REMEMBER how deadly the coronavirus was? Some politicians seem to have forgotten (Shutterstock).

It took a lot of work, but the Huntington Beach City Council has now displaced the Westminster City Council as the municipal leadership raising the most eyebrows in all of Orange County.

In Surf City, the council meeting this week dragged on for nearly nine hours and the net effect was to stamp the community as the poster child for one-sided political recklessness.

The disputes in the Westminster council, although some of it was based on party politics, were mostly about disputes between two factions in the Vietnamese-American community.

They did onto each other as they had been done to, over and over. The voting public was a little less hot-heated and overwhelmingly approved an extension of the sales tax without which Westminster likely would have plunged into insolvency.

The situation in Huntington Beach is a bit different. The council majority – whose opponents have several less polite names for – has emerged mostly as a far-right group determined to “own the libs” with actions almost certainly designed to drive the Biden-Obama folks up the wall.

In addition to that, the council majority took action to take an ax to a wide variety of city committees and commissions. That sort of makes sense. Why ask for advice from the public when you already appear to have determined your course, as taken from the red-hat playbook?

The council concluded Wednesday morning by tilting at windmills. On that all-too-common 4-3 vote the council acted to seek to “ban broad (universal) mask and vaccine mandates” and declare the city to be a “no mask and no vaccine mandate city” vis a vis the coronavirus.

So I guess the city government would be willing to defy state and county health mandates. What’s next? No seat belts in cars? Abandon health inspections in  restaurants? Make up your own speed limits?

Come to think of it, these folks appear to have few limits in their campaign to paint the city a dark shade of red. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.