Deadly disease is no trolling matter

            Hardy har har.

            Increasing numbers of Floridians are dying of a newly invigorated virus, and Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to make puns of Anthony Fauci's name.

            Yuckety yuck.

            Amid a resurgence of death and devastation, Marco Rubio wants to mock face coverings – again.

            Chortle, chortle. Twitter titter.

            Has anyone noticed that amid this pandemic, Republicans have become a party of trolls?

            They can't treat a deadly matter with straight faces. While others address a public health emergency, they huddle in the corner and squirt sounds from their armpits.

            This especially is the case with some elected Republicans. They ran for office saying, "Government is the problem." Then they set out to prove it with their own infantile irresponsibility.

            Up until Jan. 6, that mode was solely modeled by the troll immortalized by a blimp labeled "Baby Trump." Now we have little trolls in red state after state.

            DeSantis sells "Don't Fauci Florida" tee-shirts and says Florida won't be a "Faucian dystopia." Whatever that means, he can't blame Fauci for 400-plus deaths a week of mostly unvaccinated and unprotected Floridians.

            He can blame attitudes that ignore or outright mock health authorities.

            DeSantis was respectful at the site of the Florida condo collapse that killed 97. What about the disaster that this week will kill four times that?

            Rubio took time to exercise his Twitter fingers when Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin arrived in the Philippines double-covered against COVID – face mask, face shield.

            Since Austin is vaccinated, Rubio called these precautions "embarrassing COVID theater."

            Ah, but the Philippines has mandated that people wear face shields along with masks in public places.

            Austin and the Philippines are taking COVID seriously. Republicans like Rubio, not so.

            Red states are where the virus is surging -- the virus that is forcing governors and health officials into excruciating decisions. And red state Republicans are doing the mocking.

            Unvaccinated Americans are causing this. People who aren't taking proper precautions against the virus are causing this.

            Leaders who pose as trolls are causing this.

            We are supposed to give points to people like DeSantis – and, stunner, Sean Hannity – for finally saying, yes, vaccinations are a good thing to do.

            It's only a pause before the mocking resumes.

            Congressman Clay Higgins should take COVID seriously. The Louisiana Republican has claimed he caught the virus twice. Yet he refuses to say whether he's been vaccinated, and he refuses to promote vaccination. Indeed, he's sponsoring a bill to prohibit companies from requiring vaccination of employees.

            Meanwhile he refers to COVID as the "Chinese Communist Party biological attack weaponized virus." Chortle, chortle.

            And now for a COVID trolling flashback:

            Last July Sen. Ted Cruz had this sterling prediction which, like so much else Republicans have done, dismissed the severity of a horrible disease:

            If Biden were to win the presidency, he said, "I guarantee you the week after the election, suddenly all those Democratic governors, all those Democratic mayors will say everything's magically better."

            The "cynical" Democrats' interest, Cruz said, wasn't containing the virus but acceding to their inner desires to "destroy people's livelihoods, their lives."

            Look around, Ted, and tell me how that prediction stands up today.

            How tragic it is that the political equations employed by Trump as president continue to infect a major party.

            The party of Eisenhower would not have acted like a bunch of trolls amid a national health emergency like this. Neither would the party of Bush -- either iteration.

            But this is the party of Trump, and Fox News. People are dying because of it.

            Yuckety yuck.

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

 

The fire is next door, wherever you live

            Last October in a Rocky Mountain fire season without end, my son got a sorrowful message.

            On a morning when the sky wore a sandpaper hue, he was in front of his apartment when something drifted from the sky and into his hand:

            A charred aspen leaf.

            One might have assumed it was from a fire next door, or certainly near.

            Depends on what "near" is. The fire was 40 miles away in Colorado's Poudre Canyon.

            The Cameron Park Fire burned from August to December, obliterating 326 square miles of forest and 469 structures.

            It was Colorado's biggest forest fire ever. Sad to say, it is just the beginning.

            Humanity rapidly is gumming up an environment that was timepiece-primed for regeneration and now is prone to disaster.

            Policymakers who won't give a second's thought to spending military billions are balking at the price tag of climate policies that put heft behind what history will record as empty words.

            President Biden is pushing for the heft. The provincial concerns of oil and coal, however, neutered an infrastructure bill designed to cut climate pollution by half by 2030 (compared to 2005 levels).

            Barack Obama, whose directives in spite of a recalcitrant Congress dramatically changed how this country consumes energy, writes in his memoir "A Promised Land" of a fantasy about new priorities with the Cold War over, that this nation "put its immense power and authority behind the climate change fight."

            He imagined, in the success of such an effort, "the geopolitical benefits that would have flowed from weakening the grip of petrodollars and the autocracies supported by those dollars."

            Sure, he was thinking of Russian oligarchs and Saudi royals. He also had to be thinking of North American tar-sands empires and a coal industry that seeks a reason to be.

            The autocrat who preceded Biden became president in large part by pandering to Coal Country, though fewer and fewer entities buy what it sells.

            That helps explain to a great degree why that autocrat smirked and clowned around the carbon-loading causing our planet to sweat.

            To be honest, forest fires, as destructive as they continue to be, are a low-priority item at the moment.

            Higher up the list is the fact that the West is experiencing a thousand-year drought.

            The Colorado River -- the Ganges of the West -- supplies water to 40 million people in six states. While populations have grown rapidly, the flow has declined 20 percent over the previous century.     

            Lake Mead, fed by the Colorado, is at its lowest level since it was built in the '30s.

            National Geographic magazine had a feature in 2015 predicting this. But what were voters concerned about. Um, building a wall?

            We can only imagine what Donald Trump would have to say about the mega drought and the clear connection to climate change.

            He'd say our shower heads are too skimpy.

            How tragic that Americans chose a clown to lead them into times like these, and that his party still thinks he says things that matter.

            There was nothing to joke about last October when the section of the Rockies nearest and dearest to me was ablaze.

            Speaking of that blackened leaf carried for all those miles to my son's hand:

            The species aspen is considered a natural fire break in a forest. Sometimes, however, the fire is so intense that fire breaks get broken.

            This week the Poudre Canyon experienced a deadly flash flood because of earth so scorched and denuded it can't absorb heavy mountain rains. One person is dead and three missing, and several houses are gone.

            Right now a canopy of smoke extends across the country from wildfires in Oregon and Washington, reminiscent of the Black Sunday cloud that drifted all the way to our nation's capital during the Dust Bowl.

            That got Washington's attention in 1935. What about today will get those in power to look to our tomorrow?

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

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.