Tag Archives: NY Times

national news

One man mocked; the other man helped

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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.

national news

Does POTUS really want a second term?

Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni are two top-notch reporters for the New York Times who have put together a story that suggests something quite remarkable.

It is that Donald Trump’s behavior and his inability/unwillingness to listen to advice from his staff to dial back his weird impulses suggest that Trump secretly doesn’t want to serve a second term as president.

Oh, I wish that were true. I have trouble believing it.

Haberman and Karni aren’t suggesting it’s all true. They just have talked to a lot of White House functionaries who make the suggestion based on what they are witnessing within the West Wing.

It is an intriguing thought to be sure. Trump cannot lead. He isn’t wired for public service. He is proving it time and time and time again. Trump’s feeble attempts at crisis management reveal a fundamental weakness in a guy who spent his entire professional life running a business, hosting a TV reality show and behaving like a crass, cruel and scandalous fool.

“I don’t think he’s fit for office,” says former national security adviser John Bolton. No kidding? Well, many of us have been saying it all along.

We have walked headlong into a most fascinating election season. I think we ought to keep Trump’s behavior at the top of our minds as this individual seeks to suggest he deserves a second term at the helm of the most exalted public service job on Earth.

Take a look at Haberman and Karni’s story here.

It might give you pause.

economic news, medical news

Trump ought to call those who have lost loved ones to the pandemic

Donald Trump isn’t wired to show compassion.

He doesn’t grieve openly. He won’t be seen wiping tears from his eyes. The president is too preoccupied with “making America great again,” and “telling it like it is.”

Donald Trump finds himself concocting rosy scenarios where none exists. He is separating himself from the suffering that is occurring in rural America and in our inner cities. He doesn’t seem interested in dealing on a personal basis with those who are suffering untold heartbreak.

As The New York Times reports: As he presides over the coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic collapse, Mr. Trump has hosted o called many people affected by the devastation, including health company executives, sports commissioners, governors, cruise ship company heads, religious leaders, telecommunications executives and foreign heads of state. One category that has to make his list: Americans who have lost someone to the pandemic.

I will not hold breath waiting to hear from anyone of those victims out here who has received a phone call from Donald Trump.

Trump’s failures as a leader are becoming even more evident than they were already. Many of us knew he lacked the compassion gene, or the gene that enables him to hurt along with the country. It’s just that watching all this play out in real time remains a sight to see.

While the country’s death toll soars past 60,000 individuals, Trump launches Twitter tirades and chastises: CNN, Democratic politicians, the media in general, China, MSNBC, Fox News. He can’t even take time on Twitter to say how profoundly sorry he is to hear about the misery that millions of Americans are feeling.

They are hurting because they have lost their jobs. Their loved ones have died from the viral infection. Their businesses are withering.

Donald Trump’s reaction? It is to blame others for his own failures and to lie about what a “fantastic” job he and his team are doing.

Sickening.

national news

It’s fair to ask: Is this POTUS losing it?

The questions arising from Donald Trump’s remarkable riff the other day about “disinfectants” reportedly has some folks close to the president wondering about the “very stable genius.”

According to the New York Times, Trump’s allies are so rattled by Trump’s musing about whether an ingestion of disinfectants could cure someone of the coronavirus COVID-19 that they persuaded him to remove himself from the daily “briefings” that I now refer to as “rants.”

Or, as the Times reported: Mr. Trump’s typical name-calling can be recast to receptive audiences as mere “counterpunching.” His impeachment was explained away as the dastardly opus of overreaching Democrats. It is more difficult to insist that the man floating disinfectant injection knows what he’s doing.

The ongoing interest in Trump’s bizarre riff has caused Dr. Deborah Birx, one of Trump’s medical experts charged with responding to the pandemic, to wonder why the disinfectant issue is still being discussed. Well, doc, it’s because it came from the mouth of the president of the United States.

The Times also notes that politicians such as President George W. Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden have at times been prone to gaffes, but Trump is in a league of his own when it comes to misstatements, lies and “stark pronouncements” based on ignorance.

And, yes, it gives many of us reason to wonder if this guy “knows what he’s doing.”

national news

Pence’s pettiness is so unbecoming

You have pettiness … and then you have Vice President Mike Pence.

The VP, who heads the Trump administration coronavirus pandemic response task force, has issued the strangest decree I can imagine.

He has ordered Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx — the task force’s preeminent medical experts on infectious disease — to stop appearing on CNN. Why? Because the network has chosen not to cover the entire task force briefings, which almost daily devolve into a campaign riff Donald J. Trump.

The president says nothing of importance at these briefings. Fauci and Birx, though, do offer expertise and knowledge of the fight in which we are engaged. CNN has chosen to report later what the principals say rather than covering them live.

That’s not good enough, says Pence.

If the briefings concentrated exclusively on the medical issues and if they focused more on the doctors than on the president, I could understand covering these events fully in real time. They don’t. They  become a forum for Trump to lie, to misdirect, to criticize others for the failings of his administration’s response to the pandemic.

CNN is not the only major media outlet to cease airing the briefings in their entirety. As Yahoo.com reported:

The New York Times, another outlet that has been a target of the Trump administration’s ire, stopped airing the briefings on its website entirely.

“We stopped doing that because they were like campaign rallies,” Elisabeth Bumiller, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, told the Washington Post. “The health experts often have interesting information, so we’re very interested in that, but the president himself often does not.”

Mike Pence petulance rips a page straight from the Donald Trump playbook. It’s disgraceful.

International news

You mean the Russians are interfering again? Wow! Who’da thunk it?

It can’t be. The Russians cannot possibly attack our electoral system yet again after what they did in 2016. Can they?

I guess they can! The New York Times is reporting that the Russians are at it once more. Indeed, now we hear that Donald John Trump, the nation’s current president, was so angry over the news that he fired the acting director of national intelligence and installed a loyalist into the job as the latest acting  DNI.

Actually, it is being reported that Trump got mad because the former acting DNI, Joseph Maguire, consented to a congressional briefing. That’s reportedly why he replaced him with U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grennell, a guy with zero experience at any level of intelligence, let alone at the director of national intelligence level.

Let’s remember that Trump dismissed the 2016 election attack, most infamously in 2018 at the Helsinki press event in which he stood next to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin and backed Putin’s denial over the U.S. intelligence agencies’ assessment that Russia had interfered in the previous presidential election.

Now we hear that the Russians have done it again!

This is scary in the extreme. Trump already is known to have solicited another foreign government, Ukraine, for a political favor. It got him impeached by the House of Representatives.

Here come the Russians once more, working to re-elect the president. They want to ensure that Trump gets a second term as POTUS, a move that is sure to sow as many seeds of anger and mistrust in our electoral system that the 2016 attack managed to accomplish.

Think of it. That’s precisely what the Russians want to do.

Didn’t the president take an oath to protect this nation against its enemies? Didn’t he vow to keep us and our institutions safe from this kind of attack?

What the … whatever?

local news

Two-fer endorsements: Idea is catching on?

This must be a new thing, more or less, in the world of newspaper editorial endorsements.

Editorial boards face a lengthy list of candidates for a specific office; they interview the contenders; they can’t settle on a single candidate to endorse … so they go with two of ’em!

Hmm. The New York Times did so when it endorsed U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren in the Democratic Party presidential primary contest.

Now it’s the Dallas Morning News doing the same thing regarding the Democratic primary contest for the U.S. Senate now occupied by Republican John Cornyn. The DMN couldn’t decide on a single candidate, so they offered up Texas state Sen. Royce West and former Houston City Councilwoman Amanda Edwards for readers to consider.

I believe that’s a bit of a cop-out on the part of the newspaper.

I get the paper’s semi-endorsement of West. He hails from Dallas. He has represented the city in the Legislature for a long time. He is a powerhouse legislator. He’s a hometown guy, sort of a “favorite son.” 

Edwards also impressed the Morning News editorial board. She’s well-educated and well-grounded in public policy.

However, shouldn’t newspapers that seek to lead a community make the same tough call that their readers will have to make when they enter the voting booth to cast their ballots for political candidates?

I am in the process of making up my own mind on who gets my vote in the upcoming Super Tuesday primary election. We’ll get to select someone to run for president along with a whole lengthy array of candidates on all manner of public offices up and down the political food chain.

We have to pick just one for each race. I had been kinda hoping for a bit of guidance from my newspaper on who to ponder in this race for U.S. Senate. I guess I’m on my own.

military news

SEALs spill beans on one of their own

Special operations forces — be they Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, Delta Force or Air Force commandos — generally aren’t inclined to blab about their colleagues unless they have valid reasons to do so.

So, when a group of Navy SEALs tell investigators that one of their own was known to be an out-of-control killer of innocent bystanders, then I believe we ought to listen and take heed.

What’s more, they are talking about a SEAL on whose behalf Donald Trump intervened. He is Navy Chief Edward Gallagher, who was convicted of conduct unbecoming a special operations warrior. Trump decided the Navy acted incorrectly and ordered that Gallagher retain his SEAL Trident emblem. Yes, the commander in chief interceded on behalf of a SEAL who had been found guilty of behaving in a manner not in keeping with the elite fighting force.

Navy Secretary Richard Spencer was forced to resign over the matter. The president has come under intense — and justified — criticism for meddling in a military command issue. Yes, he is the commander in chief, but that doesn’t make his meddlesome behavior any more correct.

Now the New York Times has heard from a number of SEALs who served with Gallagher as members of SEAL Team 7. They say that Gallagher shot children. The NY Times acquired some video of the SEALs spilling the beans on Gallagher.

According to the Times: “The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator (Craig) Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic, ” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview. “You could tell he was perfectly OK with killing anybody that was moving,” Special Operator First Class Corey Scott, a medic in the platoon, told the investigators.

And yet this is the individual who drew the commander in chief’s attention and for whom the president upset the traditional military chain of command. He interceded where he was empowered to go, but where he should have stayed away.

The SEALs who have outed their colleague have told us plenty about the consequence of a president intervening where he didn’t belong. That they would do so while breaking an unwritten rule that they remain silent about their operations tells me about the enormity of what they witnessed.

national news

Former CIA, FBI director takes aim at Trump

Donald Trump, the “current” president of the United States, is a threat to national security and is undermining the morale of the agencies charged with protecting us.

Who said that? A flaming, squishy liberal activist? Oh, no. That thought comes from a longtime Republican and the only person ever to hold the offices of FBI and CIA director, William Webster.

Webster is concerned that the president took issue with the “current” director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, who stands behind the inspector general’s assessment that he found no political bias in the launching of an FBI investigation into allegations of Russian election interference in our 2016 presidential campaign.

He skewered Trump in an op-ed written for the New York Times. You can read it here.

Webster criticizes Trump for referring to the FBI as a “broken” agency. It isn’t broken. Indeed, the only “broken” federal office is the one operating inside the White House.

My point here is that Webster is a strong, faithful and loyal Republican who is actually standing up to the fraudulent politician who is masquerading as our nation’s president.

If only other reliable Republicans — those in public office at this moment — could summon the courage of William Webster.

national news

Wondering: Why are conservatives turning on Trump?

Donald John Trump talks occasionally about espousing “conservative” ideals while lambasting “liberal politicians” over their own ideals.

The president campaigned as a sort of “conservative populist,” although there seems to be a counter-intuitive tilt to that description.

Millions of Americans swallowed the bait. Millions more of us spit it out.

For me, I am left to wonder: If the president is such a conservative icon and a believer in conservative principles, ideology and principle … why are so many notable conservative thinkers turning on him?

There might be a couple of thoughts at play here. One is that Trump is not the conservative he purports to be. Another is that actual political conservatives — except for evangelical Christians — are appalled, astonished and aggravated at this man’s history of hideous behavior.

I want to reel off just a few notable conservatives who now count themselves as anti-Trumpers: George F. Will, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist; Jennifer Rubin, a noted conservative columnist for the Washington Post; William Kristol, former VP Dan Quayle’s chief of staff and founder of the now-defunct Weekly Standard; David Brooks, a conservative columnist for the New York Times; Bret Stephens, another right-wing columnist for the NYT; Joe Scarborough, a former Florida Republican congressman who’s become a virulent anti-Trump spokesman; David Frum, a former speechwriter for President Bush 43.

Those are just a few names. They all have significant megaphones from which to comment on the state of political play.

I continue to maintain that Donald Trump is the classic, quintessential Republican In Name Only. He is the RINO’s RINO. I get that he appoints conservative judges and names conservatives to surround him within the White House.

He’s not the real deal. Donald Trump is a panderer who doesn’t understand how government works. He built his business career with one aim, to fatten his wallet and enrich his brand. He is a serial liar who is unwilling to tell the truth at any level.

True conservatives should have nothing to do with this individual. A good many notable conservatives have been willing to speak out and to declare their antipathy to what this man is pitching.

Good for them.