Reviews - GEORGE VECSEY

Trump's Pathological Crusade Against Facts – and Cycling

9/15/2015

Kerry in Yellow, in Perhaps Treasonous Activity

This time Trump has gone too far.

He has made fun of Carly Fiorina’s face and sneered at Mexicans, aiming at the angry white male. Now he has taken on John Kerry for committing the federal crime of riding a bicycle as a septuagenarian.

“They have no respect for our president, they have no respect for John Kerry, who falls off bicycles at 73 in the middle of a negotiation that’s very important,” Trump said in August. He paraphrased it Monday night, again criticizing the Iran nuclear treaty.

Of course, Trump exaggerated Kerry’s age. Said he was 73. In fact, Kerry is 71. Take it from a far lesser cyclist who tumbled on sand, every year counts while pedaling uphill

More to the point, Trump has once again pandered to the know-nothing set, this time in Dallas, making fun of Kerry’s love of cycling – the high-tech bike, the full outfit, the challenge of a Tour--level mountain in Switzerland.

Trump perhaps knows this is something thousands of men and women do daily in Europe and elsewhere, imitating the great cyclists on the hardest hills they can find. But he panders to the base.

Classic Donald. He said the Secretary of State was riding in a race. In fact, Kerry was taking on a Tour incline in May, but with his own State Department motorcade, which rushed to his help when he struck a curb and toppled, fracturing his leg.

Yes, the injury was serious enough to warrant surgery and care in New York. Trump senses it will work as part of his shtick about Kerry.

In his rally in Dallas, Trump once again imitated Kerry’s return to work. Simulating a man walking with crutches, he said, “The people from Iran say, ‘What a schmuck.’”

This is a common theme with Trump – the queasiness with anything less than a perfect 10. Trump seems pathologically uncomfortable with human frailty. What must he think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who ran a country in terrible times, limited by polio?

The fear of frailty, this discomfort with complexity, accompanies him on national television, babbling about himself -- the Reality Show Host as Candidate, for goodness’ sakes.

Undoubtedly, Kerry was inconvenienced by his accident, but there are such things as telephones and cables and the Internet. We have seen footage of Kerry with his Russian and Iranian counterparts. The body language tells me they do not consider him a schmuck, with or without crutches.

Kerry also speaks French fluently, undoubtedly a drawback to Trump’s base, maybe even to Trump himself. French was a skill Mitt Romney tried to hide during his stiff race in 2012. Why would the United States want a worldly President or Secretary, anyway, when the current rage seems to be a carnival clown, who cannot even get ages right.

laura

9/15/2015 08:10:03 pm

Well put, sir. I am waiting for the moment when this "candidacy" makes sense.

George Vecsey

9/15/2015 09:21:03 pm

How much time do you have?

Kizi 2 link

9/16/2015 05:05:26 am

Wonderful blog! This is very informative site. I am totally pleased by your excellent work. Many thanks for sharing.

Roy Edelsack

9/16/2015 08:21:41 am

In 1982 Leo Rosten wrote, "Never use schmuck before women, children, or strangers," a rule that I have tried to live by but I do concede that its American usage meaning fool or idiot has superseded its obscene origin. I did get a kick however over Trump's concept that the Iranians (Iranians!) would use a Yiddishism to describe our Secretary of State.

Mr. Trump is a putz.

George Vecsey

9/16/2015 10:53:54 am

Roy, in 1982 kids were just beginning to use the word "suck." But in the early 50's, in junior high, we called somebody "a schmuck with ear laps." I suspect there is a stronger word for Trump than "schmuck" or "putz," but I am not an authority. My friends from Jamaica High -- some of whom knew Trump as a younger kid -- might know the word, and you might. The search goes on. Nice to hear from you. GV

Sam Toperoff

9/16/2015 01:07:25 pm

Name calling, insults, anger, vituperation in general, obscenity... bullies provoke such behavior. Here's what I learned in my extensive anger-management courses: Don't call names, rather name the name-caller. For example...Just who the trump do you think you are!...or, You flying piece of trump!... or, my personal favorite, the ever-popular East Los Angeles insult, Tu madre es una trumpa!

Josh Rubin

9/16/2015 02:29:32 pm

25 years ago, i worked for a democratic state senator from Manhattan's west side. Trump was proposing a massive development called "Trump City" which was eventually scaled back to the development you now see from the west side highway from 59-72nd streets. I drafted and he issued a report calculating that the amount of sewage Trump City would have generated would have overwhelmed the local sewage plant's rated capacity, and argued that permits to connect to the sewer system had to be withheld until the problem was addressed. We never succeeded in linking development scale to sewage plant capacity but we did give the report a good name: "Trump Card or Royal Flush?"

Brian Savin

9/17/2015 08:35:00 am

Three hours of Republican debate last night and not a one mentions the world crisis developing in Queens: The diminishing lead of the New York Mets. They talk of 2008; they talk of the Reagan years. No one talks about 2007, or what about 2008? That's probably OK. Let's all make only good karma. No game today means a whole day of worry. I read somewhere the word worry comes from the Anglo-Saxon word "wrygan" meaning to strangle. Breathing does seem to be getting heavier.

George Vecsey

9/17/2015 10:17:23 am

Brian, maybe Trump's insolence -- talk about a face -- has touched off a curse on anything Queens. GV

bruce

9/23/2015 02:25:18 pm

George,

you americans sure have entertaining politicians.

best watched from across the border tho.

harper is very right wing by Canadian standards. probably a democrat in the states.

and not only was Kerry a kind of effete guy who spoke French and indulged in some elitist sailing stuff, but he was accused of looking French or, generally, European was he not?

bruce

pharmacy personal statements link

11/6/2015 05:18:04 am

Trump was proposing a massive development which is praise worthy. I hope it will work as part of his shtick about Kerry.

Comments are closed.

QUOTES

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

Trump's Pathological Crusade Against Facts – and Cycling

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Trump's Pathological Crusade Against Facts – and Cycling