I laughed at the many, many Twitter replies to this Fox News story reporting on what Carville said, most of which were variations of “COME AT ME, SKELETOR.”

It’s a shame because Carville had built up a small degree of Strange New Respect on the right over the past 18 months or so for flogging the wokesters in his party. All of that is up in smoke in one 20-second soundbite.

Weird that he’d take this stance too at a moment when the country is beset by a variant capable of puncturing vaccine immunity. This is more of a May 2021 vibe from ol’ Serpenthead, as that was the period when vaccinated people weren’t really transmitting the virus and thus the unvaccinated were chiefly to blame for keeping the pandemic going. Then Delta arrived, immunity began to wane, and Omicron emerged. So much for that.

Language warning here:

James Carville: I Want to Punch 'Piece of Shit' Unvaccinated People In The Face pic.twitter.com/S4iYOfnjX9

— Casey McCarney (@caseymack7777) February 8, 2022

What’s gotten into him? Why would his hostility towards the unvaccinated be cresting at a moment when vaccination no longer spares you from transmitting the virus?

Without hearing the full context of the clip I’d guess he’s reacting to stories like this, which have been ubiquitous over the past month. Getting three shots won’t keep you from getting sick but they almost guarantee you won’t need hospital care if you do. If every American adult were vaxxed and boosted, odds are good that everyone who needed a bed — whether for COVID or not — could get one. That hasn’t always been the case during the pandemic, occasionally with fatal consequences.

It’s truer now than it was nine months ago that declining to get vaccinated affects only one’s own health and no one else’s, but it’s not entirely true. It has potential consequences for the local ER and long-term consequences for American health care, an industry that’s lost thousands of staffers over the past two years as the strain of endless COVID surges driven mostly by the unvaxxed has driven people from the profession.

And it’s had consequences for a group that’s not often mentioned in debates over the burdens of vaccine mandates.

More than 167,000 kids in the U.S. have lost at least one parent or primary caregiver to COVID-19.

Dr. Charles Nelson coined the term COVID orphans to describe children who have lost one or both parents, or primary caregivers, to the disease. One in four adult deaths to COVID-19 leaves a child orphaned or left without a caregiver — something the Harvard University professor of pediatrics and psychiatry describes as a hidden cost of the pandemic…

Grieving children experience anxiety and depression if they’re old enough, he says, but also secondary effects like acting out in the classroom or stress caused by food insecurity or loss of health insurance. This stress can have both a psychological and biological impact on kids.

Not every parent who’s died over the past year has been unvaccinated but given the much higher rate of mortality among that group it’s a cinch that most were. Maybe Carville knows a “COVID orphan” personally and can’t contain his anger that a mother or father would knowingly assume the risk of their child growing up without them.

But here’s a hot take for you about the odd timing of this outburst, which calls to mind the equally odd timing of the backlash to Joe Rogan inviting vaccine skeptics on his show. Again, the case against anti-vaxxers was stronger last year, when they were briefly doing most of the transmitting, not in 2022 when we’re faced with an immune-evasive less virulent variant that might just be ushering us into herd immunity. So why are Carville and Rogan’s accusers lashing out now? I’m reminded of Michael Bang Petersen’s theory for why some COVID hawks will have trouble seeing restrictions finally end: “For people who have been highly vigilant about Covid-19, the end of the pandemic could end up feeling like defeat. At some point, it will be time to lift restrictions and lower the guards. The people they’ve been debating about masks or whether the crisis is improving will then be right.”

Maybe Carville and the anti-Roganites are giving their opponents a kick in the ass on their way to exiting the pandemic, before their imminent “defeat.” If they have to watch COVID doves declare “we were right” after 900,000 people and counting died, they’re going to get in one last lick about who was (mostly) to blame for it before the war is over.