Conservative: Vax Mandate Deepens Divides
Last weekend “showcased the intense bifurcation of America,” Steve Cortes notes at RealClearPolitics: Ex-presidents at 9/11 events wore masks, “even though they are fully vaccinated and were outside,” while “at stadiums across America, massive crowds of rowdy, unmasked college football fans tailgated, packed into stadiums and also recalled the grim events of 2001.” And “that chasm will now only widen” under the Biden vax mandates. “Many American workers now face termination if they . . . pass on the vaccine,” but not the unemployed or the illegal immigrants flooding across the southern border. The prez’s order “directly targets the millions of working-class Americans who are already reluctant to accept the prescriptions of ruling-class ‘experts.’ ” It’s “a medical apartheid that places a bulls-eye on the backs of the ‘deplorables.’ ”
From the left: Dems in Danger
“Without drastic changes, Democrats are on track to lose big in 2022,” warns Douglas E. Schoen at The Hill. President Biden’s “marked decline in support” makes him “significantly weaker” than Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were “at this point in their presidencies.” So the party “could suffer even more substantial losses” than its “blowout midterm defeats” in 1994 and 2010, which “can be attributed in large part” to “passage of massive spending and tax bills in the years prior.” If Team Biden “continues to push unnecessarily big government spending initiatives and tax increases, along with weak immigration policies and an incoherent foreign policy strategy, Democrats could suffer the most substantial midterm loss of any party in recent history.”
Pandemic journal: COVID-Flu Double Whammy
“Just because we’re eager to move past the virus doesn’t mean it’s finished with us,” warns former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb at The Atlantic. Rather, it’s bound to become a “persistent menace at least on par” with the flu, and the “dual threat” of COVID and flu “will be too great” to ignore. Expect workplace changes, more vax mandates, renovations to improve airflow and filtration, new drugs, at-home test kits and other measures. These may have a greater impact on the flu, reducing its impact, so the COVID-flu “cumulative threat” becomes “comparable” to that of just “a bad flu season.” We have been “far too complacent” about the flu. “With a second serious disease in the picture, we’re going to be forced to take action.”
Media desk: An Obscene Equivalence
Lefty media figures like Rachel Maddow saw this past weekend “as a perfect opportunity to draw a straight line between the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and 9/11,” sighs The Washington Examiner’s Becket Adams. “Never let a crisis go to waste, right?” Of course, “Jan. 6 was bad. A person died. Hundreds were injured. Rioters caused thousands of dollars in damage. But it was not worse than the deadly political terrorism of 9/11, which resulted in thousands of deaths, the general deterioration of American comity, overreach by the federal government, distrust in government officials and the launch of the forever wars. . . . That these left-wing zealots can’t take a break from pushing this line for even the 20th anniversary of 9/11 is all you need to know about what really motivates them.”
Gender watch: Railroading Kids Into Trans
“The champions of the transgender campaign rest their arguments on an essentially solipsistic view (‘my truth’)” that overrides “what is demonstrably real,” fume Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Paul McHugh and Notre Dame law prof Gerard Bradley at Commentary. And they’re especially troubling when applied to the “medico-surgical treatment of youngsters”: “Not only is the capacity for informed consent limited in children, experience has provided a strong hint that puberty-blocking may also significantly impair the voluntariness with which these children consent to subsequent cross-sex hormonal regimens and even to later surgeries”: After all, most kids desist from insisting they were born into the wrong body “if their puberty proceeds without interference,” whereas the puberty-blocked are railroaded into the more drastic treatments.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
