Despite his claim that his 60th birthday bonanza would be scaled back to “include only family and close friends,” Barack Obama, an infamous introvert and politician peerless in his disdain for beltway backslapping, went forward with a massive rager at his Martha’s Vineyard mansion. The former president ultimately lied not just about the guest list, which included hundreds of his closest friends, such as the recently canceled Chrissy Teigen and George Clooney, but also that it would be outdoors.
Obama’s bash shouldn’t have been a problem. As President Joe Biden’s own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Rochelle Walensky once noted, the coronavirus has become a pandemic of the unvaccinated, meaning that hundreds of fully vaccinated people can party indoors with very little risk of contracting COVID-19 and a near-zero risk of being seriously sickened or killed by a rare breakthrough case. But because his successor’s CDC made an astonishing about-face in reinstituting the indoor mask mandate for the fully vaccinated, Obama tried to fit the narrative — or appear to, anyway.
A private citizen throwing a party isn’t a story. The president’s personally appointed climate change czar hopping on his private plane to disregard his own administration’s public health policy is both a story and a scandal that simply serves to discredit our ruling class further.
For more than a year now, The Experts have told us that the vaccine will end the pandemic, and for more than a quarter-century, The Experts have continually warned we only have 12 years before climate change will kill us all. In a single plane flight, Kerry proved just why nobody with a functioning prefrontal cortex believes The Experts anymore.
Climate change is certainly happening, but are we really, again, on the brink of global extermination if we don’t abolish all car travel and return to horse-drawn carriages? Maybe, but if what were the case, why would Kerry take his family’s private jet to Martha’s Vineyard instead of taking the Amtrak to the ferry that goes directly to the island? And the coronavirus is obviously serious enough that every person who can get vaccinated should, but is it quite so serious that fully vaccinated high schoolers and children for whom COVID-19 is less dangerous than the flu need to wear masks all day in the classroom while hundreds of celebrities and billionaires can fete the former president over espresso martinis indoors?
The people making the rules don’t even believe them. Despite Washington, D.C.’s seven-day coronavirus deaths plummeting to an average of zero, Speaker Nancy Pelosi imposed a mask mandate on the House. The Democrat, also spotted on Martha’s Vineyard last weekend, claimed she missed the Obama bash because she had “other parties” to attend. Presumably, these were all outdoors or fully masked, right?
Ironically, the game was given away the most obviously not by a member of the ruling class but by a de facto defender of it. Defending the party on CNN, New York Times reporter Annie Karni relied not on The Science but rather on social status, noting that the party was safe because the guests were “sophisticated.”
“a sophisticated, vaccinated crowd” pic.twitter.com/qzh3glcQTQ
— Caleb Howe (@CalebHowe) August 8, 2021
Climate change and the coronavirus will indeed kill the rest of us plebeians, but for the sophisticated set, they’re nothing more than newspaper headlines weaponized to make the rich even richer while the rest of us suffer.
