Not so fast on ‘moving on,’ Mr. POTUS

Donald J. “Buck Passer in Chief” Trump reportedly is trying to change the subject from the coronavirus pandemic that has grabbed the attention of the entire planet.

No such luck, Mr. President. He’s got a full-blown crisis on his hands and we expect our head of state/commander in chief to take charge and to, um, lead us.

Oh, wait! This guy can’t do it. Dang! I damn near forgot. That must explain why he wants to change the subject. Why he wants to move on to other matters that have nothing to do with death, disease, heartache, misery, mourning. He wants to talk about the economy, which certainly is serious stuff. It doesn’t have as much to do about stemming the pandemic infection as dealing directly with strategies aimed at quelling the infection rate.

I will concede that devoting the vast bulk of Trump’s attention to this crisis requires him to acknowledge — in some fashion — that his strategy to date has failed. He won’t do that, either. He cannot admit failure, even when statistics demonstrate categorically that he has failed.

At some level, I happen to agree with Trump that we need to get the economy rolling again. I am with him … to a point! The first priority must be stemming the infection/hospitalization/death rate from the coronavirus. He isn’t listening to those who agree with my point of view. He is listening instead to those who have bought into the claptrap that the virus is a “hoax,” and that the media are employing scare tactics to frighten American needlessly.

Donald Trump needs to get to work — finally! — to assemble a coherent national strategy.

Aww, what the hell. He won’t heed these words, either. I just had to get them off my chest.

No surprise that POTUS would be muted in honoring this icon

I am not surprised in the least that Donald Trump has been so reticent in honoring the life of the late civil rights icon John Lewis.

Yes, he offered a brief statement via Twitter, offering thoughts and prayers for “he and his family.”

Other presidents have been much more, um, fulsome in their praise for the hard work and the blood that Lewis shed on behalf of justice and civil rights. Presidents Carter, Clinton, Bush and Obama all spoke with heartfelt anguish at Lewis’s death. Trump? Well, he didn’t go there. He isn’t wired that way. Trump isn’t equipped with the rhetorical tools one can find even in politicians who disagree with other politicians.

Oh, no. Not this guy.

Indeed, Lewis and Trump did get into a nasty spat a couple of years ago. Lewis referred to Trump as an “illegitimate president,” because of the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Trump called Lewis a man who is all talk and no action; I guess Trump forgot about the time Lewis had his skull fractured by the police during a civil-rights march in Selma, Ala.

This, I submit, is another failing of Donald Trump. A president who feels aggrieved by a political foe surely could set aside those grievances and offer a significant tribute that recognizes that foe’s contributions to the social fabric, not to mention the political life of the nation we all love.

Isn’t that part of the job, Mr. President?

What is White House hiding now?

The White House is playing a stupid game of keep-away with the U.S. Congress.

What it is keeping away from Congress happens to be information vital to the public — you know, the folks who pay the bills in Washington — on the best way to resume public education for our children.

The White House has decided to block Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Robert Redfield from testifying to the House Education and Labor Committee. The panel wants to know about the strategies being developed to allow schools to reopen eventually in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Let me see. What might be the White House be fearing? Oh, might it fear that Redfield is going to say something that contradicts Donald J. Trump’s desire to reopen the schools this fall without little or no regard to the effects of the pandemic that still is raging across the country? That’s what it looks like to me. And to others, I should add.

According to CNN.com“Dr. Redfield has testified on the Hill at least four times over the last three months. We need our doctors focused on the pandemic response,” a White House official said, confirming the decision to block the CDC’s participation in the hearing. But a spokesman for the House Education and Labor Committee said the panel had requested testimony from any CDC official, not necessarily Redfield.

The CDC is one of the go-to agencies in this fight against the pandemic. It seems to me that hearing from the head of this critical agency is, shall we say, critical to understanding what’s at stake and what the government is doing to protect our lives.

What in the name of government transparency are trying to hide within the West Wing?

Those closest to Trump think so little of him?

One of the astonishing takeaways I am gleaning from Mary Trump’s book about Uncle Donald — the current president of the United States — has to do with how those closest to him think of his ability, his credibility, his qualifications.

They think very little of any of it, according to Mary Trump, author of Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,”

She recounts, or so I understand, how his sister thought so little of him when he announced his presidential campaign in June 2015 that she thought he was joking. She presumed he was pulling off a publicity stunt to call attention to his “brand.”

Others in his family — sis, a brother and several other nieces and nephews — dismissed his boasting for what it was, empty rhetoric. He wasn’t self-made, as he claimed; he didn’t attend church, yet evangelicals flocked to his side; he is a man of zero principle.

Trump doesn’t apologize for anything. He never admits he is wrong. He tramples over everyone he meets. Trump is callous, callow and without any redeeming personal quality, or so Trump is reporting.

I happen to believe what she has written. What astounds me, though, is how those close to Donald Trump think so much less of him than those who have glommed onto his cult of personality.

Another icon passes from scene

Americans have been yanked into a long-held reality with the deaths of African-American men at the hands of police officers, which is that justice too often is applied unevenly in this country.

So now, here we are. The nation is mourning a giant of a great cause to bring equal justice, equal rights to all citizens. John Lewis has died of pancreatic cancer. He was 80 years of age.

U.S. Rep. Lewis comes from an era of great struggle. It was a violent time and Lewis, tragically, was the victim of that violence. Police in Alabama beat Lewis to a pulp as he marched along with other black citizens for equal rights. He recovered. Lewis continued to stand tall alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young and other activists of the time seeking justice and liberty for all Americans … regardless of their racial makeup.

“He loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise,” former President Barack Obama wrote in his statement. “And through the decades, he not only gave all of himself to the cause of freedom and justice but inspired generations that followed to try to live up to his example.”

Lewis took his struggle to the floor of the U.S. House, where he served with honor representing the people of Georgia as a Democratic congressman.

Andrew Young also rose to prominence as well, becoming U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and mayor of Atlanta. He spoke today of his friend’s death and the belief that despite the deaths of so many great civil rights icons, their work and their legacies live on.

The live through their spirit that remains among us, Young said.

So it will be as the nation gets past its time of mourning the death of a real-life, authentic American hero.

Rest in peace, Rep. Lewis. You have done well, but the hard work will continue in your memory.

Shakeup = stability? Seriously?

What in the name of counter-intuitiveness am I missing?

Donald John Trump keeps insisting that his campaign is rockin’ and rollin’ along. That his team is well-oiled, well-groomed and well-positioned to guide Trump to a re-election victory.

Why, then, if Trump’s command structure is so awesome does he change the man who runs it? He replaced campaign manager Brad Parscale with Bill Stepien.

Oh, it must be that Trump is trailing former Vice President Joe Biden — the presumptive Democratic nominee — by double digits. Or it was that disastrous Tulsa, Okla., rally that was supposed to overfill the arena, but drew a crowd that comprised about one-third of the arena’s capacity.

Where I come from, those things tell me that the campaign is in serious trouble. Hence, Donald Trump shook it up.

Time will tell, I suppose, whether this latest rumbling at the top of the Trump campaign team rights the ship. I am highly skeptical. I mean, the team has a boss who’s out of control.

Weird.

Happy to report sanity in our local school system

I am delighted to report some good news — if you allow me to call it that — regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is that our granddaughter and her brother are going to be kept out of their classrooms for at least the first semester of the upcoming academic year. We got the word from our son and daughter-in-law that the Allen (Texas) Independent School District, absent any guarantee that it can prevent spread of the virus in schools, has decided to give parents the option of online schooling at home.

Our son and daughter-in-law have exercised that option.

Thus, the Allen ISD will not follow Donald Trump’s blind and stupid call to reopen our classrooms despite the surge in coronavirus infection in states such as ours.

For the president to insist on school reopening is beyond irresponsible. He exhibits no outward interest in protecting the lives of our precious children and the teachers who expose themselves to potential illness or worse.

So local school districts here in North Texas are calling their own shots. Princeton ISD, where my wife and I live, isn’t going along with the president’s urging. Neither are the Amarillo and Canyon ISDs, from where we moved two years ago. They are going to online teaching, giving students materials they can study at home.

Our granddaughter and her brother — who is entering his senior year in high school — did well in the second half of the preceding school year learning at home. They will do so again once the new year begins in August.

Meanwhile, the search for vaccines continues. May the brainiacs assigned to find them hit pay dirt sooner rather than later.

Pence is wrong; media telling the truth

REUTERS/Nicholas Pfosi

Donald Trump’s top-tier toadie, the vice president, has decided that the media are to blame for sowing seeds of panic among Americans concerned about the coronavirus pandemic.

Mike Pence has been wrong about a lot of things. This one ranks near the top.

Vice President Pence spoke this week in defense of the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic that has killed 138,000 Americans and infected more than 1 million of us. He then offered a critique of the media, declaring that the media have hit the panic button.

Pence keeps referring to the “whole of government response” that he says has been a success. It has not!

A nation with 4 percent of the world’s population has more than 25 percent of the world’s deaths from the pandemic. That’s how you define success, Mr. VPOTUS?

Donald Trump has failed to lead the nation. He is challenging the expertise of actual medical experts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidelines for school reopening have been pushed to the back of the shelf as Trump insists that schools reopen this fall with classrooms full of children and teachers.

Do I need to remind everyone that Trump said at the beginning of the outbreak that it would disappear … just like that? It hasn’t.

Meanwhile, the media are doing what they are empowered by the U.S. Constitution to do. They are seeking to hold government accountable, which is part of the media’s mission. Every president — until Donald Trump — has understood the media’s role and they have accepted their role as part of the job they inherited.

To that end, Mike Pence is far from alone in criticizing the media’s coverage of the pandemic. He is part of the Trumpster Corps of loyalists that has endorsed Trump’s idiocy that the media are “the enemy of the people.” Therefore, when the media deliver bad or “negative” news, the Trumpsters call it “fake,” when in fact the news is as real as it gets.

This media criticism, which is unfounded, cuts me to the quick. I loved pursuing my journalism craft for more than three decades. It hurts to see newspapers floundering as they are these days. However, there still is some great journalism being practiced. The media are doing their job. They are telling us the hard truth about a disease that is killing and sickening too many Americans.

A big part of that truth the media are telling is that Donald Trump is failing this supreme test of presidential leadership.

Why let an interloper represent the Texas Panhandle in Congress?

I hate what I fear is going to happen to the Texas Panhandle’s 13th Congressional District.

The district’s strong Republican ties are likely to hand the district over to an interloping carpetbagger who doesn’t know the first, second or third thing about the district. But he’s an R and that’s good enough for them.

He is Ronny Jackson, a retired Navy admiral, a physician (and former doc to two presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump). He doesn’t know Pantex from Spic ‘n Span, but he’s going to represent the district for at least the next two years after they count the votes in the November election.

I’ll get to the glimmer of good news in just a bit.

I maintain an interest in the 13th District, even though I no longer live there, because my wife and lived there longer than we have anywhere else during our 48 years of married life. The congressman who is leaving Congress, Mac Thornberry, took office the same week I reported for duty at the Amarillo Globe-News in January 1995. So I have told Thornberry that he and I “grew up together” in the Panhandle.

Thornberry, though, has deep roots there, growing up on a ranch in Donley County. So he knows the district he has represented for 25 years … unlike Dr. Jackson — a native of Levelland — who took up residence there only to run for the office he thinks is ripe for the picking. And he’s right.

But … here comes the glimmer of good news.

He won the endorsement of Donald Trump in his primary race. Indeed, Jackson — from all I’ve heard — has spoken only about his close he is to Trump, that he is wedded to the president’s agenda … whatever the hell that is.

The good news? Trump is on course at this moment of losing his bid for re-election. Bigly! He has bungled the presidency at every turn. He has clearly mismanaged the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He has sought to divide the nation. Trump spews racist-sounding thoughts.

It is my fondest hope that Joe Biden defeats Trump. If that comes to pass, then what becomes of Dr. Jackson’s main selling point he is using to land a seat in Congress? He likely will be hard-pressed to get the time of day from a Biden administration.

Would that mean it’s one term and then out for the doc?

I just know that my friends in the Texas Panhandle deserve a whole lot better from their congressman than they’re about to receive. At the very least they deserve to be represented by someone who knows the issues relevant to the region.

Strike the Confederate colors!

Defense Secretary Mark Esper wrote the following today in a memorandum that has gotten worldwide attention: “The flags we fly must accord with the military imperatives of good order and discipline, treating all our people with dignity and respect, and rejecting divisive symbols.”

You only get a single guess on which flag he targeted with this message. Time’s up.

Yep, it’s the Confederate flag, which has been banned at all military installations. Period. Full stop.

I am going to hand it to Mark Esper. His order flies directly into a headwind created by opposition from the commander in chief, Donald Trump, who has made no secret of his outrage over the Confederate flag being targeted as a symbol of hate and national division … which it most certainly is.

Trump has this peculiar affection for the rebel flag, which to my eye symbolizes bloodshed, treason and enslavement.

We fought the nation’s bloodiest conflict, the Civil War, with one side rallying under that flag on the battlefield, where more than 600,000 Americans died. The Confederate States of America committed treason by rebelling against the federal government, seeking to overthrow it … and why? Because the CSA wanted to retain the right of states to allow people to keep other people enslaved.

There you have it. Defense Secretary Esper says all flags that fly on U.S. military installations must comport with the ideals of the nation. Slavery and treason aren’t part of the package.

Now I am wondering at this moment whether the commander in chief is going to override that order. Donald Trump has the legal authority to do it. Will he dare?

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