Comparing whom to Nazis?

            Republicans want their history laundered and starched.

            This apparently includes likening facilitators of life-saving medical care to Nazis.

            That's what GOP Congresswoman Lauren Boebert did the other day before a red-meat CPAC audience.

            "Needle Nazis" were coming to the doors of unsuspecting Americans to coerce them with their evil designs, she said. The carnivores applauded.

            Boebert has called vaccine outreach the designs of "medical brownshirts." Sure, they are, if brownshirts came bearing cotton swabs and life-saving vaccine.

            Lordy. Where does the Republican Party dredge up the likes of her?

            The "coercion" of which she speaks is nothing of the sort. Americans are free to abstain from what she calls the "Fauci ouchie." Catchy.

            Alongside Marjorie Taylor Greene, Boebert is either the Laverne or the Shirley of the House Republican Sedition Caucus. ("Schlemiel! Schlimalzel! QAnon Incorporated!")

            Greene recently equated mask mandates to the doings of the Third Reich.

            Let's allow the Auschwitz Memorial in Poland to respond.

            The museum tweeted that comparing public health measures to the tactics of Nazi Germany "is a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline."

            Republican Party, this is on you.

            You have let Donald Trump, and then Tucker Carlson, and these shyster sisters, do your thinking for you on a life-or-death public health question.

            Pollster Frank Luntz, a longtime Republican who nonetheless is zealous in promoting vaccinations, says this in the Washington Post:

            "We always ask, what will be the last straw? What will be the moment that we lose the ability to communicate and cooperate and get things done?

            "Well, we've reached it. Now decisions are being made not because of evidence or facts or statistics, but strictly on political lines. Now people are going to die."

            People are dying and suffering at an accelerated pace in states with low vaccination rates. Yet CPAC attendees in Dallas applauded when a speaker chortled that Joe Biden would come up short of his 70 percent vaccination goal.

            Whoopee!

            The conference was themed American UnCanceled. Catchy. What about the lives canceled by this pandemic?

            "COVID is nasty. COVID is a weapon," says Missouri Resident Louie Michael. I wonder if CPAC would have the guts to invite him to speak.

            He and his wife, who said they were "on the fence" about vaccination, caught the virus. Both almost died. He was hospitalized for 15 days. She went into respiratory failure.

            Now, telling their story on social media, he says, "I wish I could go back in time. I would have got the vaccination."

            Let's hope those words prevent some suffering in the Michaels' state of Missouri. Cases are surging there with vaccination rates 10 percent below the national average.

            Per Frank Luntz' lament, the national map showing vaccination rates appears to mimic the national electoral map.

            The same applies in states, where the rural-urban divide is showing up in vaccination rates. Denver had a packed house for the MLB All-Star Game. It could do so with over 75 percent of adults vaccinated in Denver County.

            Meanwhile, the counties of Western Colorado are all hovering around and under 40 percent as hospitalizations from COVID climb.

            Oh, guess who represents Western Colorado in Congress? That's right, one reckless shyster.

            Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.