Wow, look at all the woke Republicans! All of a sudden, they’re making public service fashion statements!

Marco Rubio is doing it: “Everyone should just wear the damn mask.”

Mitch McConnell is doing it: “We must have no stigma, none, about wearing masks when we leave our homes and come near other people. Wearing simple face coverings is not about protecting ourselves, it is about protecting everyone we encounter.”

Charles Grassley is doing it: “Everybody’s got to do their share.”

Rick Scott, Rubio’s fellow Florida senator, is doing it: “We’ve got to – every one of us – to take this seriously, wear your mask.”

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey is doing it: “Help contain the spread. Wear a mask.”

Dick Cheney, in his cowboy hat, is doing it. Mike Pence is finally doing it. Even Fox News propagandist Steve Doocy is urging Donald Trump to do it: “If the president wore one, it would just set a good example. “(Fat chance of that happening.)

Why are so many Republicans suddenly so vocal about wearing masks, a simple selfless act that can reportedly reduce Covid transmission by as much as 85 percent? Why the overnight urgency?

Duh. Take a wild guess.

Now that Covid caseloads are exploding in red states like Florida (277 percent hike in the last two weeks) and Arizona (145 percent) and Texas (184 percent) – indeed, now that their people are getting sick and dying – the light bulb is suddenly shining inside thick Republican skulls.

The macho BS doesn’t look so macho now. The selfish “me first” ethos has been outed as a public menace. The notion that one’s personal “freedom” trumps everyone else’s health – as articulated by the Florida woman who said at a public meeting that masks interfere with “God’s wonderful breathing system” – has been exposed as the idiocy it always was.

With so many Republicans now surrendering on masks – Arizona’s governor, having reopened the state too quickly without a mask requirement, is a very late convert to sanity – I suppose we should say that it’s better late than never. But look at all the human havoc they’ve already wreaked. Did they not think that Covid would strike their “base”? Did they somehow convince themselves that if Arizona, Texas, and Florida allowed maskless young people to pack the bars again, that magical superpowers would make everyone immune?

So they should not be congratulated for waking up to reality. Michael Steele, a former national Republican chairman, is rightly unimpressed by the GOP’s sudden enlightenment: “Really, now? After 120,000 deaths? After a million-plus people get infected?”

And it’s not just the deaths, and the caseload spikes, that have prompted Republican leaders to embrace masks. They’re also reading the polls. At this point, somewhere between 65 percent and 80 percent of Americans believe in masks. Clearly, the message has hit home that the politicization of masks is killing people. Combine that message with Trump’s plummeting polls – his deadly incompetence is the GOP’s albatross – and it’s no wonder that so many Republicans are scrambling, albeit tardily, to get on the right side of science.

But not all Republicans, of course. The emperor of America’s idiocracy is still seemingly determined to treat the pandemic the way Herbert Hoover handled the Great Depression.

Trump said yesterday he personally “looks good” in a mask, like “the Lone Ranger,” and if people want to wear masks, he’s fine with it. But he still won’t urge his acolytes to comply, and his remarks about the pandemic still sound as if he’s listening the voices in his tooth fillings. Hence this gem yesterday, in an interview with Fox Business: “I think we’re going to be very good with the coronavirus. I think at some point that’s going to sort of just disappear, I hope. I do, I do.”

Uh huh. Just click those ruby slippers three times.

But we need to remember that Trump is merely the most visible manifestation of the selfish, willful ignorance that infects the American mindset. He feeds off the stupid people as much as they feed off him. College students in Alabama have been throwing “Covid parties,” and betting on who gets sick next. Maskless evangelicals packed Trump’s church gig in hot-spot Arizona. Mask-haters have been throwing tantrums in stores (apparently, people who are wear masks are “Democratic pigs!”). A prominent Washington, D.C. socialite recently hosted a mask-free soiree with two dozen people; now she has Covid, as do a number of guests.

So yeah, the mask-loving Republicans are speaking up three months too late, but their long silence has been shared by tens of millions of Americans who literally can’t see past the ends of their own noses. It’s a veritable confederacy of dunces.

Which is why, today, I’m ceding the last word to Max Boot, a former Republican foreign policy adviser who has been tracking the mask issue. He writes:

“We can and should hold our leaders responsible, but ultimately, we have no one but ourselves to blame. Nobody forced so many Americans to act so recklessly – first by placing their faith in a president who doesn’t deserve it, and now in ignoring widely publicized scientific findings. We are living – and now dying – in an idiocracy of our own creation.”