That’s right, folks, even as Greg Magical Thinking Abbott proclaimed the Coronavirus pandemic over and rescinded all statewide restrictions, the pandemic continues to rage and continues to take lives.   Our positivity rate is 13.5% this week, nearly triple the rate the CDC recommends before opening.  On top of that, Texas ranks 48th in vaccinations, with less than 7% of Texans vaccinated.  The positivity rate now is about the same as last October when the pandemic was beginning its holiday spike that killed thousands of Texans.  What Abbott is doing is stupid.  The real tragedy is that he’s smart enough to know it’s stupid, but having now lost a lot of the center after letting millions of Texans freeze in the dark, his only path to keeping his job next year is to take the Trump path, whip up the extreme right mouthbreathers.

This is classic right-winger response to crises, just like the Great Blackout of 2021 – break the system, make sure it doesn’t function properly, take huge risks while falsely boasting about how great we are, don’t do anything when obvious problems show themselves, then pretend it’s someone else’s fault and throw a staffer under the bus when the system fails.  During the blackout, Abbott threw wind farms, the PUC, and ERCOT all under the bus even though the responsibility for the disaster lay right in his lap and that of the state legislature.

Everyone needs to brace for the next big wave that is certain to come, extending the misery in Texas even longer. Texas’ response to the pandemic has been nothing more than piss-poor.  For comparison, let’s look at a country with similar populations with much better results: Taiwan.  Texas has 29 million people.  Taiwan, 24 million.  Deaths in Texas? 44,000.  Taiwan? 9.  That’s right, 9.  Taiwan did it right.  They never locked down, but implemented strong quarantine rules, contact tracing, and most important, PAID their people to stay home.  Like most of Europe, Taiwan took the financial stress out of the equation.  By contrast, Abbott and the idiots in the legislature added to people’s misery by providing little to no assistance.  He then re-opened the economy in May just as the pandemic was starting to rock.  Realizing his blunder in July, he then implemented stronger shut down measures and a statewide mandate, but kept the state purse strings tied tight.   The result was predictable.  Add Abbott’s blundering to Trump’s gross negligence and incompetence, and you get some of the worst COVID response on the planet.  Thanks for nothing.

Oh, and one last tidbit.  Abbott made this announcement from a Mexican restaurant in Lubbock which, by coincidence, is not connected to ERCOT and didn’t experience the blackouts most of Texas suffered.  Apparently the places in Texas he won’t get booed off the stage are getting a lot smaller.  Asshole.