Tag Archives: Joe Biden

national news

Listen to your predecessors, Donald!

Barack H. Obama and Joseph R. Biden have been laying waste to Donald Trump’s performance in the office they once held … and with ample reason.

They both left legacies worth cherishing and emulating. Trump has called them two of the worst presidents in U.S. history. I beg to differ. I consider them both two of the best men to serve as commander in chief and head of state.

Obama has been particularly eloquent in his assessment of Trump. He chastises the POTUS for feigning toughness by being “rude to people” and denigrating others. A third Democratic former president, Bill Clinton, has been a bit quieter than his successors. Clinton did speak about some of the subjects he covered in a closed-door congressional committee hearing. It is clear that Clinton thinks next to nothing about the mess that Donald Trump has concocted.

The fourth living ex-president, George W. Bush, has been relatively quiet. He once told a TV talk show host, Ellen Degeneres, that he wouldn’t “be chirping” his criticism of presidents who follow him. He said that presidents hear enough criticism during the normal flow of business during the work week. He said a president needs to be strong to lead this massive, diverse and sophisticated nation. Criticism only weakens that person.

In a way, I kind of prefer the George Bush method. Sure, he can think ill thoughts of Trump. He needs not express those thoughts out loud. It’s always been understood that presidents walk away not just from the residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. They also turn their back on the debates that rage on.

Those who speak out, though, have wisdom to back them up. If only Trump would listen and heed them.

national news

Trump’s damage will last longer than the POTUS

Donald Trump’s time in the Oval Office has an end date, and I am grateful for that deadline.

However, the damage Trump has done — and is doing — is likely to last longer than his time in office. That consequence saddens me to no end. The damage is being done to the public perception of our electoral process.

He has been hammering at the credibility of that process since he lost his re-election bid during the 2020 election. Joe Biden beat his sorry behind but Trump never accepted the beating he took. His constant yammering about electoral credibility has sown plenty of doubt among too many Americans.

I believe none of the nonsense that Trump has fomented since 2020. Too many state legislatures, though, are controlled by Republicans and they have acted to make voting an arduous task for many citizens. They call it “voter suppression” and it appears to be working.

I hear from friends and aquaintances in North Texas about the doubt they say lingers over the election process. I have heard too many of them say something like “if it counts” when describing the act of voting. My answer always is, “Yes … it counts!”

The lasting damage to the public’s perception of our cherished voting process is troubling in the extreme and it serves as a damning testament to the harm committed to our public service by an imbecile who has no understanding or appreciation of the work done to further our democratic process.

national news, national security

Border crisis need not produce this solution

Critics of this blog have long accused its author — that would be me — of being a “yes man” to all policies Democratic and a “hatchet man” to ideas that come from Republicans.

Wrong! As in really wrong!

I was the rare President Biden supporter who said long ago that the president needed to call the situation along our southern border what I believed it was: a crisis. He refused to do so. Instead, the president masked the situation in gauzy terms meant to disguise the reality along our southern flank, which was that people were continuing to seek refuge in the “land of opportunity, freedom and good fortune.”

Donald Trump came along and then sicced the Immigration and Customs Enforcement goons on our cities and border towns. The result of their heavy hand has made us even less safe. I want, therefore, to declare that Trump’s answer to the crisis is the wrong answer.

If the current POTUS had an ounce of compassion coursing through his overfed body he would have told the ICE agents to use extreme discernment in rooting out the bad guys. He didn’t. The ICE goons have picked up on the message from the top, which is that it’s OK to roust everyone, to beat many of them to within an inch of their lives, to separate children from their parents.

I like quoting one of my favorite philosophers, who happens to be fictional character on a once-popular TV show. You remember Tonto, the Lone Ranger’s sidekick who used to tell the world that “Two wrongs don’t make it right.”

Tonto is correct. It was wrong for President Biden to avoid declaring the southern border mess a “crisis.” It is wrong for Donald Trump to hire heavily armed and masked thugs to beat the living daylights out of U.S. citizens while searching for criminals.

It no longer matters what we call the border mess. We can fix the second problem and force ICE to rethink the way it enforces the law.

national news

Trump: Proof that ‘anyone can get elected’

Surely you recall that when Barack Obama was running for president in 2008 that he proclaimed that “nowhere can my story be told.”

He intended to remind us that that a young man with a “funny name,” with parents of different races, his being raised by his mother as a single parent could be elected president. Millions of rejoiced at the prospect that, yes, “anyone can get elected” to the nation’s highest office.

Well, let’s fast-forward to 2024. Donald Trump was running for a second term as POTUS. Joe Biden defeated him in 2020. Yet there he stood, nominated by a political party that is willing to give him a pass on all his transgressions.

  • He had been impeached twice during his first term. The second time was for inciting the horrific assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 that sought to overturn the 2020 election result.
  • Trump had been convicted on 34 felony counts associated with mistreatment of women.
  • His business exploits have been exposed as failures.
  • He has been shown to be a pathological liar who can’t tell the truth under any circumstance.
  • Trump has been exhibiting signs of mental decline.

I hasten to add that the notion that “anyone can get elected” has taken on a different tone than what we relished when Barack Obama was elected in 2008.

“Anyone” now means a convicted felon, a serial philanderer, a liar, an insurrectionist.

Pretty damn ugly … y’know?

crime news

MAGA festers in ignorance

The ignorance of the morons who comprise many of Donald Trump’s MAGA base continues to astonish me in ways I never thought possible.

New York City voters elected a Muslim, a democratic socialist as its next mayor. What was the reaction among some of the MAGA cultists who heard this news?

One of them, a member of Congress, said out loud that he wants Zohair Mamdani deported. Yep. He wants to banish him to the country of his birth. I believe it’s Sudan.

One little problem with that idiotic notion. Mamdani has been a naturalized U.S. citizen since he was boy. You can’t deport a U.S. citizen. Good grief, the man wants to live in the United States. He wants to pay his taxes here. He wants to educate his children here. He wants to govern the nation’s largest, most sophisticated, most cosmopolitan city.

This MAGA idiocy reminds of when Nikki Haley, the Republican governor South Carolina, agreed to take down the Confederate flags in her state, drawing calls for her deportation. Wait! She was born in South Carolina to parents of Indian descent. I guess her parentage made the all-American governor a deportation target.

You cannot negotiate with a political movement that comprises so many of these morons!

medical news

Is Trump in decline?

The headline on top of this blog post demands an immediate answer … I have no clue as to whether Donald J. Trump is suffering any loss of mental acuity.

My reluctance to declare Trump to be off his rocker is more complicated than it seems. Consider the four years when Joe Biden was president of the United States. Critics asserted without a hint of ambiguity that they were certain the 46th president’s butter had slipped off its noodle. Did they have access to medical exams? Had they seen any test results? Were they fluent in body language that often gives away symptoms of mental decline?

No, no and no. Yet they persisted. I resisted the urge to join them. Why? For starters, I am a Joe Biden supporter. Second, I had no access to medical records. Third, I was not qualified to make any assertions about a high-profile politician’s mental fitness.

I am going to apply all those standards to Biden’s immediate successor.

Let me be clear on key point: I am likely to comment on the huge verbal gaffes that appear to be happening with stunning frequency. I cannot in good conscience, though, declare that Donald Trump needs a one-way ticket to the Funny Farm. Still, he does make me scratch my head when he said he ended a war between Azerbaijan and Albania.

Fair is fair. In fairness to the White House incumbent, I’ll let others talk among themselves about whether he belongs in the loony bin. I won’t join them.

economic news

Wishing POTUS well carries self interest

If we’re honest with ourselves, and most Americans fall into that category, we would carry a significant self-interest load while wishing the president of the United States success as he seeks to lead the country.

Where am I going with this? Here it comes.

I want Donald Trump to succeed in the office he will occupy for the next three years and some. I want him to succeed — particularly on economic issues — because it will have a direct impact more than likely on my retirement.

I’m long in the tooth, heading soon for my 76th birthday. I am semi-retired, working part time as a freelance reporter for a group of weekly newspapers in Collin County, Texas, where I have lived for six years. I also am drawing my retirement income from Social Security.

I have entrusted my retirement account to the care of a wise investment counselor who has taken good care of me, helped in large part by the performance of the stock market, which reacts almost daily to the whims of the president, be he a Democrat or Republican. The market did well during the terms of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but my support for their success went far beyond self-interest motivations.

So, when I declare my good wishes on the current POTUS, I do so with more than a twinge of self-interest. I detest the man for who he is, what he did before being elected to the only public office he ever has sought, for the lives he has destroyed, for the lies he has told, for his absolute lack of character, empathy and compassion.

I do wish him success as he seeks to manage the nation’s economic policy. It’s not because I have faith that his decisions will fatten my retirement investments … but because if he makes the right call — somehow! — good fortune will come my way.

national news

Wanting a return, again, to normal

Every living, breathing, thinking American should join me in this simple request … a return to normal conduct by the president of the United States, his/her Cabinet, the political team that works for the individual in charge and a Congress that doesn’t demonize the other side as the spawn of Satan.

I soiught such a return at end of Donald Trump’s first term in office. Voters delivered it by elected Joe Biden president of the United States. Biden had spent his entire professional life in public service. He knew how the government works — or doesn’t work, in some cases — and sought to bring normal behavior back to the White House.

President Biden succeeded famously.

He served one term before the wheels flew off and he got caught in the mental acuity rumor mongering. Trump managed to parlay a weird public desire for weirdness into an electoral victory in 2024 and now we’re in the midst of a hostile dismantling of our democratic process.

Trump promised to exact revenge on his foes. He’s delivering the goods. All the while he is conducting himself in an amped-up version of his first presidential term. Who in the world knows where this is headed?

With all of that I want to wish out loud once again for a return to normal behavior. A return to what the late John McCain called “regular order.” I want spirited debate, but I don’t want recrimination and revenge when the lights go out.

The American political system appears to be broken. I do not believe it is beyond repair. Joe Biden managed — to the extent he could with GOP control of Congress — to restore a sense of normal behavior during his single term as president. He left the presidency after getting plenty of constructive things done for the country.

Trump is now well into the first year of his final term in office. I want him to succeed, too. I also want there to be a return to normal behavior, decorum, dignity and grace among opponents. With this guy in charge of the executive branch — and his penchant for surrounding himself with sycophants — my hope is fleeting.

However, I will keep the faith.

military news

Zelenskyy must take part!

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is not a spectator, a bystander in what has turned out to be the bloodiest ground war in Europe since World War II.

Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago seeking to overrun the sovereign nation. It was supposed to take only a few days. The fight has turned into a quagmire, thanks in large part to the huge aid packages recommended by then-President Joe Biden.

Now, Donald Trump wants to meet with Russian goon Vladimir Putin — in Alaska, no less — to seek a way to stop the violence, the bloodshed, the war. I applaud the end Trump is seeking. I am concerned that a conclusion will not include the first political casualty of the Ukraine war, the president of the country that Putin attacked.

Zelenskyy already has rejected a Russian proposal that requires Ukraine to give back land it took from the Russian invaders. Russia is making zero concessions for the illegal invasion it launched. Or for the war crimes it has committed by bombing schools and hospitals. Or for the civilians the Russian army has killed.

Zelenskyy is not a spectator. He has been an active participant in this war. He needs a place at the negotiating table and he deserves to have his beliefs heard above the din of the battle.

medical news

Another conspiracy given birth

Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis is bound to run its course, no matter where it ends up.

If the former president is able to beat back the aggressive form of prostate cancer — which I and others hope happens — we’re going to see the temporary end to what is likely to occur if the president’s cancer fight ends in another fashion.

What will occur will be the birth of yet one more never-ending conspiracy theory. This one will center on allegations that the White House covered up President Biden’s cancer, that staffers knew he suffered from “aggressive prostate cancer,” but wanted him re-elected in 2024, so that he could resign and hand the presidency over to Vice President Kamala Harris.

I don’t feel good about the former president’s prognosis. He is 82 years of age. He has had cancer before, many years ago. But no one ever talks about that.

I am not privy, nor is anyone outside the White House, to what people knew during Biden’s term as president and when they knew it. A couple of questions keep nagging at me regarding the conspiracy theorists.

One is, why even worry about such a thing now? Joe Biden is no longer president. He has exited the political arena after serving what many millions of us consider to be a successful presidency. I am not going to spend a moment of my time thinking about what the White House medical staff knew and whether they covered it up.

The other is that we’ll never know the answer, except that if the White House medical team says it hid nothing, that is going to be good enough for me.

Conspiracy theories are the stuff of individuals who have too much time on their hands and too little to fill their vacuous noggins.