Because Hyperbolic and Silly Pearl Harbor Comparisons Were Just Not Enough
Today’s news from the Vice Presidency is on the covid front:
Vice President Kamala Harris echoed President Carter’s infamous 1979 “Malaise/Crisis of Confidence” speech during an interview Thursday on “PBS NewsHour.”
“Everybody is frustrated… I understand and I fully appreciate there is a level of malaise. We’re two years into this thing. People are — we want to get back to normal. We all do,” Harris told PBS’s Judy Woodruff.
The Carter comparison is stunning, particularly for those of us old enough to have watched it live. Ask yourself why Carter’s speech is “infamous.” It is infamous because of its utter cluelessness; because Carter, wonderful Christian man that he is, had not a clue why people were fed up. Not a clue. Despite the unoriginality of Harris’ comment, this administration should feel pride in the fact that got there in a year – it took Carter four. Malaise is the national state of mind that ensues when an administration keeps pounding on a clearly failed policy.
This past week, since we came out of the holidays, has marked new levels of inanity regarding covid. The Chicago teachers strike is utterly transparent. Everybody knows it has nothing to do with the teachers perceived safety and everything to do with them wanting less work or more money or…. Yesterday I was nearly trapped in my home. The entire block was surrounded with a line of cars headed to the high school around the corner. I came and went three times and it took me an average of five minutes each time to negotiate my way in and out through the line. Why was the line there? Well, kids around here are scheduled to return to classes Monday. However, last minute negotiations with the teacher’s union ended up mandating testing for the return. In a concession the District agreed to provide testing and chose the high school just around the corner from us as one of only 4 test sites to serve a community of over a million people. And, of course, they did so without any consideration of traffic control. Ah, but it has not gotten inane just yet, to this point in the story it is simply incompetent.
There are two salient factors here where the inanity arises. One, at the rate Omicron moves, a test taken Friday is meaningless on Monday. Two, the District does not require that the testing be done at one of their test sites, only that students and teachers tell them, without benefit of documentation, that they have tested negative in the last three days upon entering the premises Monday morning. So all it will take is one person willing to lie, perhaps even nobly lie, to bring the whole house of cards tumbling down. And of course, we all know that out of an entire three-high-school school system there are never any liars. In other words, the entire event is for show and effectively changes nothing in the local trajectory of the disease. I honestly do not know what is worse, that they put on this farce or that so many people so willingly participated in it.
Everybody I know has some such story in the last week – a story where they were forced to participate in some inconvenient, ineffective and frankly stupid ritual because – covid. Of course, there is a malaise!
But the malaise is not the problem. The fact that leadership cannot figure out that that those of us suffering the malaise are not the issue, that their policies are the issue, is the real problem.
Everybody makes mistakes. Going into covid mistakes were to be expected. The truest measure of an individual is not the mistakes they do or do not make. The measure of an individual is how they deal with their mistakes. We are currently in a place in this nation where we are seeing the policy mistakes made in covid not responding to changing circumstances on the ground and instead being double, triple and even quadrupled down on. This has to end.
If it does not end, the malaise could turn into something much, much uglier.
https://hughhewitt.com/because-hyperbolic-and-silly-pearl-harbor-comparisons-were-just-not-enough/
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