Tag Archives: Mike Pence

medical news

Pence flouts Mayo mask policy

Oh, man. I had hoped Mike Pence would be above flouting a policy enacted by a major medical center. Silly me. The vice president is more like the president than I had thought.

The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has enacted a policy that declares everyone in the place wears a mask. Pence visited the clinic today and was the only individual photographed who wasn’t wearing a mask to protect him against the coronavirus.

Uh, Mr. Vice President … what in the name of disease prevention is wrong with you? Mayo officials even said they would provide Pence with a mask.

Pence knew of the policy. He chose to parade around the joint without a mask. There he was, following the lead of Donald Trump, who declared that mask-wearing was a suggestion, but that he would forgo wearing a mask while working in the White House.

That’s leadership? That’s how you demonstrate to the nation that you are willing to do what health officials are asking the rest of us to do? Of course not!

It is an act of stupidity.

Truthfully, I thought Vice President Pence was smarter than that.

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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.

medical news

Dr. Anthony Fauci: cult hero

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Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci might be the nerdiest cult hero in American history.

He has become the de facto voice of reason within the Donald Trump administration, which is led by a pathological liar who also happens to be an ignoramus. Fauci has been the primo truth-teller among the men and women who’ve been briefing us daily about the progress of the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on the United States.

He will turn 80 years of age next Christmas Eve. Fauci runs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He is a giant among the physicians and scientists who work with the National Institute of Health.

Fauci has been charged with helping craft the nation’s response to the pandemic as it has circled the globe, killing thousands of human beings. It has claimed more than 1,000 Americans and the United States is now the world’s most infected nation, with more than 120,000 Americans infected by the unique coronavirus known as COVID-19.

Dr. Fauci, though, is facing a monumental task while reporting to pandemic task force chairman Vice President Mike Pence, who in turn reports to Donald J. Trump. You see, Pence is the nation’s No. 1 suck-up to Trump and Trump is the nation’s No. 1 purveyor of fake news.

So, when Fauci contradicts the crap that flies out of Trump’s mouth,  he runs the risk of angering the Top Liar, who has demonstrated a propensity for removing those who fail to fall in line with whatever falsehood he is peddling.

Trump tries to persuade us that we’ve got this pandemic “under control.” We don’t have it under control. The cases of infection are increasing daily and they are threatening the economic health — not to mention the physical health — of the nation.

Meanwhile, we have Dr. Fauci trying to tell us the truth. A social media Fauci Fan Club has emerged. I’m grappling with whether I should join. I likely won’t do it, but it surely is tempting.

However, I remain wedded to my belief that the nation needs this wise and learned man more than ever as an antidote to the imbecile to whom he must answer.

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Pence servitude ignores Trump’s early denial

Whenever I have the misfortune of listening to Vice President Mike Pence’s slobbering praise of Donald Trump’s “leadership” in handling the coronavirus pandemic, I cannot help but circle back to Trump’s initial reaction to the outbreak.

He all but denied the existence of the outbreak, which had felled people in Wuhan, China. Trump called it a “Democrat hoax.”

Then he reported that the nation had about 15 cases of COVID-19, but soon would melt away to zero. Trump said a “miracle” would occur.

Trump has continued to insist — as the death toll in the United States has topped 1,000 victims — that he has done a “fantastic” job. The United States is now the most infected country on Earth, surpassing the former epicenter nations of China and then Italy.

The president says we’ll have a vaccine ready to go shortly, only to be contradicted openly by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading medical/science expert working on the Trump administration response team.

Donald Trump’s “leadership” has been MIA since the beginning. It is still missing in action at this moment. He blames the media for fomenting panic, for disrupting the economy … all for the purpose of undermining Trump’s re-election chances.

Mr. President, your political future is in your hands and yours alone.

I am just sickened beyond measure at the extent that this president’s alleged “leadership” is aimed for one purpose, which is to advance his own effort to win re-election.

Leadership? It hasn’t revealed itself in the White House.

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Mike Pence: most obsequious VP ever

Of all the characters and assorted reprobates who answer to the Reprobate in Chief, Donald Trump, the one who astounds me the most daily is Mike Pence, the vice president of the United States.

It’s getting to where I cannot listen to the vice president speak to the nation while standing just a few feet from Donald Trump.

Why? The VPOTUS is the most obsequious individual ever to occupy the office that is next in line to the Big Job.

It’s not enough for Pence, I guess, to listen to Trump heap praise on himself, calling himself the most consequential president in human history, taking credit for things he never has done. Oh, no. Pence has to pour it on. He stands there in front of the nation and the world and continually slathers the president with fawning praise.

I get that VPs are required to be loyal to the individual who asks him or her to run with them. It’s just that when Pence speaks of Donald Trump, he sounds so shallow, so callow, so hollow. 

I keep reminding myself that Pence bills himself as a devout Christian, a man of deep and abiding religious faith. He won’t meet in the same room with women who aren’t his wife. He has told us that his faith guides his public service.

But how in the world does this individual continue to slobber all over a president who is the very antithesis of the beliefs for which Pence believes? Donald Trump has admitted to never seeking forgiveness. He never exhibits an ounce of grace. Yet there is the vice president, continually telling us about the “outstanding leadership” that Donald Trump has shown, particularly during the current pandemic that is scaring the daylights out of millions of Americans.

All the policy initiatives that Pence supposedly is leading? It’s not enough for him merely to report on them. Heavens no. He has to tell us over and over again how much Donald Trump cares for us all, how he “puts Americans’ interests first.” No! He doesn’t!

I can’t listen to this baloney.

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Pence grovels at Trump’s feet, but believe this: Trump doesn’t give a rip

I could not help but marvel at Vice President Mike Pence’s shameless groveling today as Donald Trump announced the national emergency in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

There was the VP heaping praise all over Trump, damn near slobbering as he saluted the president for his “astounding leadership” and all the things he has done to save Americans’ lives and protect the nation from the health crisis that is enveloping the world.

Please …

What is most astonishing is how little Trump thinks of those — in addition to Pence — who piled on the bouquets.

Does any serious-minded individual who watched that spectacle this afternoon think that the president ever is going to return any of the love they hurled at him? Of course not. He thinks of no one but himself and demands that kind of blind fealty of those who work at his pleasure.

It was a disgusting and obscene display.

medical news

POTUS is the ‘snake’

(AP Photo/Jeffrey Phelps)

Vice President Mike Pence traveled this week to Washington state to see where the coronavirus has killed more than a dozen residents. After all, he supposedly has taken the point in managing the federal response to the virus.

He met with Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat. He spoke supportively of Inslee’s efforts to combat the coronavirus.

Donald Trump’s response? He went to the Centers for Disease Control and called Inslee a “snake” a “bad governor” and someone who would criticize the federal response to the coronavirus crisis. He said Pence can say nice things about Inslee, but he won’t.

Good … grief!

The president’s petulant, childish, ignorant and boorish reaction to the trouble facing one of our nation’s governors tells me that Trump is the snake.

Trump lies without shame. He enrages me every single day.

medical news

Now the White House is censoring the top docs in the world? Huh … ?

What in the name of science denial is going on at the White House?

The nation is being threatened with a potentially monstrous medical pandemic — the coronavirus — and the president of the United States wants the world’s top immunologist to pass all public comments through the White House before it’s made public.

I refer to Dr. Anthony Fauci, someone who has worked for seven presidential administrations. The man is a medical genius. He is trying to offer candid assessments of the threat of the virus that is sweeping through Asia and is threatening to do the same through every other continent on Earth … maybe even in Antarctica.

He stood before the nation the other day and said without hesitation that he cannot predict what the coronavirus is going to do to the United States. Then Donald Trump took the microphone and essentially contradicted him, saying that everything is under control. He predicted — and I cringed when I heard him use the word — there might be a “miraculous” discovery to cure the virus.

Trump is saying that a vaccine is just over the horizon; the medical gurus say “not so fast,” there ain’t a cure to be found just yet.

Meanwhile, the president put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the coronavirus mission. Pence is, shall we say, a noted science denier. He has demonstrated little tolerance or understanding of the complexities of crises such as what we’re facing at this moment.

He wants instead to protect the president’s backside, of which he has shown quite an ability.

Meanwhile, the world is engaging in something close to panic. The White House response is to censor the brilliant medical minds who are seeking answers — and developing updates that they need to give to an increasingly anxious public.

medical news

Why not let Dr. Fauci take the lead on coronavirus fight?

I don’t feel much safer now that Vice President Mike Pence has been put in charge of the fight against the threatened spread of the coronavirus.

I wish instead that Donald Trump would have handed that duty over to a fellow who is immensely qualified and who has enormous stamina: Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the world’s premier immunologists and the current head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases.

There he was, spelling out today in detail the problems facing the nation when — not merely if — the disease spreads in the United States. Then the president took the podium and declared that Mike Pence would lead the fight.

It made me go … huh?

Pence is claiming credit for enacting a health care program in Indiana, where he served as governor before joining the Republican ticket in 2016. Trump brought up the Indiana health care plan, calling it a model for other states to follow.

That’s great. But … I keep circling back to the actual and practical expertise standing near the VP on the White House podium in the form of Dr. Fauci.

He got his medical degree from Cornell University. He is a noted international expert on infectious disease.

I had the high honor of attending the HIV/AIDS international conference in Bangkok in 2004 along with other editorial writers and editors. We received an audience with Dr. Fauci, who was there representing the Bush administration and its own HIV/AIDS initiative. Fauci bowled us over!

I wish the vice president well as he leads this effort. My advice to the VP? Keep the phone line to Dr. Fauci open at all times.

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What if we had a President Pence?

It makes me chuckle a bit when I consider that Republicans who are so wedded to protecting Donald John Trump are actually shunning a true-blue conservative who — in my view — would be suited much better to the agenda many GOPers are touting.

Think of this for a moment.

Suppose Donald Trump were to be convicted in the Senate trial that is about to conclude next week. He gets the boot. Enough Republican senators join their Democratic colleagues in convicting Trump of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

What then? We get Mike Pence, presuming he would escape the clutches of the scandal that at times has seemed to ensnare him as well.

If you’re a conservative Republican, wouldn’t that be actually better? I mean, Pence is deeply religious; he has a long record of supporting conservative public policies; he doesn’t even allow himself to be alone with a woman other than his wife. The guy’s as straitlaced as you can get!

Trump? Well, let’s just say he isn’t.

Don’t get me wrong. Pence is not my kinda guy. I don’t want him sitting behind the big desk in the Oval Office … ever!

Still, the question has been rattling around in my noggin: What in the world are Republicans thinking when they stand with a Republican In Name Only like Donald John Trump when they could get the real deal in Mike Pence?