Back in June, MSNBC star Rachel Maddow demonstrated a complete double standard on coronavirus precautions when she sounded horrified by a Trump rally, but gushed over “Juneteenth” events attended by thousands.
This came to mind when Maddow came out of Vice President Mike Pence’s outdoor convention speech at Fort McHenry on Wednesday night with a sermon about how these elderly Republicans were risking their lives. “It’s unnerving at a health level,” Maddow said, summing up. “It feels like we’re watching Chronicles of a Death Foretold here.” (That's a novel about a murder by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.) She began:
MADDOW: I have to say this felt like a long night from the Republican National Convention in part because a lot of the speeches were fairly long, including Mike Pence’s, and while that wouldn’t usually matter to me that much, they did go out of their way to showcase the fact that this is an event with an audience.
Our reporting suggests there was not universal testing of everybody invited to this event. And to have so many elderly veterans or otherwise elderly people in this audience not sitting socially distanced, the vast majority of them not wearing any masks, for this to go on for a very long time, including a lot of chanting and shouting, I just -- I feel concerned for what is happening here especially after what happened at the Tulsa rally and other Trump events...
While taking advantage of every opportunity to slam Republicans during the third night of their convention, she stated that the nation’s death toll “crossed another grim milestone -- 180,000 dead -- and it saw another 1,200 deaths, the highest daily fatality toll in more than a week.”
The weeknight host continued: “Maybe you feel good about that number; maybe you feel like that’s success, but … all they’re talking about with COVID is how it’s over and how they did great.”
She added that people at “other Trump events” have “gone out of their way to try to portray, show a visual image of a world and a country that’s gotten past the COVID threat when we really haven’t.”
“I know politically why they want to do that,” Maddow noted, “but this is potentially a dangerous situation even in an outdoor setting for all of these elderly veterans tonight.”
As if that wasn’t hostile enough, she stated: “It is also particularly striking against the backdrop of Mike Pence, who led the coronavirus task force; maybe still does if it still exists, talking about how an untold number of American lives were saved by President Trump’s actions.”
Reed Richardson at Mediaite made sure to tweak Pence this way: "At one point during his aggressively anti-Democrat speech, Pence mentioned that his 87-year-old mother, Nancy, was in attendance, and the camera then showed her sitting amongst the crowd, none of whom were wearing masks."
