'Setting aside the fact that most Republicans couldn’t pinpoint Sweden on a labeled map, right-wing pundits touting Swedish policy have achieved a new level of bad-faith data cherry-picking,' writes TheMaxBurns.
When given the choice between doing their homework and seizing an opportunity to bash Biden, Republican lawmakers followed their Trumpist operating procedure and went for spectacle over substance. Which raises an interesting question: when did the GOP start looking to Scandinavia and the lefty nations of Europe for guidance on how to manage American domestic affairs?
Conservatives might still be deeply wedded to the nativist, white supremacist origins of “America First,” but Republicans are eager to Europeanize as much of America’s COVID response as possible—as long as that doesn’t mean creating the public health system that makes those strategies possible. And that’s one of the new, Trumpified GOP’s many problems: it has long since chosen polemic over policy, and the latest pro-Trump party purge has driven out Republicans at every level who actually cared about developing realistic ideas.
Ladapo—like DeSantis and Trump and nearly every prominent Republican today—is primarily a performer. The nuts-and-bolts work of governing comes in a distant second to using official government platforms to espouse right-wing conspiracy theories that undermine America’s economic and public health recovery.
In their eagerness to give Biden a political black eye, Republicans are once again offering non-solutions that are designed to sow division and render America’s COVID safety protocols less effective. They’ll even praise Sweden, so long as it owns the libs.. The vast majority of those are self-identified conservatives who view vaccine resistance as a key marker of their political identities. To those Americans, the “Sweden model” is not designed to make our country safer from the pandemic.