Just in time to miss the surge of the highly contagious Omicron Variant®, and in concert with the unsteady CDC’s updated guidance on masking (i.e., that cloth masks don’t work, Joe Biden announced yesterday that he’d be giving away 400 million “free” super-deluxe N95 masks from our Strategic National Stockpile.

As Fox News reports: “The administration’s plan involves dispersing some 400 million N95s through pharmacies and community sites, offering more Americans easier access to the medical-grade protective masks amid the spike of COVID-19 cases. The White House official said the administration will start shipping out masks at the end of this week, and they should be available starting late next week.”

White-privileged Rhode Island Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, for one, could hardly contain his excitement: “Soon, Rhode Islanders will be able to pick up free N95 masks from local pharmacies & health centers,” he gushed. “This is high-quality protective equipment, straight from the Strategic National Stockpile. Keep an eye out for more info over the coming days.”

As for Biden’s latest giveaway — last week it was “free” COVID tests — we’re not interested. But at least these masks are “free,” just like the president’s recently deceased Build Back Better plan. It’d be cause for grave concern, though, if all these goodies didn’t cost “zero dollars,” and we taxpayers — as opposed to our grandkids — were actually on the hook for it.

And so, while the Biden administration continues to pitch the permanent pandemic, certain other countries are leading the way out of this two-year nightmare and beginning to get on with their lives. Take the UK, for example, where Prime Minister and Party-Animal-in-Chief Boris Johnson expressed his hope that England could “ride out” the current COVID wave without the government imposing further restrictions. Johnson acknowledged that the country’s National Health Service might be “temporarily overwhelmed” by the highly contagious (but lowly dangerous) Omicron strain, but that he and his fellow Brits could ultimately get through it.

The prime minister has been getting worked of late. As The New York Times reports: “Johnson, fighting for his political life, said on Wednesday that he would lift almost all remaining coronavirus restrictions in England, hoping to stanch a devastating loss of support over charges that he lied about parties in Downing Street during lockdowns. … The stream of disclosures about illicit social gatherings have engulfed Mr. Johnson’s government and emboldened mutinous lawmakers to push for a no-confidence vote that could topple him.”

Johnson expressed a desire to restore England’s “ancient liberties,” and he suggested that, as the Times continues, “Britain had put the worst of the Omicron wave behind it, with new cases and hospitalization rates beginning to decline, even though they are still at a high level.”

So Johnson is partying down while Biden is masking up. If the Anglosphere were Ridgemont High, BoJo would be Jeff Spicoli, and Scranton Joe would be Mr. Hand — without the sentience and the sharp tongue.

Hope is not a strategy, of course, but it can certainly set the tone for a nation. And we tend to like the tone coming out of 10 Downing Street a lot better than the tone coming out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue these days.