RUTHFULLY YOURS

Once upon a time, Jennifer Rubin was an intelligent woman. Things started to go downhill when she went to work for the Washington Post, but what really flipped the switch in her brain was seeing Donald Trump become president. Not only did she lose perspective, but she also lost intelligence, self-restraint, and decency. Her latest flight of NeverTrump nastiness has her speculate about possible Republican deaths during a time of coronavirus. Her speculation not only reveals an even further degradation of mind and soul, but she’s got things entirely bass-ackwards wrong – and a couple of maps prove it.

Maybe the seeds of Rubin’s decay were always there, considering that she attended U.C. Berkeley both as an undergraduate and at law school. Her downslide might also have come from spending twenty years in Hollywood, working as a Labor and Employment lawyer in Hollywood.

Or perhaps the problem was when she moved with her family to Virginia and started writing for The Weekly Standard and Commentary magazine. Her work there was excellent during the Bush and Obama years when these magazines were conservative stalwarts. As you may recall, though, both magazines went all-in for NeverTrumpism, which eventually killed The Weekly Standard.

By the time The Weekly Standard died, though, Rubin had already moved on to the Washington Post, ostensibly as a “conservative” commentator. At that point, the years at Berkeley, in Hollywood, and at two cocktail-party-circuit “conservative” magazines had already started to catch up with her. By the time Donald Trump came along, the term “conservative” when attached to her name was a misnomer. As with Bill Kristol, her hatred for Trump caused a seismic shift in her political ideology. Rubin’s fanatic hatred for Trump is such that she’d rather embrace a hard-left platform (for there’s little real difference between Bernie’s agenda and Biden’s other than the speed of change) than see Trump in the White House.

One can be wrong, of course, but not be evil. Coronavirus, though, has brought had the true nastiness that underlies Rubin’s character:

What’s ironic about Rubin’s mean-spirited conclusion that Republicans will die is that the disease’s spread belies it. Remember that coronavirus is a disease of proximity, and that the Democrat Party is essentially an urban party, where people are jammed cheek by jowl into the same places. It’s also a party that facilitates homelessness and enables filth and drug use; encourages reusable shopping bags that are disease vectors; and wants to pack people into densely-populated high rise buildings and public transportation. With that in mind, you’ll notice a similarity between the two maps below.

The first map is a screenshot from the New York Times’s coronavirus page. It shows reported cases, with the larger circles identifying higher numbers of cases:

The second map is a screenshot of a Time 2016 election map showing the proportional winner’s vote total in each county:

The two maps look remarkably similar.

Republicans are not blind to the fact that the coronavirus is a nasty disease that must be respected. However, they know a few other things too:

They know that the Democrats and their media hacks are using coronavirus to destroy Trump’s presidency, in contrast to their placidity about the H1N1 problem during Obama’s presidency, when many more people took ill and died. They know that the Democrats are trying to use emergency legislation to push through their political agenda. And they know that, living as they do in more wide-open spaces, they’re less at risk than people packed into filthy Democrat-run cities.

What this means is that Republicans, unlike Democrats, are not running around like Chicken Little, screaming that “We’re all going to die.” They believe in American strength, modern science, and the power of the free market. They know that those countries hardest hit – China, Italy, and Iran – have socialized medicine, aged populations, bad pollution, and widespread cigarette smoking.

And being decent people, rather than gloating that people in Trump-hating cities appear to be most at risk, they know that we Americans are in this together and wish them well in this time of fear and sickness.