Ken Paxton- Texas' King of Performative MAGA Bullshit

As dumb as post turtle, arrogant as an SS officer, and mean as a wharf rat

That’s what she said….

How many consuming fires can there be in the words: freedom, peace and democracy and how easy they can be extinguished by ignorance, stupidity and arrogance?

• Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom

Ambition is disfigured into arrogance when it becomes unmoored from self-awareness, from a realistic assessment of one's competences.

• Maria Popova, Figuring

I don’t know about you, but the one thing I learned from the COVID-19 pandemic was how easily sheeple can be turned into drooling, knuckle-dragging morons willing- nay, EAGER- to believe and act against their own best interests. How many Google and YouTube Ph.D.s died after becoming convinced that their “research” made them more knowledgeable than researchers with x number of degrees and many years of epidemiological experience?

Normally well-meaning, if undereducated and somewhat gullible, sorts decided after minutes of long, arduous research that vaccines were being forced upon us by an evil, malevolent government. These newly-minted amateur epidemiologists determined they’d have a better chance of survival eating horse paste- Ivermectin, to be precise- which no research anywhere had shown to be effective against COVID-19.

And yet Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit against Pfizer doesn’t mention suing the manufacturers of Ivermectin. No, he’s suing Pfizer for…um, not coming up with a miracle cure real quick-like as it had promised.

Except the company had never promised anyone a rose garden, just an honest effort to find a vaccine that might help to slow the spread of COVID-19.

BTW, Pfizer did a helluva job. I now have six of their shots in my arm, and while it didn’t prevent me from getting COVID-19 last December, those vaccines almost certainly prevented my bout with the virus from being worse than it was. As it was, it knocked me flat on my ass for 10 days. Would/could it have been worse without the vaccine?

I’m beyond grateful that I didn’t f**k around and find out.

Yeah, Ken Paxton is the worst- a MAGA tool who’d drop trou and grab his ankles if Orange Jesus ordered him to offer himself up.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, having somehow survived impeachment, is getting back to pursuing The People’s Urgent Business with a stupid performative lawsuit against Pfizer, accusing the drug company of lying about the effectiveness of its COVID-19 vaccine and failing to make the pandemic just go away — poof! — like magic.

In a 54-page complaint shot through with anti-vaxxer rhetoric and deliberately bad math, Paxton claims that “The COVID-19 vaccines are the miracle that wasn’t,” and that by saying that clinical trials of its vaccine showed it to be “95% effective” in preventing death or serious illness, Pfizer had “deceived the public” into expecting the pandemic would be over real quicklike — never mind that Pfizer never made any claims at all that its vaccine would end the pandemic, let alone that it would do so within any specific timeline.

Why no, the lawsuit makes no mention at all of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s constant attempts to prohibit local authorities from taking actions that would limit spread of the virus, like school and public mask mandates.

It’s not as if Texas was bending over backward trying to prevent the spread of COVID-19 within its borders. Hell, the Lone Star State invited the virus over for a Passover barbecue and gave it the key to the Governor’s mansion. Mask mandates were considered passé, an example of Big Government overreach, and a flagrant breach of the liberty and freedumb of Texans.

The lawsuit is designed more for sex appeal to MAGA looney tunes. I suspect Paxton understands the lawsuit will be laughed out of court before the ink from the laser printer is dry, so he’s appealing to his and Gov. Greg Abbott’s loser MAGA base.

The lawsuit is riddled throughout with bullshit claims, which can and undoubtedly will be used by Paxton and Abbott to claim that the courts are biased against MAGA when it’s inevitably bounced for lack of seriousness.

This is the sort of soft-core MAGA porn that Paxton will use to fire up the MAGA faithful.

Placing their trust in Pfizer, hundreds of millions of Americans lined up to receive the vaccine. Contrary to Pfizer’s public statements, however, the pandemic did not end; it got worse. More Americans died in 2021, with Pfizer’s vaccine available, than in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. This, in spite of the fact that the vast majority of Americans received a COVID-19 vaccine, with most taking Pfizer’s.

Well, duh…Pfizer’s vaccine was available for only part of 2020, so, of course, the death toll would have been higher in 2021, when the vaccine was available for a full calendar year.

Paxton also conveniently forgets to mention the large number of people who refused to take the vaccine for political and/or religious reasons and died for dumbass reasons.

As the Texas Tribune points out, yes, sure, more people died from COVID in 2021 than in 2020. In fact it was twice as many. But that has little to do with the vaccine’s efficacy, because Paxton’s playing fast and loose with time here: 2021 marked a full calendar year of nationwide infections, including the rise of the nastier Delta variant, even as more and more Americans insisted they would not get the vaccine for political reasons while also insisting on going out and becoming disease vectors themselves.

By comparison, during the nine months the virus spread in 2020, it took some time to get traction before it spread wildly; in most states, the Tribune notes, the early weeks of the pandemic saw death rates in the double digits. Comparing the calendar years is just plain dishonest and misleading.

“Dishonest and misleading,” if memory serves, is Ken Paxton’s middle name.

It may be trite, but it’s true; if his lips are moving, he’s lying- furiously and proudly. The man wouldn’t recognize the truth, nor tell it, if Taylor Swift held a spray bottle filled with hydrochloric acid to his testicles.

I could try to dazzle you with a bunch of math that makes Paxton look like the disingenuous tool he is, but all those numbers turn my ADD brain to oatmeal. Suffice it to say that his lawsuit uses a lot of “bait and switch” math intended to make legal brains think Pfizer was trying to pull a fast one over on good, God-fearing White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual Texas patriots. The numbers, to state the blindingly obvious, don’t add up.

Ken Paxton is, unsurprisingly, trying to score points with MAGA-brained, God-fearing, White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexual Texas patriots. Surely, not even the Texas AG is stupid enough to believe his laugh track of a lawsuit has an iceberg’s chance in Hell.

Then again, NEVER underestimate the intellectual vacancy of Ken Paxton.

And don’t call me Shirley….

Dear readers, we know you understood there would be no math, but we have to unpack that statement: Paxton wants you to think this means that the vaccine was doing more harm than good, or that it was safer in some cases to be unvaccinated. That ignores some basic statistical reality, as KFF explained pretty clearly last year:

[If] 100% of people in the U.S. were vaccinated, vaccinated people would represent 100% of COVID-19 deaths. Similarly, as the share of the population with a booster rose somewhat during 2022, the share of deaths among boosted people also rose. COVID-19 vaccines are very effective at preventing severe illness and death, but they are not perfect, so deaths among vaccinated people will still occur. […]

And with COVID, the group with the highest vaccine uptake remains the elderly and people with other risk factors. So yes, there will be more deaths among that high-risk population, even though they’re vaccinated, but that doesn’t mean the vaccines aren’t effective — it just means they were at greater risk to start with. As the KFF ‘splainer notes, “That’s why, when CDC adjusts for some of these factors (age and population size), we still see that unvaccinated people are at much greater risk of death and other severe outcomes than people the same age who have stayed up-to-date on boosters.”

So, yeah, when you strip away all the math, the truth is revealed: “[U]nvaccinated people are at much greater risk of death and other severe outcomes than people the same age who have stayed up-to-date on boosters.”

It’s a pretty simple concept to understand, which is why I have six of Pfizer’s shots in my arms. If it were time for a seventh, I’d be in line for that one as well.

Why? Because I’m not a dumbass, that’s why. There’s still a deadly virus out there, but there’s also a vaccine that’s 95% effective against it. What rational, intelligent person wouldn’t take 95% odds? It’s common sense…which, I suppose, is something profoundly lacking in MAGA Nation.

Nah…thanks, but I think I’d rather choke down some horse paste and wait for the sweet release of death….

And as the Texas Tribune points out, that’s exactly the case in Texas:

The state’s own Department of State Health Services COVID-19 death tracker shows that as of April, the COVID death rate for fully vaccinated Texans is 12 times lower than that of unvaccinated Texans.

In short, Paxton’s lawsuit is completely without merit, but people who are easily bamboozled by misleading statistics and handwaving will find it very persuasive. And since explaining why the lawsuit is bullshit requires people to think about math class, that probably won’t change. Maybe the case will even get somewhere, if it’s assigned to a judge who hated math.

There’s every likelihood that Paxton’s ridiculous milk carton boat of a lawsuit will sink as soon as it leaves the dock, which would be highly entertaining. Then again, this is Texas we’re talking about, so one can never be sure that there isn’t a wingnut judge out there who might take this case seriously and provide it the gravitas it doesn’t deserve.

Ken Paxton is suing Pfizer for doing the right thing in the wrong way…or was it for doing a bad thing in the right way? Whatever the case, after barely escaping impeachment, Paxton no doubt feels the need to prove his MAGA bona fides again by doing something profoundly illogical and stupid. He’s always been big on stupid.

And when it comes to being intellectually bereft, few are better (or more poorly) equipped than Ken Paxton, who’s to good lawyering what Timothy McVeigh was to nonviolence.

Man, do I (not) miss Texas….

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