Nancy Pelosi’s salon visit. Bill de Blasio’s gym session. Gavin Newsom’s French Laundry soirée. Cockburn can’t even keep up with all of the examples of hypocrisy from politicians who publicly urge people to abide by the strictest of COVID regulations and then privately flout their own rules.
Mayor Steve Adler of Austin is the latest official to be busted for such behavior. Adler told people during a Facebook video posted on November 9 that ‘We need to stay home if you can… Now is not the time to relax.’ It turns out Adler was on vacation in Mexico at the time with members of his immediate and extended family. Before he left for his south-of-the-border vacation, Adler hosted a wedding and reception for his daughter with 20 guests, despite city guidelines that suggested gatherings of no more than 10 people.
Cockburn will stop himself from passing judgment on Adler’s choice to invest in a timeshare in Cabo San Lucas. He will call him out, however, for using his political privilege to host special events and travel with his family as regular Americans across the country were shamed into canceling their Thanksgiving plans. Adler’s defense was that he was technically not breaking the rules, a rather cute response that presumably won’t fly with people who are sick of ‘rules for thee but not for me’.
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Adler isn’t alone in taking heat for his COVID contradictions. It turns out Mayor London Breed of San Francisco attended a birthday party at French Laundry just one day after Newsom. She dined with eight people and even ate in the same ‘partially enclosed room’ as the California governor. Then she banned indoor dining entirely just three days later.
‘I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that everyone act responsibly to reduce the spread of the virus. Every San Franciscan needs to do their part so that we can start moving in the right direction again,’ Breed said in a statement.
At a time when everyday Americans are repeatedly asked to make sacrifices in order to stop the spread of COVID, there is simply no good spin to put on politicians flashing the fact that their opulent lifestyles have continued on as normal.
