Coronavirus

Hysteria, thy name is Biden. Or maybe it’s Walensky, named for Dr Rochelle Walensky, aspiring soap opera star and newly appointed director of the Centers for Disease Cons. Maybe that’s not quite right, but I am sure the acronym is CDC and I am just as sure that the politicized directive pouring out of its offices count as some sort of hoax or con game. Did you catch her performance the other day? It was extraordinary. There she was, fighting back tears, telling her captive audience that she was 'scared’, warning of 'impending doom’, a 'fourth wave’ if the entire populace of the United States did not grab their masks to cower under their socially-distanced beds until further notice. It’s amazing how surreal reality TV can be.

The dim reaper is at it again. We need, President Biden tells us, to wear masks forever, to avoid ‘more cases and more desks...deaths...look...’ Look, fat: the number of desks has fallen in Texas and Florida, where mask-wearing in public is optional, while desks are rising in New York and New Jersey, where mask-wearing in public is required. It looks like COVID-19 works just like public-school teachers: differently in red states and blue ones. Biden uses the phrase ‘mask mandate’ like it’s already been approved, in the way that voters grant a mandate to an elected authority. But it hasn’t been voted for or approved. It’s a proposal from a president who parrots whatever the CDC tell him. It’s up to the state governors to approve or disapprove his suggestion.

Over the weekend, the two-hundred-and-forty-second woman to accuse Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment came forward. That number is no less true for being inaccurate. It seems you can’t open a newspaper these days without reading about some horrible Cuomo come-on at an Albany Christmas party or a Manhattan cocktail hour. How’s it going for Democrats seeking a left-wing foil to Donald Trump? They seem to have gotten all of the vices with none of the humor. Of course, Cuomo deserves his due process like everyone else. But the accusations do seem credible and certainly fit with his hard-charging bull-in-a-bodega persona. There’s also the matter of the governor’s other scandal, which has been swept under the rug despite it involving the mass death of old people.

If your facts don’t care about my feelings, then my feelings aren’t obliged to care about your facts. The facts in Joe Biden’s energetic, inspiring and exhilarating address to the nation last night were frequently as unsteady as the speaker. But the feelings that Biden expressed were, unlike the previous president who must not be named, unimpeachable. He knows how it feels, he said with that now-customary surge of anger, as if he’s not fully in control of his frontal cortex. And we know how it feels when someone says they know how we feel. Consider everything fixed: COVID, racism, opioids, deficits, the collapse of the schools, the children at the border. The Therapeute-in-Chief is here, dispensing serotonin the way Barack Obama dispensed drone strikes.

Even in the quick-as-a-wink world of democratic politics, where calculations change at slot-machine speed, you can feel major moments growling and growing. You don’t know precisely where things and events are going. You just know they are going. We're in one of those moments now, with Texas and its 29 million people poised to move out of the heavy shadow of government control over their lives and movements as we head towards what we must hope is the late stages of this so-called 'war' against COVID-19. On Tuesday March 2 — otherwise known as Texas Independence Day, when Lone Star flags decorate staves everywhere, honoring Texas’ successful struggle in 1836 for freedom from Mexico — Gov. Greg Abbott announced he was letting life return to normal.

It has been months since Congress passed the last COVID-19 relief package, and as DC hurtles toward its Christmas holiday, the prospect of another legislative effort is still bedeviling Capitol Hill.That we are here at all reflects a divergence from the lawmaking consensus that saw three phases of major COVID-19 legislation pass in March — including the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, which constitutes the largest economic response legislation passed in US history. At that time, there was general bipartisan agreement that it was necessary; that the lives of Americans were being consumed by a crisis not of their own making, and one that was putting the livelihoods of small businesses and families at risk. (That didn’t stop the bill from being stuffed with unrelated pork, however.