https://www.marshallnewsmessenger.com/opinion/david-m-shribman-beware-the-premature-victory-lap/article_267dfc3a-e10b-11eb-bb6e-9bd3cb67ab6a.html"David M. Shribman: Beware the premature victory lap
By David M. Shribman Columnist Jul 9, 2021 Updated Jul 9, 2021 Comments
Not so fast, Joe.
Last week, President Biden spoke words that Americans have waited 16 months to hear. “We are emerging from the darkness of ... a year of pandemic and isolation, a year of pain, fear and heartbreaking loss,” he said to a country that was celebrating its national day with picnics, cookouts, fireworks displays and parades.
With growing vaccination rates and with shrinking hospitalization and death rates, the president’s remarks sounded a lot like a declaration of “Mission Accomplished.”
And that’s the danger.
The last time a president proclaimed “Mission Accomplished” was 18 years earlier, when George W. Bush stood on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, a banner with that slogan behind him, and said that “in the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”
What we have here is a potentially bad case of premature celebration.
Biden’s ardor is understandable, more so than Bush’s. The country is exhausted by COVID restrictions, and it harbors enormous pent-up demand for normal human exchanges and the resumption of the customary rituals of American life — from visits to the mall or the ballpark to holiday celebrations over the embers of a broiling grill and a watermelon sliced in half with the snap that sounds like summer.
But ...
But the Delta variant rages, huge swaths of many states remain vaccination deserts, and no one knows what a summer of day camps and outings at the lake will bring. Americans are surging — to the beach, to the ice cream counter, to the softball field. So might the virus."
----------------------------------------------
This guy saw it. Everyone and anyone with half a brain saw it. We didn't know for sure about delta but we did know for sure that we didn't know yet and anyone with the least bit of medical competence knew that we should wait to find out before throwing caution to the winds. It was still way too early to let our guard down. We knew Delta was dangerous and if we didn't know how dangerous just yet that ignorance called for continued discipline and prudence, not a victory celebration. This isn't just Monday morning quarterbacking either. This was a blatant disregard for public safety at the highest levels of our government. If the CDC was the instigator of the decision to unmask I would be very, very surprised. That decision reeks of politics and not science or health or common sense during a pandemic. It reeks of pressure from Joe Biden's puppet masters to put a win in the books before the game is even half over. Sure, we were winning but we hadn't won yet, and now we're back to losing again. Losing in so many ways. Against Covid for starters, and in Afghanistan, jobs, the supply chain, inflation, the border, and pretty much every which way Biden can manage to screw things up he is doing it big time.
Now I understand for many people Biden is your guy and you have to defend him. Believe me, I've been there so I know how tough it is to hold your own accountable, but good intentions are not enough and the results speak for themselves with one disaster after another and all of them looking to get much worse before we start seeing any movement in the right direction, movement that will never come until people can admit the mistakes that were made. The "nobody could have known" and "the decisions were made with the best information we had at the time" excuses are worn thin. People did know and shouted their warnings from the rooftops but were ignored or shouted down. And it wasn't the information that was the problem so much as the interpretation of that information by decision makers who just didn't do their jobs competently, who really look like they have no idea what they're doing but also obviously have no idea that they have no idea that they don't know what they're doing. They seem to think they are doing the best job that anybody could be expected to do under the circumstances. They believe in their own greatness so see no need to reflect or start listening to anyone else, a prime example of this undeserved inflated ego being Fauci whose massive blunders and lies have led to disaster that is only rivaled by Biden himself.