Biden and the Democrats should lead the way back to normalcy. Instead, they’re dragging their feet.
Biden and the Democrats should lead the way back to normalcy. Instead, they’re dragging their feet.
T he Democrats are too dumb to realize this, but if they want to rebuild their collapsing brand they should form a chorus and sing together as one the message Americans are longing to hear: It’s time to move on.
The Danes today ended nearly all coronavirus restrictions and announced frankly that “Denmark is open.” Denmark has moved on. England, which already had looser standards than the rest of the U.K., ended nearly all restrictions two weeks ago, with minor exceptions such as a requirement to wear masks while using public transportation in London. England has moved on. Within the United States, even Democrat-run Colorado has moved on. Many other states have eliminated virtually all restrictions.
Yet instead of moving on himself, President Biden continues to embrace restrictions as if they’re a ten-year-old girl with delicious-smelling hair. “We got a way to go on that,” he proclaimed on Monday, when asked when some semblance of normalcy might return. He went on to hint that he might be unable to stop America from backsliding toward the disaster of more school closures. But even as he promised to “try like the devil to keep schools open,” schools were already ignoring his supposedly demonic efforts: The schools in Flint, Mich., remained closed, guaranteeing yet more learning loss for its poverty-stricken, majority-minority student body, despite the district’s having received $114 million in federal funding on top of its usual funding, a we-just-won-the-lottery windfall that amounted to more than $27,000 per student.
Announcing a move-on strategy would boost Biden with everyone but the hardcore neurotics who, we now know, form the base of the Democratic Party. Since these folks would eat a bowl of thumbtack cereal before they’d ever vote Republican, they’re unlikely to desert Biden when told masks are optional. They’re stuck with the president and the rest of Team Blue, but Biden does not have to be stuck coddling them. Covid panic could be his Sister Souljah, given a smart verbal swatting as the center cheers; instead it’s his Iraq War, an endless slog with little prospect of a clearly favorable outcome.
Publicly ordering Rochelle Walensky to drop the CDC’s abusive, cruel, and pointless “guidance” that kids ages two and older wear masks all day in schools — a policy that is taken as a holy writ by Democrat-dominated areas — would show that Biden rules his bureaucracy instead of the other way around, that he hears rather than dismisses the cries of desperation of America’s moms, and even that he has studied “the science,” as Walensky appparently has not. Not bringing Walensky to heel just proves that Biden is still sadly out of touch.
Three-quarters of the country — basically everyone but the lunatic wing of the Democratic Party — now accepts that Covid has become endemic. Those of us who doubted that mask madness and vaccine mandates would be effective were proven absolutely correct last month, when New York, a state that is more masked than a superhero convention and whose principal city has a Checkpoint Charlie–style regime of demanding vaccine papers from everyone, topped the coronavirus charts. The New York–media-safetyist complex wailed, “Well, it might have been worse!” Worse than everyone getting Covid?
Just as the Left believes that the U.S. is always about ten years from climate-change doom, and always exactly one election away from the triumph of fascism, Democrats keep promising that an end to Covid restrictions is merely a month or two away. Just give us a steady run of good news, and we’ll relax our grip, they suggest. But more bad news is always on the way. It’s coming at us right now, in the form of the next variant.
In the U.K., which has proven to be a couple of weeks ahead of us in infections, the Omicron wave peaked on January 2. After that, Covid cases plummeted for three weeks and then nearly leveled off, with numbers lingering far above any pre-Omicron peak. The B.A. 2 strain, now being reported as (quelle surprise!) “far more transmissible” than previous ones, is starting to take over in Britain. We can expect our case numbers to level off in a couple of weeks, too, and likely to remain at what would have been considered a terrifying, record-high level just six weeks ago. All of this will occur while the northern part of the country stays mired in flu season. Big blue states will see alarming numbers.
Panic all over again! Democrats will say. Cling bitterly to those restrictions! Just give us another month!
No. Not again. The country has had enough. The proper response will continue to be the one that should have been national policy for the entire Biden era: This virus is never going away, but if you’re vaccinated, you have very little to fear. The vaccines won’t prevent you from getting infected, but they’ll almost certainly save you from serious illness.
Democrats need to stop worrying about whether there’s an unvaccinated person next to them on the bus or at the restaurant. They need to stop being obsessed with pointless measures like social distancing and mask mandates for kids. They need to mind their own business when it comes to the unvaccinated, because vaccination is a personal choice. They need to move on.