CT Blue

Yesterday Mike Pence made a jackass out of himself by going to the Mayo Clinic and refusing to wear a mask. Naturally, every sane person in the country piled on. His initial excuse was that he was tested regularly, so he is exempt from wearing a mask, and is free to shake hands and do all the things that his Administration (in it’s saner moments) recommends that Americans refrain from doing.

Today, he gave an even stupider excuse:

Now Mike Pence has managed to make it even worse for himself. He’s claiming that he didn’t wear a mask because he wanted to be able to look people at the hospital in the eye. That’s cute, except you don’t wear the mask over your eyes. It’s not a blindfold. Pence is getting ripped to pieces for it.

On CNN, Don Lemon put on a mask and then sarcastically asked the audience if they could still see his eyes. On MSNBC, Brian Williams said that if Pence has his mask over his eyes, he’s doing it wrong. Mike Pence has managed to take something that was already going to play horribly for him, and make it even worse.

I’m about to show my age. This brought to mind a line from one of the Firesign Theatre albums. A woman in a faux radio commercial for a laundry detergent complains about the stains in her sons’ underwear and exclaims “Sometimes I think my kids do it on purpose!”

It’s hard not to suspect that the Trumpers, beginning with the guy at the top, say these stupid things on purpose, because you’d have to be monumentally stupid to say them in all seriousness. Even if we concede that Trump himself meets that criteria, it can’t possibly apply to all of them, can it?

We are long past the point where it has become true that you couldn’t make this stuff up. Even if someone wrote a Hollywood comedy about a bumbling president the idea that he would suggest ingesting Lysol would be rejected as far too absurd. That’s just an isolated example of the many things this Administration has done that would not make the cut.

So, the question arises. What do people like Pence hope to gain by competing with the genius for stupidest remark of the day? Surely they needn’t do it to please their base, and it’s hard to believe that even in the United States this level of stupidity isn’t peeling off some of the voters they managed to hoodwink in 2016. So we must conclude, though it boggles the mind, that they don’t do it on purpose.

We are really in trouble.

UPDATE: Speaking of stupid, here’s another question. Check out this article recounting a New York Times opinion piece making the point that Trump and company engaged in a cover up of the virus’s threat in February. Here’s a bit of it:

Goodman and Schulkin conclude that the public statement of Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the CDC’s authority on respiratory diseases, made on Tuesday, Feb. 25, is the key to unlocking the subsequent cover-up, because it was the actual catalyst of the administration’s response.

…

What did the administration do in response to Dr. Messonnier’s very public, very embarrassing warning? They lied, intentionally and knowingly. Trump’s rationale? He didn’t want to “upset” the stock market. A full-blown pandemic was likely to sink the only thing holding his reelection chances above the water line. He decided instead to concoct a panoply of phony assurances, and his collaborators, Kudlow, Esper and Azar, were only too happy to oblige. That very afternoon, just hours after Messonnier’s statement, Azar held a press conference, stating that “Thanks to the president and this team’s aggressive containment efforts,” the novel coronavirus “is contained.”

Isn’t it rather stupid to engage in a cover up of something that, inevitably, can’t be covered up? It doesn’t take a very stable genius to see that it would be to your long term political advantage to get in front of the thing when it’s inevitable. They had to know that their lies could never make it so, and that in the end, they’d be exposed. If they were intentionally trying to undermine their own political standing, they couldn’t have hit on a better strategy.

Caveat: This doesn’t mean Trump will lose the election. Recall what H.L. Mencken is reputed to have said.