On the front page of today’s Houston Chronicle was the headline above, with the subhead: “Officials ask feds to set up field hospital in the Valley”.
Here are the first three paragraphs of the story about this huge turnabout (or in Republican-speak “betrayal”) by Gov. Abbott:
Gov. Greg Abbott called on police across Texas to step up enforcement of his mask order amid the mounting pandemic, explaining Friday that they can either “be part of the problem or part of the solution.”
Facing a revolt within his own party, the Republican governor tried again to sell the measure, acknowledging that face coverings can be inconvenient but saying that the alternative of locking down the state again is far worse. The state on Friday reported 10,002 COVID-19 hospitalizations, almost twice as many as two weeks ago and seven times the total on Memorial Day.
Also Friday, Texas officials asked the federal government to set up an emergency field hospital in the Rio Grande Valley, where coronavirus patients are beginning to overrun the capacities of hospitals and ICUs.
When you see a Republican Governor of Texas order the police to actually enforce his mask order, and not rely on all of us darling Texans to do this voluntarily out of the goodness of our heart and the basic consideration of others (good luck with that in the redder parts of Texas), you know coronavirus in Texas is getting to be on the order of a Biblical plague.
Of course this order is generating outrage about “freedum” in the redder counties of Texas. And I expect more than a few of our redder (and concealed carry) Texans will not quietly acquiesce when a police officer asks them to mask up. We’ll see this how goes down, but it does show exactly how bad (and getting worse) the coronavirus situation is here in Texas.
Abbott is not up for re-election until 2022, and is obviously hoping that the Republican voters here in Texas will have the memory of a goldfish by then. We shall see, we shall see. I wouldn’t be surprised if our Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (who is an even bigger RW nut job) tries to challenge or take out Abbott in that Governor’s race in 2022. Patrick would love to be President someday, which would be a bigger disaster than Trump—Patrick is as evil and ideological as Trump, but a lot smarter than Trump (for a Republican), and so even more dangerous.