Joe, we get it.  You won't be putting many hot dogs on the grill over the Fourth.  Your choice.  But a lot of people intend to party hardy, and no permission from you is requested.

In his COVID-19 anniversary address, President Joe Biden gave us that patronizing bit about the Fourth of July holiday.  We were told there is a "good chance" that "small groups" might get together for "a cookout" if "we all do our part" in adhering to his own gloom and doom about the epidemic now quickly fading.

Is Biden really that detached from the growing number of Americans who reckon this thing is all but over, if not in the sense that seasonal contagion is headed toward extinction, then in that it's settling to a tolerable endemic level, and sooner rather than later?  The Fourth is more than three months off!

The spirit of crisis tires.  Headlined panic grows old.  Ever less heed is paid to government diktats that have evolved from the cautious to the inscrutable.  What are the cops going to do if youthful protesters, bare-faced as they were a while back at a Target in Florida, start dancing through other big-box stores while whooping, "Take off your masks and breathe"?

Gloom and doom.  That's been the enduring message from the Biden White House from day one.  Biden forecast a protracted winter of misery when we would need his long labors to check the momentum of the virus.  Actually, less than a month after he moved into the Oval Office, though misery there had been, the daily death tallies were already coming off their winter highs.

Maybe he'll know he's out of sync with the nation if not only more red states, but blue ones follow Florida and Texas and Montana and Mississippi in opening for business and freeing people to manage their own risks.  How many times can he spit "Neanderthal" at governors who defy him? The repetition will make him seem still more dour, to say nothing of confounding his platitudes about national unity.

Gloom and doom.  Biden complained that the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed had botched the start of the vaccine roll-out.  It was he who would get daily distribution up to a million doses.  Actually, distribution surpassed that level on Inauguration Day, and scores of millions of people in this country, now arguably even a number approaching half the population, already had some degree of immunity bought at the cost of infection.

Maybe he'll recognize that the nation isn't about to put up with ever-extended restrictions if still more parents with their kids in tow march on schools to demand full re-openings — like, you know, full — like kids in classrooms five days a week — like without nagging to maintain six feet of distance.  Or is that now three feet?

Gloom and doom.  Biden insisted that Congress would have to blow up the federal fisc, once again, to juice the economy.  Actually, he hadn't been in his new job for two weeks before the Congressional Budget Office, noting an economic expansion under way since mid-2020, projected that real GDP would return to its "pre-pandemic" (i.e., pre-lockdown) level in mid-2021 — and without the $1.9-trillion progressive wish list of a bill he just signed.

Maybe he'll understand he should lighten up if a recall movement gains force not only against a hard-lockdown governor in California, but others, including that Emmy winner in New York.  Which is diving fastest: the COVID toll, the unemployment rate, or Andrew Cuomo's political prospects?

Joe, normal beckons.  Old normal.  Come on, man.  Toss more dogs on the grill.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.