Jennifer Rubin – Screen grab via MSNBC.

There’s been this disturbing theme that has emerged in Democrat and Never Trumper circles that Republicans in red states have “ignored the science” and are the people who are largely responsible for the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus.

My RedState colleague Bonchie touched on this appalling tactic in detail here, but I wanted to focus on one specific example of a variation of this claim, which came from Never Trumper Jennifer Rubin earlier today.

Referencing a piece her fellow Washington Post “journalist” Aaron Blake wrote about how governors in some southern states “lagged” in their response time to the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, Rubin pulled a Chuck Todd, alleging that leaders in these states would have the blood of thousands on their hands.

“The GOP,” she declared, “has become a death cult.”

Gov of Florida, Texas, Missouri and Georgia will have thousands of dead on their heads. Rightwing ideologues resisted science. The GOP has become a death cult https://t.co/sfSP9UZpax

— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) April 2, 2020

To say that there is a rather large degree of cognitive dissonance on display with her remarks would be the understatement of the year so far.

For starters, the last I checked, the Republican party was not the party that had abortion on demand as the centerpiece of their platform. And we’re not just talking about abortions up until the point of viability. Democrats are well beyond that now, advocating for abortion at any time during pregnancy for any reason up until birth.

Democrats will not even support bills that would protect babies who survived abortions. They vote against them every time they come up, whether it be at the state level or in Congress.

That’s ghoulish in the extreme and is the definition of a death cult – especially when you consider that since the Roe v. Wade decision, there have been well over 60 million babies aborted. And that 60 million figure was as of 2017. The number is surely far higher now.

Rubin, in her role as a Never Trumper, has actively promoted pro-abortion Democrats for higher office, including for the House and Senate as well as the presidency. Because her way of “conserving conservatism”, you see, is to elect as many Democrats as possible because Orange Man Bad.

Secondly, as Bonchie noted in his post, New York has unfortunately become the epicenter of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, and that has nothing to do with folks in MAGA hats:

New York, which now has about half the cases and most of the deaths in the country, responded very slowly to the pandemic, with Bill de Blasio refusing to close schools for weeks and the subways still remaining open. Was it all those rubes listening to Rush Limbaugh that caused that? I think not.

[…]

Another data point is that Ohio and Maryland are red states that acted very early because their situations demanded it. Meanwhile, Gov. Cuomo was encouraging people to go about their lives into late February, even as the disease was rapidly spreading. At the same time, Nancy Pelosi spoke publicly in Chinatown and literally asked people to come and visit. Were they under the influence of Fox News? I’m gonna guess the answer is no.

That’s not to pile on New York by any means, but the facts are what they are.

But folks like Rubin don’t care about the facts as long as there are political points to be scored – even during a global pandemic. That says far more about Rubin than the so-called “lags” do about those southern state governors.