Last week, Mayor Muriel Bowser imposed a new mask mandate in Washington, D.C. Beginning at 5 a.m. on July 31, both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated would have to wear masks indoors.
For the vaccinated, this was an irritating imposition, given that only four people in the district had died from the coronavirus for the entire mask-free month leading up to it.
The very night the mandate went into effect, Bowser officiated at an outdoor wedding and then attended the indoor reception that followed. Most of the guests wore no masks. Bowser herself wore no mask. No one seemed bothered by the mask mandate.
Unfortunately for the mayor, the Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe was on hand. For the entire half-hour that she was there, she observed Bowser going mask-free. Lowe took pictures, and she published them. When Bowser’s office responded by lying, claiming that Bowser was only maskless when she was eating or drinking, Lowe released video showing this was untrue. And no, it wasn’t a close call or a matter of perspective. The Washington Post fact-checker gave Bowser four Pinocchios for her obvious lies.
Bowser responded to her exposure not with the humility and contrition of someone who knows that she did something wrong, but with the petulance of someone who is angry that she got caught. She first attacked Lowe as a “right-wing nut” and even implied that she was an anti-vaccination advocate (she is not). The mayor called the story, backed by pictures and then by video, “misinformation.”
Also, someone (surely, it couldn’t have been Bowser’s staff?) planted a tip with the left-wing Washingtonian magazine, accusing Lowe of (gasp!) going to the wedding, even though she wasn’t invited. Well, good to see the media speaking truth to power.
Of course, such ad hominem attacks are known as fallacious for a reason. Even if true, they would have been irrelevant to the actual story — that Bowser flouted her own mask mandate, which put many others to great inconvenience; that she brazenly lied about it; and that when caught, she used every kind of bad faith redirection and distraction available to gaslight the public.
When mask hypocrites such as Bowser, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Gov. Gavin Newsom ignore their own rules, it doesn’t merely expose their narcissistic belief that they are above the rules. It also suggests they don’t really believe what public health officials are saying about the coronavirus in the first place.
When Newsom partied with lobbyists at a fancy restaurant after putting his own state on lockdown, his actions suggested that he didn’t even believe the virus was a serious problem.
Bowser’s behavior is less unreasonable, suggesting that she doesn’t think it’s a big deal for vaccinated people to go maskless. There we agree, but consider the implications of her holding that opinion. It would mean that her new mask mandate is all for show. She did it so that she can throw up her hands when infections spike anyway and say, “Well, I did what I could.”
Bowser’s leadership, like that of Newsom, is thus dishonest, morally vacuous, and performative rather than substantive. Neither belongs in power. The behavior of both in managing the pandemic clearly demonstrates why.
