Let us dispel with the fiction that avoidable mass death is bad

With Josh Hawley getting too much attention in the “senator with the same voting record as Joni Ernst being getting fawning coverage as a Different Kind of Republican based on literally nothing” sweepstakes, Little Marco felt the need to pick up his game:

261,000 people and counting have officially died from COVID (with the real number almost certainly considerably higher.) 12.8 million people have contracted a serious disease that will have long-term health consequences for many people who get it. Trump’s current response to this is to play a lot of golf, and the current response of the Republican conference is to do nothing to provide relief to people and businesses being devastated by the pandemic. But yes, the negative coverage is just a massive media conspiracy to downplay all of the good news!

Leaving aside the fact that the development of vaccines has received a great deal of media coverage, again the remarkably rapid development of a vaccine makes the Republican non-response much worse. We just needed a few months of patience to suppress the virus while providing people and businesses (like those providing indoor dining and drinking, gyms, etc.) that should be closed with a financial bridge to make it through. The complete Republican failure to respond deserves much more negative press than it receives, and Rubio and his fellow Republican senators in particular are behaving reprehensibly, producing a lot of avoidable death and suffering to extract symbolic revenge on states that try to provide good services to their citizens.