Veteran journalist Eric Black writes Eric Black Ink for MinnPost. His latest award is from the Society of Professional Journalists, which in May 2017 announced he’d won the national Sigma Delta Chi Award for online column writing.
It used to be a big deal even to suggest that the president had said something inaccurate, and it was beyond imaginable to call his statements “lies.” Now it’s just another Thursday in Trumplandia.
Despite all of the discussion, mostly on Fox News, I can’t locate a coherent statement explaining the crime. Or who committed it. Or when and how it happened.
Epidemiologist Dr. Larry Brilliant was interviewed by Al Franken on what happened in the U.S. during the early months of COVID-19.
But it is not, in any way, even close to being honest.
A piece published in Vox helped a bit, not in reaching any conclusions about what really happened but in understanding why it is so hard to know what is going on (or went on) in this instance.
For most of his life, John J. Pitney Jr., a professor of political science at Claremont McKenna College, identified as a Republican. The takeover of his party by Trump seems to have shaken that attachment.
He’s a scientist, and he’s just giving his best analysis of what the “best evidence” shows, but he works for someone who has a tendency to fire those who disagree with him.
The review of decision-making during 34 days includes an I-never-said-the-things-I-said video of President Trump.
Biden’s negative gap is a more manageable 44 percent approval/54 percent disapproval, 10 points “under water” compared to Trump’s 38 approval/60 percent disapproval.
The epilogue emphasizes President Trump’s utter disregard for factual accuracy or truth and his heavy reliance on lying without ever saying that this makes him a fascist.
A columnist for the Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole, has written an eloquent, brilliant and unutterably sad piece about what Trump has done to the standing of the United States in the world.
He’s found a perfect loophole. He appoints people on an acting basis, they begin to do the job relying entirely on him, and he cares little whether they ever get the constitutionally mandated stamp of Senate approval.
This is what they are reduced to: Right-wing radio talker Hugh Hewitt vowed never to buy Lysol again after the company publicly warned that its disinfectant products should not be ingested in an effort to fight the coronavirus.
As best as political science can measure, “animus is equal across party lines,” political scientist Shanto Iyengar said, meaning the disdain of Republicans for Democrats and vice versa is of similar size and intensity.
You could say that anything with that big of a majority supporting it would happen. But then there’s the partisan breakdown.
Last week, when Gallup took a new survey, Trump had returned to a double-digits-below-water rating.
He didn’t hire the nation’s governors and he can’t fire them. And he can’t make them do things in their states that they don’t want to do and/or don’t believe are in their states’ interests.
On Tuesday, Obama released a classy, lovely, dignified video endorsing his friend and former vice president, Joe Biden.
There may be several reasons that South Korea’s rate remained low and flat while the U.S. numbers soared, but one is, as the Times reports, “from the beginning, South Korea took the virus extremely seriously, with widespread testing, tracking of cases and quarantining.”
Somehow, this short, nerdy Brooklyn-accented physician and immunologist has been allowed to continue speaking from the White House podium despite his unwillingness to ratify Trumpian nonsense.
