Pardon my French, but I have had it up to here (gestures over his head) with the entitled snowflake, anti-lockdown, pro-pandemic protestors. It wasn’t their penchant for carrying guns that got to me, even when they carried them into state capitol buildings; it wasn’t even their penchant for now and then using their guns to murder a security guard who was just doing his job. Masks? We don't need no stinkin' masks!
No, what pushed me past my limit was this petulant whine from the Princess of White Privilege, Laura Ingraham:
“You're losing your freedom. Your freedom is gone if you can't travel, you can't go see a show, you can't you know go to a restaurant, you can't go to church, can't go to school. At some point you have to ask yourself, what is life?’
Conservatives have for decades derided liberals for our supposed overemphasis on “freedom” and “rights”—No rights without responsibilities! went the cry, and Freedom isn’t free! Now, Lady Laura simply doesn’t know how life can even be worth living if there is sacrifice involved. I’m thinking she may have misunderstood Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!”
Dear Laura Ingraham: You know who else, long before COVID-19, wasn’t free to travel, to go see a show, or you know to go to a restaurant? Poor people, that’s who, because all your precious freedoms cost money. So welcome to the ranks of the unfree, if only just for a little while, you whiny entitled overpaid brat (estimated net worth, $70 million; annual salary, $15 million).
Conservatives like Ingraham want to outlaw abortion, criminalize the drugs they don't personally rely on, keep out the brown hordes from shithole countries, and make it as hard as possible to cast a ballot in any election; but they are damned if they will let anyone tell them to self-quarantine, or to wear a seat belt in their own personal automobile, or to wear a helmet while riding their own personal bike, or to use one kind of light bulb rather than another--because all of those things are intolerable infringements of their freedoms (though they're not mentioned in the Constitution, which according to the same conservatives is the litmus test for what constitutes a "right").
It would have been great fun to hang out with Laura Ingraham during, say, the London Blitz--What do you mean we have to go to the nearest shelter? Who are they to tell me how to stay safe? Or even here on the home front during World War II: Ration coupons? The government is restricting how much meat I can buy? Why are we even bothering to fight Hitler if we're putting up with tyranny right here in America?
Victor Davis Hanson (a right-wing academic and fan of Donald Trump1) was Ingraham’s guest on this particular show, and he was only too eager to second her commotion:
We went through the Civil War and lost 600,000 deaths. We went through World War II and lost 400,000.
That certainly is a lot of deaths to lose—so why are we balking at losing another 100,000 or so deaths? Thousands died at Gettysburg and Normandy so we wouldn't have to shelter in place during a public health emergency! Do you want them all to have died in vain?
Oddly, Victor Davis Hanson failed to use that same statistical logic to put into perspective the death toll from 9/11 or from subsequent terrorist attacks; instead, in regular fits of high dudgeon, he supported torture, rendition, preemptive war, indefinite detention at Guantanamo without trial, the Patriot Act, stringent TSA policies—because we were at war with “radical Islamic terrorism” and war requires some sacrifices, even sacrifices of our accustomed freedoms (though it's better if it only sacrifices other people's freedoms).
That was then and this is now. Laura Ingraham and Victor Davis Hanson don’t want to wear masks, don’t want to be forced into practicing “social distancing,” don’t think it’s fair that elected officials (governors, in particular) get to declare bogus states of “emergency” just because old people are dropping like flies. As Bill O’Reilly has helpfully pointed out, many of the COVID-19 victims “were on their last legs, anyway,” and why should Laura Ingraham have to be inconvenienced just because somebody’s grandmother might get infected and die? People get infected all the time, damn it! People die every day! But life goes on!
Please remember those statements the next time Laura Ingraham shrieks hysterically about immigrants “bringing diseases” across our southern border and bringing crime to our otherwise crime-free cities.
Let me be clear: I have no idea if the full-scale lockdowns were necessary or correct, nor do I know what would have been the consequences had we not put them in place. I’m not an expert, not an epidemiologist or a virologist; even knowing how stupid our elected leaders can be, sometimes I just have to trust them and the people advising them, and sometimes I have to accept their decisions even when I don’t like them.
Left-wing Trump-hater that I am, I am not hoping that somehow the economic damage will prevent Trump’s re-election; I would hope that a modicum of common sense and four years of enduring the Cretin-in-Chief would suffice to do that. I don’t want the economy to collapse; I don’t want my neighbors, my friends or my family members to lose their jobs and their livelihoods. I don’t want even the pro-pandemic Let’s just go back to work and let God sort this out people to suffer, economically or otherwise. I want this to be over and I want people to be safe, and I'll tolerate a certain amount of inconvenience in the meantime.
More than anything, though, I want Laura Ingraham to shut the hell up.
_____________________________________________________
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-guest-compares-social-distancing-japanese-internment-camps
1 Hanson has authored a book, The Case for Donald Trump. He refers to the president’s race-baiting, xenophobic, misanthropic comments as examples of “uncouth authenticity”. In the same spirit, I would like to say to Victor Davis Hanson, Fuck you.
But the only way I’ll know if she says anything more is if you tell me. You know I won’t watch that shit.
Posted by: Ann Markle | 05/06/2020 at 06:19 PM