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There are so many elected officials, political leaders, and public health officials ignoring the rules they demand you and I follow that two different websites are accumulating a list of the incidents.
Covid Hypocrisy: Policymakers Breaking Their Own Rules
Visualization from Heritage.org tracks incidents in the United States. A map shows location and provides one sentence summary.
Detail of incidence are listed, which includes date, name of the public official betraying the public trust, location, and description of incident. The description includes a link to news article explaining the hypocrisy.
On 12/24/20 I count 42 incidents. As you would expect, California is in the lead with eight incidents if you include the legislator’s junket to Hawaii for a vacation funded by lobbyists.
New York is close behind with six if you include two of the governor’s trips to South Carolina.
Texas and Illinois each have five.
So California has about 20% of the incidents. With the, um, quality of legislators we have I would think we could do much better.
Website at covid-hypocrites.com tracks worldwide incidents.
One of my readers pointed out this cool site.
Recap at top of page has Rule Breakers by Country, which ranks countries by number of rule makers. List names each country, the number of rule breakers, and the count of those who have incurred any consequences.
The consequences tracked can be as light as having to cancel a planned trip.
As of 12/28/20, the 18 countries listed have 121 incidents with only 15 rule breakers who have paid any consequence of any sort. Tally is up from 87 on 12/24/20.
Site also has a chronological list of the incidents which includes country, name of the rule breaker, position, brief description of incident, consequence, date, and link to article describing the incident.
With humiliated pride in my native country, I am embarrassed to announce the United States is in the lead with 62 rule breakers out of 121. You will certainly understand if I don’t break into a cheer of “we’re number one.”
Germany is a very distant second at 16 rule breakers.
Combining the tally for all of Europe puts the continent at 42 for a not-very-close second to the U.S. Come on Europe! You can do better!
Betrayers of public trust in the US have paid 2 of the 15 consequences. Only Israel and England have a higher number of consequences – 3 for 11 and 3 for 13 rule breakers, respectively.
Site also has a list of “hypocrisy by month” which shows incidents starting in March 2020 (7) and strong increase in fourth quarter (13 in October, 29 in November, 21 so far in December).
I’ll guess New Year’s parties and catching up on coverage for Christmas parties & family gatherings will vastly increase the December count of flaming two-faced hypocrites.
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