I believe our Republican leaders who started the whole trend of COVID denial made a very calculated decision.

Firstly they all got vaccinated - ergo Trump, members of Congress and the Fox News staff. Then they made sure they had access to very expensive, high level medical care. Then they encouraged the people who voted for them not to get vaccinated.

For Republican leaders and the likes of Joe Manchin who are Democrats, politics is about staying in power no matter what, protecting their lifestyles and their accumulated wealth, and making sure they get the biggest piece of the pie. All other concerns such as the value and dignity of every human life, or the public good, do not factor into any of their decisions.

Republicans calculated strategy of letting unvaccinated and maskless people die, most of them low income and uneducated or misled by warped religious beliefs, was criminal. In fact they allowed a kind of creeping genocide that is particular to American democracy. It's well hidden, and its the way we've been able to create the holier than thou image abroad. Standing tall in our whiteness, holding our hands over our hearts and singing land of the brave and the free as loud as we can. Pretending this country offers a kind of freedom that doesn't and has never existed for the majority of people her.

What we really believe in is the freedom for us and anyone else to make money and then keep as much of it as we can. That is the nature of so-called American democracy. Refugees pour in here because it's better to clean toilets and live on 5:00 dollars a day, than make nothing at all and get tortured and killed. Not because they see this as a land of endless opportunities, even they know better than that.

American Republican politicians and some Democratic ones and media, are very good at hiding their real intentions behind a cascade of control buttons, which they press with impunity and fluency, like the great Oz behind his curtain.

I wonder if we'll ever out Oz, click our red shoes together, and find our way back home, before we destroy ourselves and our planet.