Tag Archives: Person of the Year

Time’s ‘Person of the Year’ is a no-brainer

trump

Here it comes: a good word about Donald J. Trump.

Time magazine’s Person of the Year is the 45th president of the United States. When the magazine’s editor in chief, Nancy Gibbs, was asked this morning whether this was a difficult choice, she said that it wasn’t. It was an easy choice, given how Trump managed to win the presidency by breaking virtually every known rule of conventional political wisdom.

I happen to agree with this choice.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/07/504662237/time-magazine-names-donald-trump-person-of-the-year?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social

I’m not going to get into the discussion about how the magazine has named some pretty despicable characters as its Person of the Year. They include, say, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin (twice).

It’s fairly customary for the magazine to honor newly elected presidents for this honor. So it’s no surprise that the newest elected president would get the nod as Person of the Year.

Look long and hard at virtually every aspect of Trump’s winning campaign: his lack of “ground game,” his insults, his bizarre behavior, his apparent complete ignorance of the principles of governance, the fact that the presidency is the first office he’s ever sought.

It’s good to examine what so many so-called “experts” said about his chances of being nominated, let alone being elected. He was dismissed as a joke, a circus act, a carnival barker, a huckster.

Here he now stands, ready to assume the role of commander in chief and head of state of the greatest nation on Earth.

All of that, by itself, qualifies this guy as Person of the Year.

Gibbs was right to say this was an easy call.

Now we’ll await this man’s ascension to the highest office in the land and we’ll see whether he has learned anything about the job he is about to do.

Win or lose, Trump’s impact has been ‘y-u-u-u-u-ge!’

donald-trump-speech-promo-getty-491877616

Americans ought to perhaps prepare themselves for a major shock at the end of this year.

I’m talking about Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign.

No, I do not mean to suggest that Trump is going to win the election and start preparing himself to settle into the chair behind that big ol’ desk in the Oval Office. He won’t ever get to do that — in my humble view.

What I mean is that Trump’s presence on the campaign scene has had an impact far, far beyond anyone’s expectations when he entered it this past summer.

Yes, America, this man well could become Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2016.

I don’t know how the Time editors are going to process this election. The winner of the campaign assuredly should be the logical choice for the esteemed honor. If it turns out to be Hillary Rodham Clinton, well, she will have made history as the first woman ever elected, just as Barack Hussein Obama made history by becoming the first African-American ever elected president.

Trump’s influence on this election, though, has been overarching.

He has redefined how the media cover these events.

Think of it: The guy has no government experience of any kind whatsoever. He is known as a reality TV celebrity and real estate mogul. He has lived a life of excess — and boasts about his extramarital sexual conquests. He begins his campaign by insulting Mexican immigrants who come here illegally by lumping all of them together as rapists, murderers and drug dealers.

Then it got worse.

Still, the man remains the frontrunner for the Republican Party presidential nomination. The media cannot stop reporting on his utterances. Why is that? Because the public is infatuated with them. Even those of us who cannot stomach the sight of him or the sound of his voice can’t stop writing about him.

Trust me on this: If there wasn’t a public appetite for this guy, the media wouldn’t report on him. The media respond to what the public demands.

The Time editors have made much of the criteria they use for these selections. The person they put on the magazine’s cover are there because of what they contributed for “good or ill.” The publication has put some pretty hideous characters on its cover: Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and the Ayatollah Khomeini come to mind immediately.

Donald J. Trump ain’t in their league.

However, he’s had a gigantic impact on the political process that selects the person who becomes president of the United States.

Willpower is enduring tremendous stress

donald

Donald Trump is making it very hard for me to keep my pledge to create a “no politics zone” in this blog.

He keeps coming up with outrageous and disgraceful pronouncements, the latest of which is the notion that he would ban all Muslims coming into the United States of America.

I’m not going to comment on it here. I’ll save my comments to Twitter.

You know how I feel about this particular notion and about Donald Trump in general.

***

But let me offer this brief perspective on something not related directly to his idiotic declarations.

Time magazine reportedly has Trump on its short list of candidates for Person of the Year.

Trump’s influence in 2015 on the upcoming presidential campaign has been profound. Of that there can be zero doubt. For that reason, I can understand if Time decides to declare him as its Person of the Year.

There can be little, if anything, positive to say about the substance of what he’s brought to this debate.

But his influence on its tone and tenor is beyond dispute.

Look at this way: He ain’t Hitler, Stalin or the Ayatollah. They all got the magazine’s nod for their influence on the world — for better or worse.

Guiliani makes zero sense

So help me, I never thought Rudy Guiliani was capable of going around the bend.

That is, until I read about his remarks delivered last night at a dinner honoring Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

The former New York mayor, the hero of the 9/11 response and Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 2001 actually said that President Barack Obama doesn’t love America.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/giuliani-obama-doesnt-love-america/ar-BBhKLyD

What on God’s Earth has the mayor been drinking, smoking, eating or taking intravenously?

Has the man not heard the president speak of his love of a country where only his “story can happen”? How the mixed-race son of an immigrant and a young woman from Kansas could graduate from college, earn a law degree, become elected to a state legislature, to the U.S. Senate and then become elected — twice — to the presidency of the United States? How about how that son could be raised by a single mother after his father abandoned his family and how he spent time growing up overseas and then grew up listening to his maternal grandparents tell of their struggles while living in Middle America?

The president proclaims his love of country damn near every time I hear him speak in public. Doesn’t he wish God’s blessings on the United States of America at the end of every speech he ever gives?

Isn’t the former mayor paying attention?

And yet Guiliani said last night that he believes the president is a patriot. What? Which is it, Mr. Mayor? Is he a patriot or does he detest the country of his birth?

 

 

Ebola fighters get too much credit

I’m not prone to critiquing Time magazine’s annual Person of the Year selection.

The choices don’t usually get me too worked up — either positively or negatively. This year’s choice is a bit different.

Time chose to honor the Ebola fighters, the medical professionals who went to West Africa to battle the killer disease.

Of all the choices Time could have made, the editors could have chosen someone with more, um, immediate and palpable impact.

As my pal Tom Taschinger wrote in the Beaumont Enterprise, “Granted, these men and women are doing noble deeds. But Ebola has faded from the epidemic that will end Life As We Know It to an overhyped cable-TV story.”

Indeed, this story was overplayed from the beginning, particularly the “outbreak” in the United States that never occurred.

Here’s one of the posts I published on my blog about the coverage:

https://highplainsblogger.com/2014/10/16/shep-gets-it-exactly-right-on-ebola/

One man flew to Dallas from Liberia; he was carrying the virus with him. He got sick, checked into a first-rate hospital in the Dallas area, but then died. Another man died in Nebraska. A nurse got infected in Dallas, went to Atlanta, and was declared Ebola free.

That’s it.

The disease has receded from the headlines and from CNN, MSNBC and Fox news coverage.

As Taschinger noted in his excellent column, occasionally Time picks a notorious figure as its Person of the Year — such as Ayatollah Khomeini or Timothy McVeigh. It has leaned more in recent years to feel-good selections. I agree that they’re important, too. But let’s get real here. Is Ebola really a worldwide threat?

http://www.beaumontenterprise.com/opinions/columns/article/THOMAS-TASCHINGER-The-Person-of-the-Year-is-a-5969800.php

The magazine can do better next year.

 

Person of the Year: an outstanding choice

The year 2013 could have produced a number of stunners for Time’s Person of the Year honor.

You had Edward Snowden, the former NSA leaker who’s now in Russia and hiding from U.S. prosecutors for leaking highly classified information. Snowden’s mischief changed the course of national security debate in America this year.

You also had Ted Cruz, the fiery freshman Republican senator from Texas who went to Washington promising, in effect, to shut down the process of governing. Has he sponsored any key legislation? No. But in keeping with my vow of Christmas kindness, I’ll refrain from any direct criticism until after the holiday.

Those are just two examples of individuals who changed the trajectory “for better or worse.” Hey, the magazine has named Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler and the Ayatollah Khomeini as its people of the year, for crying out loud.

Instead, the magazine went with Pope Francis I.

Great choice, given the context of his ascendancy.

Francis is the first pontiff to succeed a living predecessor in more than four centuries. He not only succeeded Benedict XVI, he has supplanted Benedict’s strict enforcement of Vatican policy with a much kinder, gentler approach to pastoring to the masses.

He’s taken the church to task for not doing enough to care for the poor; he has criticized capitalism as being too beneficial to rich people while continuing to ignore the plight of others; Francis has spoken out aggressively about how the church must cope with the child abuse scandal among Catholic clergy.

Francis lives in humble quarters, rides around in a humble car and has eschewed many of the trapping used by the earthly leader of the Catholic Church.

Francis has done all this while washing the feet of the poor, embracing — quite literally — the disfigured and the maimed among his flock.

He has brought humanity back into style as the leader of one of the world’s great Christian denominations.

Pope Francis I is the Person of the Year … without a doubt.