If there is an ideal place in Shelby County for Republicans to feel at home and certain of their turf (both physical and psychological), it is surely the expansive country manse that Brent Taylor has built in suburban Eads and periodically offers as a haven for this or that visiting GOP dignity. Taylor, who has occupied several local governmental positions and is now chairman of the Shelby County Election Commission, has served many party dignitaries by offering them his home as the site for a fundraiser, as he did Thursday night. For Tate Reeves, governor of Mississippi.
Aside from the hospitality, the house itself — half of it a replica of the Governor’s Mansion of Texas, the other half a reconstruction of the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion, has its own charm.
7th District Congressman David Kustoff was an early speaker at the affair, making plain his disapproval of Democratic President Joe Biden’s handling of troop evacuation from Afghanistan: “A catastrophe on Biden’s watch,” he called it. “No exit plan!”
The next GOP eminence up was Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett, who told the crowd, “It’s been an interesting time to be the chief election officer in the state of Tennessee, or really the chief election officer anywhere in the country. What I want to show each and every one of you is that we’re going to do everything we can to make sure that we, whenever we count the votes, you know, we count them once — no more, no less.”
Eventually, following a gracious proclamation in his honor presented by Shelby County Commissioners Mick Wright and Amber Mills, and read aloud by Mills, there was Governor Tate Reeves, and, though he used the word “solidarity” relative to the ongoing national emergency, he wasted no time conveying his dispraise of Biden: “Since the election of this president, I don’t know what has been worse, the execution of the removal of our troops from Afghanistan, or the execution of our southern border. Fact is this president just doesn’t understand.”
Reeves warmed quickly to what sounded like an essential credo: “I don’t always know what the future holds. But I do know who holds the future. And when you are in an elected office, you place your confidence in our Heavenly Father, and you let him provide you the strength to make the hard decisions. And everything else is what it is.”
The governor applies this lesson of faith to the ongoing Covid crisis, which finds Mississippi among the most afflicted states, both in numbers of cases and in the percentage of citizens infected.
“I’m often asked by some of my friends on the other side of the aisle regarding Covid,” Reeves said. “You know, most of them are about Covid. And why does it seem like both in Mississippi and maybe in the Mid-South people are a little less — scared, shall we say. And my response is, when you believe that living on this Earth is but a blip on the screen, you don’t have to be so scared.”
Reeves would add: “Now, God also tells us to take necessary precautions. And we all have opportunities and abilities to do that. And we should all do it. And I encourage everyone to do so.”
After his formal remarks, the Governor would contend that the curve of new Covid cases in Mississippi has held steady for a week, and he reaffirmed his opposition to imposing state mandates for either masks or vaccines.
