Gov. Tate Reeves needs to add one more exception to his statewide mask decree for Mississippi.
It should say that the facial coverings are also optional when they are not politically convenient.
At least that seems to be the standard he sets for himself.
For weeks on end, Reeves and his medical sidekick, Dr. Thomas Dobbs, have been lecturing Mississippi residents to wear facial masks, to keep their distance from each other and to avoid large gatherings.
If they’ve said it once, they’ve said it a hundred times. They’ve told us if we just do those few “simple” things, the incidence of COVID-19 can be brought down to a manageable level until a safe vaccine has been developed.
And when the lecturing didn’t seem to be working well enough and the cases of the virus kept growing in Mississippi, Reeves began to order masking and social distancing by law — first phasing the mandate in over dozens of counties before eventually, and grudgingly, expanding it statewide.
Yet, what does Reeves do when he’s out rubbing political shoulders and trying to be a GOP power broker? He abandons every bit of advice he’s been heaping on the rest of us.
Last weekend, it was reported, Reeves attended a crowded campaign event in North Carolina for that state’s Republican gubernatorial challenger, Dan Forest.
Forest has openly defied the masking requirement and social-gathering limits imposed by the Democrat he is trying to unseat, Roy Cooper. Reeves went along with that defiance, even though North Carolina’s orders are almost identical to what Reeves has imposed in Mississippi.
According to The Associated Press, there were more than 200 people at the indoor gathering Reeves attended. Like most of those there, Reeves did not wear a mask.
When questioned about it after returning to Mississippi, Reeves tried to claim that he wore a mask 90% of the time he was in North Carolina, only taking it off to speak at the rally. Photos from the event showed that to be untrue, according to the AP. Reeves was photographed, sans mask, sitting at tables surrounded by other people, posing for photos next to attendees and shaking hands with Forest and others.
Bad enough, but then he compounded his poor judgment by trying to draw a false equivalence between his blatant slip-up and the Black Lives Matter protest that occurred in Jackson following the death of George Floyd. He suggested that there was no greater public health risk to what he did than what the protesters did back in June.
That’s not true either.
The Black Lives Matter protest against racial injustice and police brutality occurred outdoors, where the risk of transmitting the disease or catching a heavy viral load is less. Also, unlike Reeves and his political brethren in North Carolina, most of the Jackson protesters wore masks.
Reeves has tried to make that protest in June his scapegoat before. When Mississippi started seeing a second surge of COVID-19 cases at the beginning of summer, he tried to attribute it to the protest without any proof. It’s much more likely that the uptick of transmission was the result of Reeves’ relaxing of the shutdown orders that he had imposed in the early months of the outbreak.
The governor’s political hero, Donald Trump, has been even more irresponsible when it comes to following the advice of the infection experts.
It was astounding to see Thursday night that the president and his campaign staff decided that the theatrical benefit of delivering an acceptance speech for the GOP nomination before a live audience was worth potentially putting 1,500 supporters at risk. There was a glaring incongruity to the president’s assurance that the country was on the brink of defeating a bug that is still killing 1,000 Americans a day while he was holding an event that had the outward appearance of being a super spreader of that very virus.
But at least Trump has been consistently inconsistent on COVID-19 precautions, endorsing them one day, criticizing them the next.
Reeves’ inconsistency has not been with what he says but rather with the example he has set. This is not the first time he’s been caught failing to live up to his masking mantra. He’s attended at least one funeral maskless and he hung out at the Capitol without a mask during a legislative session earlier this year that resulted in the infection of dozens of lawmakers and staffers.
Nobody likes wearing a mask or having to treat others as if they have the plague. But we are being told repeatedly — including by Reeves — that it is selfish and dangerous to do otherwise.
If it’s selfish and dangerous for us peons, it’s selfish and dangerous for him, too.
Tim Kalich is editor and publisher of the Greenwood Commonwealth. Reach him via email at tkalich@gwcommonwealth.com.
