Democrat gets bitten by fox — and hypes the CDC

Authorities have finally done something about the aggressive, rabid critters that lurk around our nation’s capital and slink from their dens on the Hill to assault honest people for no good reason.

Cockburn has encountered all sorts of such creatures on various Capitol Hill pub crawls, but the type the police just decided to address was neither a blundering elephant nor an indignant jackass. Neither was it a Blue Dog, one of those endangered porcupines that rarely appear in the Swamp, nor even a squawking chicken hawk. It was a red fox. A cute little lady fox with a majestically bushy tail, black-tipped ears and feet, white markings on her chest and muzzle, and shining black eyes.

People first started posting images of the fox on Monday. “After workers spent hours trying to find the animal in question, Capitol Police tweeted a photo at 3:36 p.m. Tuesday of the culprit in a cage with the line ‘Captured,’” reports ABC News.

The fox has since been euthanized, but not before it encountered Senator Joni Ernst (the Iowa Republican escaped unscathed) and bit several people, including Democratic Congressman Ami Bera from California, who got a bunch of rabies shots “out of an abundance of caution,” and joked, “I expect to get attacked if I go on Fox News, I don’t expect to get attacked by a fox.”

Bera, who is also a medical doctor, used the fox biting incident to remind people to rely on the government for health and medical information by tweeting a link to the CDC — which even the New York Times labeled “broken” in a lengthy post-Covid exposé of the agency. Unlike Covid, though, rabies has an extremely high mortality rate, so Cockburn hopes Bera tweets the link to a list of Rabies Booster Shot locations soon.

And speaking of Covid, the ABC report on the fox says she was “spotted scavenging on the streets nearby Tuesday afternoon, despite the area being crowded with tourists now that the Capitol complex reopened to the public last month after being mostly closed for two years because of the pandemic.”

Is it any wonder that wild animals took up residence in a place that was a veritable ghost town for two years? Why does an innocent little fox get killed for making a home in the neighborhood Nancy Pelosi continues to insist is uninhabitable?

Cockburn hopes the fox incident will be just the nip in the leg all Democrats need to realize that, just as we wish for the dead fox mama’s kits, being humanely relocated from Capitol Hill to somewhere else before you can do further harm to innocent folks isn’t such a bad idea.

Update: Cockburn has learned the mother fox tested positive for rabies. Since the kits could have been exposed to the virus, they “were no longer able to be safely rehabilitated,” per DC Health. Is no creature immune from the sickness seeping out from Capitol Hill?