Tag: shutdowns

by Tom Rabbe   Count me among the Pollyannas who was sure that when the election was done the pandemic would be “done,” too. November 4 would dawn bright and clear, the thunderheads of contagion looming on the horizon dissipated by a dry air mass of political reality. And I was not alone. None other than President Trump was with me, as were pols and pundits across the conservative landscape who speculated that the draconian restrictions on liberty were as much a political tactic employed by the Left as they were a public prophylactic against viral pestilence. If Biden won, the Democrats would stumble into sanity and downplay the potency of the virus — we need only protect vulnerable populations, those with comorbidities, they would say; everybody else can return to normal. Or they would adopt more amenable metrics for analyzing the crisis — the number of cases doesn’t matter, because practically everybody recovers; it’s deaths caused by COVID alone that are important. They would urge a return to normalcy, and a few months later claim credit for a booming economy. If Trump won, the Dems would see the futility of their political gambit and back off — I told…