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The real reason the right-wing elites are so threatened by Biden's vaccine mandates
The assholes in the GOP are running on the platform of blaming Democrats for failing to curb the COVID pandemic and President Biden's plan will help fight the spread of COVID This is sick. The GOP is willing to kill many of its supporters to try to win additional seats in 2020
Link to tweet
As Greg Sargent of the Washington Post pointed out last week, "After having gone to great lengths to impair our response to covid at best, and to actively sabotage it at worst, Republicans will claim the covid resurgence is only the fault of President Biden and Democrats." While there are some people still telling themselves it's impossible that the same people who backed Trump would do something this slimy, it's been evident for some time now that Republicans are running the same playbook on Biden's efforts to end the pandemic that they did on Barack Obama's efforts to heal the country during his presidency: Sabotage the effort and pin the blame for the continued misery on the president and his party. It's a strategy that requires using their own followers as bioweapons in their effort to hamper Biden's success, but as anyone who watches Fox News for even an hour can tell you, treating their voters as cannon fodder clearly doesn't tickle the conscience of GOP leaders and pundits.
Perhaps the outrage over the vaccine mandate is real, but not because of "freedom" or any of the other empty excuses Republicans are hiding behind. It's because Biden is messing with their 2022 midterm strategy. If this mandate works and brings COVID-19 under control, it blows up GOP plans to run on claims that Democrats "failed" to end the pandemic. Never mind that it's Republicans who are actually to blame for discouraging vaccination. These folks are willing to kill thousands of Americans a week in a bid to get a political advantage over Biden, so they're not going to be constrained by the moral imperative to be honest.
Biden's vaccine mandate threatens not just to save thousands of lives and return the country to normal, but to derail the GOP's maximally cynical and deadly 2022 political game plan.
Whether or not it will work remains, of course, to be seen. Much depends on how quickly companies comply with the executive order. If companies act quickly to implement the mandate, it's likely many, if not most, will not bother to roll it back even if there are lawsuits against it. In the end, the results will be most visible in the vaccination rates — if they start to climb rapidly, it's a sign that Biden's mandate is working. If not, it's a sign he didn't go far enough and needs to move quickly to do things like banning the unvaccinated from flights before the holiday season gets underway. But whoever prevails, this entire situation underscores how much the GOP has come to rely on grotesque and often nonsensical culture war politics to gain power. They aren't just willing to kill their own people, either, but now are turning their backs on the interests of the monied elite that they traditionally serve.
The culture war is no longer just a tool, but everything to the GOP. They are willing not just to let untold numbers die for their culture war, but even, shockingly, to let the profit margins of corporate America suffer.
Perhaps the outrage over the vaccine mandate is real, but not because of "freedom" or any of the other empty excuses Republicans are hiding behind. It's because Biden is messing with their 2022 midterm strategy. If this mandate works and brings COVID-19 under control, it blows up GOP plans to run on claims that Democrats "failed" to end the pandemic. Never mind that it's Republicans who are actually to blame for discouraging vaccination. These folks are willing to kill thousands of Americans a week in a bid to get a political advantage over Biden, so they're not going to be constrained by the moral imperative to be honest.
Biden's vaccine mandate threatens not just to save thousands of lives and return the country to normal, but to derail the GOP's maximally cynical and deadly 2022 political game plan.
Whether or not it will work remains, of course, to be seen. Much depends on how quickly companies comply with the executive order. If companies act quickly to implement the mandate, it's likely many, if not most, will not bother to roll it back even if there are lawsuits against it. In the end, the results will be most visible in the vaccination rates — if they start to climb rapidly, it's a sign that Biden's mandate is working. If not, it's a sign he didn't go far enough and needs to move quickly to do things like banning the unvaccinated from flights before the holiday season gets underway. But whoever prevails, this entire situation underscores how much the GOP has come to rely on grotesque and often nonsensical culture war politics to gain power. They aren't just willing to kill their own people, either, but now are turning their backs on the interests of the monied elite that they traditionally serve.
The culture war is no longer just a tool, but everything to the GOP. They are willing not just to let untold numbers die for their culture war, but even, shockingly, to let the profit margins of corporate America suffer.
13 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
They work.
