Long-term covidiocy and other new political diseases

A long, long WaPo opinion piece discusses how the radical right GOP House leadership is doing as the radicals begin their witch hunts with its attendant festival of partisan crackpottery. At this point, it is insane to think that most of the Republican Party in congress is sane. Most of those people are truly nuts. Columnist Dana Milbank writes:

The pandemic has faded, but one of the least understood effects of the virus still eludes treatment: There is no known cure for long covidiocy.

Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) kicked off with the unsupported allegation that “covid was intentionally released” from a Chinese lab because “it would be impossible for the virus to be accidentally leaked.”

Rep. Richard McCormick (R-Ga.) advanced the ball by informing the panel that coronavirus booster shots “do more harm than good.”

And then Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) scored with this extraordinary medical discovery: “Researchers found that the vaccinated are at least twice as likely to be infected with covid as the unvaccinated and those with natural immunity.”

Vaccines make you more likely to get covid! Thank you, Dr. Jewish Space Lasers.

Another witness, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University (also a Fox News regular, on matters medical and nonmedical), had called coronavirus testing “actively harmful” and warned about “great harm” and “danger” from vaccination.

Makary, mocking “King Fauci,” claimed that “the greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic has been the United States government.” Bhattacharya repeatedly complained that they had been “censored,” “marginalized” and “slandered” by public health “dictators.”

And then there are leaders such as James Comer. The Kentucky Republican, chairman of the House Oversight Committee (which includes the covid select subcommittee), has shown himself to be a bear of very little brain.

Last week, he sent a letter to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg about the Ohio train derailment in which he referred to “DOT’s National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)” and demanded of Buttigieg “all documents and communications regarding NTSB’s progress on the cause of the derailment.”

Buttigieg responded by saying he was “alarmed to learn that the chair of the House Oversight Committee thinks that the NTSB is part of our department. NTSB is independent (and with good reason).”

Comer, on Fox News, claimed it was “a typo” — a 19-word typo, it would seem.  

Last month, Rep. Jim Jordan’s Judiciary Committee featured as a witness a man who is part of the far-right “constitutional sheriff” movement. Constitutional sheriffs — an outgrowth of the white-nationalist posse comitatus movement — claim they are above federal and state government and are the ultimate arbiters of the law. The nonprofit Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting found that the witness, Cochise County Sheriff Mark Dannels, spoke at a constitutional-sheriff’s event and supports allowing sheriffs to nullify laws.  

Then, it was the House Homeland Security Committee’s turn for some extremism. It hosted as a witness Pinal County, Ariz., Sheriff Mark Lamb — another constitutional sheriff. Though eschewing the term, Lamb is the “frontman” for one constitutional-sheriff group, has spoken to a second and also supports nullification, AZCIR reports. A booster of the “Stop the Steal” rally (he called the Jan. 6 rioters “very loving, Christian people”) and anti-vaxxer movements (he refused to enforce the stay-at-home orders of Arizona’s Republican governor), he responded to the Black Lives Matter movement by creating a “Citizens Posse” of residents to be deputized at Lamb’s pleasure.

Little more than a week before he came to Washington, Lamb spoke at a Second Amendment rally attended by Oathkeepers, Proud Boys and other extremists. He teased a Senate run and took photos with a few Proud Boys.

And there he was, just 10 days later, at the witness table in the Homeland Security Committee’s hearing room. Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) hailed Lamb’s “essential role in defending our nation’s homeland.”

This is precisely how Republican lawmakers bring dangerous extremists into the mainstream.

Milbank’s opinion did point out that one Republican committee chairman, Mike Gallagher (R-WI), is acting professionally and seriously. Gallagher is in charge of the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Milbank writes that this committee “is everything the covid committee isn’t: bipartisan, serious and productive.” That's good, because the issue of China urgently needs to be dealt with seriously and competently. Unfortunately, so do a slew of other important issues, e.g., climate change and defense of democracy, but that is just not going to happen.

On balance, it is reasonable to expect mostly partisan witch hunting, political disease like covidiocy and radical right anti-democracy crackpottery, with far too little seriousness or competence from the radical right in congress. 

Pew Research 2022 data