Gun violence is the horrific social equalizer: Everybody is equally vulnerable

On America’s gun violence, it’s time to stop asking why and start asking who?

Echo opinion editorial by Leonard Pitts, Jr. published in the Miami Herald

But why? It is the question that haunts every mass shooting. It seems to be asked in the tacit belief that if we could just find a reasonable motive, just suss out a cause, it might provide a way to comprehend the incomprehensible — even suggest a road map to preventing the next one. In America, there is always a next one. Sometimes, we do find motives — often racial or cultural hatred. Just as often, the shooter dies at the scene and takes his reasons with him.

But even when do we get a “why” it often feels superficial and does little to facilitate the question’s ultimate goal. Which is to say, it does little to help us understand the tragedy before us. Yet, like a gnawing itch, the question persists. Why did this happen? Why is America like this? We are conditioned to seek the answer after mass shootings, those moments of communal grief and rage when the nation’s attention turns, predictably as a wheel, to the fact that our public spaces have become shooting galleries. But it might be instructive to spend a little time contemplating a different category of firearms assaults. Call them “knucklehead shootings,” i.e., small-scale shootings where the motive is patently absurd. 

Like with mass shootings, there is no shortage.

In Atlanta, in June, a woman who worked at Subway was killed for putting too much mayonnaise on a sandwich. 

In Brooklyn, in August, a man who worked at McDonald’s was shot in the neck because the french fries were cold. In Houston, in September, a woman who worked at Jack in the Box allegedly shot at a customer in an argument over curly fries.

In Detroit, in November, a man was shot to death after he apparently failed to the hold the elevator door. 

In Tulsa, in November, a man reportedly shot at his stepfather after they got into an argument over a game of Monopoly. 

Absorb enough of these knucklehead shootings and the idea that a search for motive might yield any insight of value begins to feel silly, little more than intellectual busywork that gives the mind something to do, some illusion of control. And never mind that whatever the motive is, whether it was that the french fries were cold or the shooter hated black people, it will never come close to explaining, much less justifying the carnage.

It will never tell us why. So maybe it is time to stop asking, time to start interrogating the “who” and not the “why.” 

Many will say the problem is that guns are too readily available in America, which is demonstrably true, but even that only gets us part of the way to any sensible answer. Other countries — Canada and New Zealand for instance — also allow citizens to buy guns, albeit with laws more restrictive than you’ll find here. Gun ownership in both countries is widespread. Yet, American-style violence is not. 

Maybe it’s because America fetishizes not just guns, but also the idea that guns, more than a tool of hunting or even of self-defense, are a shortcut to capability, an instant equalizer allowing even the weak-minded and the lily-livered to stand their ground. 

Standing your ground is a foundation of the American myth, so it’s hard to overstate the allure that must carry for a certain type of person. For them, to own a gun is to own swagger, to know that nobody’s going to mess with you or move you off your spot. 

And that if you want hot french fries, then doggone it, you will have hot french fries. Because this is America. In the end, that’s all the “why” you’re ever going to get. And all you’ll ever need. 

Maine Writer post script- "french fries❓"..... Hmmmm, it seems to me like Pitts has not finished this opinion. He needs to write a sequel to include some expert opinion quotes about the premise he created in the lead:  "On America’s gun violence, it’s time to stop asking why and start asking who?"

Neverhteless, Pitts makes a case for gun violence being an equal opportunity social equalizer, because Americans are all at risk for being victims.

Trumplicans and Trumpziism and Trumpism and Nazis

We’ll get to the Nazi flags in a moment.

Thank you Leonard Pitts, for the echo opinion published in The Eastern New Mexico News!

First, however, let us turn to Merriam-Webster for clarification of a point I recently made in a column that left a few of you vexed. 

American Fascism: It Has Happened Here

It came in a passage that noted the right wing’s attempted takeover of state voting apparatuses and contended that because of it, 2024, could be the last meaningful election we ever have.

“Fascism is on our doorstep,” I wrote. It seemed a self-evident truth, but it didn’t sit well with some on the right.

“You have become more hysterical and hyperbolic,” said “Jack.”

“A great example of why Dems aren’t taken seriously any more,” said “Eric.”

“[Fascism] would be the mask and vaccine mandates,” said “James.”

Hence, the recourse to Merriam-Webster, where we learn that fascism is, in fact, “a political philosophy, movement, or regime ... that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader ... and forcible suppression of opposition.”

So let’s parse that, shall we? Who do we know who exalts nation (“I am a nationalist, OK?”) and race (“I want [President Obama] to show his birth certificate.”)?

Who can we think of who admires centralized, autocratic government (“[Kim Jong Un] is the head of a country, and I mean, he is the strong head. He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.”)

What recent president so believes in forcible suppression of the opposition that protesters in Washington were gassed and beaten so he could walk through Lafayette Square, while those in Portland, Oregon, were dumped into unmarked vans for unstated reasons by unidentified federal agents?

The answer, of course, is Donald Trump, to whom much of the right swears fealty above the Constitution itself. Twenty months after Joe Biden won the presidency in an election that was not close, most of them still insist he did not. As noted previously, a number of those election deniers are seeking -- or already hold -- offices allowing them to oversee voting in battleground states. And Jonathan Swan of Axios recently reported that supporters of the disgraced former president are planning to fire thousands of career civil servants from government posts and replace them with loyalists should he ooze his way back into office.

Friends, these are structures of fascism. The word describes not “mask mandates,” but strongman rule -- think Putin, Kim or Castro -- in which “Dear Leader” is unbound by such trivialities as the laws, the courts or the ballot. This is what Trump desires to have -- and the political right aspires to give him. The rest of us would do well to understand this, given the mortal threat it poses.

And that brings us to the story of the swastika flags -- which offers an eloquent rebuke to the denialism so prevalent on the right. It seems Hitler’s banners were carried by demonstrators who turned up outside a conservative gathering this month in Tampa. The Florida Holocaust Museum was, not surprisingly, appalled and Turning Point USA, sponsor of said gathering promptly distanced itself. “We have no idea who they are or why they’re here,” said spokesman Andrew Kolvet.

Which was naïve, if not downright disingenuous, for the representative of a convention whose attendees worship Trump like Jesus. But then, he might have choked on the likely truth. Namely, that the Nazis simply sought the company of like-minded people.

And knew just where to find it.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. Readers may contact him at:  lpitts@miamiherald.com

Russian war euphemisms

Echo opinion by columnist Leonard Pitts published in the Northern Virginia Daily newspaper:

When Russian bombs began to fall on Ukraine, Julia Tymoshenko called her aunt in Moscow.

She told her about spending a night in the basement as explosions thundered overhead. Her aunt was unimpressed. "Well, you don't know who did that," she said. "We're seeing one thing on the news, you're seeing another thing on the news."

Tymoshenko, who is 22, sent her aunt photos: the bomb shelter, the refugee train packed with fleeing people. "It's not the news for me," she told her aunt. "It's my reality, and it's what I see with my own eyes."

In response, her aunt blocked her.

That story, told last week on "CBS News Sunday Morning," suggests that, for as much as this is a war against buildings, bodies and a legitimately elected government, it is also a war against objective truth. Richard Pryor, channeling Chico Marx, once put it like this: "Who you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?"

Well, this is a war against your lying eyes.

Evidence abounds. It includes Russia's attack on TV towers in Ukraine, its crackdown on social media and other independent information sources, its detention and intimidation of journalists and its new law mandating up to a 15-year prison sentence for reporting so-called "fake news," i.e., news that contradicts the Kremlin. Some Russian TV journalists have quit rather than parrot Moscow's lies about the "special military operation" they are forbidden to call a war.

More ominously: At this writing, four reporters have been killed by Russian forces. War being as heinous as it is, it's impossible to say definitively whether journalists Brent Renaud, Pierre Zakrzewski, Oleksandra "Sasha" Kuvshynova and Yevhenii Sakun were specifically targeted. 

But Russia, being what it is, it sure seems likely the journalists were targeted. (Check the website: Committee to Protect Journalist ).

Four journalists killed covering Russia-Ukraine war
Two Ukrainian journalists missing since start of conflict

Yes, every nation at war seeks to control the flow of information, to shape the narrative to its advantage. That's why television and radio stations are prize targets for invading armies. But this feels like an Orwellian step beyond that, an extension of something with which we've become sadly familiar in this era of preposterous social-media conspiracies and multiple-choice truth. Meaning, an attempt not just to lie, but to overwrite reality.

America, unfortunately, has extensive recent experience with that.

So it's hard to watch this with any sense of detachment, to observe as though through some intervening window, as the very idea of knowable things is mauled. No, this is frightening stuff.

Julia Tymoshenko's aunt is, what you'd expect her to be, under a regime that weaponizes lies and interdicts truth. And Lord knows, truth has trouble enough even without that. "You can't handle the truth!" Jack Nicholson famously snarls in "A Few Good Men," but the thing left unsaid is that many of us don't really want it anyway -- all protests to the contrary notwithstanding -- because it challenges what they choose or need to believe.

In other words, truth is hard, but QAnon is easy. And defending truth grows harder still, not only in Ukraine, but also in Lafayette Square, where journalists were gassed, in Ferguson, where they were arrested, in Minneapolis, where police shot one in the eye. This, as some of us wait for John F. Kennedy to return from the dead and Donald Trump to be restored to the White House. All of which makes it difficult to have any sense of remove from Moscow's war on reality.

You'd like that war to be just some scary thing far away, glimpsed safely through a window. But it's actually a mirror reflection of us.

Distorted, yes. But not nearly as much as you'd like to believe.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

Maine Writer post script:  I continue to be mystified about the delusional effectiveness of euphemisms: A mild or indirect word or expression substituted for one considered to be too harsh or blunt when referring to something unpleasant or embarrassing.
"“downsizing” as a euphemism for cuts"

1984 in 2022: In George Orwell 's novel 1984, the government 's highest class, called the Inner Party, (could be a euphemism for "Putin's Party) uses multiple tactics and pressuring mechanisms such as using slogans/propaganda, persuasive surveillance and Newspeak to maintain social control. The Inner Party uses language as means of social control by using ¨doublethink¨ which is a major way the Party controls the Outer Party and Proles. They do not question the elimination of words from the vocabulary.

Tennessee: Land of the Scopes Trial, snake worshippers and now vaccine ignorance

Leonard Pitts echo opinion: Ignorance is death- STOP vaccine misinformation!

                         "Inherit the Wind" is critical of creationism.

Maine Writer- We are living in ignorant times.  In Tennessee, the land of the Scopes Monkey Trial, the ignorance has surfaced like snake worshippers charming the serpents out baskets.

By now, surely this is obvious beyond argument to anyone who’s been paying attention. From the Capitol insurrectionist who thought he was storming the White House to Sen. Tim Scott’s claim that “woke supremacy (?) is as bad as white supremacy” to whatever thing Tucker Carlson last said, ignorance is ascendant.

Yet, even by that dubious standard, what happened recently in Tennessee bears note. According to a story by Brett Kelman of the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville, the state, under pressure from Republican lawmakers, fired its top immunization official, Dr. Michelle Fiscus, and shut down all vaccine outreach to young people. Fiscus’ sin? Doing her job, working to increase access to the COVID-19 shot among kids. (Maine Writer- is this the brink of infanticide?)

Specifically, she sent a letter to health care providers reminding them that under the state’s “Mature Minor Doctrine,” they are legally allowed to vaccinate children 14 years or older without parental consent. According to Fiscus, the letter, written in response to requests for guidance made by those administering the shots, utilized language drafted by an attorney for the department of health and was vetted by the governor’s office.

All that notwithstanding, it infuriated some state lawmakers. They used words like “extreme disappointment” and “reprehensible” and talked of closing the health department. Some anonymous person even sent Fiscus a dog muzzle. Then she was fired, and the state shut down all vaccine publicity efforts targeting young people.

This means no postcards sent out to remind kids to get their shots, no nudges on social media, no flyers or advertisements, no events at schools, no outreach whatsoever. And not just for COVID, mind you, but for everything — measles, mumps, tetanus, diphtheria, hepatitis, polio.

In a pandemic.

In a state with a less-than-stellar COVID vaccination rate.

At a time when experts are tracking the rise of a deadlier new COVID variant.

It is hard to imagine behavior dumber, more dangerous, more short-sighted and more downright bass-ackward than that exhibited by Tennessee and its lawmakers.

Which is, unfortunately, right on brand for this country in this era. It was in the 2000s that Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” to describe the right wing’s secession from objective fact, and some of us began to speak of them as living in an “alternate reality.” 

How, we wondered in newspaper columns and speeches, can we have meaningful discourse if we cannot agree on basic facts?

Years later, that concern feels too abstract. The threat turns out to be more visceral and urgent than any of us could have imagined. Yes, some people live in alternate realities. What’s worse, though, is when they have power to impose those realities on the rest of us. That’s what we’re seeing in Tennessee and elsewhere, and the results will be as tragic as they are predictable and preventable.

Ignorance is bliss, they say. But it isn’t.

Ignorance is fever.

Ignorance is chills.

Ignorance is trouble breathing.

Ignorance is an empty seat at the table, a bedroom come suddenly available.

Because ignorance is death.

And while the aphorism isn’t true, can you imagine if it were, if ignorance really were bliss? Disney theme parks would have to find a new slogan.

Right now, Tennessee would be the happiest place on Earth.

Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald.

God in a shrinking church

Maine Writer- Although humans continue to discover how the universe is expanding, the Creator of the universe is experiencing a shrinking number of dedicated religious followers.  God does not abandon the creation, but humans are expressing alternative opinions about how to be spiritual, without going to church. I don't understand how humans can be spiritual without also experiencing a community where we can share our human condition. But, as Leonard Pitts reports in this echo opinion column, published in the Savannah Morning News:

So, it seems the church is shrinking.

The mosque and synagogue, too, for that matter. 

Not that this is breaking news. It has long been known that the numbers of Americans who belong to religious organizations are dwindling. But, last week, that decline hit a milestone. For the first time since Gallup began tracking religious membership back in 1937, it has dropped below half. Back then, 73% of us belonged to some house of worship. Today, just 48% do.

Experts cite multiple reasons for the slippage, including the Catholic Church's many sex scandals, growing distrust of institutions in general and a modern disinclination to be pigeonholed into any single theological tradition. While there is surely merit to all those observations, it seems likely that where Christianity -- more specifically, the white, evangelical church -- is concerned, there is also another explanation for the disappearance of the missing congregants:

They were driven away.

Consider it a byproduct of the rise, a little over 40 years ago, of the so-called religious right as a political force. Suddenly, Jesus of Nazareth, the itinerant rabbi whose life, death and life have inspired believers for two millennia, was adopted as a mascot of Republican conservatism.*

Granted, the 1980s was hardly the first time -- or the last -- people allowed their politics to be informed by their faith. As the lives and ministries of Jim Wallis, Jeremiah Wright, William Barber II and Martin Luther King Jr. amply attest, the progressive left has often done the same thing.

No, the difference 40 years ago wasn't the fact of faith in politics, but the substance of it. We went from "feed my sheep" to cutbacks in school lunch programs. From "love ye one another" to ignoring AIDS because it was "only" killing gays. From "woe unto you who are rich" to tax cuts for the wealthy and trickle-down leftovers for everyone else. From compassion for "the least of these" to condemnation of mythical welfare queens and other lazy and undeserving poor. (AKA religious hypocrisy!)

It was a faith less of joy than of perpetual outrage, less of hope than of abiding fear. Which means that ultimately, it was not faith at all, only the degradation thereof. It reached its sorry nadir when the religious right made common cause with the 45th president. He broke commandments like glass, but they didn't care. He was a biblical illiterate, but they didn't notice. Indeed, this year at CPAC, when his people rolled him out in the form of a literal golden idol, they lined up to take pictures.

"Thou shalt not have strange Gods before me", Exodus 20:2

And really, if you were a person seeking God, seeking the comfort of faith, the solace and sustenance of faith, would you be drawn to that? Fat chance.

Small wonder the church is shrinking. And yet, even when they feel let down by the church, seekers don't stop seeking. Note that Gallup also reports that, depending upon how you word the question, as many as 87% of us still profess belief in God.

That's a minor miracle. You might even call it good news. And it speaks to the challenge -- and opportunity -- facing every preacher watching a congregation dwindle.

Faith can shape politics, yes. But when politics start shaping faith, maybe you've lost your way. When you find yourself preaching exclusion and rejection in the name of Him who said, "Come unto me," maybe it's time to recalibrate. Or even repent. Maybe that's what the people who used to fill those pews are waiting for. Because, yes, the church is shrinking.

But, they also know that God is not.

*Maine Writer postscript:  In Europe and Canada, the decline in Christian religious worshippers has been inversely collated with  religion in government. Canadian churches are largely empty. This does not seem to be the situation with Moslem governments like Saudi Arabia.  

Donald Trump lacks dignity - He's a Republican disgrace

Echo opinion by Leonard Pitts published in The Portland Press Herald:

We turn, one last time, to Hans Christian Andersen. Trump is a fake.

Over the past four years, many observers, this one included, have found one of the Danish writer’s most famous tales irresistible for explaining both Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s slavish sycophancy toward him. In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a monarch parades through town naked, having been convinced by swindlers that he’s actually draped in an exquisite outfit made of a fabric visible only to those who are not “unusually stupid.”

Not wanting to be thought dense, everyone pretends they can see the magnificent outfit. Then a child blurts out the obvious. “But he hasn’t got anything on!” And the crowd begins to whisper to itself, until the truth finally breaks like a shaft of sunlight through the clouds, and the whole town cries out that the emperor is unclothed.

Well, in the wake of Donald Trump's definitive election loss and his refusal to concede the same, it’s Trump who stands naked before us, revealed for anyone who inexplicably still harbored doubt, as the liar and loser he always was (and always will be). He rages against math, excoriates voting, raves about imaginary schemes to steal a victory he never won. His psychopathy is nude, his disconnect from reality is disrobed, his toxic narcissism stands bare-cheeked before us all.

And you wait for the whispers to begin, wait for the toadies and lickspittles who have long enabled him to at last blurt the obvious. And you wait. And you wait.

And there is silence.

In a political season that has produced more than its share of embarrassments, this may be the greatest humiliation yet for a nation that styles itself a beacon of democracy. At this writing, almost no one – not party elders, not young guns, not cabinet members, not the first lady, not the children – has found the courage to publicly say the truth. Indeed, some – like the invertebrate Sen. Lindsey Graham – have even encouraged Trump’s delusions, a display of political gutlessness with few, if any, equals in recent memory.

Its insistence on denying reality has reduced the GOP to a state beyond parody. Think a Washington Post report of party loyalists marching seven times around the U.S. Capitol like Israelites in the Bible around Jericho. Think the once-respected Rudy Giuliani holding a press conference in a Philadelphia landscaping supply company parking lot near a sex shop to decry fictitious election irregularities. “Do you think we’re stupid?” he cried. “Do you think we’re fools?”

It’s enough to make comedy writers obsolete.

But it’s not a joke. Attorney General William Barr, Trump’s consigliere, has authorized prosecutors to “pursue substantial allegations” of voter fraud. Even though there are none. The General Services Administration has refused to process paperwork needed to release funds for President-elect Joe Biden to begin the transition process. In other words, the machinery of government has been brought to bear to protect a boy man’s fragile ego from the truth.

Acknowledging a bitter defeat is never easy. But, so many others have risen to the task with grace. Hillary Clinton did it. Mitt Romney did it. John McCain, John Kerry and Al Gore did it. The weakling Trump is uniquely unable to do it, a failure that makes you long for Jan. 20. On that day, he’ll be escorted into disgrace, still insisting that he won what he didn’t. One imagines the emperor would empathize. Even after the child cried out, he still couldn’t admit his nakedness.

“So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.”

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for The Miami Herald. 

Donald Trump exhibits a new mental health symptom called "Dr. Fauci envy"

Donald Trump has denied truth about the coronavirus and now showing jealousy towards the attention shown to Dr. Anthony Fauci, because he is among those who spoke truth to the American people.

Anthony S. Fauci, is the country’s leading expert on infectious disease. Fauci warned Americans to “hunker down significantly more than we, as a country, are doing.”

Among the growing list of poor mental health symptoms on full display whenever Donald Trump appears and/or speaks in public is a fixation about Dr. Anthony Fauci. Obviously, this is a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) subset of symptoms.

Donald Trump is jealous about how Dr. Fauci enjoys a higher public approval rating than "me, me, me!"

Columnist Leonard Pitts echoes his opinion in Florida's Miami Herald column, about why the public opinion poll numbers about the respected Dr. Fauci are much higher that those of the selfish Donald Trump.

Pitts writes: “Nobody likes me.” says Donald Trump

“Truth or Consequences” is the name of a town in New Mexico, and of a game show dating from the 1940s. But it’s also one of the primal laws of existence. 

Where an important truth is denied, consequences follow.

So none of us can be surprised at the state of our union, after seven months of Donald Trump’s lies, alibis and magical thinking in the face of one of the worst public health crises in history. 

More than 150,000 of us are dead, the U.S. economy just endured its worst quarter on record and there is no sign the disaster is going to abate any time soon. To the contrary, the federal government is adding to the list of “red zone” states — i.e., states where the COVID-19 infection rate continues to climb. Twenty-one states — nearly half the country — now make the list, including Florida, Tennessee, Texas and Mississippi.

And it should be lost on none of us that the “red zone” states are also mostly red states. Nineteen of the 21 — California and Nevada are the outliers — went for Trump in 2016. Red states, not to put too fine a point on it, are those we’d expect to be most susceptible to his lies, alibis and magical thinking — and most resistant to masks and social distancing.

Again, this is no surprise. As has been noted repeatedly in this space, truth doesn’t care about your feelings. Unfortunately, Trump doesn’t care about truth, so on behalf of 330 million of us, he chose consequences instead. And this country will be years in recovering, if it ever does.

All of which lends to a sense of astonishment at the morose monologue quoted above. It came during a news conference last week, called ostensibly to provide an update on the nation’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic. But the briefing also offered a squirm-inducing glimpse into Trump’s fragile psyche as he ruminated over the fact that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the face of his coronavirus task force, is more popular than he is.

“It sort of is curious,” Trump said. “A man works for us and yet they’re highly thought of and nobody likes me. It can only be my personality.” And Lord, what to say about that?

It was pathetic, the miserableness of an unloved boy poking through the braggadocio of a 74-year-old man.

It was amazing, this most reality-resistant of men publicly conceding this most humiliating of facts.

It was sickening, 150,000 people dead, the nation in chaos, and yet, he can’t see beyond his own envy.

Moreover, it was a revealing testament to a failure of self-awareness more epic than Greek tragedy.

Consider that shortly before the briefing, Trump retweeted the crackpot theories of some woman who claims, despite expert consensus to the contrary, that hydroxychloroquine can cure COVID-19. Mind you, she also believes doctors use alien DNA to treat patients, and researchers are creating a vaccine to stop people from being religious.

Called on his decision to amplify this woman, Trump insisted she is “very respected.” And also that “I know nothing about her.” Yet he muses that “nobody” likes him and it must be his “personality?”

Well, yeah. That, his imbecility and his utter inability to feel — or even fake — compassion for other human beings.

“Nobody likes me.” Boo hoo.

He denied the truth, and that’s one of the consequences. Here are some of the others: People are sick, people are dying, people are losing their homes, people are losing their businesses, the country is unraveling. So Trump’s operatic self-pity is a bridge way too far.

If anyone has compassion to spend, there are 330 million people who deserve it more.

Donald Trump's speech is so boring. He made news because he needed two hands to drink a glass of water

Frankly, I find Donald Trump's chronic "boringness" draws more attention to his flaws.  He speaks in negative cliches and he can't even read what he is supposed to say during his boring speeches. 

This opinion echo describes a binary choice. 

Trump is eiter a monster or an ignoramus.

Maine Writer- I agree with this point of view, an echo opinion by Leonard Pitts published in the South Bend Tribune, in Indiana.

Either Donald Trump did nothing when informed that American intelligence believed Russia was paying a bounty to the Taliban for killing American military personnel in Afghanistan, or he had no clue, didn’t even know it was going on.

A monster or an ignoramus? Well, if you believe Trump, he’s the latter.  (IMO DJT is both!)

Which makes you wonder if he understands how excuses work. Your excuse is supposed to exonerate you, show you innocent of all charges. His have a tendency to show him thick as a brick, stretching credulity like taffy.

He tweeted a thank-you to some guy caught on video yelling “White Power”? Oh, he didn’t hear that part.

He needed two hands to drink a glass of water? Oh, he didn’t want to mess up his tie.

He said he had the coronavirus pandemic under control? Oh, the death toll could have been much worse.

He suggested injecting household disinfectants as a cure? Oh, he was only joking.

He fired the prosecutor investigating his personal lawyer? Oh, he was not involved in that.

Who can be surprised, then, that Trump has responded to news of Russia putting a price on American heads by saying nobody told him?

Except that apparently, somebody did. The New York Times reports that two American officials say the information was included in late February in the President’s Daily Brief, a document summarizing national security concerns and assessments that is prepared by the intelligence community each morning for the president to read. In all fairness, that last word is problematic with this particular president, whose impatience with the printed word is legendary.

And besides, he’s a busy man. Indeed, according to one of the Times’ sources, the specific date the Russian intel was included was Feb. 27, a day Trump met with “Diamond and Silk,” two former Fox “News” personalities famed for being Black and loud while supporting him. Because, you know, priorities.

Presumably, the PDB he received that day would have told him how three Marines were killed by a bomb last April. Presumably, it would have informed him that this tragedy has emerged as the focal point of a probe suggesting Russia put a bull’s-eye on Americans. Whereupon a normal president would surely have raised the alarm, confronted the enemy or, at a minimum, acknowledged the crime.

But again, Trump is a very busy man, what with coronavirus blame to dodge and Confederate statues to defend.

And in the end, it doesn’t matter much whether he is a moral monster or an utter ignoramus. Or both. What he undeniably is is a man who has spent a lifetime oozing his way out of accountability. From his bone spurs to his broken marriages to his bankrupt casinos to his fraudulent university to his crooked charity to his failed meat company to his unpaid bills to the manifold debacles of his presidency, when has Trump ever had to stand up and take the weight? No, avoiding the weight is who he is, who he always will be.

Yet if this latest episode teaches us nothing new about Trump, one harbors a faint hope that it may be a Rubicon of sorts, a bridge finally too far, for some of his enablers, for the pundits, politicians and aides who serve as his unswerving amen corner, professing to divine perfume-scented rainbows in the steaming piles of horse manure he leaves behind. One hopes they finally understand the bottom line here: 

You can support your country or Trump, but not both.

That, too, is a binary choice.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald

Competence in the White House left the premises in January of 2017

HomeTribune Premium ContentOpinionIndependent Leonard Pitts Jr. A eulogy for competence

A eulogy for competence

By Leonard Pitts, March 1, 2020

Consider this a eulogy for competence.

It’s an appreciation long overdue, but then, competence — the quality of being equal to the situation, of knowing what to do — was always easy to overlook. You learned to expect it, to take it for granted.

Competence was not sexy.

Another reason this eulogy is overdue is that the loss of competence — meaning federal government competence — is not recent. 

"...our leader is an idiot", Leonard Pitts.

To the contrary, competence has been gone since January of 2017.

But the events of the last week make this an especially appropriate time for a eulogy. Seldom has the absence of competence seemed more glaring. Seldom have we been able to draw such a direct line between that absence and threats to our physical and financial health.

The mixed-up, mixed-messaging misadventures of the Trump regime as it struggled to frame a coherent response to the novel coronavirus threat was a master class in what happens in a post-competence world once a critical mass of voters decides that stupidity is authenticity and ignorance some form of native genius. It was frightening and yet perversely fascinating to watch.

In a moment that cried out for a president to be presidential, you instead had Donald Trump, having previously assured us warm weather would dispatch the disease, lashing out at his favorite foils. “Fake News MSDNC” and CNN, he tweeted, are trying to create panic. In a press conference Wednesday, he leveled the same charge at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who have criticized his response to the threat.

During that same press conference, Trump said Johns Hopkins University rates the United States “No. 1 for being prepared.” As proof, he held up a piece of paper with a chart printed on it. Trump likened the coronavirus to the flu and played down the threat it poses. “We really have done a very good job,” he said. Then he announced Vice President Pence would lead the response to the virus. Pence’s scientific acumen can perhaps be judged by his insistence that climate change is a “myth” and his claim in 2000 that “smoking doesn’t kill.”

The markets, not surprisingly, were not reassured; they spent most of the week in free fall. Nor were health officials. In contrast to Trump’s litany of vague reassurances, the CDC — whose budget Trump wants to slash, by the way — said the stateside spread of the disease is “inevitable” and advised Americans to brace for “significant disruption.”

“But we’re very, very ready for this,” said Trump. Yeah. Sure we are.

Some have likened all this to the George Bush administration’s laggard response to Hurricane Katrina. But here’s the thing: That failure was noteworthy precisely because it was unexpected, flying in the face of what you looked for from the federal government.

But who among us didn’t expect this? Who would’ve bet the farm that, in the face of a global crisis, the Trump regime would act with the coordinated precision of circus acrobats? No one, that’s who. Circus clowns maybe, but acrobats? No.

Some of us have spent the last few years pretending it doesn’t matter, pretending you could indulge, normalize and make excuses for gross incompetence in the most powerful office in the world and there would be no impact, no price to pay.

It was always a lie, always a triumph of ideology and agenda over common sense and as such, always destined to unravel. Now, perhaps, it does. We are teetering on the edge of pandemic, our lives and fortunes at stake. And our leader is an idiot.

Competence has rarely been so dearly missed.
(P.S. Maine Writer- there is no cure for stupid!)
(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald

War criminals set free and immigrant children die in US custody: Republicans "have you no decency?"

This is an open letter to all of you privately disgusted Republicans.   From Leonard Pitts, echo opinion published in the Casper Star Tribune, in Wyoming.

It’s prompted by the fact that in the last few days, two of your colleagues have come forward to share with us your angst.

One was actually an ex-colleague, former GOP Rep. Charlie Dent. He told CNN that you continue to support Donald Trump because pressure from the base — the almighty base — forces you to. “But there’s no question,” he added, “having spoken to many of them privately, they’re absolutely disgusted and exhausted by the president’s behavior.”

Democratic Rep. Gregory Meeks seconded that emotion. “If you talk to my Republican colleagues off the record, they’re all very concerned,” he said, also on CNN.

It’s not that we haven’t heard similar sentiments before. To the contrary, they have surfaced repeatedly over the last four years. 

But ladies and gentlemen, your lament has reached the point — and breached the point — of sheer tiresomeness.

As the scope of Trump’s abuse of power grows ever more obvious, as his contempt for the rule of law grows ever more plain, as leaders of your party offer ever more threadbare justifications and rationalizations for that which is neither justifiable nor rational, we receive word that you folks are “privately ... disgusted?”

As Rick Perry and others claim Trump as God’s “chosen one,” as a new Economist/YouGov poll finds that most Republicans rank him a better leader than Lincoln himself, as the party grows ever more indistinguishable from a cult, with Trump as he who must not be questioned, he whose wisdom is beyond mere mortal ken, we hear that off the record, you lot are “very concerned?”

One struggles for adjectives to convey how little that means, how insignificant is the comfort it offers.

Sixty years ago, Martin Luther King issued a warning: “If you fail to act now, history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

King was addressing white racial moderates, but it is remarkable — and disheartening — how well his warning fits you, who have prioritized your own political backsides above truth, above honor, above national interest. As the country lurches toward a precipice from which it will not recover, you count votes. In a time that demands every good man and woman raise their voices, you embrace the appalling silence instead.

War criminals are set free. And appalling silence.

A Russian attack unanswered. And appalling silence.

Children dying in our care. And appalling silence.

Except we are given to understand that in private, you grumble from time to time. And Lord, what are we supposed to do with that information? Are we expected to sympathize with your dilemma? Please.

We are posing for history here, ladies and gentlemen. One day we will be judged by what we said and did not say, the stands we took and did not take, in this moment of peril. And you, the party of Reagan and Eisenhower, T.R. and the apparently overrated Lincoln, are coming up well short. Where is your courage? Who broke your moral compass?

Enough with your private disgust and off-the-record concern. The times are calling. They demand you stand up like American women and American men — stand up like John McCain would long ago have done — and speak what you know to be true, what we all know to be true.

Or else, at the very least, please shut up completely. 

Let the rest of us mourn our country in peace. 

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald. This column was published in several national newspapers including the Casper Star Tribune. This is a clarion call to all Republicans. You must remove Donald Trump!

Echo opinion - Trumpziism: intensity of the anger, fear and disaffection Americans feel

This echo opinion by columnist Leonard Pitts was published in the Southern Illinoisan newspaper. 

Leonard Pitts: Donald Trump got what he deserved

Those Trumpzi bubbles were popped at the Nationals' World Series Game!

By the way- the Nationals won but DJtRump lost his cool!*

Oh My God! Somebody in the White House let Donald Trump out of his bubble on Sunday. As expected, it did not go well.

Granted, every president lives in a bubble, due to security concerns. But Trump lives in a bubble within a bubble, one that has less to do with protecting him from assassins than with protecting him from reality. That's why his public appearances are largely confined to friendly rallies with true believers where nary a word of dissent is heard. And his handlers go to remarkable lengths to keep that bubble intact.

Take last week's speech at historically black Benedict College in South Carolina; Trump is about as popular as polka music with African Americans, so it might have seemed a brave outreach on the surface. But students were reportedly asked to stay in their dorms during the speech. Thus, Trump's appearance at a "black college" was actually an appearance before an audience of political allies with maybe seven actual students.

All this, to protect him from the fact that he is widely despised. Well, Sunday night during Game 5, of the World Series, the bubble popped. When Trump was introduced, the crowd at Nationals Park in Washington erupted in thunderous boos, followed by a chant: "Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up!" His grin shrank to a grimace as the magnitude of this public rejection sank in.

It was an immensely cathartic moment. For some of us, at least.

Dana Perino of Fox "News" (yuk!) was simply shocked. "I never thought he would get booed," she said, adding that she had thought "Americans would cheer." Apparently, Trump is not the only one living in a bubble.

Joe Scarborough of MSNBC took exception to the chant. "We are Americans and we do not do that," he lectured, a claim that neatly refutes itself. We do not do that? Sorry, but those weren't Ukrainians in that stadium.

Meantime, Democratic Senator Chris Coons was also troubled. "I frankly think the office of the president deserves respect," he said. Which it does. Maybe someday, we'll have a president who understands that. (Maine Writer- IMO, the office of the potus deserves respect when the person in that position shows respect for others!)

Those who are wringing their hands over this fail to appreciate — or respect — the intensity of the anger, fear and disaffection Americans feel at what is happening to this country. They know that this is less a presidency than a crime wave. And in demanding quiet forbearance in the face of that, critics seek what free people cannot, ought not — and better not — give.

Trump is not the first president booed at a sporting event. It happened to the Bushes, Obama, Truman, Hoover. Nor is he the first to face a rude chant. In the depths of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson was routinely serenaded with, "Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?"

No, what happened Sunday only felt revolutionary because it broke the bubble, allowed reality into the reality show that is the Trump presidency. It forced him to face, if only for a few fleeting moments, the fact that most Americans — Gallup says Trump has a 39 percent approval rating — regard him with scorn. That's a truth he's been able to dodge in that bubble, where "many people are saying" counts as a factual basis, delusion and fraud are political strategy and storm tracks can be changed with a Sharpie.

Now some of us think he should be spared the consequences of an accidental brush with reality? No. When you have endured the frustration of seeing that reality daily mutilated, you have the right — indeed, the obligation — to vindicate it at the top of your lungs.

Sunday night, Donald Trump got what he deserved.

And some of us got what we needed.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald. 

*Washington Nationals fan Chuck Todd closes ‘Meet The Press’ with World Series trophy

A 10,000 lie record- media must be the arbiters of truth

Was the Titanic "delayed"?  No!  It sunk.  When Trump tells lies, the statements are not "inaccurate".  Opinion by Leonard Pitts.

This echo opinion by Leonard Pitts was published in the Daily Commercial a Florida newspaper. Americans must support the media in holding Donald Trump accountable for his inability to speak truth.

Check out Donald Trump's reputation for telling lies at this link.

Trump told the 10,000th lie of his presidency Friday. This, according to The Washington Post, which maintains a database of all the times Trump has exaggerated, distorted or misled.

Ten thousand.

Feels like there ought to be a statue, or something. And what does Trump lie about? Pretty much everything.

He lies about the border wall, claiming it is now being built. It isn’t.

He lies about his tax cut, claiming it was the biggest in history. It wasn’t.

He lies about the Mueller report, claiming it exonerates him. It doesn’t.

Indeed, the very same weekend he notched his dubious milestone, Trump told a particularly gruesome whopper about supposed legislation empowering a new mother and her doctor to “determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”

And how did The New York Times respond to this flaming canard? It called it “inaccurate,” which raised something of a stink on Twitter. That’s not surprising. Calling that hogwash “inaccurate” is like saying the Titanic was “delayed.”

The Times is not alone; most news organizations have resisted calling Trump’s lies lies. Their reasoning, it must be conceded, is thoughtful. After all, to call something a lie is to impose judgment. Sometimes, when people are incorrect it’s not a lie, only a mistake.

But 10,000 times in a little over two years? How gullible must you be to believe someone could be that wrong that often by accident? If any other man told you half that many untruths, you’d call him a liar. You wouldn’t hesitate. Yet here, we do.

It sets an extraordinary precedent, yes, for a news organization to brand a president a liar. But these are extraordinary times and a liar, brazen and inveterate, is precisely what Trump is. In their refusal to call him that, in their insistence upon giving him the benefit of nonexistent doubt, news media compromise their prime directive, which is to present a picture of the world as it is.

That’s something we can ill afford with the very idea of truth under attack and the need for news media to do their jobs arguably more critical than ever.

This is a time for forthrightness, yet too often journalists are anything but, from coverage of race, to climate change to this, as the newspaper of record dubs a grotesque lie merely “inaccurate.”

It makes you wonder if all the effort conservatives put into neutering the referees was not a waste of time.

Seems the referees have done a fair job of neutering themselves.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald

Where Trumpzi red hats hide

First step, build a spaceship.

Echo opinion by columnist Leonard Pitts, who writes for the Miami Herald. His experience about finding a Trumpzi, who was hiding in plain sight, was re-published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper:

How could he have known that patrons in a black barbershop in an urban area would not like Trump?

Leonard Pitts writes- So I go to my barber for a shave. 

While I’m waiting for her to finish the man ahead of me, this other guy and I get to talking about Donald Trump. He’s no more a fan of the boy president than I am, and pretty soon we’ve got the whole shop laughing as we rip Trump’s idiocy.

My barber finishes her customer, and I take my seat in the chair. Whereupon she informs us that the guy who just left is a Trump voter. He asked her to wait until he was gone to announce it.

I’m sure you’re as deeply distressed as I was at the plight of that lonely Trumper — yes, he was black — listening in silence as his hero was eviscerated. How could he have known patrons in a black barbershop in an urban area would not like Trump? If only there were some way he could have spared himself that pain.

Well, now there is: 63red Safe, a new app from a guy named Scott Wallace, a self-described lifelong Republican from Oklahoma. It’s a sort of Yelp for conservatives, with crowd-sourced reviews telling them where they can safely dine, shop or get a haircut without being harassed or hearing the Dear Leader ridiculed.

Wallace got the idea one day when he thought about buying a hat, but didn’t. It was one of those spiffy red numbers, stitched in white with the words, “Make America Great Again.” A number of Republican officials had been heckled for showing their faces in public, and as Wallace recently told The Washington Post, he wasn’t sure it was safe to openly declare himself a Trump supporter.

His app — which, at this writing, has apparently crashed because of a traffic spike after being featured on The Daily Beast, Fox “News” and elsewhere — is part of a family of conservative-themed products, including a news aggregator and a message board. 63red Safe, which The Daily Beast calls a kind of “Green Book” for red-state voters, asks reviewers to rate businesses by answering a series of questions, including: “Does this business serve persons of every political belief?” and “Will this business protect its customers if they are attacked for political reasons?”

How is the average patron supposed to ascertain these things? That’s not clear.

How will 63red Safe foil mischievous liberals who sign up to create havoc? Also not clear.

Shockingly, for a Trump voter, Wallace may not have thought this thing through. Nor is the ideological segregation he promotes anything new.

Years ago, someone marketed a conservative ice cream — because who knows what those hippies at Ben & Jerry’s are putting into the Chubby Hubby?

Then there’s Conservapedia, which counters the left-wing slant of Wikipedia by telling us, for instance, that Barack Obama was “reportedly” born in Hawaii.

Nor can we forget that attempt to translate a conservative Bible so that Christians would no longer have to put up with all that welcoming the stranger and helping the poor you find in the King James Version.

And some singles now seek soul mates on DonaldDaters.com, apparently having discovered that grabbing prospective partners by the pudenda actually doesn’t work as well as you’d think.

63red Safe, then, represents only the latest effort to create a safe space for conservatives who find themselves triggered by, well ... reality and its liberal bias. Like its predecessors, it’s likely doomed to failure or irrelevance. But if conservatives really want to find a place of their own, a place where they will not have to hear people malign the Dear Leader on a daily basis, it’s theoretically possible, but it won’t be easy.

First step, build a spaceship.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald. This opinion editorial was published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Confessions of a Republican ~ echo essay by Leonard Pitts

Vote Blue! Be a proud Democrat!

An editorial essay published in The Hutchinson News, a Kansas newspaper; written by Leonard Pitts.

The other day, a woman confessed to me (MaineWriter~ Ahh? Like she was in a confessional?) that she’s a Republican. (!)

Republicans may bristle at the verb, but it’s used advisedly. In fact, the lady admitted her party affiliation the way you would some personal failing. “I don’t tell a lot of people,” she said, “but . . .”

To be fair, the reticence might have been in part because we met in a blue state. But she also made clear her disenchantment with the GOP on its own merits -- or lack thereof. 

And who can blame her? 

In genuflecting before a rabid rabble of vulgarians, hyper-nationalists and flat-out bigots -- the “base” -- her party has embraced stealing Supreme Court seats, “alternative” facts, alienating allies, kissing up to enemies, “good people on both sides,” tax breaks for billionaires -- and Donald Trump. 

Republicans are a moral train wreck.

She’s hardly the only Republican who feels estranged. Another woman told me, “The Republican Party has clearly lost its way. Actions speak louder than words in politics. You cannot campaign and say you’re a fiscal conservative when you allow the debt to increase to the degree that it has or to provide the types of giveaways in the tax bill that the Republicans have given away.”

This person was not simply a Republican voter, but a former elected official, Claudine Schneider, a Rhode Island congresswoman who left office in 1991. 

“I am astounded with the lack of backbone,” she told me by telephone. “My assessment is, the Republicans keep hearing how popular Donald Trump is and I think the House and Senate members are just inclined to go along to get along. . . . It’s all about holding on to power. It’s essentially, ‘I’ll do whatever it takes to get re-elected.’ ”

So Schneider has assembled a group of like-minded former GOP officials, Republicans for Integrity, to hold the party to account. “Though we are lifelong Republicans,” she wrote in a Miami Herald op-ed, “we are urging you to vote only for candidates who will restore the kind of integrity and constitutional accountability that our nation’s forefathers intended.”

“I’m not going to be one that’s going to argue that we should defeat all Republicans,” RFI member and former Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe told me. ”. . . .But I do believe Republicans need to stand up for principles and for integrity and they need to stand up to a president when he’s not following those principles.”

And doesn’t the group’s name speak volumes? Like “Jews for Jesus” or “Blacks for Trump,” it’s an implicit acknowledgment that what it describes is a departure from the norm. In “Republicans for Integrity,” then, we have a group of Republicans conceding that integrity has become rather rare in the GOP.

That’s something the party has yet to face. One recalls Sen. Lindsey Graham, in the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearing, yelling at his Democratic enemies -- another word used advisedly -- about their supposed willingness to do anything to achieve their goals. “Boy, y’all want power,” he sneered. “I hope you never get it!”

It was a moment of sheer moral disconnect that brought to mind a verse from Matthew: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own?”

Republicans should heed that injunction. Especially given that it comes not just from “leftists,” “libtards” and “Demwits,” but from inside their own tent. Party stalwarts such as George Will, Jeff Flake and Bill Kristol have all complained about the stench of rotting elephant. Now “Republicans for Integrity” is a thing.

“I don’t tell a lot of people . . .” the woman said. And it was sobering.

“I’m a Republican” should not be something you confess (Perhaps, only in a Confessional?).

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 

White House adults in the room are not assuring Americans

http://www.hutchnews.com/news/20180909/actually-there-are-no-adults-in-room-at-white-house

This opinion was published in the Kansas Hutchinson News by Leonard Pitts

Donald Trump needs adult supervision

Actually, there are no ‘adults in the room’ at the White House
For a man who places such a premium on loyalty, Donald Trump inspires remarkably little.

Bad enough his administration is a sieve, embarrassing accounts of bungled phone calls with foreign leaders and cheeseburger-fueled rants with cronies regularly showing up in the news. Bad enough top aides keep fleeing his White House like it’s on fire. Bad enough his ex-lawyer has named him an unindicted conspirator in a campaign finance felony.

Bad enough, all that. Now there’s this.

Meaning, of course, last week’s publication by The New York Times of an anonymous op-ed by a person the paper describes as “a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.” The writer tells us that he or she is part of a large cabal of officials working to subvert some of Trump’s plans and to frustrate his crazier inclinations.

This is not, we are told, because of disagreement with Trump’s agenda -- “We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous” -- but rather, because these officials recognize that he is a man of great “amorality” -- “reckless,” “impetuous,” “adversarial,” “petty” and “ineffective.”

But there are, the writer assures us, “adults in the room.”

We’re told that these adults take it upon themselves, when Trump makes one of his “half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions,” to ignore it, do something else or cajole him into a less stupid course of action. The writer says these officials try “to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t. The result is a two-track presidency.”

Not shockingly, the essay landed on the White House like a bomb. In an angry tweet, Trump described the writer as “GUTLESS” and demanded that the Times, “for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!”

As if the First Amendment were repealed while we weren’t looking. As if the Times has the writer stashed in a newsroom closet.

But at least Trump was unconflicted. Frankly, it was hard to know what to feel after reading this essay. Another way of describing a “two-track presidency,” after all, is to say that America has undergone a de facto coup.

It’s possible to be deeply concerned about that -- Just who’s running this country? -- and yet grateful somebody is standing between us and Trump’s meatheaded ideas. And it’s possible to be both those things and yet appalled at this person’s failure to be as large as the crisis demands.

To the contrary, he or she shows the jellyfish spine and bunny rabbit bravery common among Republicans these days. Real courage would’ve required the writer and the “many Trump appointees” he or she says are part of this to quit their jobs en masse, find a public forum and speak the obvious truth without hiding behind the cloak of anonymity. Namely, that this tantrum-throwing child is unfit to govern.

Instead, we get this anonymous rationalization. It impressed MSNBC host and former Republican Rep. Joe Scarborough, who wrote that we should be grateful to these people for stopping Trump from “creating an existential crisis for the country.” Which is laughable. Trump is the existential crisis, but they’re OK with trying to manage it from behind the scenes because of tax cuts.

With apologies to James Comey, these people need to discover a higher loyalty. Until they do, the assurance they offer is empty.

There are no adults in that room.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132.