"THE SNAKE," REVISITED FOR SLOW LEARNERS.

I used to post here way more often than I do now. That was partly because I was young, dumb, and full of rage. Also I had fewer outlets then, whereas now I have Twitter and the daily newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (subscribe, cheap!).

But every so often I see something that I really worry will be overlooked if I don't say something. (I know, hubris -- but in a good cause!) So in this public forum I would like to call your attention to a detail from Tubby's Saturday lie-fest in Arizona.

In recent weeks many people who should know better have been giving Trump credit for saying nice things about vaccines. It's a hangover from the old bothsider trope: Of course we should encourage Trump to push vaccines! If he wants to take credit and make political capital from it, let him! It's fine if it will get people to vaccinate! 

Well, Trump has spoken up for vaccination publicly a few times. I'm sure the moderates and milquetoasts are thrilled, notwithstanding that his yokels booed him for it. 

Like the trimmers, I knew when Trump pushed vaccines it would not be out of a suddenly spasm of altruism. But unlike them, I was not deceived that it would cause Republicans to vaccinate, or favor vaccination, or take any other public health precautions against COVID whatsoever,

And I appear to have been right. Take this poll from last month, showing 30% of Republicans saying they'll never get vaccinated. Congressional Republicans are still objectively anti-vaccine: When, in the face of the Omicron surge, D.C. instituted an extremely limited vaccination requirement for some public accommodations, GOP members raved about Nazis and Big Brother. And one of crypto-Trumpkin Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin's first acts in office was to make mask mandates in public schools illegal.  

So de facto Republican policy is, obviously, to make it as easy as possible for COVID to rampage through the country and then complain about how Biden isn't stopping the pandemic. And in Arizona last night, Trump made clear what his yeah-sure vaccine endorsement was all about:

The left is now rationing lifesaving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating, white people to determine who lives and who dies. If you’re white, you don’t get the vaccine, or if you’re white, you don’t get therapeutics.

Claiming liberals are taking vaccines belonging by right to white people and giving them to the dusky hordes -- that's guaranteed to cause something, but it ain't vaccination. 

I don't know how many times I have to tell you: This guy is not going to help America even if it appears to be in his interest to do so -- because he finds it much more rewarding to make everything worse. He's not a recalcitrant public servant who has to be prodded to do the right thing; he's a sociopath and a public menace and he really has to be stopped.