What has been a pathetic spin tour for the past couple of weeks has just been revealed to be even more pathetic. Governor Gretchen Whitmer has, in the span of one year, seen her political fortunes rise like a comet to only then switch to a meteoric descent. The once short-listed VP prospect (correct gender but wrong race, alas) has of late been coming under fire, and now the gas is about to be turned up.
As the nation is getting vaccinated and both Covid caseloads and deaths are plummeting there is a paradox taking place in Michigan. There the state is experiencing a spike in cases in recent weeks, with the latest report on April 19showing yet more being recorded. This has led to the spotlight becoming more of an interrogator’s lamp bearing down on her. Whitmer has provided answers to those asking for explanations -- it is everyone else’s fault. Her image was even polished last week by Andrea Mitchell, striving to lay the blame at the feet of others.
For the better part of this month, she has laid the blame on the rising totals on the courts blocking her, the state legislature fighting her, and then she made the oddest declaration -- The Sunshine State was to blame. Gretchen tried to say that spring breakers visiting that den of iniquitous freedom, Florida, were catching the virus and spreading it in her state. Of course, in order for this to hold up, Florida itself would have to be a roiling petri dish of cases, except the opposite is happening. Cases have been dropping for months, and the daily death figure recently fell to a single digit.
Now Whitmer has completely injected herself in the aorta. After making a Sunday appearance on Meet The Press, where she again said she has been hampered from being effective, and that dire state to the south was seeding her cases, news has come out that Whitmer has recently traveled to that very viral hot zone.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer traveled to Florida more than a month ago to visit her chronically ill father, her office said Monday. News of Whitmer's trip south, first reported by the Lansing newsletter Michigan Information & Research Service, brought new charges of hypocrisy from Republican critics.
This is horrendous from an optics standpoint, but it is only made worse that two other state officials had made similar trips as well. The state’s director of the Department of Health and Human Services traveled to the Gulf Coast, unvaccinated, as they were warning citizens not to travel. Also, the Governor’s Chief Executive officer made a family trip to Florida for Spring Break, just as Whitmer was attempting to sell that very activity as the cause of their outbreak. Now we learn that Gretchen herself has defied her own orders, and doing so while involving her attempted target of blame.
This is the governor who has routinely imposed lockdowns which have had no beneficial result, has instituted near 200 executives orders to clamp down on citizens, and while she blames political opponents for blocking her efforts she is managing to install new protocols, while most of the old ones remain in place. The reality of this is that Governor Whitmer is willing to look anywhere in order to cast blame, except in the mirror.
If she thought people were going to stop listening to her and to her commands she is about to find out that is only going to become worse, no that it has been revealed that she does not even follow her own directions.
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