Two Vignettes Of The Morning After

According to The Daily Wire,

On Tuesday night, President Biden and his wife Jill, both of whom are triple-vaccinated, took a walk on a deserted Rehoboth Beach with their German Shepherd puppy during their Delaware vacation, but despite the fact there was reportedly no one within 10 yards, still refused to take their masks off. Last July, Biden insisted, “Don’t have to mask if you come home to Delaware with me.”

“The President, 79, even continued to wear his mask after the First Lady, 70, took hers off. It’s not clear who Biden believed he was protecting or who he felt he needed protection from as the only other people on the beach, the secret service, didn’t come within 10 yards,” The Daily Mail noted.

A few days earlier,

A pre-Christmas flight got dicey when a woman now dubbed ‘Airline Karen’ got into an altercation with another passenger.

The ATL Uncensored Twitter account posted a nearly two-minute video of a woman standing with her mask down below her chin while on Flight 2790 from Tampa, Florida on Dec. 23. The woman repeatedly tells an older male passenger who is seated to put his mask on.

. . . "Sit down, Karen. You’re a god—- Karen, sit down,” the man fires, to the vocal amusement of other passengers. The back-and-forth continues as flight attendants attempt to defuse the situation.

When the man calls her a “b—-“, Cornwall strikes him in the face and continues attempting to attack him as an attendant holds her back and the man yells, “That’s assault, now you’re going to jail!”

According to the UK Daily Mail,

The former Baywatch actress dubbed 'Delta Karen' for punching an 80-year-old man in the face on a Tampa-to-Atlanta flight, threatened to kill her mother and stepfather and kidnap their children, court documents claim.

Patty Cornwall's stepfather filed a restraining order against her in July 2020 claiming she made the threats while living at their house.

. . . Spoeri claimed his stepdaughter, who has now been released on bail following Thursday's air rage incident, had already been detained two or three times before by the authorities for mental health reasons.

So far, nobody has juxtaposed these two episodes, and I'm not sure why. In the case of the Delta Karen, an 80-year-old man stands up to a domineering, entitled, unstable woman "to the vocal amusement of other passengers". On the Rehoboth beach, a 79-year-old man, apparently fearing a similar reaction from entitled and unstable Karens in tne elites, performs an act of supererogation in continuing to wear his mask beyond even the most prudential exhortations of the public health authorities.

President Brandon is not, ever, going to say, "Sit down, Karen!" to the vocal amusement of anyone. Indeed, as I anticipated, he backtracked on Monday's assertion that there was no "federal solution" to COVID. But this leads me to a pearl-clutching analysis of the "Let's go, Brandon" phonomenon I ran into this morning:

When a caller used that expression to President Joe Biden's face during a livestream on Christmas Eve, it prompted widespread cheers on the right.

This is bad, and for multiple reasons. It's bad to spew vulgarity in public spaces, whether or not it's concealed by a modestly clever slogan. But it's worse to teach other Americans, especially children, that it's acceptable to practice politics by hurling insults at those on the other side of partisan disagreements.

. . . "Let's go, Brandon!" [doesn't] assert a fact or claim that could be argued about or disputed. However much you may disagree with the assertion, it's possible on principle to marshal evidence for and against the claim that Biden is a socialist, or a crook, or that he stole the 2020 election. But that's not what these slogans are about. They are insults intended to dishonor and offend the president and the 81 million or so Americans who voted for him. That makes them inimical to reason and deliberation. They express anger, and their aim is to provoke it in return. They are roughly equivalent to telling your neighbor to go to hell.

They are also roughly equivalent to telling your neighbor, "Sit down, Karen!" Or for that matter, the vulgarism behind "Let's go, Brandon!" is almost exactly the same as Churchill's V gesture, which does not actually mean "Victory".

This isn't the high school debate team. At this point, the national mood is calling for more people to tell the Karens to sit down.