April 30, 2020--Who Was that Masked Man?

Masked Man?  Clearly not Mike Pence. 

He was maskless at the Mayo Clinic the other day when he and a delegation of Trump administration officials visited to thank doctors for their work on combating the virus.

The Mayo has a firm policy that anyone working there or visiting MUST wear a mask. When Pence showed up without one and declined to use one his hosts offered to provide, they pressed him and he continued to demure, asserting that the masks are to protect people from spreading the virus and since he is not infected (he claimed to be tested "regularly") he didn't need to wear one.  

And didn't. 

His hosts were gracious enough not to turn him away, as I would have.

What conceit, what arrogance. Or was it vanity--that he didn't want to mess up his $500 haircut?

Wondering about this, a panel of guests on Morning Joe Wednesday, searched for an explanation about why Pence insisted on going without a mask.

They came up with all sots of complicated speculation while a simple one was obvious.

It is not just because the person he is making a career out of sucking up to, Trump, also refuses to wear one. Though they both insist on never being seen with one.

Let me suggest a stretch of a comparison to how President Franklin Roosevelt, who was paralyzed from the waist down from polio, did all he could never to reveal the steel braces he needed to wear on his legs.

Doing so was political--FDR wanted to project strength and thus this "cover up."

The last thing Pence and Trump want is to appear fallible. And they do not want to remind voters that there are complicitous in the spread of the coronavirus. Their agenda is to deny its reality and obscure their series of policies that have it much worse, much deadlier.

Wearing a mask would underscore that the pandemic is still very much with us and until and before there are effective treatments, including vaccinations, they are desperate to vamp their way though the crisis by using theatrics, distortions, and lies to cover up their failures.

For them, business as usual.

As Jared Kushner just said, It's a "great success story."