Tag Archives: partisan divide

national news

Put partisan politics aside to fight the pandemic … please!

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We are living in perilous times in light of the pandemic that is sweeping around the globe and has killed nearly 100,000 Americans.

OK, that is no flash on the part of this blog and your friendly blogger. Still, the idea needs a bit of fleshing out.

One would have thought — or could have thought — that a pandemic on the scale of the COVID -19 crisis could unite a nation that is divided sharply along partisan lines.

Democrats and Republicans dislike and even detest each other. We need a reason to unite. I would have thought that a pandemic that kills Republicans and Democrats with equal malice would do the trick. It isn’t happening.

Who’s to blame for the continuing partisan pi**ing match? I’ll declare my view: The blame belongs to Donald John “Demagogue in Chief” Trump.

The president takes an oath that compels him to unify the nation when crisis strikes. Past presidents have risen to the task: Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor was bombed; George W. Bush after 9/11. Donald Trump and the coronavirus pandemic? He has picked fights with Democratic governors, Democratic members of Congress, the media … you name ’em, he’s fought ’em.

Trump bristles at the idea that voting by mail is an alternative to traditional balloting. Why? He dismisses the fear that traditional voting would expose Americans to the virus and concocts a phony fear of “rampant voter fraud” if we allow all-mail voting. He threatens to withhold federal aid to Democrat-governed states if they proceed with mail-in voting.

We shouldn’t be fighting partisan battles when we’re supposed to focus on the viral infection that kills Americans with no regard to whether they are Democrat or Republican.

It appears to me that we are locked in a hopeless divide that is growing perhaps too wide for a worldwide health crisis to bridge. If only Donald Trump could learn to abide by the oath he took when he became president of the United States.

What an utter shame.

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Glenn Beck sorry? Now he owns up to it

Glenn Beck told the Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly that he is sorry for all the division and partisan rancor he has caused since the start of Barack Obama’s presidency.

Now he says he’s sorry? Now?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2014/01/22/glenn-beck-admits-divisive-role.html

It’s a bit late in the game for Beck, the talk-show radio host and one-time TV superstar on Fox to say he’s sorry for all the divisiveness he has contributed to the country.

Fox signed him on in 2009 and seemed to give him a single task: Trash the news president often and with extreme prejudice. Beck did all of that with apparent glee.

He made things up. He embellished his version of what he said was wrong with the country. He stoked the fire of anger from those on the right and the far right over the nation electing its first African-American president. You’ll recall that Beck once said famously — or infamously — on the Fox channel that the president of the United States hated white people.

Now he’s sorry for saying all those angry things about the president.

It reminds me of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara writing in his memoir, published in early 1996, that he believed the United States shouldn’t have fought the Vietnam War, that we were engaged in a futile endeavor. He was about 30 years late in offering that mea culpa, after more than 58,000 Americans were killed in that tragic war.

I recall the reaction then was that McNamara, too, was a bit late.

It pains me to say it, Glenn, but you can’t unhonk the horn.