Loose cannon tweeter Jemele Hill is shooting from the hip at Republicans again. On Wednesday, the disgraced former ESPN Sports Center co-anchor criticized President Donald Trump's decision directing government health officials to coordinate communications on the coronavirus through Vice President Mike Pence. Hill's tweet implied that the former Indiana governor was previously responsible for the spread of HIV and now we're all doomed by the coronavirus.
Hill, a contributing writer for The Atlantic magazine, has bitterly attacked President Trump in the past as a "white supremacist", but this week she directed her vitriol at Pence on Twitter, her "weapon" of choice:
“Mike Pence, who was Indiana’s governor during the worst H.I.V. outbreak in the state’s history, is now in charge of the coronavirus response. Welp, we had a good run y’all.”
Blaming Republicans for HIV outbreaks — like the one in Indiana in 2015 — is common among those on the left. Magic Johnson, who retired from the NBA in 1991 due to HIV, said former President George H.W. Bush "dropped the ball" for not doing enough to fight the AIDS virus.
And how can we forget U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer's idiotic line, "Republicans will make Americans sick again"?
Michael D. Shear and Maggie Haberman, of the New York Times, echoed Hill's claim on Friday:
"Democrats noted that Mr. Pence was blamed for aggravating a severe AIDS outbreak among intravenous drug users when he opposed calls for a clean needle exchange program on the grounds it would encourage more drug use."
Shear and Haberman were so concerned with carrying water for the Democrats that they did not research what their own paper wrote about the HIV epidemic in Indiana.
In 2016, the Times' Megan Twohey reported that at the time of that outbreak, Indiana law prohibited possession of a syringe without a prescription. Congress had banned the use of federal money for it in 1988. Pence, a steadfast conservative, was morally opposed to needle exchanges on the grounds that it would encourage more drug abuse, but there's more to the story, she reported:
"On March 23, more than two months after the outbreak was detected, Mr. Pence said he was going to go home and pray on it. He spoke to the sheriff the next night.
"Two days later, he issued an executive order allowing syringes to be distributed in Scott County.
"Tens of thousands of them were handed out over the following months. And the program, along with drug therapy and aggressive outreach, slowed the flood of new H.I.V. cases to a trickle."
Hill's sensationalistic tweet implies that, based on a false claim about Pence opposing needle distribution, the vice president is now putting everyone at risk of dying of the coronavirus: "Welp, we had a good run y'all."
In other words, it's all over for us, and y'all better get your affairs in order with the little time we have left. Pence won't be able to protect us; we can't possibly survive the coronavirus.
This is just one more reason why Hill should stick to sports rather than embarrassing herself on political matters.
