In light of the nursing home disaster in New York, what kind of a ghoul would take that as an example to emulate instead of a baleful death warning to avoid, and then order contagious COVID-19 patients into her state's nursing homes?

Only Michigan's hard-faced Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the ambitious Democrat who banned sales of garden seeds to Michiganders, saying she's doing it in the name of keeping everyone "safe."

"Safe" to Whitmer is seeding the nursing homes with COVID-19 patients, supposedly as a means of lightening the loads of hospitals.  Too bad if Granny gets it.  Under Whitmer's executive order, which she just extended yesterday for a week, any nursing home with less than 80% capacity will be forced to create special COVID units, regardless of their ability to protect their other patients, with the special ventilation systems, trained staff, and personal protective gear something like that would require even if it were advisable, and none of which is included in her order.

If I were a nursing home, I'd be offering free places to anyone who wants one just to prevent a breach below that deadly 80-percent threshold. 

Even New York's Andrew Cuomo could see the disaster of that outrageous and deadly policy.  Nursing home deaths in New York are sky-high at more than 5,000 deaths, and since the outrageous order was exposed as his own administration's doing, he's backtracked, blaming everyone but himself.

Yet Whitmer, by contrast, viewed Cuomo's bad maneuver as a "how-to" guide.  There will be deaths with even this one-week extension, and the blood will be on her hands.

It's as if she wants them all dead. Easier to harvest their ballots when they're dead come election day, is one thought that springs to mind.  Or maybe she's attempting to goose the death count numbers, the better to claim federal funds.  Or possibly the opposite.  The nursing home figures are muddled and non-transparent, something that leads many observers to think the death toll numbers are far higher than the official count.  Hospital figures, by contrast, are more clearly counted and reported.  Or maybe she wants to clear out the nursing homes of patients, the better to cut down on the Medicaid expenses to the state.

None of these potential calculi has a scintilla of morality to it; every last one is utterly vile in intention.  Yet here she goes, and now Joe Biden has been holding "preliminary" talks with her to make her his vice presidential running mate.  On top of old people's bodies.

I have a stake in this personally.  My elderly aunt is in one of these Michigan nursing homes — not far from Shelby Township, center of the legislative resistance to this fiasco, and the whole thing is terrifying to the family.  For the last two months, her children and grandchildren and great grandchildren have been visiting her through the nursing home glass in order to protect her from potential virus infection, never hugging, never holding hands, just doing it prison-style, solely to protect her.  With Whitmer's order, now there's no potential virus infection to protect her from; what's going in now is lethal, live, and real, going in by force of law.  People inside those homes have absolutely no defense.

This is more than just immoral, as if that would mean something to her; it's politically stupid.  Cuomo has torpedoed his own chances for ever achieving higher office after revelations came out about his outrageous order.  He's forever associated with nursing home dead people, a charge that will follow him wherever he goes.  Whitmer is following him like a lemming off that cliff, not noticing what it's done to Cuomo.  She needs to run, not walk back that order if she ever wants to save a scrap of hope for her political future, running mate or no running mate.  Angry voters who've just lost their mothers and fathers to this beyond evil folly are likely to dog her wherever she goes.

And don't think she doesn't know it.  The Detroit News has run a big editorial demanding that this order be scrapped immediately.

Elderly people have been needlessly exposed to the virus and died as a result of that order.

The Detroit News pointed out that Florida's Gov. Ron DeSantis has managed to protect Florida's nursing home population, while New York's nursing home death toll has exceeded Florida's 30 times over.  It takes no genius — and no "study," as Whitmer put it — to know that that's a killer.

The Washington Examiner has railed against this Whitmer outrage, too. 

You can bet the voters have noticed, and Whitmer might be hearing from them, too.  Still she persists.

It goes to show that someone capable of issuing a vindictive little petty tyranny, such as banning sales of garden seeds, is perfectly capable of issuing a big tyranny, too, a death sentence to innocent old people though the most lethal, harm-inducing order imaginable.  Go into that room and breathe the COVID, Granny.  It's the doing of someone making the most Machiavellian of calculations, taking everything but the lives of human beings into account, if for nothing else, because she has grown power-mad.  One can only hope that in this vile order, she has sown the seeds of her own political destruction even as the old people are put into the ground. 

Image credit: cjh 1452000 via Wikimedia Commons