The remarks of a desperate man are to be taken seriously, because there’s no tellin’ precisely what might fly out of his mouth.
Donald Trump went to Scranton, Pa., this week and offered a truly bizarre twist to the “birtherism” theory that has become all the rage — yet again — among right-wing politicians.
He said, according to the Huffington Post:
“He’d say he was born here,” Trump told listeners in Scranton. “But he left when he was like 8, 9 or 10. So he left 68 years ago, he left — a long time ago. So I view it differently. He wasn’t born here. He abandoned Scranton!”
Trump conceded: “His family had something to do with that, you know, his parents. But he left Scranton.”
Trump is talking about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who was born in Scranton, but left when his family moved to neighboring Delaware. Biden is proud of his Scranton roots and he mentions it often while campaigning for president.
But what the hell is up with Trump suggesting that Biden might not have been born there?
Someone might need to take Trump’s temperature. His desperation might be getting to him.
I couldn’t help but feel my heart pounding hard as I watched a 13-year-old boy tell the world about the kindness extended to him by Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden.
Brayden Harrington has a stuttering issue he must confront every day. He delivered his remarks with supreme courage during the virtual Democratic Party Convention this week. He got most of his remarks out without a hitch. Not all of it, though.
Biden overcame a stuttering issue as he was coming of age. He would read poetry, forming words carefully to avoid getting caught up in a stutter. I admire his courage, too, in fighting through the debilitating impediment. I also will pray for the future progress of young Brayden as he makes his way through life.
I also would tell him, if given the chance, that he must prepare himself for more of the mistreatment I am certain he has endured already from his peers. I won’t call them his “friends,” because real friends wouldn’t subject him to the bullying and humiliation he likely will experience … and has experienced already.
I know how it goes. I felt it, too. I once had a serious stuttering problem. I cannot say it is totally eradicated. Words still trip me up on rare occasions. As a teenager — indeed, well into my high school years — I struggled with speaking, particularly in front of large groups of people.
Two of my classmates in high school heard me once stumble while trying to say my own last name during a class project. They just split a gut, man! For the rest of my high school years these two fellows would mimic that moment of supreme embarrassment.
Well, that was then. The here and now is quite different. I have conquered that demon … more or less. Oh, those two guys? One of them is now deceased. I saw the other one at my 50-year high school reunion in 2017. We chatted amicably as if nothing ever happened during the bad old days. I hope he reads this blog and recognizes himself in it.
Hey, I don’t hold any hard feelings toward him now. I damn sure did back then.
So, I salute young Brayden Harrington for standing before the entire world and speaking out on behalf of a politician who knows the battle he is enduring.
Could I ever do such a thing when I was 13 years of age?
I guess you can file this in the “Better Late Than Never” category of official government findings.
The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, the panel run by a Republican Party majority, has concluded what many of us knew already: Russia attacked our electoral system in 2016 seeking to aid in the election of Donald J. Trump.
It is a bipartisan finding. It lends credence to the assertions delivered by special counsel Robert Mueller III, who told us in 2019 that Russia attacked us and that they will do so again this year. The report confirms all of that.
It also puts to rest any phony denial — supported by Trump — that Russia didn’t do what has been alleged all along.
Recall that Trump stood next to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and openly dismissed reports from our intelligence experts that Russia had interfered in our 2016 presidential election. He sided with his pal, Vlad, standing before the entire world.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report now has put to rest any notion that Trump might try to foist on us that the Russia probe was a “hoax,” a “witch hunt,” or a fishing expedition.
It was none of any of those things. Indeed, the Senate findings also suggest that there was, indeed, “collusion” between the Trump campaign and the Russian goons who hacked into our electoral system. Does that sound like “exoneration”? Not to me!
CNN reports:The report is all the more remarkable because it was led by then-Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican, and Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia. The report provides an exhaustive, bipartisan confirmation of the contacts between Russians and Trump associates in 2016 — and it was the only congressional committee that managed to avoid the partisan infighting that plagued the other congressional investigations into Russian election meddling.
What do we do with this report? It will remind me — just a chump voter and blogger who happens to be an American patriot — of the corrupt nature of Donald Trump’s political team … then and now.
Why the nervous jerks? Why am I sweating bullets? It’s easy to answer.
Donald Trump is capable of doing damn near anything to pilfer this election, to do whatever it takes to win.
I get that Politico is merely reporting what it learns, which is that former VP Biden is beginning to look beyond the election coming up in 70-some days. I just dread the prospect of Trump finding a way to win a second term and effectively destroying the nation that we have come to know, revere and cherish.
When I say “destroy” the nation, I am not suggesting he is going to torch the White House, burn down the Capitol, throw out the Supreme Court. I do intend to suggest that Trump will leave a virtually indelible imprint on the institutional framework of the government crafted by the framers. And I don’t like what I have seen so far.
I don’t like the massive rush toward environmental deregulation; I don’t like his federal court appointments; I detest his effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act; I hate the manner in which he has isolated this nation from the rest of the shrinking world; and I damn sure hate the way he makes out with dictators and disparages our intelligence network.
Accordingly, I want him defeated as much as the next guy. Maybe more than the next guy. Which makes me nervous as hell when I read about Joe Biden forming a “government.”
The former vice president has to pour every bit of energy he has into defeating Donald Trump. Then he can take the next step, which is to form a government that can repair the damage that Trump has inflicted on our republic.
It was a moment during the Democratic National (virtual) Convention that to me spoke volumes about the differences between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Biden featured a young man, Brayden Harrington, who had a terrible stuttering problem. The former vice president also conquered a stuttering handicap he had a child. Biden reached out to the youngster, lent him his emotional support and helped him fight off the debilitating handicap.
On Thursday, the youngster appeared in a brief video that meant to call attention to the empathy and compassion that is part of Joe Biden’s makeup, part of what drives him daily. “About a few months ago, I met him in New Hampshire and he told me we are members of the same club. We stutter,” Brayden said, stumbling over his words.
The other picture you see here is taken from a 2016 campaign appearance in which Trump mocked a disability suffered by a New York Times reporter, Serge Kovaleski. He mimicked the reporter in hideous fashion. The social media image has gone viral and it speaks to the ghastly impulse that too often overtakes Trump, who has no discernible empathy or compassion bone in his body.
I thought I would share these thoughts just to remind you of the choice we all get to make this fall as we elect the president of the United States.
I am going to express a fond hope for the next week while Republicans nominate Donald Trump for another term as president of the United States.
It is that Democratic presidential nominee Joseph Biden will refrain from launching into Twitter tantrums as Trump keeps telling lies while the party nominates him.
Trump, of course, was busier than the dickens this week as Democrats conducted their virtual nominating conviction. Each tweet demonstrated Trump’s smallness, his pettiness, his petulance. I get that the individual has 80 million Twitter followers — give or take — and he’s mastered the medium as a way to make policy statements even when they surprise his own senior staff.
Biden is wired differently, or so it seems. He’s a good bit more thoughtful than Trump, which well could mean that he’ll be discreet and patient before making a public policy statement via Twitter.
That’s my hope, at least, while much of the nation watches the RNC do its job.
I am joining the chorus of Joe Biden supporters to declare that Thursday night’s presidential nomination acceptance speech, while perhaps not a grand slam home run, could pass as a stand-up triple.
I am giving the Democratic presidential nominee credit for stepping up his game, for offering a glimpse into the future he foresees if he gets elected president and for reminding us — without overdoing the rancor — that Donald Trump has failed in his primary mission as president, which is to protect Americans.
The former vice president had a big hurdle to clear. It was erected the previous night by vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris and, of course, by former President Barack Obama and their respective speeches to the nation.
Biden cleared the hurdle. I am more than satisfied with how he comported himself and how he delivered an important message to those of us who wanted to hear what the nominee had to say.
My major takeaway? Joe Biden intends to lead us out of the darkness and into the light.
Even on his best days, Donald Trump cannot stop alleging that America has lost its way, that we no longer were great, strong and economically healthy when he took office. Trump has told those myriad lies for too long.
Joe Biden reminded us that the pandemic needed Trump’s attention from the very beginning. As a result of his early denials of the seriousness of the COVID crisis, we have lost too many American lives and seen too many more infected by the killer virus.
Trump and the Republicans get their turn next week. They, too, will conduct a virtual convention, with Trump set to accept his party’s nomination with a speech delivered from the White House.
I’ll state it once more: My mind is made up. There is no way on God’s precious and fragile Earth that Trump will earn my support. However, I intend to watch the Republican show if only to see how they intend to defend the indefensible … which is Donald Trump’s record in the only public office he ever had sought.
That is to say that the more citizens who participate in the democratic exercise of voting, the more representative the government that results is of the people it is designed to protect and defend.
This is my way of furthering an argument I used to make while working in daily print journalism. I aimed the argument at voters who failed to participate in local elections. Local government elections generally draw abysmal voter turnouts. I witnessed it in Oregon and Texas, where I worked for nearly 37 years as a journalist.
I sought to urge voters to cast their ballots so they would have a voice in the government that sets tax policy, determines the quality of law enforcement and fire protection, picks up the trash and provides water for us to drink.
So … how does this logic play out now as the nation prepares to elect a president of the United States? The same argument applies.
However, Donald Trump and his Republican pals want to suppress voter turnout. We have a pandemic raging across the country. Millions of voters are afraid of getting sick by voting on Election Day; they want to vote by mail. Trump opposes that idea, promoting a specious argument that mail-in voting is inherently corrupt. Except that it isn’t corrupt.
The Trumpkin Corps wants us to believe we cannot vote by mail without our ballots being stolen or compromised in an unspecified nefarious manner.
It is imperative that we do all we can to encourage more voters to decide this election. Not fewer of them. I do not want others to determine who we elect as president of the United States.
If we are able to vote by mail, I intend to cast my vote in that fashion. Absent that, I intend to vote early in Texas, even though I have a lengthy history of reciting on this blog my loathing of early voting. My preference is to vote on Election Day as a hedge against the candidate of my choice doing something stupid or criminal that makes me regret my vote.
The pandemic changes that dynamic for me.
Thus, it should be imperative that we allow more people to vote. The reasons are as straightforward as they are regarding local elections.
Democracy works better when more citizens — not fewer of them — take part in this fundamental element of living in a free society.
We hear it every presidential election cycle, about how “this election is the most important in our lifetime … or in the past century … or in the history of our glorious republic.”
Take your pick. It’s one or some or all of them, right?
Well, I happen to think the election we’re about to conduct might qualify as the most important election ever. As in ever in the history of the great nation we love and cherish!
Donald J. Trump became president by trading on voters’ unhappiness with the “status quo,” whatever that meant. What the nation got has been a lesson in chaos, confusion, incompetence, disloyalty and an obsession with hostile dictators at the expense of our national intelligence community.
Who would think they ever would hear a president trash his predecessors’ records in the White House while extolling the “love letters” he receives from a murderous Marxist dictator? Moreover, who would have thought that another dictator would stand accused of paying bounties on the lives of American service personnel and our commander in chief would refuse to punish him; the president has betrayed the oath he took to protect the men and women he sends into battle.
Joseph Biden stands poised — I hope! — to remove Donald Trump from the White House, a place he never should have been allowed to enter, let alone as president of the United States.
I have tried to make a singular point about Donald Trump, which is that this individual’s entire adult life — all of if! — has been focused solely on enriching Trump. Public service has been totally foreign to him. We now are witnessing the consequences of what I have sought to tell readers of this blog. He doesn’t comprehend the public service aspect of his job.
As President Barack Obama noted in his speech Wednesday night, Trump views his office as a “transactional” endeavor, meaning that he would enact public policy in exchange for favorable treatment.
That is not good government. It is not in keeping with public service at any level, let alone at the highest level possible.
Yes, we are faced with a monumental election in just a few weeks. Americans who were fed up with the status quo now have learned what they got. They got a president who doesn’t know what he’s doing, he doesn’t care to learn anything about the office he occupies or the limits built into it.
We need to rid ourselves of a president who is endangering the very democratic principles he took an oath to protect.
Is this the most important election we’ll ever decide? It looks like the real thing to me.
Barack Hussein Obama delivered the goods and laid them directly at the feet of Donald John Trump.
Those goods contained a fairly detailed recital of precisely why — in my own view — Trump is unfit for the office he holds and why former President Obama’s “brother,” Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., deserves to be elected the next president of the United States.
The media are making quite a lot of the “unprecedented” nature of a former president taking a sitting president to task so directly and so harshly. Hmm. Well, my own sense is that Trump merely is reaping what he has sown.
Why? I consider equally unprecedented the level of direct criticism, denigration and disparagement that the current president has laid on his immediate predecessor. I feel the need to point out that President Obama had remained essentially silent in the face of those unfair and unwarranted attacks … until now!
Obama said Trump has failed to grow into the office. He has failed to grasp the gravity of the awesome responsibility he inherited when he walked into the Oval Office. He said Trump has failed to rein in his angry impulses, failed to cease labeling foes as the “enemy.”
Yes, the 44th president delivered the goods. As did Sen. Kamala Harris, the VP nominee who’s running with Biden against Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
What’s next? Joe Biden has a steep hill to climb tonight when he accepts his party’s presidential nomination. He will need to at worst to meet the level that Obama and Harris reached with their speeches.
Biden has a stirring and compelling personal story, full of heartache and tragedy and perseverance. We know the story. He needs now to tell us where he intends to lead the nation if he becomes elected as our 46th president.
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