I was thinking about making the latest Atlantic essay “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty: We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID” an Ethics Quiz. Wouldn’t that be the civilized, forgiving, soothing, fair thing to do? After all, as author, a Brown professor named Emily Oster, argues, weren’t “most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society”? They meant well! (Rationalization #3A  The Road To Hell) Anyone can make a mistake! (#19. The Perfection Diversion) OK, we could have done better! (#19B The Insidious Confession) That’s in the past! (#52. The Underwood Maneuver). There are so, so many more rationalizations, all employed here to avoid accountability by those who richly deserve it. And I realized that this was coming from The Atlantic, one of the leaders of the Trump-hating media, and a herald of the Progressive New Order. Of course they want an amnesty.

The Atlantic’s ideological and political clients were responsible for closing the schools, which started a domino effect resulting in businesses shutting down. Progressives used “Science denier!” as a bludgeon to force Americans to accept the contradictory, ever-changing, often dishonest edicts of the CDC and its narcissist symbol, Anthony Fauci. Social media platforms censored posts and tweets as “disinformation” that questioned what turned out to be fake science and often outright lies by Fauci and others. “The good of society” for Democrats meant killing the good Trump economy to make him vulnerable in the 2020 election, and using pandemic fear to justify deliberately insecure, and often illegal, voting procedures. Amnesty? For which misdeeds? All of them? Claiming that President Trump had blood on his hands for all the pandemic death, when the next administration saw more, even with a vaccine? Using the disease to place outrageous restrictions on travel, arresting people for walking alone on a beach, taking down tennis nets? Issuing arbitrary rules and orders about masks and social distancing? Does the Left get amnesty for accusing President Trump of racism for referring to the Wuhan-originating virus as the Wuhan virus (as I will do until my dying day)? Does Andrew Cuomo get amnesty for killing thousands of nursing home resident by putting infected patients among them? Do all the Democratic mayors and governors (and a Republican here an there) who forbade citizens to travel, gather in churches or around Thanksgiving tables deserve “amnesty” for violating their own rules? Do the hypocritical (but woke!) health officials who waived their supposedly life and death rules so Black Lives Matter could hold mostly peaceful protests without social distancing or masks deserve amnesty? How about the mainstream news media that engaged in flagrant fear-mongering, like the New York Times with its front page death charts with peaks that reached beyond the margins of the paper?

To hell with that. There should be no amnesty, just vigorous prosecution of responsibility and betrayal of trust. Pundit Emily Burns sees the Atlantic’s dodge more narrowly than I do—she sees it from a feminist perspective— but her analysis isn’t wrong. She writes,

First, let’s be clear to whom Emily Oster is speaking. She’s speaking to the furious well-educated suburban women who are swinging towards Republicans in this cycle, even in the bluest of states. Because it was the bluest of states that were hit hardest by these policies. It was in blue states that the schools were closed longest, that the economic devastation was worst, that crime spiked the most, where masks were required longest. …As women, we have felt far more acutely than at any time in the past what it really means for government to interfere in our lives—controlling whether our children go to school, whether we can socialize, or go to a gym, or a restaurant, how many people can be invited to our home, whether we can spend holidays with family, whether we can run our businesses. These are all violations, violations of our personal liberty that harmed us, our children, and our communities, and which were done solely in service to political power. We have internalized this, and many will not be quick to forgive.

Emily is asking us to forgive a mistake. There was no mistake. There was a political calculation that harmed us, but even more, that harmed our children. The harm was considered acceptable because those who undertook it, took the votes of women for granted. They assumed they could lie and manipulate us into believing these harms were necessary, or barring that, unintentional. If we, as women, want our votes to be courted in the future by either party, we must vote to punish the past three years treachery. After we have exacted some political retribution, if there is acknowledgement of the wrongs committed and contrition for those wrongs, then we can talk about amnesty.

Bingo. This is just another desperation Hail Mary effort to somehow avoid the Nov. 8 retribution Democrats deserve.