The Morning Briefing: Lockdown 2, BS Boogaloo Is Upon Us

We’re back to this already. While enjoying a perfectly lovely dinner with nine other people as we were celebrating a friend’s birthday, I discovered that I’d missed the news that Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey had issued another lockdown edict. I really wanted to like Ducey when I moved back to my native state a couple of years ago, but he’s been a continuing disappointment and makes me worry about Arizona’s ability to resist becoming purple for good during this next election.

The move wasn’t entirely surprising. I felt that another lockdown was imminent when Vice President Mike Pence canceled a visit that he was scheduled to make here today because of increasing coronavirus concerns. The weak Ducey was bound to use that as cover to issue Lockdown 2.0.

The move here comes shortly after Greg Abbott in Texas issued another executive order for a partial lockdown and Gavin Newsom in California is quickly slipping back into petty tyrant mode. None of these orders are lockdowns as comprehensive as what we all went through in March and April, but we know that’s coming. Newsom is already signaling as much.

The lockdown virtue-signaling is already back in full bloom. Il Ducey’s Twitter feed was positively insufferable on Monday night. It was almost as if he were auditioning to be the Democrats’ new favorite useful idiot Republican. The liberal responses were so laden with hysteria that I think the poor dears are at greater risk of succumbing to cardiac arrest than they are COVID-19.