As year two of the pandemic dragged on in the U.S., Missouri was hit especially hard. The state's low vaccination rates and high infection figures made the coronavirus by far the single most urgent issue facing Missourians in 2021. So, naturally, the state's Republican leadership was laser-focused on ... limiting abortion rights. And undermining voting rights. And preventing gun reform. And foot-dragging on the voter-mandated expansion of Medicaid. And pressing pretty much every other culture-war button they could find, as the state's biggest public health crisis in a century raged on unimpeded.

One top Missouri Republican, Attorney General Eric Schmitt, did appear to be fully engaged in this year's coronavirus war. Unfortunately, he was fighting on the virus' side. Gov. Mike Parson, meanwhile, had his own battle to wage — against a Post-Dispatch journalist who had the temerity to discover a gaping security hole in a state website and warn Parson's administration about it.

With Republican leadership like this, no wonder disgraced ex-Gov. Eric Greitens decided this year that Missouri's GOP might be ready to take him back into the fold.

The gravitational force that has warped much of this year's politics in Missouri was the March announcement by Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., that he wouldn't seek reelection in 2022. The temptation of an open Senate seat came just as Republicans here, as around the country, were succumbing to two big, dangerous lies: that ex-President Donald Trump was wrongly expelled from office by vote fraud, and that the pandemic was effectively over.

In fact, Trump lost reelection by 7 million votes and a clear Electoral College margin in the most diligently monitored and thoroughly reviewed election in U.S. history. And new variants of the coronavirus, combined with an anti-vaccination/anti-mask movement that has spread across red-state America like a cancer, have not only kept the pandemic going but have contributed to some of the highest infection rates yet seen in some regions.

Yet most of those who announced that they are vying for the GOP Senate nomination in next year's primary — Schmitt, Greitens, gun-toting lawyer Mark McCloskey, a half-dozen others — have embraced those lies, believing the Republican base demands it.

Among those Senate hopefuls, Schmitt has had the advantage of making Missouri taxpayers foot the bill for spreading the lies. Using his power as attorney general to sue over basically anything he wants, Schmitt has lobbed some of the usual red meat to the base, joining a multistate lawsuit seeking to invalidate President Joe Biden's election victory, promoting the GOP bogeyman that critical race theory is some kind of looming threat to Missouri schoolchildren, and even traveling to the Mexican border (two states over) to mug for the cameras about immigration control.

But Schmitt's political brand this year has been primarily about resisting reasonable pandemic responses, with both eyes locked on the science-deniers of the Right, whom he believes he needs to win the Senate primary. He has sued to prevent school districts and local leaders from imposing their own mask orders. He has sued the Chinese Communist Party over the pandemic, hoping to look tough but ultimately looking silly. He has sued the Biden administration several times, seeking to prevent federal vaccine mandates.

Schmitt even called on parents to act as informants against schools that seek to impose mask mandates, even though it's not at all clear mandates by elected school boards are in violation of any legal authority. With that stunt, not only does Schmitt increase the chances the virus will spread from children to their families, but he also stokes the irrational rage that is already swirling around public school board meetings. Even in the age of Trump, Schmitt's self-serving demagoguery and relentless pandering to the anti-science crowd this year has been truly stunning — and worthy of the national ridicule he has received.

If Schmitt's official behavior is infuriating and dangerous, at least Parson has provided some comic relief. After ascending to office in 2018, with Greitens' resignation in a sex-abuse scandal, Parson won the office in his own right last year and was sworn in to his first full term in January. Since then, with remarkable speed, he has been relegated to a sideshow in Missouri politics.

In January, after legislators moved his State of the State address from the House chamber to the smaller Senate chamber because of coronavirus infections in the House, Parson almost out-Trumped Trump, whining about the venue and accusing his fellow Republicans of trying to embarrass him. In July, he pardoned Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis lawyers who became red-state heroes for recklessly waving their guns around at nonviolent protesters in 2020. But Parson refused to pardon Black inmate Kevin Strickland, who even prosecutors said was wrongly convicted of murder.

And then there was Parson's bizarre vendetta against Post-Dispatch reporter Josh Renaud, who inadvertently discovered that the state had exposed potentially thousands of teachers' Social Security numbers on a website. Renaud did the right thing and warned the state, even agreeing to hold the story about the flaw until the security hole could be closed. Rather than thank him, as was proposed by others in his administration, Parson launched a deranged campaign to have Renaud investigated for illegal hacking. Even after the FBI indicated to Parson that the source of the flaw was internal and not the result of hacking, he continued to push it.

When it comes to nonsense, though, no one does it quite like the Republican-controlled Missouri Legislature. The examples of the extremism emanating from Jefferson City this year are too numerous to list here, but one stands out: The Legislature passed, and Parson signed, a measure declaring federal gun laws null and void in Missouri. As amusing as it is to imagine that the state's entire GOP apparently forgot who won the Civil War, this unconstitutional stunt has had serious consequences for police departments around Missouri, creating confusion about whether they are even allowed to work with federal authorities in fighting gun crimes. Way to stand for "law and order," folks.

As 2021 draws to a close, the virus that has killed more than 13,000 Missourians so far is still on the march, with state death rates rising in December and health care systems in St. Louis and Kansas City straining under the doubling or tripling of coronavirus hospitalizations. State legislators, preparing to return to session in early January, are responding by ... filing legislation to block vaccine requirements and other tools that might contain the virus.

And they aren't imposing mask or testing orders in the crowded state Capitol. "We have no specific measures in place," Senate Administrator Patrick Baker told the Post-Dispatch last week — an assessment that could describe the entire approach to the pandemic by this state's ideologically blinkered leadership.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Photo credit: trevoykellyphotography at Pixabay