I’m responding to your points in order, and almost paragraph for paragraph…
I think you are drastically over-stating things. For one, you are conflating people that vote for Democrats with the Democratic Party. Synecdoche is fun in stories but bad for logical reasoning/discourse. Further, you admit that they were wearing masks but I also pointed out that, at least in the footage I saw, they were in clusters of (presumably) household groups. In addition, they were outside and short-lived (pardon the gallows humour) events. Not hours-long, indoor rallies. I’m not especially clear on which of the points you raised is enhancing your stance on unverifiable facts, but there are plenty of papers on the impact of masks, on being outside rather than inside, duration of exposure, etc. In addition, you can look at the countries that enforced to greater or lesser degrees each of those policies and see the impact on their infection rate. So, no, not unverifiable.
Obviously one shouldn’t cheat just because one know one's opponent is, but then you haven’t yet made a strong case that the Dems were cheating. That having been said, the GOP benefits from the vast majority of gerrymandered districts and is extremely selective with their enforcement of rules of conduct let alone law. On the matter of conduct, see Mitch McConnell blocking Obama’s SCOTUS nomination in his final year, yet insisting that Trump’s pick be rammed through despite being far closer to the election. On the point of law, Republican Presidential administrations have 40 times as many indictments and 80 times as many convictions over the last 50 years as compared to Democrats (and that’s before adding the full Trump administration count). You could argue that the Dems are better at cheating so don’t get caught. But if that were true, they’d be in power more, otherwise what’s the point of cheating? At this point, the point of cheating might be to level the playing field. However, as I said, you’d need to show that any cheating actually occurred. Trump’s various court cases are failing to even reach the required burden of proof, so it seems unlikely.
You must surely be aware that an anecdotal example of one person being assigned to the COVID column (sorry for your loss) merely fails to recognise that others will have died of COVID but been given a COD of something else. The best measure of this, and at the (appropriate) population level, is excess deaths. A measure that many countries are using, if not as their day-to-day count, certainly as a background sanity check. The number of deaths in a given period is fairly consistent, year on year, so noting sizable deviations from the average is a robust measure of the impact of COVID.
Along similar lines, I’m going to take you to task for your take on co-morbidity. Manageable diseases like diabetes and asthma are risk factors for Covid, are you seriously suggesting that someone that has lived for years with either of those diseases and then died after a Covid infection should be in the diabetes or asthma column? I’m sorry, but THAT is more than a tad bit absurd. If, however, you agree with me, then it’s only one step further to accept that, even people that were on death’s door when they caught COVID and may only have died a few days earlier due to the negative impact of Covid still died earlier. Do you suppose that their relatives give a flying damn that Covid merely accelerated the inevitable? Of course not. Covid robbed them of their final days with their loved one that they’d steeled themselves for. It seems to me that, on the one hand you’re reasoning emotionally for the passing of the guy you knew to be moved into the “correct” column, but arguing dispassionately about more-or-less the same set of circumstances for people you don’t personally know. That’s biased reasoning.
I didn’t take your response as the slightest bit disparaging. In fact, it’s nice to get a cogent response rather than slew of sound bites and vacuous diversions. I trust you take my response in the same light.
To finish, I agree with your point about themes being difficult to fully grasp given that they are merely implied by the written content, but on the other hand, if you can show the content to be flawed to any significant degree, then the theme ultimately falls with it.
