BUG CHASERS.

I’m unlocking a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue on two temporary injunctions issued by Trump-appointed judges to keep Biden from requiring COVID vaccinations for health care workers -- you know, doctors, nurses, radiologists, medical assistants; the people who take care of you when you’re sick and immunologically challenged. Both the suits to which the judges responded and the injunctions themselves are peppered with the kind of wingnut whinges one hears from QAnon quacks and reads on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. I feel as if the rightbloggers and talk-radio crackpots I’ve been covering for decades have advanced to the highest rungs of powers, and are ruling as one could have expected -- in the words of Bernard Shaw, like badly-brought-up children given torpedoes to play at earthquakes with. 

Meanwhile their comrades in Congress are, according to Politico, threatening to shut down the government to prevent Biden from making anyone get vaccinated:

“There is leverage immediately in the Senate, and we think that House Republicans ought to be backing up any number of Senate Republicans … to use all procedural tools to deny the continuing resolution passage Friday night — unless they restrict use of those funds for vaccine mandates,” Rep. CHIP ROY (R-Texas), a Freedom Caucus member, told Playbook.

Getting as many people as they can sick with COVID and blaming Democrats for it is a key part of current Republican strategy. But they can multi-task, and are also working on spreading the CRT scare (and banning books wherever they get a toe-hold) and psyching up their goons for fascist street action. Their current drive to overturn Roe v Wade (and Griswold and who knows what else) is just a taste of what they intend to do with whatever power they accrue. In short, they are literally nothing but a malignant force in our lives as well as our politics, and must be stopped.