It’s a macabre prelude to festive fun in the US, says Richard Lutz.

First things first as we all watch the final Christmas meltdown in the United States. And it’s stained by the poison dripping from the White House as Trump goes 180 degrees delusional.

First he drives through the final approval of the Covid-19 vaccine a week after the UK breakthrough. Who knows? He might be right and thousands of lives may be saved in the fifty states by the injections. But at the same time his vicious administration is using another needle to kill people off.

While the elderly are given  life protecting shots, he is fatally injecting phenobarbital into convicts as part of a lame duck death penalty plan. If all the scheduled executions take place before Biden takes over in late January, it’ll make a total of thirteen death row inmates who will have been given a fatal jab since July. One needle for saving people’s lives. Another to kill them.

Of course, the federal execution scheme is all part of the US’s violent dance with death. The law allows killing convicts, and it makes no sense when you compare the States with the UK: Britain  has no death penalty, a total ban on hand guns and, of course, semi-automatics and its murder rate is pretty low. The US allows all sorts of weaponry, has a death penalty and is plagued by more and more murders. Which nation has its head screwed on? Which nation has a death wish?

Anyway, Happy Christmas.

But a Christmas that, tragically, will also come with a fatal flaw. A deadly virus doesn’t stand down for a holiday. It’s accepted fact from professionals, the real scientists who know things, that the expanded UK holiday meal will increase Covid death rates come late January and February. Once again, look across the Atlantic.

The US’s Thanksgiving holiday has spiked viral death rates there – 3,000 per day at last count. Britain will face a proportionate increase in coronaviral deaths, and all for political expediency because the British (aka voters) would be aghast and aggrieved  if their festive holidays were banned outside a family bubble.

Yet Johnson’s administration has gone ahead and opened the fatal gates, knowing it will cause more deaths. And to be fair, I think any other UK administration, including Labour, would have agreed to the Christmas slackening of a rigorous protective plan to simply placate a restless public..

In this macabre world, getting tough over the holiday period is a vote loser. I mean, what politician wants to go down in history resembling Alan Rickman’s fictional Sheriff of Nottingham who wanted to ban Christmas because the peasants backed Robin Hood?

But to hell with reasoning. Ban Christmas and lives will be saved. Let it run its expanded course and more folks will die, despite the vaccine roll out. We live in a delusional world.