This weekend the conservative interwebs went hard after President Obama’s birthday bash in Martha’s Vineyard.
All kinds of smarmy snark was thrown out on social media. With grainy pictures attached—usually one with a fuzzy outline of Obama himself circled in red, a list of celebrities who attended was also included.
Some reports claimed to know pertinent facts like how late the party went, the menu of choice and notes of who was paired up.
The point of all of it was to point out how awful it was for the elitist former President and his entitled clan to host a party of large numbers (several hundred,) and to do so without wearing a single mask.
Conservative Twitter and Instagram weren’t inaccurate in drawing the observation, but there is a much better point to be made than merely pointing out Obama's stark hypocrisy.
And it is hypocrisy.
Almost everything the left does usually is.
After two straight weeks of preaching the dangers of the Delta variant and the “exploding” new infection numbers of CoVid19, parroted by the media at every turn, Biden and the Blue state governors are trying to tip the nation’s psychological scales into fear-porning America back into a late summer lockdown.
(This column has discussed in detail over the last few weeks their reasons why they need to do so: their policies are deeply unpopular, election audits and reforms are real, and they are beginning the final stretches of the prep for the 2022 campaign.)
But the Obama birthday retreat for the elites, is actually evidence for the greater debate.
For the day of Obama’s gathering—the state that held it—would go on to record zero new infections and deaths related to CoVid19. (According to the New York Times.)
For that same 24 hour period the nation as a whole would record 206 deaths total where CoVid19 was present in the person who died.
By comparison 1600+ Americans die each day of cancer, 2300+ die of heart disease, roughly 900 die per day of hospital infections (something you did not have when you checked in,) and 400+ will die of stroke on an average day.
Those causes added up equals slightly more deaths (212) per hour, than the nation lost to CoVid19 on the entire day of Obama’s party.
For the same time period more than 30 US States and territories recorded no CoVid19 related deaths of any kind.
One other contrasting point that demands notice: on May 14th when the CDC lifted its national mask guidance the average number of CoVid19 deaths was 549 per day.
On July 30th—the day *President Biden and the CDC reinstated the mask guidance; the number was 296.
The day of Obama’s birthday bash was 206.
The Delta variant has made some trouble for the truly non-immune, but it is not ripping through the nation like the original variant did.
350 million doses of vaccine, 165 million partially vaccinated people, and 34.4 million formerly infected persons that have fully recovered are preventing the virus from doing what it otherwise would like to.
The mask guidance (now turning into mandates in some places) is laughable.
And former President Obama gave us the perfect talking point as to why we should move on with life.
Because… we can!