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(Update: A major evangelical magazine, Christianity Today, founded by Billy Graham, has called for Trump's removal via impeachment. This is a huge step. I used to cover religion; I also know and love some evangelicals, who scurried out to vote for Trump in 2016 because their pastors said he was a good Christian fellow. Many of those pastors are caught up in Trump's money and power and swagger. The red ties! The adoring crowds! Will they pay attention to the prophetic message from a magazine that has been a voice of evangelical thinking? The "mainstream" media is taking this very seriously. Will it trickle down to people who call themselves "Good Christians?")
* * * A guy I know canvasses for the Democratic party in his rural corner of America. He says it is not unusual to knock on a door and have the woman of the house say, softly, that she votes Democratic these days, but that the visitor should not try to discuss voting with her husband. In that exchange there may be a palpable sense of intimidation, of fear. I was thinking of that on Impeachment Wednesday when President Trump was in Battle Creek, Mich., making an ad-lib rant about how he had “given” an A-plus ceremony upon the death of Debbie Dingell’s husband, John Dingell, a veteran of World War Two and the longest-serving member of Congress in history, 59 years. The President made his brand of joke that John Dingell was “looking up” rather than “looking down” – and a smattering of Republicans right behind him tittered, as if this was one more out-take from Trump's reality show, which, in a way, it is. The President referred to the touches he had personally included in the funeral, like a third-rate real-estate sleaze who tosses in a used doormat and a fly-swatter as incentives to seal the deal for an apartment rental (as long as the renter is white, of course.) John Dingell’s widow, Debbie, now holds his seat in Congress, and Trump took it personally when she joined all but three Democrats in Congress to vote for the two counts of impeachment Wednesday evening – after all he had done for her. She owed him, he suggested. In fact, in the old way of government, which seems to have been dumped in January of 2017, the White House always had respectable functionaries, essentially apolitical, trusted to treat deceased veterans and members of Congress with dignity. Red regime, blue regime, the government knew how to do the right thing. But now the country is divided, and one of the major splits is on the civility frontier. The video from Trump’s vile talk Wednesday night shows women right behind him, cheering him on. Reports from the hall said some people were hushed and upset by his attack on the Dingells, but I could not tell. * * * * * * Polls suggest women lean toward the Democrats rather than Trump in the 2020 election. What is clear is that Trump particularly victimizes women – not just from charges of his physical brutality but also in verbal abuse. He expresses deep feelings that women are objects of disgust, to be feared and mocked: the TV personality who had blood coming from her “whatever;” the opponent who used a debate intermission to go the lavatory; the speaker of the House whose teeth were “falling out” as she spoke. Women upset Donald Trump, apparently disgust him. I am sure it has to do with his late mother, whom he never mentions. His third wife seems frozen in fear, possibly loathing. His daughter Ivanka? Another story. Women in Michigan, a state he needs in 2020, hear Trump mocking a widow, a highly capable public figure on her own, now serving as a Representative from Michigan. When do American women tell the men in their lives that this man is sick, this man is perverted, this man is cruel? Or does the American male -- that intimidating presence somewhere in the back of the house -- have the same anger, the same bluster, as Jordan and Gaetz and Collins in the House of Representatives? Where does this anger in the American psyche come from? I have come to recognize that Bill Clinton has worse baggage than I was willing to admit. Now, when are the women of America going to realize that Donald J. Trump seems to have no limits to abuse, verbal or otherwise?
Hansen Alexander
12/19/2019 03:46:21 pm
George,
bruce
12/19/2019 11:49:53 pm
george, 12/22/2019 01:17:42 pm
Mark Galliher, editor of Christianity Today certainly did the right thing in calling out Trump. I wonder if he would have done so if he had not resigned from the paper.
bruce
12/22/2019 01:39:03 pm
george/alexander,
bruce
12/23/2019 09:59:27 pm
once again my editor let me down....should've read 'petty', despicable Comments are closed.
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Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
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