Ducey’s restaurant order is a joke, right?

Acknowledging “the brutal facts of our current reality,” Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey took bold, new action on Thursday to get the coronavirus under control.

Except it wasn’t bold. Ducey ordered that restaurants limit their indoor dining to 50% of their capacity.

And it wasn’t new. Ducey on June 17 ordered that restaurants space their indoor tables at least 6 feet apart, essentially requiring them to keep every other one empty.

Ducey’s announcement comes as the state is in the national spotlight, America’s embarrassed poster child for how not to handle a highly contagious, sometimes fatal disease.

His announcement comes as the virus continues to gallop across the state, as hospital ICUs and emergency rooms continue to fill up, as overworked doctors and nurses and technicians continue to somehow stay on their feet.

It comes on a day when the state’s death toll passed 2,000.

“Arizona’s time of maximum challenge is right now,” Ducey said, during Thursday’s press conference.

Well, you’d think that at a time of maximum challenge our governor would do more than simply reinforce what he already did three weeks ago — an action that clearly did nothing to slow the spread of this disease.

You think at a time of maximum challenge he’d do more, given that he says his actions of last week – reclosing Arizona’s gyms, bars, movie theaters and water parks – “are making a difference. We need to increase this difference.”

You’d think at a time of maximum challenge he would have closed restaurants to indoor dining or at least let mayors do it, given that his own chart shows a “moderate-high” risk of being exposed to the virus when dining inside restaurants.

You’d think he would at long last mandate masks statewide, given his own renewed warning that “no county in Arizona, no matter how rural or how sparsely populated, has been spared.”

That he would acknowledge that schools cannot open their doors on Aug. 17, given that “we’re going to be living with this virus for the foreseeable future.”

You’d think at a time of maximum challenge, he would do something more than nothing.

Ducey pointed several times to his spring stay-at-home order as successful in keeping the virus under control. It wasn’t until two weeks after it expired, he pointed out, that COVID-19 began to soar in Arizona. Yet he wouldn’t even go so far on Thursday as to mandate that we eat our cheeseburgers outside or take them home.

Heck, you’d think at a time when

he’s been held up nationally for blowing it – one report released this week on the nation’s and the states’ responses to COVID-19 dedicated an entire section to Ducey and Arizona – that he’d want to do something, anything, to get this virus under control.

Ducey did announce Operation Catapult, a badly needed new initiative by Sonora Quest Laboratories and DHS to provide a massive increase for diagnostic testing and to provide more testing availability in Maryvale and south Phoenix.

Beyond that, however, Ducey’s press conference on Thursday was another sad demonstration of a governor who just isn’t up to leading us through this crisis.

I get it. Ducey’s in a pickle. He’s got a significant part of his base, whipped up by Arizona’s own Rep. Andy Biggs, that basically thinks the virus is one big nothingburger. He’s got Republican legislators grumbling that he’s power hungry and they’re angling to reconvene in an effort to shut him down.

And he’s got Donald Trump — who now has his own ringtone (Hail to the Chief, naturally) on Ducey’s phone.

Yet Ducey assures us that he is his own governor.

“I hear the criticism and I know there are differing opinions out there on how Arizona has handled this virus,” he said on Thursday. “I want to make a commitment to the people of Arizona. My decisions are not going to be influenced by any attempt to please the press and they will not be influenced by politics in any way.

“Everything we will do going forward will be to protect and promote public health in Arizona.”

Well, when, sir?