MATT TAIBBI: From ‘Yes we can’ to ‘No, you moron’: Dems have selves to blame for vaccine hesitancy.

I’m vaccinated. I think people should be vaccinated. But this latest moral mania — and make no mistake about it, the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” p.r. campaign is the latest in a ceaseless series of such manias, dating back to late 2016 — lays bare everything that’s abhorrent and nonsensical in modern American politics, beginning with the no-longer-disguised aristocratic mien of the Washington consensus.

If you want to convince people to get a vaccine, pretty much the worst way to go about it is a massive blame campaign, delivered by sneering bluenoses who have a richly deserved credibility problem with large chunks of the population, and now insist they’re owed financially besides. . . .

Now this new vaccine debate has been amped to 11. The universal consensus of the “Powerhouse Roundtable” types is that it’s time to start opening the cans of whoop-ass on the vaccine-hesitant, yanking services and civil liberties from those murderous holdouts who are, the president tells us, “killing people.” They do this acting like the public doesn’t remember the messaging from the Biden-Harris campaign last year, which was talked about at the time as being irresponsible precisely because it set a precedent of urging the public to distrust the vaccine.

“Sneering bluenoses who have a richly deserved credibility problem,” indeed. Well said.

It’s also really apparent, as Taibbi notes, how much bipartisan consensus there is among members of the ruling class that people should knuckle under to the ruling class, or suffer.