OTTAWA -- A perfect storm is battering the brand of politicians across party lines and provincial boundaries, worsened by having leaders caught up in the turbulence.

While we should be severely outraged by the slow rollout of vaccines in provinces given months to prepare for a mass inoculation, it’s the 20 or so beach bums who are hogging the headlines.

On Tuesday morning, I counted no less than eight opinion columns on one news site alone, frothing fury at pandemic-fleeing, sun-seeking politicians and their retroactive regret at being caught.

While delayed vaccination could be a killer, there likely won’t be one COVID-19 case linked to the return of MPs, MLAs, a senator or a political staffer who ignored the spirit, if not the letter, of self-isolation orders.

But that’s not the point.

Rarely is a public outcry rooted in so many offensive elements, which are so easy to understand yet so difficult to comprehend.

There’s the hypocrisy of politicians pledging solidarity with those in lonely isolation even as they searched online to upgrade seats for family reunions.

There’s the raw deception of MPs, MLAs and a senator pretending to be among us in pre-recorded Christmas greetings when they knew they’d be slathering on sunscreen at the swim-up bar by the time it was released.

There’s the dishonesty of issuing "sincere" apologies, but only after their bogus excuses were exposed by reporters.

And there’s the culpability of having their leaders know or even approve travel plans only to pretend they were in the dark when the trips came to light.

What’s most difficult to comprehend is the sheer stupidity of politicians even attempting a pina colada escape.

Surely, they knew there was a high risk of being busted by having their face in a palm tree photo on social media, of being ratted out by a jealous neighbor or, that most obvious of signs, being a Canadian politician sporting a nice tan in January.

Of all these scandalous elements, stupidity is the most unforgivable.

We’re already conditioned to believe politicians live an entitled life above the rest of us with big paycheques, platinum pensions, front-of-the-plane travel and generous living expenses.

But for them to strut through empty airports toward a boarding call for Cancun, knowing it was morally if not legally indefensible, is to suggest they believed the voters were so pathetically easy to dupe, they didn’t even need to try and cover their tracks to the tropics.

The damage might’ve been containable except for the befuddled fib-filled reaction by premiers and federal leaders who couldn’t get their stories straight on what they knew, when they knew it or what they were going to do about it.

It seems so long ago now, but political leaders traditionally held in low public esteem were enjoying a renaissance of sorts in the spring.

They became the reassuring face of empathy as they harnessed the collective power of public concern to impose harsh actions for the safety of all Canadians. The polls nodded their approval.

But at this critical mass of moments – with case counts surging, vaccinations limping out of the starting gate and warnings about mutant COVID-19 strains coming to life – to see so many politicians doing the walk of shame out of airports is a defining catalyst for political outrage.

When this pandemic’s post-mortem is written, it will find plenty of fault with politicians for failing to detect what was coming, test when it arrived, trace as it spread and vaccinate quickly as lifesaving doses poured in.

Any of those mistakes could be grounds for electoral pink slips.

But it’s the little stuff that sticks in long memories.

That’s why the brand of all Canadian politicians will suffer lingering damage from the actions of the stupid few who left voters in cold lonely lockdowns while they sought socialization under the sun.

That's the bottom line.