As RedState has chronicled, the last week has been an absolute disaster for the Joe Biden Administration. It started with a disastrous jobs report which fell 700,000 below expectations. Then there was the report on inflation which showed a 4.2% rise in April alone, crushing the savings and buying power of normal Americans. Meanwhile, war has broken out between Israel and Palestinian terrorists at a level that hasn’t been seen since the year 2000. But if that weren’t enough, we also had a ransomware attack on a major pipeline that caused days of gas shortages.

Yeah, it hasn’t been a good week. That meant that a distraction was needed. Enter today’s CDC guidance changes.

New mask guidance from the CDC. These exceptions: "All travelers are required to wear a mask on all planes, buses, trains, and other forms of public transportation" and in health care settings, correctional facilities and homeless shelters. https://t.co/XtGsRDSUUe pic.twitter.com/uh24ILYPON

— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) May 13, 2021

Now, to be clear, the above guidance still spits in the face of science. There is no evidence that large outdoor gatherings like sporting events are dangerous. In fact, we have overwhelming data that shows spread is basically non-existent in those settings. The same is true for a variety of things listed above that non-vaccinated people are supposed to wear a mask for. In fact, the CDC’s own data pointedly shows that masks essentially don’t work, with them only finding a 1% chance in infections between masked mandated and non-mask mandated areas.

Regardless, this change in guidance is a sharp turn from where the CDC was just a few weeks ago.

This is the dumbest damn thing I've ever seen. https://t.co/1p0l9BFjjI

— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 27, 2021

That chart basically required vaccinated people to still wear masks in all situations. What changed? Absolutely nothing changed insofar as the science goes. We’ve known since the beginning that the vaccines are highly effective and that mask-wearing, to the extent it could ever be justified, was certainly no longer necessary. Rather, what this flip-flop was about is the current political dynamics we are facing.

Joe Biden and the Democrats sense the coming backlash. They are watching an economy that was on cruise control burn to the ground as inflation swallows any gains people have made. The Middle East is descending into a new round of chaos after a relative peace had settled under Donald Trump. Gas prices have shot up over 50% since Biden took office. People are hurting, and the pain is getting worse.

Partisanship only takes people so far, and you can only scream about the orange man or Liz Cheney for so long before people get sick of it and want real issues dealt with. Joe Biden is not capable of handling anything, much less the current malaise the country is sinking into. In fact, he’s the cause of it.

Thus, you get the big distraction we got today. None of this is a coincidence. Someone behind the scenes read the tea leaves and realized things are already looking bleak enough for Democrats in 2022 so they rolled out this change and paraded it about like the federal government had just cured cancer. It’s all too little too late, though. Most people eschewed the CDC’s anti-science proclamations long ago. They aren’t listening to Joe Biden, who barely appears sentient, either. As Americans are prone to do, they’ve figured out their own path forward and are following it.