[ Posted Friday, June 26th, 2020 – 17:29 UTC ]
America, led by President Donald Trump and (mostly) Republican governors across the country, launched a grand experiment a few months back. Rather than following guidelines and milestones recommended by top epidemiologists, each state would reopen its economy as it saw fit. If your governor felt comfortable enough with the state of things, then the doors would be thrown open. This all started just before Memorial Day weekend, when Trump decided he was bored with the pandemic. And now it's becoming pretty obvious that this experiment has failed, and failed badly. And tens of thousands of Americans are paying a very steep price for this exercise in unfounded optimism.
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[ Posted Tuesday, June 23rd, 2020 – 17:28 UTC ]
Have we ever had a president with a thinner skin than Donald Trump? I suppose Richard Nixon almost qualifies; but Nixon was more outright paranoid, which is somehow slightly different. Nixon did believe his enemies (most definitely including the press) were out to get him, but on a personal level he could occasionally take a joke and even be self-depreciating at times. The same simply cannot be said about Donald Trump. His go-to emotion is resentment, and his go-to reaction is to viciously lash out in all directions at the tiniest perceived slight.
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[ Posted Friday, June 19th, 2020 – 18:14 UTC ]
As time goes by, it is looking more and more like the television show Trump: The Reality-Show President is just not going to be renewed for a fifth season. After all, Fox News just released a poll showing Donald Trump a whopping 12 points behind Joe Biden. That's tough news from your sponsoring network, obviously. When CNN released an earlier poll showing Trump down 14 points, he had his lawyer try to intimidate the network into retracting the poll. It didn't work, of course. So what will Trump's lawyer now have to say to Fox?
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[ Posted Thursday, June 18th, 2020 – 16:48 UTC ]
To President Donald Trump, today's Supreme Court ruling was not actually about the hundreds of thousands of young people whose legal residence in this country hung on this court case. Instead, it was about one thing and one thing alone, which is pretty much the same thing that everything is about for Donald Trump: himself. After learning of the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision denying Trump the ability to strip legal protection from the "dreamers," Trump petulantly took to Twitter to ask: "Do you get the impression that the Supreme Court doesn't like me?" Once again, Trump reduced an issue of monumental importance to the level of schoolyard gossip (about him, of course). Maybe if the Supremes really really liked Trump, things would be different? Because that's obviously what it's all about, not all that legal mumbo-jumbo or hundreds of thousands of young people's lives.
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[ Posted Friday, June 12th, 2020 – 18:07 UTC ]
President Donald Trump seems to have settled on a theme for his campaign, as he doubles down on blatant racism. Think that's too strongly put? We don't. Consider the following, from just the past week:
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[ Posted Wednesday, June 10th, 2020 – 17:04 UTC ]
Is anyone else out there ready for some cheerful and perhaps even downright rosy-tinted optimism? I for one certainly think it's time to write a column filled with positive vibes, and I've got just the subject. While triple crises rage throughout America (medical, economic, and injustice-based) and while Donald Trump's poll numbers continue to sink like a stone, there have been some interesting developments in another important political arena. The Senate is now not only "in play" for Democrats in November, the possibility now exists that they won't just win back the chamber, but win it back in a big blue wave that puts them firmly in control.
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[ Posted Friday, June 5th, 2020 – 17:24 UTC ]
This week, an American president ordered the violent removal of peaceful protesters -- who were doing nothing more than exercising their First Amendment rights to assemble, speak, and petition the government for redress -- from a public park so that he could then walk across the park and hold up a borrowed Bible for a photo opportunity with both the Secretary of Defense and (clad in battle fatigues) the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Afterward, the Trump White House immediately issued a propaganda video of the event. Later that evening, a military helicopter clearly marked with a red cross took offensive action against the protesters (which is banned by the Geneva Conventions, and is now under investigation). Later still, the president and all his enablers in the White House lied through their teeth about the entire incident, repeatedly. At week's end, we learned of another affront to the Constitution by the Trump administration, when it was revealed that federal law enforcement had unconstitutionally seized a shipment of cloth face masks created by a Black Lives Matter affiliate, and the only possible reason they did so was that the Department of Justice apparently didn't like the messages displayed on the masks (which read: "Stop killing black people," and: "Defund police").
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[ Posted Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020 – 16:24 UTC ]
After apparently sleepwalking through the first part of the week, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper woke up today and realized his responsibilities as the head of the Pentagon. Perhaps he got some pushback from the generals who are aghast at the thought that the vaunted U.S. military could become to be seen as a political force at the beck and call of a partisan president. Esper had apparently forgotten this bedrock tenet of American government earlier, when participating in Donald Trump's now-infamous "brandishing a Bible in front of a church" photo op. Esper not only walked back this participation (by stating he somehow had no idea it was about to happen), but he also openly contradicted the president's call to mobilize the military to crack down on protests in the streets.
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[ Posted Tuesday, June 2nd, 2020 – 17:29 UTC ]
President Trump staged a photo opportunity yesterday that went horribly wrong, but the White House doesn't yet seem to have comprehended how bad a look it actually was. In fact, they proudly put up a video montage of the event that seems to strive for the impact of a Leni Riefenstahl production (watch it for yourself if you think this is overstating the case). The whole staged event is nothing more than a naked effort to counter the growing ridicule Trump has gotten for hiding in his bunker over the weekend during the protests, in fact. You see President Trump boldly striding away from the White House, crossing Lafayette Square, pumping a macho fist to all the militarized police standing around, and then appearing in front of a historic (and boarded-up) church where he awkwardly tries to hold a Bible up for the cameras. Trump then (according to the Riefenstahl clip) triumphantly strides back to the White House, to the adoration of all. Mission accomplished. Roll credits.
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[ Posted Friday, May 29th, 2020 – 17:16 UTC ]
Anyone "tired of all the winning" yet? Just asking....
In the same week America passed the grim milestone of 100,000 dead from the coronavirus pandemic, a black man was suffocated by a white police officer while three other cops stood by and either helped him commit this crime or did absolutely nothing to prevent it. Since then, there have been sometimes-violent protests in the streets of not only Minneapolis but in several other cities across the country. The dead man was accused of the crime of trying to use a fake $20 bill at a convenience store. The cops, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, provided him with a death sentence -- for the transgression of trying to pass a fake twenty.
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