'It's awfully quiet inside Jim Jordan's head': Columnist shreds Republican's 'absurd' objection to all vaccines

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) has been vaccinated against COVID-19, but he wants his home state to ban mandates for all vaccines -- even long-used shots against measles and the mumps -- as the partisan war against pandemic safety measures expands.

The Republican Party is racing toward the bottom, wrote The Daily Beast columnist Margaret Carlson, with GOP governors taking away local authority to require masks and vaccines, and now the bombastic Ohio Republican is staking out a new front by chipping away at mandates for other safe and effective vaccines.

"It's awfully quiet inside Jordan's head, without the clanging from Republicans who are OK with every other vaccine but dead set against mandating this one to help stop the spread of a disease that's still killing nearly 2,000 Americans a day for the simple reason that their base hates anything elites want, no matter how sensible or helpful," Carlson wrote. "He's resolved the dilemma by objecting to all of them."

At the local level, right-wing politicians and agitators are pressuring school boards and local governments with "domestic terrorism," according to the National School Boards Association (NSBA), with angry outbursts, violent threats and false accusations of child abuse -- and Carlson said the grim spectacle was all part of the rot infecting the GOP.

"We no longer live in a country where there's agreement on what constitutes the common good," she wrote. "It's two decades since half the country told Gallup we were on the right track, and longer still since 600 children died in the early days of the polio vaccine but parents still followed the science and lined up their offspring for the immunization until iron lungs all but disappeared."

"If Jim Jordan would roll down his sleeves — he can since he's had his shots, like most of his GOP colleagues — and stop making absurd pronouncements, the same will someday be true of ventilators," Carlson added.