From the Editorial Board of The Washington Post

The editorial is titled: "The danger is growing that Trump’s lies about the election will lead to violence."

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-danger-is-growing-that-trumps-lies-about-the-election-will-lead-to-violence/2020/12/09/cf71d6f0-3a61-11eb-9276-ae0ca72729be_story.html

Am going to be saving this paper

 

Joe Biden

Here are two very nice commercials from the Joe Biden campaign.

The first is called "Hometown," and is narrated by Bruce Springsteen.  It first aired on television this past weekend, and Mr. Springsteen's "My Hometown" is heard throughout.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftGp3UTTO4E

The second commercial first aired a couple of weeks ago, and is titled "Go From There."  The narrator is the actor Sam Elliott.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2Xufahbaq4

The Election

This post has been edited,  to include additional information from a New York Times story which had been cited.

 

Am hoping for the sea-change, via the election:  that the country will have voted for calm, steady, strong, caring, wise leadership. 

One hopes, in short, that the Trump ride will soon be over:  that we'll be done with the President's endless divisiveness, his endless lies, his cruelties, the racial dog whistles, the conspiracy theories, the contempt, the self-pity, the self-glorification. And, of course, there have been his stunning failures regarding COVID--and what has become his disinterest in, dismissal of, minimizing of (and his preference for falsehoods about) the virus.

In a July 19th New York Times story, David Carney, an advisor to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, said this, of Mr. Trump and the pandemic: "The president got bored with it."   

Some governors, the article reported, "have sought out partners in the administration other than the president, including Vice President Mike Pence, who, despite echoing Mr. Trump in public, is seen by [such governors] as far more attentive to the continuing disaster."  Mr. Carney, the Times story said, "noted that [Governor] Abbott, a Republican, directs his [COVID-related] requests to Mr. Pence, with whom he speaks two to three times a week."

The President has said, many times, that the country is "rounding the corner," concerning the pandemic. On October 23rd, he added one word to the phrase: "We're rounding the corner beautifully."  On that day, in the U.S., there were over 900 deaths, due to the virus.  There were also more than 83,000 new COVID cases that day--a record, at the time, which has since been surpassed.

As of today, there have been more than 9 1/4 million COVID cases in the U.S.--and more than 231,000 deaths. A death count of a quarter of a million is in sight.

"Hometown": a new commercial for Vice President Biden

The commercial is narrated by Bruce Springsteen, and his song, "My Hometown," is heard throughout.

https://youtu.be/ftGp3UTTO4E

From columnist Michael Gerson, in The Washington Post: "Here are the Trump administration’s four most profound failures in the pandemic"

Gerson served in the administration of George W. Bush.

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/27/here-are-trump-administrations-four-most-profound-failures-pandemic/

"Could we wake up just one morning without thinking: Lord, what has he done now?"

From Boston Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham, October 10th, about President Trump:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/10/10/metro/please-just-make-it-stop/

A strong, persuasive endorsement of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, from the editorial board of The Boston Globe

 https://apps.bostonglobe.com/opinion/graphics/2020/10/biden-endorsement/editorial/

"More than 200 retired generals, admirals endorse Biden, including some who served under Trump"

From NBC News, via Yahoo:

https://news.yahoo.com/more-200-retired-generals-admirals-093007165.html

John Lewis

 

This is a 2007 portrait of Congressman Lewis--a brave, heroic man--who died on Friday, at age 80.

The photograph, by Eric Etheridge, is from Etheridge's 2008 book, Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders (New York: Atlas & Co. Publishers).

The President, and COVID-19

For some time, it is clear, President Trump has been pretty much done with COVID.

On June 17th, he said that the coronavirus was "dying out."

Nine days before, on June 8th, he said: "We may have some embers or some ashes, or we may have some flames coming, but we'll put them out.  We'll stomp them out.  We understand this now. We'll stomp them out and we'll stomp them out very, very powerfully."

On July 2nd--his impersonal locution, I think, was interesting; it was suggestive, perhaps, of his own remove from the issue--he said: "The crisis is being handled."

 

Two days later, during a July 4th address, he sought to minimize the virus's severity.  He said that "we have tested over 40 million people. By so doing, we show cases, 99% of which are totally harmless."

My previous post was written June 22nd. At that time, more than 120,000 Americans had died as a result of the virus.

As of today--three weeks later--there have been approximately 15,000 additional American deaths.

Our era

This has been a staggering, harrowing time.  

 

First, the cataclysm that is the pandemic. Near the end of May, 100,000 Americans had died due to the virus.  Less than a month later, there have been more than 20,000 additional deaths.  By October, it is now estimated, more than 200,000 Americans will have died.

 

And then, on May 25th, there was the world-shifting death--hideous, chilling, and heartbreaking--of George Floyd.

 

It is a time of enormous consequence--as regards the health catastrophe, and the issues of race, bigotry, inequity. Yet the President--a remarkably hollow man--has shown, routinely, that he is fully incapable of helping to heal the country.

New York Times story: "‘Ugly Even for Him’: Trump’s Usual Allies Recoil at His Smear of MSNBC Host"

From the article:

Some of President Trump’s most stalwart media defenders broke ranks with him on Wednesday, aghast at his baseless smears against the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, whom Mr. Trump has all but accused of killing a former staff member two decades ago despite a total lack of evidence.

The backlash even spread to the senior levels of Mr. Trump’s party on Capitol Hill, where the No. 3 House Republican, Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, said the president should drop the matter and focus on leading the country through the coronavirus pandemic. “I would urge him to stop it,” she told reporters, referring to the false allegations.

And this, from the article:

The president’s attacks have caused anguish to the family of Lori Klausutis, the staff member in Mr. Scarborough’s former congressional office who died in 2001 when a heart condition caused her to fall and hit her head on a desk. Mr. Scarborough was not present and the police ruled her death an accident. Ms. Klausutis’s relatives have said that the president’s evocation of her death and his unfounded insinuation that she had an affair with Mr. Scarborough have caused them deep distress.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/business/media/trump-joe-scarborough-conservative-media.html

New York Times op-ed essay, "Make America Immune Again," by Thomas Friedman

Mr. Friedman writes:

"At a time when we desperately need to be guided by the best science, Trump’s daily fire hose of lies, and his denunciations of anything he doesn’t like as 'fake news,' has contributed mightily to the loss of our 'cognitive immunity' — our ability to sort out truth from lies and science from science fiction."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/opinion/coronavirus-us-immunity.html

A warning from Dr. Fauci, about reopening the country prematurely

He made the comments on Monday's Good Morning America:  

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/04/20/nation/dr-fauci-says-reopening-too-quickly-will-backfire

Op-Ed essay by Jennifer Senior: "This Is What Happens When a Narcissist Runs a Crisis"

From The New York Times, April 5th:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/05/opinion/trump-coronavirus.html

Albert Camus

(From The Plague, by Albert Camus, Modern Library edition, ©
1948; original French edition published in 1947) 

"Surfaces? Sneezes? Sex? How the Coronavirus Can and Cannot Spread"

From the New York Times, March 2nd:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/health/coronavirus-how-it-spreads.html

From the Editorial Board of The Washington Post: "History Will Remember Mitt Romney"

The editorial cited Mr. Romney's very fine speech on the floor of the Senate, before the impeachment vote:

“I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me,” Romney said in his floor remarks, calling Trump’s conduct “grievously wrong.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/history-will-remember-mitt-romney/2020/02/05/b5945e22-4856-11ea-8124-0ca81effcdfb_story.html

New York Times: "Barr Once Contradicted Trump’s Claim That Abuse of Power Is Not Impeachable"

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/us/politics/barr-impeachment-abuse-of-power.html

"Trump took aim at kids’ nutrition. He picked the wrong food fight."

From Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/20/trump-has-picked-wrong-food-fight/

Columnist E.J. Dionne: "Hey Republicans, demagoguery won’t hide Trump’s incoherence"

From the January 8th Washington Post, online:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hey-republicans-demagoguery-wont-hide-trumps-incoherence/2020/01/08/6ce30a4a-325b-11ea-91fd-82d4e04a3fac_story.html

From New York Times columnist Frank Bruni: "We Can’t Afford Trump as Our Commander in Chief "

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/opinion/trump-iran.html