I agree with Rep Chris Stewart, R-Utah, that America needs to pull together as one team to contain and manage the COVID-19 pandemic. I have long been confident in the research and health care services here in the Beehive State, and the contributions that Utahns can and do make to national health and security.
What I can’t validate, is the congressman’s admonition not to politicize this or other national emergencies we are facing. That politicization has been going on and will continue for some time, and the Rep. Stewart has played an enduring, and what appears to be an intractable, role in that politicization and now division in the country.
Calls of “Can’t we all just get along?” and “Divided we fall!” are maddening attempts on Stewart’s part to cash a check voided months and months ago by the current administration — enabled, applauded and endorsed as it has been by Stewart and others in the GOP. This is the problem when you hitch your wagon to an authoritarian leader and an entire political party that appears to have lost its moral compass: everything is always going to be politicized.
Why? Because partisanship is the only thing that can keep authoritarianism and its henchmen of obstruction, denial and deflection — resulting in national division — so securely in place. And staying in place, in “power,” at any cost is authoritarianism’s only objective.
So, when the time comes to make a call for unity during a medical or other kind of crisis, Stewart’s credibility vanishes. That the congressman secured his seat back in 2010 largely because of a savagely gerrymandered congressional District 2, hasn’t escaped those of us who have watched him relentlessly pander to the administration, the GOP leadership and its base of Trump supporters and single-issue voters. These are Americans who play an ideological game and they have always been in the minority nationwide, and arguably even in the politically conservative state of Utah.
David Pace
Salt Lake City