Los Angeles Times Opinion•July 31, 2020
\Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) with his bandana around his neck during a House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday. (Matt McClain/ Associated Press)There are no intelligent grounds for rejecting masks. They’re simple and cheap, and they protect humans against a vicious disease that has caused more than 660,000 deaths across the world.
Refusing to wear a mask is like supporting the fire against the fire department. It’s like openly sneezing into a packed elevator. It’s stupid. It’s also kind of disgusting.
But that didn’t stop Herman Cain — the accomplished businessman and onetime presidential hopeful, who died of COVID-19 on Wednesday — from rejecting masks. Before he headed to President Trump’s June rally in Tulsa, Okla.,he tweeted jubilantly that “masks will not be mandatory for the event” because “PEOPLE ARE FED UP!”And the stupidity of refusing to mask up did not stop Texas Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert from appearing bare-faced around the Capitol recently. This kind of infantile rebellion is pathetic.
On Capitol Hill on Tuesday, when the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony by Atty. Gen. William Barr, some reluctant maskers had to be reminded by the committee chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), to keep their masks on. Though Gohmert insisted he wasn’t among those admonished by the chair, he could be seen maskless intermittently during the hearing, and a video surfaced that showed him, along with Barr, entering the hearing room without masks.
Now it turns out that Gohmert is infected. In advance of a planned trip to Texas with President Trump on Wednesday, Gohmert took a test: Positive. He wasn't allowed on the plane.
This is bad news. Gohmert is the 11th known member Congress to contract the coronavirus. The others are all Republicans, except for Rep. Ben McAdams (D-Utah).
Trump’s national security advisor, Robert O'Brien, also came up positive this week. O’Brien joins a long list of White House and W.H.-adjacent personnel who have contracted the virus, including a cafeteria employee, a personal assistant to Ivanka Trump, members of the Secret Service, a military aide to the president, Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is the consort of Donald Trump Jr. and a high-profile member of Trump’s reelection campaign.
Gohmert appears to be uniquely uninformed about the pandemic — and indifferent to his own health. Of his diagnosis, Gohmert told Texas television station KETK, "I can't help but wonder if by keeping a mask on and keeping it in place, I might have put some germs — some virus — onto the mask and breathed it in," Gohmert said.
So Gohmert gave himself COVID-19 because he already had it. How is this person a member of Congress?
Gohmert is at least consistent with his idiocy. In early March, a slate of conservative lawmakers, including Gohmert, was exposed to an infected person at a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference. The event provided its own kind of contact tracing, and a passel of Trumpite luminaries, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chose to quarantine out of what Cruz at the time called “an abundance of caution.”
But not Gohmert. He opted for a dearth of caution. He “took no action,” in the language of a GovTrack report charting COVID-19 in Congress.
Since then, Gohmert claims he has been getting tested regularly, and he has been seen occasionally wearing a bandana. He seems to have gotten swabbed Wednesday chiefly because the president requires a clean bill of health for anyone who comes near him. Trump, of course, nearly always forgoes a mask. (Trump also claimed Tuesday that most of America is “corona-free.” Yeah, no.)
Gohmert reported in a video on his website that he was first given the “quick test” for what he, like many anti-Asian bigots, calls the “Wuhan virus.” When that came back positive, he was retested with “the swab that goes way up in your sinuses” (In fact, it goes in the cavity between the nose and the mouth). It too was positive.
Ordinary Americans, of course, don’t get such speedy results. We’re stuck with our country’s non-testing non-program, which, as Bill Gates told CNBC on Wednesday, is a "complete waste" because results take too long. It's nearly useless as a public — or personal — health measure.
Which is why the majority of Americans don’t get cute with the pandemic. We’re wearing masks and observing social distancing, whatever our politics.
The Republican leadership that appears to be on tilt must bewilder their constituents. Most of the members of Congress who have suffered with the virus — and all whom are anti-mask — come from currently hard-hit red states. Gohmert’s state of Texas, though it has shown some signs of improvement, recorded 8,800 new confirmed cases on Thursday.
That anyone plays down the importance of masks is disturbing. But it’s staggering that denialism comes from people in high places. How hard can it be: Stay clean and healthy, and keep your snot, saliva and other excretions to yourself. Do anti-maskers like Gohmert also reject soap and toilet paper?
At this stage in the coronavirus lottery, the rejection of masks expresses nothing so much as a death wish, which makes it not just irrational but unusual. Most of us want to stay alive as long as possible. Common to all animals, this baseline preference for life over death is nonpartisan, non-ideological, noncontroversial.
Here’s wishing Gohmert a speedy recovery — of both his health and his senses.
@page88
The tragic consequences of anti-mask paranoia
July 30, 2020
Ryan Cooper
Herman Cain, the former pizza mogul and brief frontrunner in the 2012 Republican presidential primary, has died of COVID-19. It is not known for sure where he contracted the virus, but he came down with symptoms nine days after attending President Trump's campaign rally in Tulsa on June 20, and posted a picture online of himself there in a group of people without masks.
Here’s just a few of the #BlackVoicesForTrump at tonight’s rally! Having a fantastic time!#TulsaRally2020 #Trumptulsa #TulsaTrumprally #MAGA #Trump2020 #Trump2020Landslide pic.twitter.com/27mUzkg7kL
— Herman Cain (@THEHermanCain) June 20, 2020
In other news, Bill Montgomery, the 80-year-old co-founder of the conservative student group Turning Point USA, has also died of COVID-19. It has not been reported where he might have come down with the virus, but the other founder of TPUSA, Charlie Kirk, has repeatedly spread misinformation about the pandemic in general and masks in particular. On Kirk's podcast last weekend, he stated he refuses to wear a mask, and falsely suggested that doing so might make you sicker. The official TPUSA Twitter account deleted a tweet mocking mask-wearing after Montgomery's death.
The whole conservative movement has been trying to deny, downplay, and disregard this pandemic from the start. The resulting collateral damage now includes several prominent figures in their own ranks. But even that might not be enough to convince them to shift direction — 66-year-old Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Tex.) recently tested positive, but he suggested on TV that it might have been from wearing a mask. Ryan Cooper
Jim Jordan explodes when asked to put on a mask, pivots to 'unmasking' of Michael FlynnKathryn Krawczyk,
The Week•July 29, 2020
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has successfully twisted a public health concern into a conservative conspiracy theory — but not the one of the dozens of COVID-19 conspiracies one might expect.
During a Wednesday hearing with the country's four biggest technology companies, Jordan used his questioning time to claim Google tried to help Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-Penn.) was up next, and started her questioning by saying she would pivot from "fringe conspiracy theories" to anti-trust questions. Chaos predictably ensued.
"We have the email, there is no fringe—" Jordan interrupted before committee chair Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) cut him off. "Put your mask on," Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) chimed in. Jordan then used Raskin's request to pivot to a favorite conspiracy: "You want to talk about masks? Why would the deputy secretary of the treasury unmask Michael Flynn's name?"
"Put your mask on!"
Shouting breaks out among members of the House subcommittee during tech hearing, after Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon suggests Rep. Jim Jordan is pushing "fringe conspiracy theories" https://t.co/83sKht0bRx pic.twitter.com/E6fEZKT6tO
— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 29, 2020
Jordan's outburst came just hours after Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) tested positive for COVID-19 and then walked around the House office building knowing he had it. Jordan was also reminded, albeit more gently, to put on his mask during a Tuesday hearing with Attorney General William Barr. Gohmert was also at that hearing, and one of his aides — and other Republican staffers — have since anonymously complained about the lack of mask compliance among their congressmembers.
Ever since PM came out, Ive gotten a flood of emails from republican staffers who say they too are being forced to come to the hill without a mask now.
If you’re one of those people, email me or dm me.
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) July 29, 2020
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