Trump, Pence must resign to avoid pandemic catastrophe

Vice President Mike Pence convened the first Covid Task Force news briefing in nearly two months today and told this grotesque lie:

“We slowed the spread, we flattened the curve, we saved lives,”

He said this after the two highest single day infection totals since pandemic engulfed America in March with deaths exceeding 126,000. That lie was as delusional as if President George W. Bush addressed the nation September 12, 2001, and said “We slowed the destruction, the World Trade Center wasn’t flattened, we saved 3,000 lives”.

The opposite is true. The first wave is growing, not fading. There is no break from summer heat. Incompetent, criminally negligent federal policy has ensured the country would be divided on a collective response, guaranteeing failure. Hundreds of thousands, including tens of thousands unnecessary infected and dead, has been the result.

When challenged by a reporter who asked if the Trump rallies are adding to pandemic infections, Pence twice said that ““Freedom of speech, the right to peaceably assemble, is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States”. That is as irresponsible as defending the right of persons to yell “Fire” in a crowded theater as being ‘enshrined in the Constitution’.

But as untrue, reckless and life threatening as Pence’s comments are, he’s just following orders of his boss Donald Trump. Together they represent an existential threat already playing out with deadly consequences across America. Both must resign forthwith if America has any chance to respond anywhere near the lifesaving response of must countries. Only Brazil, currently mismanaged by Trump’s delusional soulmate Jair Bolsonaro, comes remotely close to America’s catastrophe.

People of note are beginning to say publicly that Trump/Pence are getting lots of people killed. That is unprecedented in US History. We cannot wait till November 3. We need the Barry Goldwaters of 2020, reprising the Goldwater clique that persuaded Nixon to resign over Watergate in 1974, to make that fateful trip to the Oval Office or Mar a Lago, to whisper that message in Trump’s ear. We need Trump to take that last sad walk to Air Force One, wave to his base, and disappear with Mike Pence in tow.

Our life depends on it.

Unhappy 70th anniversary Korean War

I can still remember my parents discussing the outbreak of the Korean War seventy years ago today, June 25, 1950. My 5 year old brain had trouble processing ‘war’. I thought we were still fighting WWII which I could barely fathom. In a sense we were.

The US and Russia liberated Korea from 35 years of Japanese rule in 1945. We promised Korea their freedom. But Korea became a pawn in the emerging Cold War and we divided Korea into two entities. This satisfied no Korean in the communist North or US aligned South. Seventy years on it still hasn’t.

Both governments brutalized anyone not in line with their quest to take over and unify Korea under their rule. Like China and Vietnam, Korea would likely have come under communist rule. So what? An October, 1946 survey showed Koreans favored communist rule 77% to 14% for the US backed tyrant Syngman Rhee, who had piled up thousands of dead commie sympathizers and a hundred thousand political prisoners in the South. The US even used defeated Japanese forces there to suppress dissent early on. Both sides made cross border incursions resulting in thousands of casualties in the five years leading up to the North Korean invasion that kicked the Korean War. Had the South invaded first, the US would have shouted ‘Right On’ and pitched in with aid.

The US kept Korea from being unified at a gargantuan cost. We used the Japanese model from WWII to inflict ‘total destruction’ on North Korea. We dropped more bombs on the North than we did on Japan. Roughly two million, 20% of North Koreans, vanished. The capital Pyongyang was reduced to 50,000 from a prewar 500,000 souls. Fighter pilots were ordered to strafe refugees fleeing southward avoiding US bombs because we feared they’d infiltrate the south with fighters. Bridges swarming with refugees were blown up. When we ran out of cities to destroy we blew up dams and reservoirs, flooding out the food supply.

Sixty-seven years later there is an armistice but no truce. North and South are still technically at war. And Uncle Sam, represented by a reality show host, is still threatening ‘total destruction’. Some folks today claim that destroying Confederate statutes represents erasing history. They should revisit the Korean War…where the history of monumental US war crimes was largely never reported, much less memorialized in statutes.

How many?

The first two large indoor public gatherings since pandemic struck America were Trump re-election rallies last Saturday and yesterday.

How many of the 10,000 plus who attended will become infected? How many will die? How many will infect future contacts? How many of those so infected will die?

How many infections and deaths will it take till America rejects a sociopathic president?

His mantra should have been 'First, do no harm'. His has been 'Do only harm'

It’s not Chicago’s shame…it’s America’s.

The latest in a long litany of Trib editorials decrying Chicago gun violence calls it Chicago’s shame (Editorial, June 22). Yes, the 106 shot, 14 of whom died Father’s Day weekend is a shame all right. But it’s not Chicago’s shame, it’s America’s. Nobody, individually or collectively in Chicago can slow down, much less stop the weekly slaughter of 40 shot, 10 killed on average, week after week, month after month, year after year. Not the mayor, not the city council, not the police chief, not the 13,000 cops on the beat, not the millions of us in Chicagoland, far removed from the mean streets of poverty and hopelessness that breed gun violence.

But the Trib ponders that if, like in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, we could be so shocked by the killings of 3 year old Mekhi James and 13 year old Amaria Jones that it “jolts our collective consciousness into action…making Chicago a better and safer place”. That is utter nonsense. What I hear on Chicago’s ‘safe streets’ is that ‘it’s Black on Black crime that must be stamped out by Black leaders too busy protesting rogue cops instead of citizen gun violence’. That ensures there will never be a ‘collective consciousness’ to confront the daily shooting gallery.

The reality is that our racist, capitalist economy allows unlimited guns into the hands of millions left out of America’s overly revered economy. Chicago’s battleground streets, like those of every urban metropolis, were redlined out of that economy from the get-go. Before pandemic, when US unemployment was under 4%, the urban dispossessed never got below double digits. Pandemic has simply worsened the unlimited guns, scarcity of jobs mixture fueling endless gun violence.

The Trib’s feel-good happy talk about a mythical ‘collective consciousness’ should cease. It’s time the Trib dropped its love affair with cruel, unregulated, racist American capitalism and begin championing an end to gun availability and a beginning to a public rebuilding of America’s ghettos that capitalism couldn’t see with 20/20 vision.