Back in the 1950’s, when I was a kid, Republicans were Protestants, Democrats were Catholics and Jews. Republicans were also from England and they were White, Democrats were ‘ethnics’ or they were Black.  I don’t remember any Hispanics and the only Chinese was the family that owned the laundry or the little take-out that we referred to as ‘the Chinks.’

              Friday night was pizza night because you could order a big, family-size pie which didn’t have any meat. And if you lived in any New York City neighborhood outside of Manhattan, which is where all the Protestants lived, you didn’t eat meat on Friday whether you were Catholic or not.

              Obviously, the world has changed. Jews can now get executive positions in finance, banking and insurance, Italian Americans aren’t assumed to be members of the Mafia, we even have elected another Catholic as President of the United States, and we are well on our way (hope, hope) to electing a woman as President who will not only be a woman but will also be a woman of color as well!

              But there’s one thing that hasn’t changed, or at least it seems to be no different today than it was when I was a kid. And what hasn’t changed is that, generally speaking, Republicans also tend to be dumb. How else do you explain the fact that after leading the single worst, most corrupt and ineffective political administration of all time for the last four years, that Donald Trump in 2020 still received more than 74 million votes?

              I’m not saying that everyone who voted for Trump has an IQ located somewhere on the left side of the bell curve. Exceptions can always be found for every rule. But a recent poll on whether people will get themselves vaccinated against Covid-19 needs to be taken seriously in terms of what it says about the relative intelligence of the Left versus the Right.

              Back in December, when vaccines first started rolling out, a national poll found that Republicans were four times more likely than Democrats to resist getting the vaccine, The poll found that vaccine resistance was 26% among GOP voters versus only 6% among Democrats who responded to the poll.

              Now we’re in March and enough people have gotten vaccinated for us to have a pretty good idea about whether the vaccinations are dangerous health-wise or not. Has vaccine resistance among Republicans gone down? No. In fact, it’s gone up.  A recent poll found that 44% of individuals who claimed to be GOP voters are saying they will ‘never’ get the shots.

              Recently we have seen a spate of articles in the right-wing press which claim that red states like West Virginia and South Dakota, are outpacing blue states like New York and California in terms of the rate in which the state’s residents are getting immunized against Covid-19. The per-100K vaccination rates in West Virginia and South Dakota are 13%, in New York and California, the rates are 9%.

              How many people have been vaccinated in West Virginia and South Dakota? Try 550,000, give, or take a few. How many vaccinations have been delivered in New York and California? Try 11 million, okay?  Want to compare how much work is involved getting the populations of states like West Virginia and South Dakota vaccinated as opposed to doing a comprehensive vaccination rollout in New York or the Golden State?

              There are now 18 states which have yet to administer at least one vaccine dose to 18% of the residents in that state. Of those states, 16 were carried by Trump both in 2020 and 2016.  To quote Al Franken back in 2000, these are truly the ‘dumb states.’

              If the dumb states receive enough vaccines to give everyone a dose, they’ll have plenty of medicine left over when the vaccination lines disappear. How can anyone actually believe that vaccines don’t work? Something tells me that none of those dopes who stormed the Capitol on January 6^th are going to get their Covid-19 shots.