The latest in "immemorial imbecilities" — another priceless Menckenism I ran across just today — from the modern Republican Party and its barking lapdog of a kinda newsy organization:
"Here comes the MEV - the Midterm Election Variant," tweeted Ronny Jackson, a United States Representative (Tx.) and former Chief Medical Officer to a bloated orange, about the possibly more lethal and probably more transmissible omicron variant. "They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots," he wrote. "Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election - but we're not going to let them!"
Added Pete Hegseth of Fox News: "Count on a variant about every October, every two years."
CNN's Chris Cillizza gets this much straight: Notwithstanding Jackson et al.'s gross misrepresentation of the omicron variant as a goldmine of a Democratic ploy, this is "terrible politics for President Joe Biden" — the very last pandemic development that he and his party could ever wish on themselves. The president, especially, is already taking a relentless beating on covid's persistence, so headline news about a rampant fresh variant is scarcely a Biden desideratum.
But Chris, being Chris, then horribly garbles Republicans' misrepresentation, writing that "the truth" is simply foreign to that tribe these days, so they're "too blind to see" the political awfulness of omicron for Democrats. But of course they do see the truth and they absolutely know that omicron-as-a-Democratic-wet-dream is laughable nonsense. On the other hand, they know and appreciate that the base will slop it up; just one more immemorial imbecility with which to own the libs.
An aside: Kansas' Republican legislature is now "telling Mom and Pop [by law] that they can’t fire people who pose a health risk to their co-workers and customers." That observation is from the Kansas City editorial board, whose bottomless consternation is topped by a photo of a quotable state senator, Dennis Pyle: "There are people that do not want to take this vaccine, even at the expense of their own lives. So we’re here defending that liberty."
At that, the rational mind is brutalized into a stupor. That's where Republicans have Democrats beat, hands down. When political accusations — one Big Lie after another — and Orwellian perversities become so outrageously dumb, their target is left speechlessly adrift. For sure, it's fruitless and thus inadvisable to argue with an idiot, yet that leaves the floor to the idiots themselves. And Republicans are scarcely "too blind to see" that.