatter. When they not only pass bills that impose measures to repress voters and increase their control through gerrymandering, but add in provisions for their state legislatures to overturn the voters’ choices, they are creating chances to sidestep our democratic practices.
I’m not sure what can be done about it, but we absolutely have to face these facts head on.
As of today, vaccines across the U.S. are available to everyone 16 and older. This is a remarkable thing. I have to tell you I did not expect to reach this stage until mid- to late summer. And I am so happy to be here.
It may still take a while to get an appointment, but we are quickly reaching the time where there is as much or more vaccine than people who need it. So please, find your state’s information about how to sign up, check your local pharmacies, read up online or even make an actual phone call to your state’s public health department. They will have the information you need.
I am now fully vaccinated. Both Dolly shots and nearly three weeks past the second one, I should have 95% immunity, barring strange new variants which are still arising. Mr. J has had both shots of Pfizer, and we are waiting out his last week before he has full immunity too.
It’s a wonderful, freeing thing (though also a little scary). We look forward to slowly, slowly getting back out and about and continuing on with the long list of tasks we have not been able to do this year. Now we can meet up with (also vaccinated) friends, and do our own shopping, schedule some needed home repairs, and all the things that will hopefully feel more like the before times. I am sure as ever that there will be booster shots in the future, as this virus mutates so freely. But just like our yearly flu shots, we’ll manage to get it done.
We still intend to wear masks indoors. At least as long as such a huge amount of the virus is circulating, and mutating, through the world. The more people who are vaccinated, the more that tide will subside. That will be the best phase yet.
I hope you join us in vaccinated land. It’s nice over here, even with the nervous feelings. And there are more of us here every day.
Another mass shooting in Colorado, at a King Soopers which is everyone’s basic grocery chain around here.
And I’ve just gotten my first vaccination and was really looking forward to doing my own shopping again. Maybe not so much anymore.
While reading some reports from folks on the scene, recounting how they always look for the exits when they go into a store, I realized something I had not recognized before in my own behavior. And that is, ever since Aurora, which was the horrific shooting in a Colorado theater that you might recall, ever since then when I go in a theater I’ve always looked to check out the exits. And in the back of my mind I’m thinking what I would do if someone came in with guns. Somewhere in the back of my mind there is always a picture of that crazy guy dressed in black who came through the back of the theater and started killing anyone he could. I suppose he’ll always be there now.
It’s weird because it’s clear in my mind but I hardly noticed it before. Took for granted I’d be watching the exits, as if that’s a normal thing to do and not a horror. Is this what grocery shopping will be like for me now, forevermore?
[M]uch of the pressure will fall on Haaland, because the territory she’s responsible for is so vast, and the political terrain so charged. She’s a brilliant choice because, with luck, she’ll be able to summon the rest of the country to appreciate the legacy that she now protects: the amazing landscape of the American West, the ancestral home of her own people and of many of our ideas about American identity. If she can leverage those powerful sentiments to get the resources she needs to underwrite a fair transition away from fossil fuels for the Western states, she will have played an outsized role in protecting that land, and the whole world, for the next thirty-five generations.
And here’s wonderful endorsement.
Deb Haaland’s confirmation as Interior Secretary means so much to Native women. We are born with targets on our back & spend our lives being attacked, fetishized, hunted—forever climbing uphill.
But we are the daughters of Mother Earth. We are the 1st to stand & last to fall.
— Ruth H. Hopkins (Red Road Woman) (@Ruth_HHopkins) March 18, 2021
I hope she does find her path among all the forces she’ll have to deal with. Her position here raises a lot of hope in my heart.
