Pandemic politics can make you feel sick

Weekend public-health warning to pro football fans in Massachusetts:

If you attempt to watch the Patriots-Raiders game at a restaurant bar Sunday afternoon, you may very well die – of the virus.

If, however, you go to that same bar on Monday night to watch the Ravens-Chiefs game on ESPN — no problem, none whatsoever.

The virus that will kill you at the bar Sunday will be harmless Monday, per edict of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

It’s science, you know. Metrics. Protocols. Just ask Gov. Charlie Baker.

He’s been busy talking to the “folks.” And this is what the “experts” have told him, when they weren’t cashing their six-figure state paychecks, none of which they have missed since Tall Deval sent the state spiraling downward into a new depression.

According to the governor, it remains deadly to drink at bars in restaurants until Monday. That’s when the virus will vanish, and it will be totally safe to return to your old haunts.

Here’s another amazing fact about public health from the man Joe Biden calls “Charlie Parker”:

If you go out to eat on Saturday or Sunday night with a party of more than six, you’ll have to be split up and seated at two tables, because apparently the virus will only attack groups of more than six diners.

But at midnight Monday, the COVID-19 eatery virus apparently turns into a pumpkin, or something, because tables of up to 10 will be safe – but not until after the last seating of the weekend.

“Charlie just loves killing the weekends for us,” one exasperated restaurant owner told me. “He won’t rest until every restaurant is gone.”

According to the latest estimates on MA restaurant closings, it’s 4,000 down, 14,000 to go. Give Charlie a few more months and he’ll finish them all off. After all it took him only 10 months to get the unemployment rate up from 2.8% to 17.7.

Will someone please explain to me how an activity that’s a public health hazard one day can be totally safe the next?

I also want to know, who is negotiating these truces with the virus, so that it suddenly decides to stop infecting barstools and large tables (in some, but not all cities)?

And why were slot machines in casinos in hot spots like Everett deemed to be totally safe, but until last week you couldn’t play video games in arcades in towns with zero cases?

Charlie Parker issued this latest imperious order on Wednesday, which was a day in which the state reached a “grim milestone,” or would have, if Tall Deval were a Republican. But only (real) Republicans reach “grim milestones,” so the Boston media utterly ignored the fact that the death toll in the state’s nursing homes reached 6,000 that day.

That’s 6,000 of the total 9,135 MA deaths that have occurred in nursing homes mis-regulated by Charlie’s corrupt Department of Public Health. How is that not a grim milestone?

“We want to help restaurants use their spaces more effectively,” Parker pompously announced, as if he’s done a great job with the death houses whose owners have funneled him more than $52,000 in campaign contributions.

“While bars remain closed in Massachusetts, restaurants with bar seating may now use those spaces for food service with the right distance measures in place.”

Which appears to include plexiglass to separate patrons from the bartender. In other words, pulling up a stool at your local watering hole will be like visiting an inmate in a local jail, and talking to the jailbird, through the glass, via phone.

The plexiglass, I am told, has to be eight inches above the bar.

What that means, I guess, is that you can sit at the bar (with food, of course, because food somehow repels the virus) and order a drink over ice, in a rocks glass, and the barkeep can push it under the plexiglass.

However, if you order a martini, or a pint of beer or a glass of wine, I guess the bartender will have to turn the glass on its side to get it to you.

How does Parker get away with peddling such arrant nonsense, day after day? He prattles on about how he’s trying to get rid of Bennett Walsh, the hack superintendent of the Holyoke Soldiers Home, where 76 died.

Yet no reporter asks him the obvious follow-up question:

“Governor, when will you return the $950 that that Walsh gave you after you gave him the job? And what about the $1,000 he handed to your lieutenant governor, Karyn “Pay to Play” Polito?”

Nothing to see here, folks, move along.

Here’s where we are today:

Third highest death rate in the nation, 134 per 100,000 population. Sixth worst unemployment rate in the US, after having the highest rate the preceding two months.

What exactly is Charlie Parker bragging about?

But this too shall pass. As Pay to Play Polito stammered out in Lowell:

“The places that maybe before pandemic uh were really big part of your routine, the places you looked forward to going, will get back and doing that as part of your routine even as we have to manage through the virus.”

Surely she meant to say, mismanage.

“No standing around the bar, okay?” Charlie Parker blurted out, like he’s Carrie Nation without the axe.

This election can’t come quickly enough. The 2022 election, I mean.