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