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Marco Rubio’s Dragging Of The Secretary Of Defense For Following COVID Protocols Is Not Going Well For The Senator

Over the past week, two states accounted for one-third of all freshly positive Covid-19 cases in the U.S. Those states would be Texas and Florida, and it’s not as though there wasn’t enough warning that this would happen with the Delta variant out in the wild. And of course, this is a global situation with other countries maintaining stricter protocols than here in the U.S., and when our officials travel, they tend to respect those requirements.

That was the case when Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III recently tweeted a recent video of going “[w]heels down in the Philippines.” In doing so, he sported not only a mask but also a face shield, which (as confirmed by Snopes) was the required protocol in public places at the time that Austin arrived in the country.

Marco Rubio, however, scoffed at the video posted by Austin. He tweeted, “Our @SecDef is vaccinated. But he arrives in the Philippines wearing a mask AND a face shield. Embarrassing COVID theatre.”

Granted, anything COVID-related (including masks and face shields) has turned into a ridiculously political matter, so Rubio is not alone in being theatrical in his own way here. I mean, there are congresspeople screaming at each other and throwing masks at staffers over reinstated mask mandates.

It’s very silly to react this way when masks and shields can save lives, and this is especially silly since Rubio is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but (and as pointed out by MSNBC) Rubio continued to drag Austin by tweeting photos of the defense secretary in other countries in various states of masked-ness but with no shield and adding, “I guess the face shield mandate was lifted shortly after he landed.”

Well, Twitter had some words for Marco, including the true meaning of the word “embarrassing.” Ouch.