Monthly Archives: April 2020

national news

Trump says we’re ‘respected all around the world’? Not exactly …

OK, folks. I have very little to add to an item I am reposting on this blog.

Except to say that it was published this weekend in Irish Times. Ireland is a key ally of the United States. The Irish have been wish us through thick and thin. They’ve gone to war with us. They have emigrated to our shores and contributed mightily to our culture.

Get a load of how one Irish citizen, Finlan O’Toole, views the way we are responding to the global pandemic.

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THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality.

The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful. Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode?
 The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations.

Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic. As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted … like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.” It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – willfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.


The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a
shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.


If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated. Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas? It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.


Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order. In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.


Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.” This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fueled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus. It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right. Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralyzed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted. The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”.

Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it. There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection. Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder. And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realization that the
antics have to end.

No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here. That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behavior has become normalized. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality. And this will get worse before it gets better.

Trump has at least
 eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is reveling in it. He is in his element. As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more deathwish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics. Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again

national news

What is with this so-called ‘leader’ of an entire nation?

Someone needs to explain to me how a U.S. president who declares himself to be a “wartime” leader, who vows to “unify” the nation, can get away with saying this about other elected officials in this great nation.

He put this ditty out on Twitter this morning:

Why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states (like Illinois, as example) and cities, in all cases Democrat run and managed, when most of the other states are not looking for bailout help? I am open to discussing anything, but just asking?

What in the world is our “Dipsh** in Chief,” Donald Trump, saying here? Is he suggesting that if these “poorly run states … and cities” were run by Republicans that they would be getting all they help they sought from the feds? Or is he saying that party identity is the sole reason they are suffering so badly by the coronavirus pandemic?

Good grief, man! I didn’t think Trump could sound more idiotic than when he ran for the presidency, but he has delivered the goods in spades since taking office. His response to the pandemic is offering proof damn near hourly of his unfitness for the office to which he was elected.

A “wartime president” is obligated to speak to all Americans, to offer care and compassion to all of us, to seek common ground in the fight against a common enemy. This enemy, the viral infection called COVID-19, is killing Republicans and Democrats without a single regard to its victims’ party affiliation.

There is no limit to the depths Donald John Trump will plunge as he continues to disgrace this country.

media news

So glad to be free of the media misery

I am watching with great dread the fate of my former colleagues in print journalism, watching as they are being forced out of work or forced to take unpaid furloughs.

It’s a continuation of what has been happening to the media landscape for years.

Gannett Corp. laid off seven newsroom staff members from the Austin American-Statesman this week. One of them is a former colleague of mine with whom I worked way back when I first arrived in Texas in 1984. She gravitated from the Beaumont Enterprise to the American-Statesman two years later and was told that her 34 years of service was no longer relevant.

Another former colleague of mine, who works for a Gannett newspaper in Corpus Christi, is being told to take one week of unpaid leave each month for an undetermined amount of time. He told me recently “it sucks,” but he’s doing what he needs to do.

Gannett, by the way, is the name of the company that now owns the newspaper that served as my final stop in a daily print journalism career that spanned nearly 37 years. That career ended in Amarillo when the paper was owned by Morris Communications. Morris eventually sold all its papers to GateHouse Media, which this past year purchased Gannett Corp.; however, the newly minted newspaper giant operates under the Gannett name.

This is tough to watch.

I am watching it happen in real time while thanking Almighty God in heaven that I am no longer subject to that kind of misery. I went though enough of it as my career ended. Two pay cuts, decimating of staff, a newsroom reorganization and finally being told I would no longer do what I had done with some success for most of my career.

My heart hurts for my colleagues who are still toiling, still wondering, still awakening every day while not knowing with any form of certainty what the future holds for them.

They are doing their jobs the best they can do. The media landscape is shifting under their feet. It is unsteady at best.

All I am left to do — if you’ll pardon the cliché many of us have grown tired of hearing — is offer my thoughts and prayers for those who are being caught up in the media sausage grinder. I was there once myself. They just need to know that many of us who have gone on to “pursue other interests” are in their corner.

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

‘Presidential temperament’ is missing

I was given a crash course while working as a young reporter in Oregon on what it means to have proper “judicial temperament.”

My editor assigned a story that allowed me to look into the bench conduct of a Clackamas County trial judge. We had heard of complaints leveled against this judge and my editor set me on a course to determine the veracity of the complaints. They were mostly true, so I wrote the story and the newspaper published it.

I am trying to transfer the issue of judicial temperament to a discussion I don’t hear much these days while the nation discusses the presidency of Donald Trump.

The more I watch this individual flail and flounder under the pressure of the coronavirus pandemic, the more convinced I become — as if I needed any convincing — that he lacks “presidential temperament.” 

Proper judicial temperament, I learned, includes traits that enable a judge to treat litigants and their legal counsel with courtesy, to treat witnesses with respect and to honor the service of jurors who are tapped to sit in judgment of their peers.

Proper presidential temperament in a time of crisis requires that presidents exhibit compassion, empathy, strong leadership, maturity, knowledge and trust.

The judge I examined in the late 1970s exhibited little proper judicial temperament. The president we are examining today demonstrates next to zero presidential temperament.

The viral infection has killed more than 54,000 Americans. We don’t know where the death toll will end. Donald Trump cannot, or will not, demonstrate the kind of empathetic understanding one expects from our president.

His leadership qualities produce waffling, changing of mind, mixed messaging. In the span of 24 hours, Trump went from praising the Republican governor of Georgia for his decision to lift restrictions brought by the pandemic to criticizing him acting too hastily.

His continual excoriating of the media reveal an amazing immaturity in a president who doesn’t grasp what all of his predecessors have understood, that the media’s job is to hold government officials accountable for their statements and deeds.

Donald Trump lacks knowledge at every level of this pandemic. He mused aloud this past week about whether we could kill the virus by allowing individuals to ingest “disinfectants.” When the pandemic broke out, he boasted about the then-total of 15 cases vanishing to zero “like a miracle.”

Trump is the most untrustworthy man ever to occupy the presidency. His incessant, relentless lying provides all the proof anyone needs.

If we’re going to demand that a president exhibit the proper temperament to lead a nation — particularly now when its citizens are frightened by an “invisible enemy — then we have to examine the fundamental lack of presidential temperament exhibited repeatedly by Donald John Trump.

national news

Yes, Mr. POTUS, they are worth ‘time and effort’

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(Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

Donald John “Braggart in Chief” Trump has declared that the daily “briefings” that take place to tell Americans what’s happening with the coronavirus pandemic are no longer “worth the time and effort.”

So he’s thinking about backing out of them.

Allow me this rebuttal.

These rants certainly would be worth the “time and effort” if the president of the United States would refrain from mindless bragging about what a “fantastic job” he says he is doing to fight the viral infection.

They would be worth the time and effort if he would simply open event with some sort of preview of what is to come and then step aside to let the experts speak to the nation. I would even settle on hearing from Vice President Mike Pence — chairman of the White House pandemic task force — but only if he would forgo the slathering, blathering brown-nosing he throws at Trump’s back side.

These events would be worth the time and effort if they delivered anything of value to us. Instead we have received daily doses of brickbat-tossing, of self-congratulations and outright lies. Virtually all of what I have just described has come from Donald Trump.

None of what I have offered in this rhetorical wish list is going to happen for as long as Donald Trump is president. He cannot deliver the kind of compassion and empathy that tragedies such as this demand of our head of state. Nor can he stand aside while actual experts deliver the hard facts about what we’re facing. Moreover, he cannot take the time needed to study the impact of this pandemic on rank-and-file Americans.

This individual, who boasts of knowing the “best words” and of surrounding himself with the “best people” simply is not wired to lead a nation in distress. He doesn’t possess a single strand of compassion nor does he empathize at any level with the suffering that is under way out here, even in the middle of Trump Country.

So, here we are. A president who could have offered something of value at actual “briefings” aimed at educating and consoling a nation of frightened citizens is left to say that those events are not worth the “time and effort.”

Donald Trump continues to fail a nation he was elected to lead.

medical news

Trump bowing out of daily rants provides confusing reactions

Oh, the confusion I am feeling at this moment trying to digest the news that Donald Trump might not be delivering his daily rants inside the White House press briefing room.

I stopped calling them “briefings” because they long ago ceased providing any useful information related to the worldwide coronavirus pandemic.

So now we hear that after Trump’s disastrous off-the-cuff riff about ingesting “disinfectants” to get rid of the deadly viral infection, the White House has reportedly persuaded POTUS to cool it with the daily appearances. Trump put out a Twitter message that suggested it’s his idea, that the media are asking too many nasty questions.

The confusion treks along several lines of thought.

Trump’s poll numbers appear to be slipping. Donald Trump’s daily rants are hurting his re-election chances, according to pundits, pollsters and politicians. Accordingly, given my disdain for this fellow, I am torn between wanting him to keep blathering and babbling incoherently to create for the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden a clearer path to defeating this clown.

Trump is prone to say something dangerous if he continues. Thus, if he keeps delivering nonsense, he might say something that puts more American lives in dire peril. You see what I mean here? I don’t give a damn about Trump’s poll numbers, other than to see them continue to slide. I do give a damn, though, about whether this idiot will say something even more stupid than he did when he was “thinking out loud” about whether applying “disinfectants” would kill the virus “in a minute.”

Leave it to the medical experts to tell us what we need to know. I’m all in there. Donald Trump has some first-rate medical and scientific minds at his disposal. Dr. Anthony Fauci is a first-class infectious disease expert. Dr. Deborah Birx has done great work on HIV/AIDS research. Dr. Robert Redfield runs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Surgeon General Jerome Adams is a clear-headed thinker. Trump doesn’t listen to them. He prefers to hog the spotlight and say things that, well, make millions of us cringe; one of them, Dr. Birx, was caught on camera struggling mightily to control her facial muscles while Trump ran off at the mouth about disinfectants. 

I guess where I land is for Donald Trump just to keep his trap shut. Don’t discuss issues about which he knows nothing. He has inflicted enough damage already. I hope the damage is enough to doom his re-election. Meanwhile, the medical team working inside the White House can keep us informed on ways to protect ourselves and those we love.

local news

Here’s how you make it right, Mme. Mayor

Beaumont Mayor Becky Ames has asked residents of the Southeast Texas city she governs for forgiveness. Why? She got caught getting a nail treatment in a salon, in violation of the order she issued to residents to stay away from such businesses during the coronavirus pandemic.

Ames’ letter of apology was forthright and, I believe, sincere.

But … this thought occurred to my wife this morning at the breakfast table and I want to share it here.

You see, Ames might be prosecuted by the Jefferson County district attorney’s office for violating the order. The maximum fine if she is convicted is $1,000. I already have said in an earlier post that Ames ought to be pay the fine if the DA, Bob Wortham, determines sufficient cause for prosecution and conviction.

Ames ought to pony up the dough anyway, if she isn’t prosecuted, and contribute at least a thousand bucks to a worthwhile charity in Beaumont. Hmm, who or what might get such a donation? Food banks? A retirement center? Emergency medical services providers? The Beaumont police or fire departments? A service employee union office?

Mayor Ames’ request for forgiveness from her constituents would be honored in full, my wife and I happen to believe, were she to take a proactive stance … even if local authorities decide against slapping her on the wrist with a fine. She might even consider doing so in addition to the wrist-slap sentence.

Voters can be forgiving if their elected leaders demonstrate true contrition.

State news

Mayor learns first-hand lesson on trial of leadership

Beaumont (Texas) Mayor Becky Ames certainly knows what it means to be an elected leader of a city under duress.

It means, to those who might be unaware, that you must do what you order others to do, or in the case of Ames’s recent misstep … not do what she tells others they shouldn’t do.

Ames was seen in a nail salon getting a nail treatment the other day. As the saying goes: oops. Beaumont is under a shelter in place/stay at home order that the mayor issued. You know the story. The coronavirus pandemic has forced us all to keep our “social distance” and we must not use services that put us too close to other human beings.

Ames was caught violating the city’s mandate.

Ames has issued an apology. According to MSN.com:

“I promise there was no malice intended,” she wrote in a statement. “I should never have entered the salon last Tuesday. I did not intend to take personal privilege while asking others to sacrifice and for that I am truly remorseful.”

Ames concluded by asking for forgiveness. “As an elected official I am held to a higher standard, I regret my action that day. I am honestly sorry and I pray that you will forgive me,” she said.

I worked in Beaumont for nearly 11 years as editor of the Beaumont Enterprise opinion page. I barely know Becky Ames, who’s been mayor since 2007. She served as an at-large member of the Beaumont City Council from 1994 until she became mayor; I left Beaumont in early 1995.

That all said, I want to suggest that Ames’s apology sounds like the real thing. There’s none of that “If I offended anyone” qualifier in it.

I also suggest that elected leaders of all stripes, at all levels, should heed the embarrassment that has befallen Mayor Ames. She knew better than to do what she did. She got caught.

As for whether she ought to be prosecuted for getting a manicure, Jefferson County District Attorney Bob Wortham is looking into it. My gut tells me that there ought to be some punishment. An apology doesn’t expunge the record of a crime being committed. She won’t go to jail, but could face a fine of as much as $1,000.

The mayor can afford to pay the fine.

medical news

‘Disinfectant’ means ‘medicine’? Sure it does

Here come the rationalizations, the excuses, the covering of Donald Trump’s rear end over the president’s use of the term “disinfectant” to describe how one might treat the coronavirus that has killed tens of thousands of Americans.

I ran across an item from a guy who calls himself a “respiratory therapist” who says he is “not registered to vote and I don’t vote. I am neutral.”

Are we clear? I’ll proceed.

Trump mused nonsensically this week about how we could apply “disinfectant” to individuals suffering from the deadly viral infection. He didn’t say “Lysol” or didn’t declare one should guzzle “bleach.” He did, though, suggest one could “ingest” a “disinfectant.” Where I come from, when I hear disinfectant, my mind goes immediately to a household product used to, um, scrub surfaces clean. 

This individual suggests Trump, being a “layman,” used the term “disinfectant” incorrectly. He meant to say “medicine” or “medicinal products.” That’s what this guy suggests. Do you buy it? Me, neither.

Here is part of what he posted on social media:

(Trump) is basically brain storming for an idea to help the lungs. He stated that the disinfectant kills the virus in one minute, so he proposed the question can we inject disinfectant (not Lysol), he used the word “disinfectant” … in the lungs, but that is for the doctors to figure out.

Now a lay person like Trump will say disinfectant and a medical person would say “medicine”. Medicine dumped into the lungs happens all the time! I personally have dumped respiratory medicine down an Endotracheal tube directly into the lungs. When babies are born prematurely, guess what? Yes we “inject” the lungs with a medicine called surfactant that helps keep the alveoli open to oxygenate the lungs. Antibiotics are sometimes injected into infected parts of lungs through a chest tube.

… His statement was so twisted around and misinterpreted, and this is coming from a Respiratory Therapist that has injected medicine in people’s lungs.

There isn’t much more I can add to this other than to remind our respiratory therapist that I haven’t yet encountered a single individual who would sub the word “medicine” with “disinfectant.” Furthermore, Donald Trump calls himself — with words to this effect — the smartest man in human history.

Would someone with Trump’s alleged intellectual wattage use such clumsy language when talking about something so grim and serious as a deadly infection?

I’ll just have to sigh and echo the folks at Lysol: Don’t drink this stuff … it’ll kill you!