Hypocritical Politician(s) of the Year

Admirable politicians are extremely uncommon. You’re more likely to spot a leprechaun or see the Loch Ness Monster.

In general, the people who want to rule over us are a distasteful mix of narcissism and demagoguery.

But some elected officials are worse than others, which is why I created the Politician of the Year Award.

At the end of 2021, for instance, I bestowed this honor on the Pathetic Politician of the Year and the Reprehensible Politician of the Year.

We’re still very early in 2022, but there already are some politicians who deserve recognition for going above and beyond the call of duty.

Especially with regards to hypocrisy. Consider, for instance, the Governor of California and the Mayor of Los Angeles, both of whom ignore the mask mandates they want regular people to follow.

What’s especially laughable is when politicians concoct absurd excuses.

Liz Wolfe highlights a grotesque example in a column for Reason.

L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti is the latest California politician to hammer home the point that the state’s pandemic rules are just for the little people. What Gov. Gavin Newsom started, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed continued, Garcetti has perfected. He even developed the ideal face-saving line: When a photo surfaced Wednesday of Garcetti, maskless, with Lakers legend Magic Johnson at a Rams game, the mayor reassured concerned citizens that he held his breath to take the photo. …Garcetti’s comically absurd response betrays either a misunderstanding of how COVID is spread or the extent to which the rules he’s imposed, but doesn’t feel the need to follow, are largely hygiene theater.

Since we’re on the issue of mask hypocrisy, let’s include Stacey Abrams, Georgia’s Democratic nominee for governor in 2018.

She’s already famous for being a sore loser. Like Trump, she refused to accept the fact that she lost her most recent election battle.

Now she’s also famous for being a mask hypocrite, thanks to a photo of her getting special treatment in a room full of masked children.

Here are some details on the controversy, as reported by Jim Geraghty for National Review.

On February 4, Stacy Abrams visited Glennwood Elementary School in Decatur, Ga.,.. She retweeted a tweet…which featured three photos of Abrams with students and faculty. Why are all the children masked, and she is not? Why is everyone masked, and Abrams is not? On what planet does that make sense? …After those on Twitter called out this insane double-standard, Abrams deleted the tweet… But deleting the tweets doesn’t eliminate the photos from the archives, and attempting to hide what happened does not change what happened. …The school welcomed a celebrity guest and chose to suspend its masking policy for her while keeping that rule in place for everyone else. If that is so self-evidently indefensible that Abrams and the school won’t even try to defend it, then why are those policies still in place? …Abrams and the school are just playing ostrich and waiting for the controversy to go away. We keep seeing this over and over and over again — Gavin Newsom, Ralph Northam, Muriel Bowser, Joe Biden, London Breed, Jamaal Bowman — officials who enact masking rules, then ditch the masks as soon as they think no one is looking and always insist that their not wearing masks is different somehow.

There are many other pandemic hypocrites. I mocked two of them in a column in September of 2020. And then skewered several more of them in a column in November of 2020.

Now that everyone has had a chance to get vaccinated, I’m trying to figure out if the double standards are absurd or elitist? Arrogant or pathetic?

But maybe we should ask politicians. After all, they’re the experts on hypocrisy.

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Image credit: Gage Skidmore | CC BY-SA 2.0.