Better Not to Know

President Donald Trump made another trip to a swing state factory that manufactures face masks on Thursday, once again declining to wear a face mask, and as usual he said some interesting things to the assembled media. He continued to brag about all the coronavirus testing that’s going on, but also said that testing “might be overrated, it is overrated,” and then mused it could even be the reason the United States has so many coronavirus cases.

“And don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. But why? Because we do more testing,” Trump said. “When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”

Which leads us to wonder why Trump is so often exaggerating the amount of testing that’s going on. If we weren’t doing any testing at all, Trump’s reasoning suggests, we wouldn’t have any cases at all and everyone could go back to work and resume drinking in crowded bars and the economy would again be robust by Election Day

Although don’t have any more medical credentials than Trump, we think it possible that we’d still have many hundreds of thousands of coronavirus causes but not know about it. That might suit Trump’s political purposes, for now, but eventually everyone in the country will know someone in increasing pile of corpses, and in the long run he’d be better off finding to actually stop coronavirus infections.

To do that Trump will need the help of the most excellent medically credentialed people in government and academia and the private sector, but they keep saying gloomy things that don’t jibe with Trump’s upbeat rhetoric. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s most respected infectious disease expert since President Ronald Reagan’s administration, told a Senate committee this week that schools might not be able to open in the fall, and Trump told the press “That is not an acceptable answer.” On Thursday Dr. Rick Bright, until recently in charge of the government’s effort to find a coronavirus vaccine, criticized Trump’s response to the coronavirus before a Senate committee, warning of the “darkest winter and quoted another official saying “We’re in deep shit,” so Trump dismissed him as somebody he never even met but heard bad things about and a “disgruntled employee” bent on revenge for a well-earned demotion.

Somehow we are not reassured that the president didn’t know the man he had in charge of finding a vaccine for America’s greatest public health problem in more than a century, or that he demoted him based on what he’d heard from some people. Bright was demoted after publicly disagreeing with Trump’s endorsement of hydrochloroquine as a cure for coronavirus, which Trump and his media allies touted until studies came in showing it does more harm than good, and hydroxychloroquine faded from the news, at one point supplanted by Trump’s suggestion that infections of household disinfectants might work on coronavirus patients, but Trump was back sticking to his claims on Thursday.

At this point, we’re inclined to stop the reading the news. If we did, perhaps our president wouldn’t be saying and doing such stupid things.

— Bud Norman

Who to Believe? The So-Called “Experts” or What Some People are Saying?

To hear the government’s top experts tell it, the coronavirus crisis is very dire and likely to get worse if states prematurely lift restrictions on businesses and public gatherings and reopen schools.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified before a Senate committee on Tuesday, via a video link due to his possible exposure to the coronavirus inside the White House, and warned that it might not be safe to open schools next fall. On the same day Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control, made the same warnings. Dr. Rick Bright, until recently the head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development in charging of finding a coronavirus vaccine, previewed his testimony on Thursday with a written statement warning that due to a lack of needed testing and tracing efforts a premature reopening could result in “the darkest winter in modern history.”

Which is why President Donald Trump and his spokespeople at Fox News and on talk radio would prefer you not listen to the experts, and instead hear their happy talk about a quick end to the epidemic and a rapid economic rebound in time for Election Day.

Trump told reporters he was surprised by Fauci’s answer to a question about reopening, and that “To me that is not an acceptable answer, especially when it comes to schools.” He went on to say that Fauci “wants to play both sides of the issue,” then predicting in the same run-on sentence that next year’s economy will be “phenomenal.” Redfield somehow escaped similar criticism, even through Trump and his spokespeople have been plenty critical of the CDC for allegedly over counting the coronavirus death toll. Bright was recently demoted from his job leading the government’s efforts to find a vaccine for coronavirus, so Trump dismissed him as a “disgruntled employee.”

None of which is quite convincing. Presidents probably shouldn’t find expert opinion unacceptable just because it’s bad news, and we have no idea what Trump means when he says Fauci “wants to play both sides of the issue.” Trump has been touting the extraordinary measures he’s taken against the epidemic but also insisting that it’s not really such a big deal and that states should defy his administration’s guidelines, while insisting he has “total authority” over the states’ restrictions but that it’s up to the governors and “I take no responsibility at all.” That’s what we call playing both sides of an issue.

The CDC can be justly criticized for a slow response to the crisis, but that might well be because its leadership was afraid of offending Trump, who was bragging that the coronavirus was contained and that cases would soon be down to zero and that the stock markets shouldn’t be spooked. Since then the Trump administration has been refusing to release more dire CDC reports, and was probably furious about the leaking of a White House task force report finding an astounding 1,000 percent — that’s right, 1,000 percent –increase in infections in the rural areas of rural states where Trump still enjoys political support. Bright was demoted after he publicly demoted after he disagreed with Trump’s endorsement of hydrochloroquine as a miracle, and subsequent studies have vindicated his judgment, so we can’t blame him for being a disgruntled employee, and don’t worry that he’s lying before Congress to exact his revenge.

These guys all have excellent academic credentials, and have been rewarded for good work by steady promotions to the top of their profession during decades of Republican and Democratic administrations alike, with Fauci’s distinguished career going all the way back to the good old days of President Ronald Reagan, and they seem unlikely conspirators in a conspiracy to prevent America from being great again. Trump’s scientific credentials are an uncle who was a professor of physics at the Massachussets Institute of Technology and as a genetic result he has “a very big, uh, brain” and how he wowed all the doctors at the CDC were by how much he knew about virology and epidemiology, and what some people say about his very stable genius, but he also went on live television and urged the government’s scientists to investigate the possibility of injecting household disinfectants into the human body.

So far all the public opinion polls show that a vast majority of the public is more inclined to believe the so-called experts than Trump, but that the Republican portion of the populace is increasingly siding with Trump. We attribute this partly to the normal human aversion to bad news, but also a populist resentment of pointy-headed government officials telling thrm what to do, and mostly to the average Republican’s blind faith in whatever narrative is most helpful to Trump’s political fortunes. No matter what happens during Trump’s time in office, even in the bleakest scenarios, they’ll always have someone else to blame.

Sorry to sound so gloomy and doomy, but we expect to be hunkering down for at least a few more months of the unbearable status quo, and aren’t counting on it all magically going away in time for school and Trump’s reelection. Our many Republicans friends are entitled to differ, and to act accordingly, but we’d advise them not to be over-confident.

— Bud Norman

Charles Bishop, RIP

We awoke earlier than usual on Tuesday and donned a tie and coat for the the first time in ages, then drove 25 miles or so south of Wichita on Highway 81 to attend a funeral at the Belle Plaine Cemetery. Charles Bishop was being laid to rest, and it was important we be there.

Bishop was an elder and the preacher at the West Douglas Church of Christ, a small but staunch congregation in the rough Delano neighborhood where we weekly worshipped until the coronavirus shut everything down, and we liked and admired him, and he taught us much about Christianity and bolstered our faith in it. He had a formidable intellect and scholarly understanding of scripture, and in his sermons he would sometimes get bogged down talking about which New Testament translation of a certain scripture was truest to the original Greek, and although he’d always apologize for the digression we found it fascinating. We’d often tell him after services that we found him very rabbinical, and being a philo-Semitic student of the Old Testament he took it as the compliment we intended.

He was a most interesting fellow in a lot of ways. Born in Wellington in the Great Depression year of 1939 he grew up in nearby Belle Plaine, part of a fervently religious farming family that hewed to the Church of Christ’s strict rules against dancing and watching movies on Sunday. As a rebellious youth he argued that he couldn’t find anything about that in the scriptures he carefully read, and even as an aging preacher he didn’t back down from that, but from his youth to his death he was proud to preach about the love and forgiveness and giving spirit he had discerned from the scriptures. As he aged and faced his mortality, God’s grace and the sacrificial suffering of His son Jesus Christ became the usual theme of his carefully-researched and well-spoken sermons.

He preached it in Malaysia and behind the Iron Curtain of the Cold War, and didn’t quit until he was kicked out by the alarmed authorities. When back in Kansas in the big, bad city of Wichita he made a good living for his family as a pharmacist, having graduated with honors in pharmacology from the University of Kansas, and although he was a man of science he’d often preach against scientism, which he defined as a hubristic belief that science is the sole source of understanding the human condition. There was something slightly prideful about his arguments, but he’d freely admit that, and then give reasons why he was right that were hard to argue with.

On one rare occasion Bishop boasted he’d been a standout basketball player for Belle Plaine, with his six-foot-one-inch height and healthy youth allowing him to dominate the paint in small town high school games at the time, and if you coaxed him he had good stories about traveling by bus in Malaysia and behind the Iron Curtain, and the interesting people he’d met at various Churches of Christ. He was a good father and a loving husband, and after his first wife’s death he was a good to husband to an absolutely delightful woman we’re lucky to know, and unless you’re an anti-religious bigot we’re sure you would have liked him, too.

Belle Plaine is one of those very pleasant Kansas small towns that you might want to escape to in case of apocalypse, and it has a fabulous and famous arboretum you really should visit if you find yourself in south-central Kansas after the coronavirus, and the drive from Wichita is always scenic, and on Tuesday all the wheat was gorgeous green. A cold and wet and gray spring day at the Belle Plaine Cemetery is very bleak, though, especially when a congregation of Christians is socially distanced from one another and the specter of death suddenly seems omnipresent.

When we came home and fired up the internet we found that more 81,000 Americans had died of coronavirus, and that the government’s top public health expert was warning congress via video feed that thousands more will die if the government continues easing public health measures. The Supreme Court of the United States had a “virtual” hearing about whether President Donald Trump’s tax returns should be made public, Trump was “tweeting” more accusations that his critics are guilty of felonies and should be jailed, and another federal judge was making it hard for Trump’s Department of Justice to drop charges Trump ally Michael Flynn had already pleaded guilty to.

All the more reason we feel blessed to have known Charles Bishop, and to hear his compelling preaching that God is good and in the end His plan for all of us is perfect.

— Bud Norman

On Monday’s Presidential Performance

President Donald Trump is clearly in a foul mood. He spent Sunday sending out angry “tweets” at a rate one of every 17 minutes, and on Monday he snarled his way through a press briefing before abruptly ending it and walking away in an unmistakable huff.

Trump’s perpetually enraged die-hard supporters surely loved it, but to the rest of the country it looked as if the man who has promised to get coronavirus under can’t control his temper. Most viewers probably also noticed that Trump continues to say a lot of things are provably untrue, and that he doesn’t have any answer to a lot of fair questions about it.

One of Trump’s more than 100 “tweets” on Sunday accused President Barack Obama of “the biggest political crime in American history, by far!” Except for “re-tweeting” a conservative writer’s unsubstantiated claim that Obama “attempted to “target incoming officials and sabotage the new administration,” Trump did not elaborate. So we can hardly blame The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker for asking exactly what crime Trump was alleging, and whether he wants to the Justice Department to lock Obama up.

“You know what the crime is,” Trump explained. “The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers, except yours.” Rucker didn’t seem to know any better than we do, although we assume he reads as many newspapers as we do. “Obamagate,” Trump further explained, “It’s been going for a long time, it’s been going before I got elected. It’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s gone on and you you look at now all of the information that is being released, and from what I understand, that’s only the beginning. Some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again. You’ll be seeing what’s going on in the coming weeks.”

In other words, which we hope are more parseable, Trump can’t quite say what Obama did or provide any evidence to back up the allegations, at least for now, some reason, but you can believe it’s coming, that he can say, OK? Rucker didn’t get a chance to ask why Trump is withholding evidence of the “biggest political crime in American history, by, far,” but the die-hard supporters have faith that everything will eventually be explained.

Ever since the coronavirus started crowding everything else out of the news, Trump has been trying to convince the public that’s really not such a big deal, and has lately suggested that it’s no reason not to go to work or on a shopping spree. So naturally he was asked about the news that testing has found a military valet who served Trump’s meals and Vice President Mike Pence’s press secretary — who is also the wife of senior advisor Stephen Miller in the nepotistic administration — had been infected with the coronavirus.

Trump assured the nation that he’s safe because everyone he comes into contact with has been tested, quite falsely claimed that every American and all of their co-workers can now be tested before returning to work, and then explained that testing is overrated because people can get negative results until they acquire the virus. He also endorsed the White House’s new rules about everyone, except for himself and Pence, wearing a face mask while in public. Questions about an appearance of inconsistency and double standards were simply sneered at rather then answered.

A face masked Weijia Jiang of CBS news asked why Trump boasted of how much testing the United States was doing relative to other countries, “as if it were some kind of international competition,” and by that point Trump had clearly had enough pesky questions for the day. He could have been grateful she hadn’t asked why the United States was lagging behind so many other countries on a per capita basis, or simply explained that international comparison were a useful benchmark, but instead he replied “Well, they are losing their lives everywhere in the world. Maybe that is a question you should ask China. Don’t ask me. Ask China that question. When you ask China that question you may get a very unusual answer.”

We’re sure that if Jiang did ask China why Trump says the things he does that she’d get a very unusual answer, but we would have liked to have heard Trump take a stab at the question. Jiang asked why he would direct his question to her, apparently thinking that her Chinese ancestry might have had something to do with, but he ignored and pointed to another reporter. When she didn’t immediately step, waiting for the president to answer her colleague’s follow question, Trump scolded her and refused to hear her question and ended the briefing with a terse “Thank you, thank you very much.

Somehow, we are not reassured Trump has everything under control.

— Bud Norman

Little Richard, RIP

The weekend was full of sad news, with the coronavirus death toll continuing to rise and the scholarly and loving preacher at our church and our sister-in-law’s mother dying of other causes, and on top of that Little Richard died of bone cancer at the age of 87.

The man born as Richard Penniman last appeared on the pop charts the year before we were born, but his influence on all the weirdness of the popular cultural revolution that has occurred over our lifetimes never waned, and he remained one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most mesmerizing performers well into his 80s. He was one of those rare musicians who changed music and the broader culture.

Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley and Fats Domino and a few others had already scored hits that introduced a a stunned America to the scary sound of rock ‘n’ roll when Little Richard burst upon the scene, but he was the one who fully unleashed the style’s most subversive influence. His music was rhythmic and raw, with a pumping boogie-woogie piano and four fat-sounding saxophones driving a hard beat, and he sang scandalously suggestive lyrics with a guttural growl that swooped to a primal scream. His public persona was as provocative as his real personality, and after he somehow got away with that in the staid ’50s it all the weirdness of the ’60s and ’70s was inevitable.

Little Richard was one of 12 children in a religious family in Macon, Georgia, and grew up in the Great Depression singing the effusive and emotive music of the black Christian tradition, which would always infuse even his most secular music, but he was an unlikely gospel singer. He was a highly libidinous bisexual, and although he didn’t publicly admit to it he adorned himself in silk suits and elaborate pompadours and heavily massacred eyes that left no doubt about his omnivorous sexual appetites. David Bowie and Mick Jagger and Elton John and and Michael Jackson and Prince flaunted the same sort of gender-bending ambiguity in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, and it was considered shocking even by then, and only a Little Richard-sized talent could have gotten away with it in the ’50s.

After Little Richard, all the aspiring rock ‘n ‘rollers in garages across America and the rest of the hepped-up world knew that they could take  their music as far to the hard and weird side as they wanted. He and Jerry Lee Lewis banged the piano so hard it inspired all the hard rock styles, from psychedelic to heavy metal to punk. His singing style led to James Brown, which led to soul and funk and hip-hop. The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and all the biggies of ’60s freely acknowledge how they idolized and emulated Little Richard, and Nobel laureate Bob Dylan penned a heartfelt tribute in Rolling Stone magazine about the man who inspired him to play music.

Between his heyday and his much mourned death, Little Richard led an interesting life. In the early ’60s he renounced rock ‘n’ roll and his longtime sex life and enrolled in Bible school to become a preacher, and eventually did start effectively spreading the gospel from the pulpit and singing some very compelling gospel music. After a while he started playing that devil’s own rock ‘n’ roll again, and was still damned good at it, and after that he alternated between the sacred and the secular. Eventually he decided to do both, and proved quite good at it.

Time eventually slows down even such inexorable forces as Little Richard, though, and we’ve read that he spent the last decade or so of his life alone in a tiny apartment, emerging only to walk the sidewalks and hand out religious tracts to passersby who didn’t recognize him. We hope it give him some satisfaction that wealth and fame and adoring audiences never did, and he’s arrived at the unalloyed joy he always sought and tried express in his primal music.

Thanks to the miracle of modern recording technology, even time cannot conquer the inexorable force of Little Richard’s music. You can drop an old 45 rpm record of “Tutti Fruitti” or “Lucille” or “Good Golly, Miss Molly” our many other gems onto your turntable, or ask Alexa to play it for you or look it up on YouTube if you’re the newfangled type, and that wondrously rowdy and raucous and rebellious will still come pouring out. We suggest you do, because in times like these we all need to shake our butts to some real deal rock ‘n’ roll.

— Bud Norman

On a Stormy Day at Home

Stuck at home on a cold and stormy Kansas day, we spent most of it reading the news. Needless to say, it did not cheer us up.

Turning to Facebook, which is the closest thing we have to hanging out with friends, we found some of nutty right wing friends recommending the latest conspiracy theory video and insisting that the coronavirus death toll is being grossly exaggerated if not entirely fabricated to further a left-wing “deep state” plot to keep everyone at home. They’re all avid supporters of President Donald Trump, so we wonder if they’re disappointed that their hero hasn’t yet thwarted this dastardly plot and locked up the conspirators, but for now they don’t say and we don’t dare ask.

One day Trump will tout the strict guidelines his administration came up with for easing the emergency restrictions, the next day he’ll be “tweeting” his encouragement to states to reopen businesses, and when he’s not vacillating between the positions he’s blaming China and President Barack Obama and distracting Democratic oversight hearings for the problem, and noting that things could be worse. What he hasn’t done, so far at least, is embrace the conspiracy theory that most of the executive branch of the federal government he’s in charge of, including the expert scientists Trump has praised and allowed to speak freely, are carrying out the most elaborate conspiracy in the history of conspiracies.

We also have many friends who are pretty loony left, but for now even the looniest of them are sounding compartively sane. They’re all posting words of encouragement to keep up the social distancing and hand-washing and face-masking-wearing to fight what they perceive as a major public health crisis, and we give them credit for posting ample amounts of information from credible sources to refute the conspiracy theories coming from sources of very dubious repute. They have their own theories that Trump has underestimated the threat posed by the coronavirus and is urging a premature return to business as usual for purely self-interested political reasons, but damn it, we find it harder to argue that.

One of our loony left friends is a very gentle and generous and loving soul but possibly the looniest of them all, and she’s still siding with Trump’s endorsement of hydroxychloroquine even after Trump and his allies on Fox News and talk radio have abandoned the cause, but we noticed all the comments tried to dissuade her and had ample amounts of information from credible sources. We were surprised to see a couple of liberal friends charge that there is a plot to create a false crisis and keep us all at home, but that Trump is in on it, but most on the left prefer the theory that the crisis is real and Trump has failed to adequately respond.

In a rare non-coronavirus story, charges against former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn were dropped by the Department of Justice. What one makes of that is also determined by whether he’s looking at it from the right or the left. If you’re on the overwhelming majority of what’s now the right that supports Trump no matter what it’s a victory for justice, a happy case of a solid soldier and good man prevailing over false accusations wrought by President Barack Obama’s conspiracy with corrupt federal officials to bring down Trump. If you’re on the left, it’s a case of a man who had already pleaded guilty to lying to public officials and was getting money as a lobbyist from Turkey while he advised the president on foreign getting a get-out-of-jail card from a politicized Trump Justice Department.

The other non-coronavirus news that penetrated the front pages and was talk of our Facebook friends circle was that two man have been charged for the murder of a 25-year-old man named Ahmoud Arbery in Georgia. Arbery is black, the two men charged with his murder are white, and as always in America that matters.

By all accounts so far Arbery was an average unarmed American guy with no criminal record out for his daily 2 mile jog when he was gunned down on an empty stretch of road between a forest. The two men charged with his murder are an ex-sheriff and his son, who by all accounts roamed the roads as an unofficial patrol, and there’s video that’s surfaced of them confronting Arbery as a burglary suspect and Arbery being subsequently shot, which after more than two weeks led to the arrest of the two men after two local district attorneys recused themself an the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over.

The left is calling it another example of America’s racist strain, and rightly so, but the right isn’t disputing that. Georgia’s Republican governor praised the GBI’s work, Trump said that Arbery’s death was “a very sad thing,” and no one we know is posting any offensive “memes” about Arbery’s deaths. Our diverse group of black friends often have diverse opinions about the topics of the day, but they all share the same worry that Arbery won’t get justice in an American court, and we try to reassure them that this time will be one of the many times justice has prevailed in America.

Perhaps the worst thing we hate about the Trump era even before all this coronavirus catastrophe is how often find ourselves siding with those damned Democrats we’ve been squabbling with for years, since way back when Trump was a Democrat. At this peculiar moment in history we find ourselves stuck at home and on the political sidelines, our only rooting interest being our hope the center somehow holds. We hopefully retain some hope in the principles and the institutions and American spirit that have somehow guided this nation toward greatness through hard times, no matter what sort of corrupt and incompetent officials had been elected to high office.

— Bud Norman

The Problem With the Very Best People

President Donald Trump promised his enthusiastic voters he would have only “the very best people” in his administration, and he also made a lot of other extravagant promises about everyone having better and less expensive health care and the governments running on balanced budgets and such. It’s turned out that by “the very best people” Trump meant his son-in-law and his pals and anyone willing to tell Trump what he wants to hear.

Those brave messengers who dare bear bad to Trump tend to be quickly defenestrated, even though they tend to be the most credentialed people he’s got.

The latest example is Dr. Rick Bright, who earned his doctorate in immunology and molecular pathogenesis at Emory University and compiled an impressive resume in the public and private sectors and until recently was leading the federal government’s coronavirus vaccine program at the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. He’s now transferred to a “less impactful position,” as a White House statement put it, and he alleges in a whistleblower complaint that it’s because he didn’t share Trump’s enthusiasm for investigating the use of hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for coronavirus and wouldn’t be involved in cronyism..

Trump has told the press he doesn’t the guy and hard never heard of him but has heard bad things about him, which is his modus operandi when getting ride of people, and notes that he was on the job back when President Barack Obama was in office, which Trump and his fans find suspicious. We fine it worrisome that didn’t bother to introduce himself to the guy in charge of finding a vaccine for the coronavirus.

This sort of bureaucratic reshuffling goes on all the time and is rarely worth noting, we suppose, but in this case Bright’s complaint seems both valid and very noteworthy. Trump did indeed often tout the potentially miraculous effects of hydroxychloroquine in his daily press briefings, with much of the Trump-friendly media on Fox News and talk radio chiming in, and Bright did go on the record in government documents and press interviews to expose his more skeptical opinions. We freely admit we don’t know any more about this medical stuff than Trump or the people at Fox and on talk radio, but we’re the curious sorts who delve into what the methodically scientific studies say, so we’re inclined to believe that Bright was right and Trump was wrong, and that’s probably the reason Bright was demoted.

Christi Grimm was until recently an inspector general at the Department of Health and Human Services, but Trump decided to replace her after she wrote a report that hospitals across the country faced a short of supplies needed to deal the coronavirus problem. Trump brags about how well he’s done suddenly creating everything a medical system might need to deal with an epidemic, and doesn’t want some previously anonymous bureaucrat saying otherwise, but it seems she was right and Trump was once again wrong, and we figure that’s the most likely explanation for why she was demoted. We’d encourage her to write yet another whistleblower complaint and invite even further House oversight hearings.

Over three long years we’ve noticed that sycophancy is more important to Trump than expertise. Marine General John Kelly and Army General H.R. McMaster had distinguished careers over decades of Republican and Democratic administrations and enjoyed excellent reputations when they became Trump’s chief of staff and national security advisor, respectively, but both were shown the door for their annoying habits of saying things Trump didn’t want to hear. There are plenty of criticisms to be made of erstwhile Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ fealty to Trump’s views on immigration enforcement and state’s rights and civil rights and many other important things, but his decision to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s investigation of Russian interference in the previous presidential election was the right thing to do, and that’s what got him fired.

All of which was annoying enough back when the Stock markets were setting record highs and the unemployment rate record lows and the gross domestic product was expanding at the usual slow-but-steady rate, but given the current statistics and the more than 72 thousand deaths in a death toll throws by the thousands every day it’s downright alarming. Now is the time, as best we can tell, to listen to the people who have some credible reason to believe they know what the hell they’re talking about.

For now the smarty-pants are telling us that we’re going to be largely stuck at home and wearing masks on beer runs and will be poorer for a longer while lest we wind up killing hundreds of thousands of people, and we don’t want to hear that any more than Trump does. but we’re inclined to believe them. Trump had an uncle who was a professor of some non-medical scientific field at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he claims all the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control were all amazed by how how much he knew about this virology and epidemiology and scientific stuff, but he also advised the scientists to investigate the injection of disinfectants into the body as a possible cure, and we’re inclined to go with the degrees and the long records of public service.

Trump still has fans and media allies on the right who trust more in his hereditary gut instincts than any so-called “expert,” whose long and distinguished public service and bipartisan respect are proof of their role in a “deep state” conspiracy to prevent Trump from making America great again. We’ve also got a dear but loony-left friend who is saying pretty much the same thing about hydroxychlorine on Facebook, using weird right-wing sources to prove it’s same conspiracy that’s conspiring to prevent Sen. Bernie Sanders from making America great for the first time as socialist utopia.

By now Trump and his media allies have largely abandoned their advocacy of hydroxychloroquine, and they’re doing somewhat better at providing medial supplies, but no one will acknowledge ever being wrong. Events will soon push the fates of Bright and Grimm and Flynn and McMaster and all the other humble civil servants who dared question Trump off the news and into the history books, but the bigger story will be how this coronavirus problem played out. At this point, we’re betting on the establishment and its dissidents.

— Bud Norman

bright and hydroxy
grimm and ppe
jared and his pals
long history of good folks being defenestrated for doing their jobs

The Best and Worst of America

Nobody likes the restrictions and inconveniences that have come about as the result of the coronavirus, but most Americans consider them necessary to save lives and are willing to go along for as long as needed. Some Americans are flouting the rules, however, and it’s getting increasingly ugly.

Every day seems to bring another story about people resisting any restrictions with violence. They range from the park ranger in Austin, Texas, who was shoved into a pond while asking park-goers to stay six feet from another to the security guard at a Family Dollar store in Flint, Michigan who was shot and killed after refusing entry to a customer who refused to wear a face mask. The mayor of the fine city of Stillwater, Oklahoma, felt compelled rescind an order requiring face masks before entering stores and restaurants and some other businesses because owners have been threatened with violence if they enforce the policy.

In some cases, the violence has been committed by overzealous police officers. There are also concerns that police too often have a different standard for black and white violators of the social distancing rules, which will inevitably lead to further violence.

For the most part the coronavirus has brought out the best of the American people. Most citizens are willingly complying with public health orders, helping out their family and friends, contributing generously to charities that help the newly unemployed, and treating the grocery store clerks with politeness and a newfound respect. The worst of America has also been on displaying, with hoarders and price gougers and protestors bringing semiautomatic rifles and their implied threat of violence to rallies, but for now that’s a distinct minority. A certain selfishness and a penchant for violence are also an unfortunate part of the American culture, and here’s hoping we can keep it in check as the frustrations continue to mount.

— Bud Norman

Looking for Some Alternative to the Lesser of Two Evils

America’s last presidential election was perhaps the most desultory moment in our nation’s political history, with two of the worst Americans ever as the major party nominees. They advocated very different but equally appealing policies, and in the end it all came down to which candidate’s character you thought was more awful. This year isn’t looking any better.

Last time around both finalists for the highest office in the land were scandal-ridden scoundrels, and in eerily similar ways. Republican nominee Donald Trump was credibly accused by a dozen women of decades of sexual assault, and was caught on audiotape bragging about it in the most vulgar terms, but Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was a longtime enabler of her ex-president husband’s just as egregious sexual piggery. The Clintons had a phony-baloney family foundation supported mostly by big-bucks donors courting Hillary’s Clinton’s influence as Secretary of State, but Trump had his own phony-baloney family foundation that did made all sorts of questionable spending including a big campaign contribution to a Florida Secretary of State who immediately withdrew from a multi-state lawsuit against the fraudulent Trump University that had bilked hundreds of suckers out of million dollars and Trump eventually settled that for $25 million and the family foundation was put out of business by the New York state courts, who also decreed that anyone named Trump would have to take an ethics course before they were ever again allowed to be involved a New York charity.

Both the Clintons and the Trumps had decades of financial shenanigans, ranging from the former’s Whitewater dealings to pretty much the entirety of the latter’s career as an oft-bankrupt billionaire mogul, but for the most part they got away with it. Clinton had to hide records of the millions she and her husband had made from giving speeches to special interest groups, but ran as an heiress to the mostly scandal-free administration of President Barack Obama. Trump had openly bragged about buying off Democratic and Republican politicians to get favorable treatment in his very fishy business dealings, and went to extraordinary lengths to hide his educational and military and health and tax records, but argued that made him the ideal guy to lock up “Crooked Hillary” and “drain the swamp.”

This time around looks to be every bit as tawdry. The apparent Democratic nominee after a truncated-by-coronavirus race is former Vice President Joe Biden, an underwhelming career politician with all the baggage you’d expect after four decades of riding trains to Washington, D.C., and Trump is once again the Republican party’s nominee. Biden’s son seems to have made a lot of money while in Ukraine while Dad was in charge of America’s foreign policy in that country, but the Trump kids have also been doing well in China and other countries while their father is president, and although the details of both stories are complicated it looks bad no matter how closely you look.

Both men now stand credibly accused of rape, too. A former Biden employee has come forward by her name, Tara Reade, to allege that 27 years ago then-Sen. Biden pushed against a wall in an empty hallway and penetrated her with his fingers. This is on top of another dozen women Biden’s behavior made them feel “uncomfortable,” and ample photographic and videographer evidence of Biden being somewhat creepily touchy with women. Some two dozen women have accused Trump of even worse behavior, of the sort he’s bragged about on a surreptitious audiotape and on Howard Stern’s nationally broadcast shock jock radio shows, and a woman named E. Jean Carroll has publicly come forward to allege that Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in the ’90s.

Which will certainly take a lot of the fun out of the next election for a lot of people, who might well conclude that we’re choosing between two rapists to lead our country.

Our sixty-some years of observing human nature have convinced us that women sometimes do make false allegations of sexual harassment and rape, but that it’s by far more common for men to sexually harass and rape women, so we’re usually inclined to believe women who have nothing to gain and much to lose with accusations against powerful men. We try apply that same standard regardless of the accused’s party affiliation, and we’ve long noticed Democrats and Republicans are about equally as likely to land in the docket. In this case, we can’t look at either man’s life history and say he’s too much a gentleman for us to even imagine him ever doing such a thing.

We’re instinctively disinclined to look at anything from the Democrats’ perspective, but if you want to get deep into the weeds of all this theDemocrats have the slightly better argument.

Reade is only now making her 27-year-old allegation, after staying silent through Senatorial campaigns and Biden’s vice presidential nomination, and he’s asked the Senate to release any complaints she might have made at the time, and she’s admitted to the press that she only filed a vaguely worded complaint about being “uncomfortable,” and Obama’s thorough vetting team didn’t turn up anything to keep him off the ticket. Carroll didn’t file any charges against Trump at the time, but she did report it to friends who are willing to come forward by name to talk about it, and she has a reputation as a journalist and comedy writer that she’s put at stake, and Trump denies it by saying she’s not his type, which leaves one to wonder on what type of woman he might rape.

As for all the financial shenanigans, whatever Biden’s ethical lapses he’s not become nearly so rich from them as Trump claims to be, and there’s no reason to believe his son got rich in Ukraine by the same sort of quid pro quo deal with the Ukrainian government that got impeached and should have had him removed from office, and Trump’s kids have done pretty well in Dad’s negotiations over the past three years. With apologies to Irving Berlin, we can hear them at the debates singing a rendition of “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Awfuler.”

There’s really no need to wade so deep into the weeds, however, as it really won’t matter much in the election. The public will wind up reconciling itself to a a presidential choice between two scoundrels who are obviously corrupt and quite possibly rapists. So far Trump hasn’t hypocritically seized on Biden’s rape problem, instead noting that powerful men are targets for such allegations, but that’s obviously self-interested and is likely to change between now and election day. A large segment of the Democratic party sticking to principle and trying to somehow find some other nominee, but we expect they’ll mostly fail line and turn out in November to vote against Trump.

A small but decisive minority of independent and independent-minded voters will wind up deciding the election, and what they do depends on what happens between now November, which we admit we have no way of knowing. There’s a chance that a couple hundred thousand Americans will be dead and millions more unemployed and bankrupt, with many more voting by mail if the postal service still exists because they’ve been cooped up at home and grocery shopping in face masks for months, and they’ll care more about that than the candidates’ grotesque character flaws.

Neither Trump nor Biden seem to have any answers for the crisis of the moment, though, nor any inspiring ideas about what to do when we eventually get past it no matter how badly it’s been bungled. Our Republican and Democratic friends alike are once again telling us it’s a binary choice and we have to pick a side, and that the fate of our nation once again hangs on it. Ignoring such shrill and panicked cries, for the second time in our lives we’ll probably pick some obscure protest candidate as a “none of the above” vote.

We’re trying to muddle through the current crisis and see beyond the weeds and past the swamp toward a country that can choose between two candidates of stellar character who strive to unite a great nation of 330 million free men and women behind a plausible program for a better future. We invite dispirited Republicans and Democrats and independents of all races and sexes and classes to join us on this quixotic quest.

— Bud Norman

Partisanship and Presidential Pettiness

Several of our friends thought George W. Bush was a horrible president, but now tell us he’s been an exemplary ex-president. They admire that he’s hewed to the longstanding tradition of refraining from any criticism of a sitting president and avoiding partisan politics while devoting himself to non-controversial causes. We expect they appreciated a three-minute video released on Sunday urging Americans to put aside their political differences and help one another during the coronavirus crisis.

“Let us remember how small our differences are,” Bush said in the video. “In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants. We are human beings, equally vulnerable and equally wonderful in the sight of God. We rise or fall together, and we are determined to rise.”

Who could argue with that? Even President Donald Trump didn’t try, but he did use the video as an opportunity to take yet another swipe at Bush via “tweet.”

“Oh bye the way,” Trump “tweeted,” with his characteristic poor spelling. “I appreciate the message from former president Bush, but where was he during impeachment calling for putting partisanship aside. He was nowhere to be found in speaking up against the greatest hoax in American history!”

As always, Trump believes that anyone who doesn’t rise to his defense on every occasion is guilty of partisanship, and that those who do defend him no matter what aren’t partisans but rather true patriots. Trump’s impeachment trial was one of those controversies that ex-presidents are supposed to stay out of, as all four living ex-presidents did, and Trump should be grateful that they kept their opinions to themselves. All four almost certainly believed that Trump was guilty as charged, and should have been removed from office, so their silence probably required severe self-discipline.

A few hours after his sneering “tweet” about Bush, Trump “tweeted” an unexplained and unsubstantiated accusation that President Barack Obama “was the one running the Russia hoax.” He then insulted Democratic California Rep. Adam Schiff, and once again threatened to withhold federal aid to states with Democratic governors who won’t cede to Trump’s demands on sanctuary cities, which is at slightly more specific than his threat to withhold states from Democratic-run states on general principle. Oh, and he also “tweeted” a boast about the golf courses he owns in Scotland.

It’s hard to see how any of this helps the country reach a bipartisan solution for the coronavirus problem, or somehow helps make America great again, but he clearly believes it serves his own political purposes. Trump has heaped scorn not only on Bush but also on the late Arizona Sen. John McCain and current Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who were the three previous Republican nominees for president, and except for an occasional nod to the “late and great” Abraham Lincoln — he apparently ads the “late” part just in case you haven’t heard the bad news — he doesn’t seem to have much respect for any pre-Trump Republican. At least he’s nonpartisan to that extent.

Trump’s die-hard fans have probably voted for Republican presidential nominees as long as they’ve been old enough to vote, but they probably don’t mind him trashing the more dignified party they once supported. “At least he fights,” they’ll tell you. That such vindictive grudge-holding only serves to make the President of the United States look small and petty to the rest of the world doesn’t seem to matter.

— Bud Norman