ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The quote is apocryphal, but now-deceased New York hotelier Leona (“Queen of Mean”) Helmsley is said to have boasted before being tried and convicted on tax-evasion charges in 1989: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”
That same sort of arrogant attitude is de rigueur today among high-profile Democrats concerning COVID-19: “Mask and vaccine mandates, crowd-size restrictions, and social distancing for thee, but not for me.”
They, too, are only for “the little people.”
From California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s maskless $350-per-person dinner for 12 at a chic Napa Valley restaurant to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot getting a haircut while telling others that “getting your roots done is not essential” with salons under lockdown to D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s reimposition of COVID-19 restrictions, but conveniently not until the morning after her birthday party, Democratic politicians seem to delight in rubbing the noses of “the little people” in it by flouting the very rules they advocate for and impose on them, supposedly for their own good.
That double standard was on full display again, in the most blatant instance yet, Saturday on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where former President Barack Obama feted himself with a spare-no-expenses belated 60th birthday party. (He actually turned 60 three days earlier, on Aug. 4.)
When news of plans for Mr. Obama’s self-indulgent “Big 6-0” bash broke the weekend before, it caused even some of the ex-president’s sycophants in the mainstream media to “tut-tut” and “tsk-tsk.” But the eye-rolling was less because the event ran the risk of being branded a coronavirus “superspreader” than because of how bad the optics were of a gigantic party attended by 475 of his “closest friends,” including numerous “A-List” Hollywood celebrities and the 200-odd servers hired to wait on them hand and foot.
The optics of the extravaganza at Mr. Obama’s palatial $12 million, 29-acre estate in a toney island community off Cape Cod were made worse in light of Democrats such as New York Mayor Bill de Blasio now either unilaterally reimposing or advocating reimposing COVID-19 restrictions on the rest of us.
Taken aback by the criticism, Mr. Obama promised a “trimmed down” guest list of “close family and friends” to make it a more “intimate” event. But the massive tents set up on the Obamas’ oceanfront property Saturday night showed that clearly didn’t happen. So did the presence of A-Listers like John Legend and Chrissy Teigen, Beyonce and Jay-Z, Gayle King, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Stephen Colbert, and Steven Spielberg, most of whom likely arrived aboard private jets, greenhouse gases notwithstanding.
The Daily Mail reported that the soiree “began around sunset and lasted until the small hours of the morning” and that “[t]he former president was caught on video dancing, maskless.” The DailyMail.com ran dozens of photos from the event, most of them showing the guests unmasked.
“It’s hypocrisy at its finest and shows they don’t believe what they are saying [about COVID-19],” Republican consultant Ryan James Girdusky told The New York Post.
Mr. Obama has done phenomenally well financially for a onetime community organizer, and it would be no one’s business how lavishly he celebrated his 60th birthday were it not for his and his party’s coronavirus finger-wagging.
But their flagrant nose-thumbing contributes to understandable resentment and public resistance to efforts to reimpose widespread masking and other COVID-19 restrictions against the delta variant.
It seems that, for Democrats, gaslighting has become the new leading-by-example.
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