Over the weekend, New Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ 2) called for President Biden, Vice President Harris and Speaker Pelosi to resign because of the spectacular collapse of Afghanistan’s American back government, including the quick restoration of the Taliban to power in Kabul, that beleaguered nation’s capital. 

“With this administration it is failure after failure after failure,” Van Drew told Fox News. “I cannot believe I’m saying this, it literally is time for this president to resign. It is time for this vice president to resign. It is time for the Senate president and Speaker to resign. We need new people, even new Democrats, hopefully that are moderates.” 

That same weekend, with the highest number of COVID-19 cases since mid-May, New Jersey State Senator Shirley Turner called for the reimposition of the universal mask mandate and the reinstitution of the ban on indoor smoking in Atlantic City casinos.   

“Casino employees and patrons shouldn’t have to roll the dice with coronavirus,” wrote Senator Turner. “With the growing threat of the Delta variant, and a push for all residents to begin masking indoors again, it is crucial we bring back the ban on smoking inside casinos and the indoor mask mandate. This is no time to gamble with people’s health.” 

Senator Turner’s statement continued. “Smoking indoors presents a serious health risk to both patrons and staff, which is only amplified by the highly transmissible respiratory illness we are battling. Ideally, I would like to see smoking in casinos permanently banned but most urgent is that we bring back the temporary ban so that everyone within those establishments are following CDC guidelines and wearing a mask. Atlantic City’s casinos draw people from all over New Jersey and without masks, there is a chance they could lead to increased infections around the state.” 

In a phone interview, Senator Turner said she had been contacted by a number of casino employees who were union members who were alarmed by both the lack of masking in the midst of the Delta surge and the proliferation of second-hand smoke they were being exposed to for multiple hours at a time. 

“They are the only indoor facility where smoking is allowed and were exempted primarily for the monetary reasons and they are using casino workers as collateral damage so the casinos can continue to make money,” Senator Turner said. “Now, the Governor and the CDC have indicated that they are not mandating it, but they are saying you should wear a mask even of you are fully vaccinated indoors and that should apply to the casinos as well. Now, you can’t smoke with a mask on.”  

Over the weekend, while Afghanistan was collapsing, the local Fox News affiliate out of Philadelphia reported that close to 40,000 Phish devotees had jammed the beaches and boardwalk in Atlantic City for a three-day concert series. The band announced that at all future dates it will require fans to be vaccinated. But for this three-day event there was no vaccine or masking mandate. 

“As far as indoor masks in the casinos and any other establishment in Atlantic City, we are going to be guided by the data,” said Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small, during a Sunday phone interview.  “I know the Delta variant is causing a disturbance out there and we are paying attention. In City Hall we require masks, so we are going to follow the data. A decision regarding the casinos that falls on the state and Gov. Murphy will do the safe thing and analyze the data.” 

Back in May, when the Murphy administration introduced its municipal vaccine dashboard, Atlantic City, a majority minority community of color, just 29 percent of the residents had been vaccinated, one of the nation’s lowest vaccination rate. 

According to the New York Times COVID tracker, Atlantic County has had close to 33,000 COVID cases and over 700 deaths.  

Mayor Small said his city is pressing on with its neighborhood-based vaccination campaign. Public health experts say the Delta variant, which is exponentially more contagious than the original virus, is zeroing in on unvaccinated communities and unlike the original strain is hitting children. 

“It’s coming along with mixed results, but we are continuing to push and doing what we think is right and educating people on the vaccine and hopefully getting more people to take it,” Mayor Small said. 

InsiderNJ forwarded Sen. Turner’s press release to Gov. Murphy’s press office.  “We won’t be commenting,” responded his press office.  

Gov. Murphy left for his villa in Umbria, Italy last week. On Aug. 12 the U.S. Department of State suggested Americans “reconsider travel to Italy due to COVID 19.”  

That same day, former Assemblyman Jack Ciattareili tweeted “While ‘Rome is burning’ here in New Jersey, Murphy is living in the lap of luxury and too rich to care about the communities and families impacted by the small businesses that had to close their doors forever.” 

Since winning his party’s nod, the Republican candidate, who has himself been vaccinated, has pushed to loosen the state’s requirement that public school children be vaccinated from illnesses like measles, a major issue with anti-government voters. He has said that it should be up to parents whether or not their children don a mask when they return to school next month. 

Gov. Murphy maybe “out of pocket” but his image can be found on a doorknob placard distributed door to door in places like Neptune, as part the state’s vaccine drive. “Let’s keep up the fight,” Murphy’s message reads. “Let’s get vaccinated to keep ourselves, our families, and our communities safe. Let’s get back to normal and have a great Jersey Summer.” 

Before he left, Gov. Murphy announced that New Jersey would require universal masking for students and staff when school starts, which is sure to further agitate the anti-masking, anti-vaccine activist base that supplies much of the intensity in GOP’s activist cadre.  

In doing so, the Governor was aligning himself with the CDC as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics. 

“Due to the circulating and highly contagious Delta variant, CDC recommends universal indoor masking by all students (age 2 and older), staff, teachers, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status,” the CDC announced Aug. 5. “In addition to universal indoor masking, CDC recommends schools maintain at least 3 feet of physical distance between students within classrooms to reduce transmission risk. When it is not possible to maintain a physical distance of at least 3 feet, such as when schools cannot fully re-open while maintaining these distances, it is especially important to layer multiple other prevention strategies, such as screening testing.” 

From the very start of the COVID-19 pandemic, our national response has been fractured and dysfunctional as the body count continued to rise and the virus proliferated into even more contagious variants. 

Tragically, that has continued under President Biden, who pledged during his campaign to defeat the virus by making decisions guided by sound public health science and not an economic calculus that was the hallmark of the Trump tenure.  

In May, with Biden in for four months, the CDC executed a Bush “Mission Accomplished” move in the war on COVID.  The nation’s premiere health agency inexplicably lifted the universal mask mandate for vaccinated Americans in public indoor settings, even as tens of millions of Americans were not vaccinated and living in counties where below 40 percent of the eligible population had their shots. 

At the time of the CDC rollback, many of the nation’s frontline unions, including New Jersey’s Health Professionals and Allied Professionals, the state’s largest healthcare union, warned that lifting the universal mask mandate would put their members at additional risk and the proliferate the virus. 

Both things happened. 

The corporate news media reports our $2 trillion fiasco in Afghanistan as a separate story from our inability to control the spread of COVID, but they are completely intertwined.  

The awful truth is the media and our elected leaders from both parties, since 9/11 focused myopically on the risk of an external threat from terrorists.  They largely ignored the most clear and present danger in the form of a highly contagious virus in a country were life expectancy had already been declining for three years in a row and so many of our people were walking around chronically ill. 

For years, with a few rare exceptions, local and state politicians avoided offering a critique to our further notice war on terrorism even as we closed hospitals in struggling rural and urban communities that are now seeing the worst of the pandemic.   

We remain a “Stuck Nation” unable to reach the most essential consensus on how best to protect our children from a deadly virus.  

It’s an ancient lesson about the hubris of empire. How can you project military force and make it stick on the other side of the world if you don’t have enough cohesion at home to beat a virus?