Having your COVID cake — and wanting to eat it, too — Vice President Mike Pence in Texas

29 June 2020

Is having your cake and wanting to gobble it, at the same time — a sin?

That's a form of sinful greed, isn't it?

Let's amuse ourselves . . .

. . . by witnessing how this childish form of Cake Avarice works.

We'll follow Vice President Mike Pence, as he visited Dallas (Texas), just yesterday.

First, Mikey went to . . .

. . . the annual Celebrate Freedom Sunday choir performance at First Baptist church in Dallas.

This proved to be an amusing example — considering Texas's spike in COVID-19 hospital admissions — of potentially further spreading coronavirus into the air by the bucketful:

More than 100 choir members at a church where Vice President Pence attended a rally in Texas could be seen singing without masks on Sunday, just days after the state’s governor announced he would be reimplementing certain restrictions in the state following a surge in coronavirus cases.

In footage of the event, which CNN reported was held at First Baptist Church in Dallas, Pence could be seen wearing a mask, clapping along with other members of the audience to the choir’s performance.

According to the news network, the choir performed multiple times during the event without the masks, which they would reportedly put on when they took their seats.

The event, dubbed the “Celebrate Freedom Rally,” reportedly drew upward of 2,000 people to the church, which has a capacity of about 3,000, on Sunday.

About half of those in attendance were reportedly seen wearing masks, which CNN reported had been encouraged.

Afterward, the Silver-Haired Fox went to . . .

. . . the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

There, he gave a speech praising Texas Governor Greg Abbott and emphasizing the utility of COVID hygiene measures:

[W]e’re grateful, Governor, that you’ve taken the steps that you’ve taken to limit the kind of gatherings and meeting in certain places in communities that may well be contributing to the community spread that we’re seeing in Texas and in states like Arizona and Florida and California as well.

[W]hen we issued the Guidelines to Open Up America Again, we laid out a phased reopening plan.

Texas took that plan and implemented it here in a safe and responsible way. But there was guidance throughout that applied to all of the phases. And chief among them was that people should continue to practice good hygiene — wash your hands, avoid touching your face, and wear a mask wherever it’s indicated or wherever you’re not able to practice the kind of social distancing that would prevent the spread of the coronavirus, and we would strongly reiterate that today.

But, Governor, again, I just want to thank you.

When we — when we hear that the — that Texas has the lowest number of fatalities of the major affected states, that’s a tribute to your healthcare workers, it’s a tribute to your people, and, frankly, it’s a tribute to your leadership.

Our objective is to keep it that way. Our objective is to save lives as Texas continues to reopen your economy and help to lead this country back to work.

So, I guess, Mike . . .

. . . we can talk a good game, but not really follow its plan?

Like, you know, by wearing a mask:

right in front of 100-plus hymn-singing folk,

who are

spewing aerosolized saliva —

at the top of their lungs-scouring voices?

That kind of almost useless hygiene?

Performed in absolutely the wrong context to have voluntarily put ourselves into?

A pertinent aside

Typically, the politically 'Left" Lamestream misreported Pence's comments by omitting his hygiene suggestions.

Common Dreams, for instance, tried to make it seem as if Pence were praising Abbott for having caused the huge spike in COVID cases that Texas's reopening had caused.

This distortion was achieved by omitting everything that the Vice President had said about the importance of maintaining COVID preventative measures, during Texas's magnified outbreak.

See:

Jake Johnson, Pence Praises Texas Governor for Reopening That Fueled Massive Surge in Covid-19 Cases and Hospitalizations, Common Dreams (29 June 2020)

On the other hand . . .

. . . the Left did get the totality gist of Pence's Dallas travels correct:

One cannot very well talk about hygiene — and then blatantly violate it — by indulging one of this Pandemic's already best-demonstrated ways of spreading the illness.

Nor can one (persuasively) praise one of the least foreseeing of America's governors (Abbott) in dealing with the pandemic.

Texas's lackadaisical COVID response has been an incipient pandemic disaster from the start.

That said, maybe Governor Abbott's performance hasn't been so comparatively bad

In comparing gubernatorial performances, the State of New York's initial COVID greeting actually encouraged its spread.

I give the much Left-lauded Governor Andrew Cuomo exactly zero kudos for intelligence and foresight at the coronavirus's beginning in his state.

In early March, for example, New York City authorities were still encouraging people to go out and mingle. And the now famous Democratic governor was not vehemently quarreling with them.

Assessed by that low New York standard of performance, the Longhorn State's governor looks okay.

Points to Greg and Mikey.

What meanings can we Reasonable and Prudent Folk take from all this?

On the Right hand, we can conclude that:

Lord be praised, silver-haired Mikey is here to save us.

Can Jesus be far behind?

"I've got us tickets to Jerusalem, hon!"

On the Left hand, we might conjure that

. . . Republican leadership still has not learned anything at all from the United States' shared COVID experience.

The moral? — Lawdy, lawdy . . .

With leadership like this — from both political sides — Americans are, we can presume, left to hope for Divine Intervention.

Fifty years ago, I would not have thought the United States' supremely inane response to the COVID pandemic would have been possible.

In those days, mildly competent American leadership still existed, even though very visibly tainted with avarice and self-interest.

Today, even traces of competence are nowhere to be found at the national level.

The United States' three aimlessly idiotic pandemic control experiments continue, without a speck of investigatively minded accoutrements.

We are floating on a raft that is exclusively piloted by oligarchic wealth and its airheaded Government and Lamestream propagandists.

But, at least — the Vice President looks pleasingly human.

Always a silver lining.

PeteFree.com

Having your COVID cake — and wanting to eat it, too — Vice President Mike Pence in Texas