Crazy Week

 This has been one hell of a week for events and news. Almost overwhelming and the news is either RB (real bad) or at least disheartening. The Omicron variant has produced a lot of chaos and that is heightened by what we don’t know about it and therefore really fear as well as the stage it steps onto of a pandemic closing in on two years' duration. The Supreme Court showed it has become only a space for partisan political hacks with the Mississippi abortion case. There was yet another school shooting in Michigan with a troubled and possibly schizophrenic 15-year-old who was aided and abetted by irresponsible and morally bankrupt parents who not only bought the gun for him as a Christmas present but ignored the signs he was mentally disturbed and then fled the law when they were indicted for involuntary manslaughter for their role. The school district also failed here. We also saw Putin building up military force on Ukraine’s border with a possibility of invading that country (hopefully not a reprise of Sarajevo in 1914). And of course, the Republican Party continues to be obstructionist at every turn -- because they can.

I wrote last week about Omicron and there is not much solid information for an update. It does appear to be able to spread better than Delta and the fear of immune evasion continues to provoke anxiety. Despite that, the antivaccination and antimasking crowd continue to do their Alfred E. Neuman “What, me worry?” act imperiling themselves and others. The MAGA crowd apparently will never understand that they are part of a larger community to which they have responsibilities.

Supreme Court partisan hacks Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Roberts came up with some dandy ideas with the Mississippi case; Kavanaugh wants a neutral stance while Barrett suggests it is no big deal to force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy because hey, safe-haven laws in all the states say the newborns may just be dropped off for adoption. Roberts is confused on viability while Alito just wanted everybody to believe that SCOTUS could reverse precedent any time it wished; guess he never learned about stare decisis in his legal education.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, the sad confluence of too many guns, abysmal parenting, refusal to acknowledge mental health issues, and a set of school personnel who failed to recognize a red flag when it was waved in front of them now counts 4 dead kids and others wounded physically and emotionally. Gotta get that kid a Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol for Christmas, though. It’s the MAGA thing to do.

Vladimir Putin, the dictator of Russia, after having a good run with Donald Trump for four years now finds an American administration that clearly has his measure as a thug and a tyrant. Turns out that he is embarrassed that the USSR fell apart and that Ukraine went its own way and he now wants it back to make his fragile ego feel better. Has anyone else noticed that dictators and would-be dictators (talking Donald Trump here) have egos of glass? Keep watching this one. It is frightening.

And of course, the multiple trolls in Congress who call themselves Republicans continue to call President Biden a communist. In fact, anyone they dislike is apparently a communist. I am sure they would dislike me and call me a communist. Delve back into the history of the extreme right and guess what you will find? Philip Jenkins, a history professor at Penn State, published his book Hoods and Shirts: The Extreme Right in Pennsylvania, 1925-1950 in 1997. The charge of communism was in the air from the extreme right, lodged against those who opposed fascism and Naziism. But underneath, what tied diverse right-wing extremists (Klan, Father Coughlin, Nazis, Fascists, Christian Front) together was antisemitism. Biden is not a communist. Marjorie Taylor Greene is not a Nazi. She and her ilk are extremists who represent the nadir of American politics. They have not won in the past. They must not win now or in the future.