When Will Biden Apologize For His ‘Neanderthal’ Smear?

More than two months ago, President Joe Biden, using a slur a Republican could never get away with, criticized the decisions by red state governors to lift mask-wearing mandates and reopen. He not only insulted the people of those states, he was wrong. So where’s his apology?

On March 2, Texas Gov. Greg Abbot and Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, both Republicans, not only lifted their states’ mask rules, they also killed business capacity limits. The next day, Biden, who seems to be as devoted to his mask as an infant is to a pacifier, felt it appropriate to compare Texans and Mississippians to cavemen.

“The last thing – the last thing – we need is the Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything’s fine, take off your mask,” said Biden, whose cerebral activity has failed to live up to his lifetime of flap-jawed bragging about his intelligence.

Unwilling to let an opportunity pass by without showing the world just how righteous they are, a number of “stars” offered their professional opinions. George Takei called the restoration of freedom “criminal, a racist death sentence for so many who could have been spared.” Bradley Whitford tweeted that “the @GOP is a death cult.” The news even made one “expert” want to “vomit so bad.” 

Like those celebrities, today’s Democrats and their media collaborators are convinced they are intellectually and morally superior to those who don’t agree with them. So it’s part of their routine preening to insult the inhabitants of the red states, and those who think similarly but are behind the blue state wall. And there’s been no better vehicle than the pandemic for them to show the rest of us that they’re just better than we are.

In April of last year, for instance, the Washington Post published an op-ed by columnist Dana Milbank with the headline “Georgia leads the race to become America’s No. 1 Death Destination” after GOP Gov. Brian Kemp allowed private businesses to reopen. A few months later, the ever-sneering Paul Krugman tweeted that “Reality is coming for white supremacists driving golf carts,” linking to a Bloomberg story about the “COVID-19 surge” in red Florida that was beginning to reach “older, more vulnerable” residents. It was an obvious shot at the Republican state and its GOP governor, who has been a target of the Democrat-media machine throughout the pandemic because of his less-than-tyrannical policies.

This better-than-thou vanity was not warranted last year, nor was it when Biden handed down his judgment two months ago about Texas and Mississippi from on high. Consider the facts:

• When Biden made his media-approved statement, the seven-day moving average of new cases in Texas was 7,088, according to the most recent federal data available. As of Sunday, that average had fallen to 2,215.
• Texas’ seven-day moving average for virus fatalities on March 3 was 116. That number had fallen to 41 on Sunday. (That number comes a month after the Texas Rangers began playing before the largest average crowds in baseball and the Houston Astros before the third-largest average crowds in the majors).
• In Mississippi, the seven-day moving average for new cases has fallen from 477 to 182, and from 21 for deaths to one over the same period.
• Despite Milbank’s prediction of mass death, the virus didn’t “burn through Georgia like nothing has since William Tecumseh Sherman.” The seven-day average for deaths was 42 on April 21, the day his rant was posted. By Sunday it had fallen to 22. In between, the state went through some tough times. But its numbers closely followed the national trend, never becoming the outlier the fearmongers swore that it would.
• Florida daily cases topped at 17,568 (seven-day moving average) on Jan. 8, right in the teeth of the flu season, and now are at 3,786. Daily deaths spiked at about 190 (seven-day moving average) in both early August and late January, and are now at 66.

Now let’s compare these numbers to those in a mandated self-suffocation state such as, say, California, where for many mask-wearing is an opening for virtue signaling, and which was praised as a model showing how to beat the coronavirus before the virus spread like one of the state’s predatory wildfires. The seven-day average for daily cases was about 44,000 a few days before Christmas, an all-time high in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s workers’ paradise, while the running average for daily deaths peaked at 565 in late January. Current numbers are 1,723 for new cases, 68 for deaths.

The policymaking lesson is that “Neanderthal thinking” performed no worse, and in some cases better, than the “enlightened” thinking that gave us the masked-up, locked-down states. Not that the Democrats and their spokesmen in the media will ever admit it. Nor will they ever act responsibly and civilly, and issue apologies for the mocking ridicule they so proudly dished out.

But maybe something good will come from all this. Rather than outfit the fully vaccinated Biden with a mask for public appearances, his handlers will instead put a muzzle on him.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board