PARTISAN HACKS

Recently the Supreme Court made a definite step in the direction of overturning the nineteen seventy three Roe Vs Wade decision when they allowed a law banning abortions after six weeks in Texas to stand.  Considering that most women do not even know that they are pregnant within six weeks of  pregnancy means that this is essentially a ban on abortions completely in the state of Texas.  The oddness of the law allows private citizens to enforce the ban, who can then collect bounties on anyone who aids a woman who gets an abortion after that six week period.  And in a particularly cruel twist, there is no exception for women who have been raped.

While this is upsetting to people like me who do not want Roe Vs Wade overturned (and we are still in the majority in this country), I can't say that I was surprised by it.  I knew way back in twenty sixteen right after Trump won that this day was coming.  As much as I disagree with them, you have to kind of hand it to the anti abortion people on the right, who have spent decades of singleminded devotion to this issue, working hard to elect Republican presidents who will put conservative judges on the court.  

Now to add insult to injury, one of the judges who voted  to uphold that law, Amy Coney Barrett, recently gave a speech defending the court, saying that they are not "partisan hacks", and that “judicial philosophies are not the same as political parties.”  This is patently absurd.  One of the things that makes this so laughable is that she made these remarks after being introduced by Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the man who brazenly shoved her confirmation through the senate after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, just weeks before the presidential election.  And who had done the complete opposite years earlier when he blocked then President Barack Obama from filling a vacancy ten months before the election.  If Barrett really holds herself as something other than a partisan hack, she should have turned the appointment down, seeing it for what it was: a blatantly hypocritical and  partisan power grab by the Republican party, who know that their racist voter suppression laws (among others) will be upheld by a sympathetic court. 

The notion that the Supreme Court is beyond politics, even as the appointments are an inherently political process, is plain silly.  Oh sure, they can windily pontificate about "judicial philosophies" and precedents and such, but at the end of the day Republican appointed judges are expected to rule in favor of conservative causes, and vice versa for the Democrats.  And the outside political world can definitely effect rulings, which is not always a bad thing, since the legalization of gay marriage was clearly made because a changing world has come to see same sex marriage as something that should be legal.  

So, with Roe more than likely to be directly overturned sometime soon, what are progressives to do?  Sadly, there isn't much.  While there has been some talk of appointing more judges (which is called packing the court), that would be the kind of  bold and unprecedented move that Joe Biden wants no part of.  So, the only real recourse is for progressives to do what conservatives have done so well and focus on the Supreme Court (and lower courts) working hard to get out like minded voters and pushing abortion rights as an important issue.  Yes, this is a bitter pill to swallow given that Trump's three(!) Supreme Court choices will probably be ruling on our laws for decades to come, but that's the system we are stuck with. Political hack or not, Barrett isn't going anywhere.

AMERICA THE STUPID?

 Calling someone who disagrees with you politically "stupid" is an easy trap to fall in for both sides of the political fence.  As a progressive, I try to choose my words carefully, realizing that lapsing into childish name calling doesn't change any minds or do any good.  After all, there are smart people on both sides.

And yet, what is happening in red state America right now appears to be, well, downright stupid.  In the past few months, four different right wing talk show hosts who ridiculed vaccines have died from Covid-19.  While I feel sad for their friends and family, it is hard to mourn someone who so clearly had a way to avoid death and openly, proudly, chose to ignore it.  And the fact that all of these men had a media influence that they used to promote dangerous lies about vaccinations, which has surely led to the loss of other lives, makes them even less sympathetic.  And yes, stupid.

And the stupidity continues: right now in red states there has been a rash of people taking the drug Ivermectin in a misguided belief that it can effectively defeat the covid virus.  There is not one study that shows  this to be the case, but because the drug has been mentioned positively by right wing Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, their followers  have started taking the drug, which is normally used for deworming horses.  It's gotten so bad that the drug has run out in some places, with prescriptions numbering in the thousands and calls to poison control centers from people who have taken the drug skyrocketing.  There's a word for people who reject a vaccination that is the product of months of intensive research and testing, and which has been fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration, to instead take a  horse dewormer because their science denying heroes have recommended it.  That word is stupid.

And then there's the school board meetings.  Somehow, the common sense precaution of having children who are too young to get vaccinated wear masks at school has become a political issue.  Board meetings to discuss the matter have often degenerated into screaming matches and death threats.  As someone who has worn a mask quite a bit in the past year myself, I can't possibly see how something as simple as a cloth face covering has become an object of such anger.  I've never seen anyone get angry about  restaurants that enforces a "no shirt, no shoes, no service" policy.  Because that would be stupid.  

The American stupid response to the pandemic is utterly depressing when contrasted with the rest of the world: the official statistics show that in raw numbers the US leads the world in Covid cases by millions, and in deaths by tens of thousands.  Even when adjusted to a per capita basis, the country does poorly.  Even worse, our rate of fully vaccinated people lags behind nearly every other first world country, and the number of people getting vaccinated daily has lately been stuck at only around a million, a far cry from the over three million per day rate that occurred back in April.  And according to a July Forbes poll, around forty percent of Republicans plan to never get vaccinated, needlessly prolonging the pandemic because they are too stubborn to do the right thing to protect themselves and others around them.  Stubborn and stupid.  

This is certainly not the first time that conservatives in this country have believed in a stupid thing: during the presidency of Barack Obama, large numbers of Republicans doubted his birthplace.  A majority of Republicans currently believe that Donald Trump won the twenty twenty election.  But these beliefs are mostly harmless ones that are more about a desired belief than a strongly held one.  Vaccine denial is entirely different and deadly.  As America weathers our fourth wave of the virus, with hospitals overflowing and death counts rising, it's hard not to get angry at the proudly unvaccinated people that are still spreading the virus.  The proudly unvaccinated and stupid.