Dang liberal virus …

Fear of this virus is a liberal Democratic conspiracy. Conservative Republicans sneer at such media hype and mind control.

So-called evangelical Christians, a conservative Republican mainstay, are threatening in the Conway area to lick floors to prove their defiance of this little bug. They put their faith in the Lord, not man, not even Donald Trump, though he’s the greatest man.

They admire Trump for resisting this herd-the-masses socialist manipulation for as long as he could. They understand that he is pretending to go along now only to try to get the heathens to settle down so his greatness can re-emerge on the economy.

And there is your roundup of weekend political developments on the pandemic front.

NBC News and The Wall Street Journal came out with a poll that discovered that Democrats take the coronavirus seriously and Republicans don’t.

I’m speaking generally. There are good and serious Republicans. You have Asa Hutchinson.

On changing travel plans because of the virus, 47 percent of Democrats in this poll said they would do so while only 23 percent of Republicans would; on declining to dine at restaurants, 36 percent of Democrats said they would decline while only 12 percent of Republicans said they would; on staying away from large gatherings, 61 percent of Democrats said they would while only 30 percent of Republicans agreed; on whether the worst of the virus is yet to come, 80 percent of Democrats said that was so while only 40 percent of Republicans thought so; and on believing their lives would be significantly changed by the virus on a continuing basis, 56 percent of Democrats concurred while only 26 percent of Republicans did.

On the sheer amusing joy of coughing into each other’s faces and then high-fiving with unwashed palms … well, I don’t see that they actually polled that. But indications are that Republicans would have left Democrats in the shade in that cross-tab.

What’s clear from the poll is that, if the virus spreads substantially, certain extreme-right Republican attitudes— which is not to say practices, because I’m not actually viewing those—will be at least partially to blame.

And if the virus never gets as bad as the liberals and the doctors warn, then we can all make fun of the liberals and Democrats for their lily-livered hype, never considering that things aren’t as bad as they warned because many of us heeded the warnings.

Then there was that news feature in The Washington Post in which a reporter somehow wound up talking last week to a Baptist pastor in Conway who was reporting on a meeting of fellow pastors about whether and how to assemble for worship on Sunday.

The Baptist pastor told the reporter that one of his ministerial colleagues said half his congregation was ready to engage in the aforementioned floor-licking to prove contempt for these secular virus lies. He also told the reporter that worried reaction to these virus reports in the media was seen as a concession to liberalism.

They were calling Governor Hutchinson a liberal.

He is sure-enough giving a worried reaction to the virus, to the point that, on Sunday, he directed that all the state’s public schools close by today.

Here is why: Thanks to the Trump administration’s incompetence or indifference, the state doesn’t have yet nearly enough virus testing kits. So, these 22 infections reported in the state as of Monday morning were either selfreported or discovered by investigating known contacts of the person with the state’s first known infection.

But persons walking around unknowingly with coronavirus, either mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic, could amount to … well, just pick a number and double it.

The governor and public health officials are trying to keep the number of conceivable infections as low as possible so that our hospitals will not be overrun and forced to set up battleground-style triages in parking lots.

So we shouldn’t permit our schoolchildren to gather by the hundreds right now and then disperse to their homes possibly infected with a virus they can probably handle but that their grandmas and grandpas might not.

Closing schools statewide is a hard, hard judgment call. It inconveniences working folks from border to border and causes possible financial hardship. I applaud the governor for his difficult right decision, one probably not met well by FLAL—Floor-Lickers Against Liberalism.

All of this ought to make clear one thing I’ve tried to explain in this space. It’s that Hutchinson—and indeed there still are other Republicans like him—believes that he can maintain conservative philosophies while making government work.

Ancient Republican figures like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush thought that.

But many in Hutchinson’s current party believe government work to be the devil’s work and that anything the media report is a conspiracy against righteousness.

We haven’t yet had one of that number as governor. But a couple of possible viruses have been reported.