“I can be someone’s and still be my own.” — Shel Silverstein

The world of sports and politics rarely collide. That’s why I consider myself such a fan of sports. I can talk sports and follow sports without getting into a political quagmire. Aaron Rodgers entered the scene last week when it was discovered that he tested positive for COVID-19 and he hadn’t been vaccinated.

Back when the season began Rodgers said he had been “immunized” and the press at the time naturally assumed that meant vaccinated. I suppose it is a natural assumption to make. Instead he took Ivermectin and considered it good. Obviously, that didn’t work and he had to sit out a game his team likely would have won with him.

Naturally, we get into the weeds when we start talking about whether he overtly lied or whether he actually believed he was immunized. We can stay in the weeds and talk about the right to privacy as it pertains to medical decisions. Rodgers was certainly free to answer that question anyway he saw fit and we still don’t know how much the Packers knew and we don’t know if he followed protocols for unvaccinated players.

What we do know is that when asked a question about his status, he purposely gave a vague answer. Rodgers has since decried the whole situation and predictably he has lost at least one sponsor in the aftermath. Who knows if State Farm or other national brands will continue to go with him. Clearly, the vague answer was done to avoid a controversy at the time. Whether he lied or not is in the eye of the beholder.

However, the misdirection is telling. He clearly knew what he was doing and he clearly wanted to avoid responsibility. The line above from Shel Silverstein is unusually profound for a children’s author. The battle over vaccinations attempts to be simplistic, but things are never that simplistic. It isn’t as simple as doing what you want with your body. I know a lot of people wish it were that simple.

People used to understand that personal freedom also came with responsibility. When you made certain decisions people understood that they came with natural consequences. If you wanted to avoid childhood vaccinations for your child you understood that meant you’d be home schooling your children.

So, it isn’t so much that Rodgers wanted to take alternative medicines in favor of a vaccine. It’s that he knew the consequences of doing so and obviously wanted to avoid them. If you are smart enough to understand the consequences and understand that you would take a hit in public relations then you’re smart enough just to take the damn vaccine. Other athletes made the same choice and are currently not playing because of it. They at least are openly accepting the consequences of their decision.

The vaccination debate used to be a non-political debate. At least it used to run independent of left and right politics. In fact, the anti-vax crowd used to stereotypically land on the left. Somehow the party of personal responsibility has not only gone anti-vax, but also want to shirk personal responsibility. Shel Silverstein and those that read his books managed to grasp the concept that personal freedom also comes with responsibility. Rodgers still has a lot to learn.

Glenn Youngkin managed to find the key to unlocking electoral success for modern Republicans. The newly minted governor of Virginia won a narrow victory last night in a state that Joe Biden had won by ten points. His campaign was a campaign of half measures and lip service to the king without openly endorsing the king. It was a thing of beauty.

He refused to campaign with the ex president even until the end and yet somehow managed to convince the forever Trumpers that he was on their side all along. I suppose Democrats should be worried when they they lose a key governorship, but there is a silver lining in there somewhere.

Youngkin refused to kiss the ring. For that, you could label him a lot of things and we will label him those things before all is said and done, but he is no fool. For all his talk about winning, the ex president has never actually won. He didn’t the first time around. He didn’t in the last election and anyone significant that has ever hitched their wagon to him also has failed.

Youngkin’s stance on vaccine mandates alone is enough to make you dizzy. When it was brought up in debate he stuttered and stammered all over the place as if he were trying to solve an algebraic equation. He was for mandates for all of those other vaccines because no one wants to be on the record as the guy aiming to bring back the measles. Yet, he was against a mandate on the COVID vaccine because a majority of his base is against it.

It’s a perfect tactic if one could actually articulate it intelligently. I’m not sure Youngkin ever got there, but I guess he deserves a prize for effort. I suppose he finally settled on the point that there hasn’t been enough research done. If he had thrown out the nugget that everyone should do their own research he might have spit the bit, but he managed to walk a tightrope where he was against the mandate and for people getting the vaccine. It was twisting and turning that would make Simone Biles wince in pain.

In the meantime he just might have given Republicans the blueprint for long-term success. For all of his bravado, the ex-leader always trailed expectations by five to ten points nationally. That probably has something to do with voters that actually care how you say things and voters that actually care about the moral fiber of their candidate. Admittedly, it’s not nearly as many people as we might have hoped, but five percent can make a huge difference on election day.

What Youngkin managed to do is say enough of the buzzwords to signal to the MAGA crowd that he was one of them without uttering the offensive versions of their rhetoric that turn off moderates. This leaves us with only one conclusion. As long as national GOP politicians think they have to kiss the ring and be the biggest ass in the room then things are looking up. As soon as they discover they can ignore him and just borrow the more tame versions of his rhetoric, we could be in serious trouble.

Some stories keep coming around no matter how much you try to avoid them. This happened yesterday when it was reported that Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto tested positive for COVID-19. Being that the reporter suffers from multiple sclerosis, you’d imagine that he has already been fully vaccinated against the virus.

Fox News is a deep dive of depravity and contradiction all by itself. There has always been a schism between the hard news division and the commentary division. Cavuto comes from the hard news division. When you look at only the news division you see some examples of bias, but it doesn’t outwardly appear to be all that bad.

Then comes the commentary. Their prime time hosts rail against vaccine mandates, mask mandates, and safety protocols as if the Gestapo were marching in and strapping everyone down to the chair. Yet, news has been oozing out about Fox News themselves. Seems their corporate policy says something else entirely.

We start with the usual disclaimers and statements of concern for people like Cavuto. Like Colin Powell yesterday, he represents the moral gray area where most people reside. Sometimes it’s light gray and sometimes it’s charcoal. Yet, this gray area exists for people that know the truth, don’t outwardly speak against it most of the time, but also don’t speak against those that would distort the truth. Powell made a career of selectively speaking truth to power. His critics would say he let far too many things go in the service of gaining more power.

I don’t know Neil Cavuto. I don’t know what makes him tick. I’m guessing he enjoys cashing his paycheck every couple of weeks and that is understandable on a certain level. Yet, it is hard to take anyone seriously from a news agency that doesn’t consider itself a news agency legally. They have been taken to court before for reporting and commentary that has been less than accurate. Each time they’ve thrown out the defense that they are an entertainment company.

There is something to be said about people that know the truth, follow the truth in their own personal lives, and then speak the opposite in public. We can most assuredly add more to those that say these things for the mere purpose of garnering ratings and cultivating an audience for profit. Judas famously got his 30 pieces of silver for betraying Jesus. I suppose Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity have simply done a good job of negotiating on their own behalf.

In the old days, scholars asserted that heresy was the worst of sins. In that case, it was people preaching the absence of God. Yet, one wonders how horrible a sin it is to simply believe something different than the majority. In the case of COVID, an idiot can be forgiven his idiocy if that idiocy is his natural condition. In other words, if he really believes his rhetoric he is to be pitied and pat on the head.

What Fox News does is somehow worse than heresy. While it may be implied, the definitions of heresy do not overtly say whether the heretic actually believes the lie. Fox News definitely doesn’t. They all bask in the glow of their own vaccinations and somehow peddle “freedom” to the masses like rancid red meat you wouldn’t even feed your dog.

I haven’t read Dante lately. Perhaps he could tell us which concentric circle of hell that gets you into. There is no greater sin than to know the truth, live the truth, and then to speak against the truth for your own personal gain. There is no greater evil that exists in the world. There should be no greater punishment than what awaits you at the end. I’d love for that punishment to be on a Biblical level, but I’ll settle for a class action lawsuit.

“Lay down the law, don’t let em’ cross the line. Under the hood, got the bad and the good, everybodies doing time.” — Mike Post

These lyrics came from the theme song for the sitcom “Hardcastle and McCormick”. Post made a career of writing sitcom jingles and this is probably one he would rather forget. The show ran for two seasons during the mid 1980s and it is one I remember watching. In the old days, that would put the show on the scrap heap of history. A show has to be on the air for several years before episodes will officially go into syndication. So, this show joined “Buck Rogers” and “Battlestar Gallatica” (the original one) in the relative dust bin of television history.

Through the miracle of YouTube and other streaming services, these shows have been brought back to life. I have not found full episodes of this particular show yet, but we found the theme song and opening credits. That alone was good enough for a trip down amnesia lane.

At this point, you are probably wondering what this has to do with anything. That’s a fair question. I suppose the point is that nostalgia is a powerful feeling. In this sense, we are just talking about old shows. We remembered them being good because we were younger and because there wasn’t anything better to offer.

As long as those shows exist only in our memories they continue to be as good as we want to remember them. The moment we watch those old episodes (as you can with Buck Rogers and Battlestar Gallatica) we suddenly realize how stupid they were. It isn’t even so much that they were stupid, but that they seem so stupid now. Our sensibilities have changed and so our tastes in entertainment have changed.

I’m sure the perceptive ones among you realize where this is going. One of the allures of conservative politics is the whole idea of nostalgia. The concept of MAGA depends on the notion that America really was great and isn’t anymore because of what those damn liberals have done. It counts on you remembering the past like it was a Hardcastle and McCormick episode. Man those days were cool.

The problem is that they are tapping into a feeling and not any sort of reality. Reality (much like those old shows) was never quite as good as we remember. Oddly enough, it was also far different than what we remember. So, some wax on about how good the Reagan years were when everyone was free and the government didn’t mandate you do anything.

Unfortunately, we can’t YouTube the distant past, so we can only fact check actual rules and regulations. We can’t re-watch a memory. We can’t experience what life was like again to test our memories. The powers that be have managed these conditions well. They’ve used the old west in addition to our childhoods to create a world that never really existed, but know must be true. So, many rail against the present in a not so quiet bout of desperation. It makes so little sense until you consider they are working from false memories or faux nostalgia.

So, they rail against vaccine mandates and quarantine rules that have actually been used in the past. We just don’t remember them. We don’t want to remember them. If we don’t remember them then they must have never happened. If they never happened then all of these mandates now are an obtrusion that’s new. We somehow tack that onto the stuff that actually is new because we live in an ever evolving society.

Life was simpler then. Our shows were simpler then. Everyone knew their place and everyone was a lot happier. If we try hard enough we can train ourselves to really believe that. We can convince ourselves that those were good shows that never should have been cancelled. We can convince ourselves of a lot of things. When forced to face the reality we understand how truly foolish that is. Some just don’t want to face reality.

Yesterday, some readers were very passionate about vaccine mandates in the wake of the news that Pfizer has had some successful tests of children between the ages of five and eleven. We obviously aren’t there yet, but hopefully we will have a vaccine for all school aged children before the end of the year. This of course begged the question: why aren’t all elementary schools and daycare centers mandating that every adult in the building take the vaccine? Forcing everyone else around them to be fully vaccinated just seems to make the most sense.

That conversation morphed into a conversation as to why we aren’t mandating every abled body adult get the vaccine. The FDA has give full approval to at least one vaccine. We have plenty of it to go around and the vaccine has been free for quite some time.

The Democratic party should be working from a position of strength, but they can’t seem to get out of their own way. Heavy majorities want vaccine mandates. They want a higher minimum wage. They want stiffer environmental protections. They want voting rights protected and expanded. We know all of this. Yet, little seems to happen because some within the party are worried about the fallout.

See, we know a loud minority will protest any of these things. We know this because we’ve seen it before. When President Obama was negotiating the Affordable Care Act, he took very popular planks like a public option off the table. There was no way the Republicans could support it. Except, they didn’t support any of it. They’ve been spending the past ten years trying to get rid of all of it. So, why are we worried about what planks Republicans find objectionable? They find everything objectionable.

Conservatives are up in arms about mandates. It’s antithetical to freedom they say. Except it’s the exact same thing we’ve been doing with other vaccines for decades. In order to attend public school you have to have certain vaccinations or documentation from a doctor of why you cannot comply. There’s none of this “I don’t know what’s in it” or “it’s a way for them to track you.” Sure, there are those that have always believed that, but they had to suffer the consequences of their decision.

The end result this time around is that one of the wealthiest countries in the world has one of the lowest vaccine rates in the developed world. Sure, developing countries lag behind, but they also have institutional barriers to consider. A country without those barriers can’t seem to get to 70 percent in full vaccinations. Sadly, giving people the freedom to choose means too many make the wrong choice.

Whether you mandate it or not, the Tucker Carlson’s and Sean Hannity’s of the world will spew their garbage comparing a government to fascism when doing something we’ve done dozens of times before. You can tiptoe around it or you can simply shove it down their throat. If people are going to complain let’s give them something to complain about. In the meantime, maybe then we can properly protect our children and anyone else that is vulnerable instead of hoping only the idiots weed themselves out of the population.

Greg Abbott has definitely cast his lot by throwing his muscle behind voter suppression, killing health measures, and failing to fix a broken energy grid. He is certainly courting those voters and he knows who to target. The question is whether those he targets will be there to vote for him when 2022 rolls around.

Multiple data points indicate that he may be fighting a losing battle. We know anti-vaxxers are more likely to be Republican than Democrat. Numerous other data points indicate that Republicans are dying at a much faster rate than their more progressive counterparts. Abbott certainly has taken care of making sure the wrong people can’t get to the ballot, but you have to wonder if he has stopped to consider that the right ones might be six feet under by the time November of 2022 gets here.