​Until the advent of the 21st century, I believed that the U.S. Supreme Court’s worst-ever rulings were two terrible 19th century decisions--Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)—and one 20th century pronouncement--Korematsu v. United States (1944). All three cases found the Court firmly on the side of flagrant discrimination.
 
In this century, the Court has outdone itself when it comes to dismal jurisprudence. Bush v. Gore decided a presidential election by a 5-4 vote of justices who ignored the proscription that the Court does not involve itself in political questions (what’s more political than electing a president?). Citizens United opened the floodgates of billionaire and corporate money to buy elections. Shelby County emasculated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and gave Republicans the go-ahead to engage in unfettered voter suppression designed to steal elections.
 
Now the Court is poised to make even more conscience-shocking decisions by the addition of yet another reactionary judge. Trump and his chief legislative executioner, Mitch McConnell, are once again (see Merrick Garland) pilfering a Supreme Court appointment that will skew the Court even further to the hard right.
 
Forget the naked hypocrisy of such an appointment only a few weeks before a presidential election. McConnell and his partners in crime championed what they labeled a holy writ in 2016 when Justice Antonin Scalia died more than nine months before a presidential election, namely that the voters should decide who should have the right to name a new justice. It would be unseemly, said McConnell and his fellow travelers, to allow a sitting president to make such an appointment in an election year.
 
What was unseemly then is perfectly seemly now, say Mitch and the Mitchspittles. So, it is highly likely that the Court will get its new justice either before November 3 or shortly after an election that may result in a new president-elect and a new U.S. Senate controlled by the other party. And there is nothing the Democrats can do about it. The filibuster no longer applies to Supreme Court nominations. It now appears that only two Republican Senators will join their Democratic colleagues in opposing the nomination. Democratic threats to “pack” the Court and get rid of the Senate filibuster completely are hollow. The Republicans live only for the moment, their sense of history being limited to locking in a right-wing Court majority for decades.
 
At the Constitutional Convention, James Madison, the chief intellectual architect of the Constitution, viewed the legislative branch as a “fence” that would surely restrain a madman, maniacal, authoritarian president from running roughshod over the nation. “Checks and balances” built into the foundational document, he was convinced, would assure that Congress would rein in a corrupt, runaway executive. Unfortunately, Madison failed to consider the possibility of an obsequious Senate Majority Leader who cared not at all for defending Congress’ legislative prerogatives against presidential usurpation and who was willing to be a doormat for an unconstrained president contemptuous of constitutional boundaries.
 
If the new justice is seated in early November, she will take part in oral arguments about the future of the Affordable Care Act on November 10th and will likely vote along with at least four of her right-wing colleagues to deep-six it, including pre-existing condition protections. Don’t believe for a minute that Trump’s recent empty executive order pledging (falsely) to protect this essential benefit is anything but a bogus, panicked attempt to delude voters into believing that he is suddenly on the right side of an issue he has spent his entire presidency opposing.
 
So this is where we are today. Republicans will push the Court further rightward, render moot Chief Justice John Roberts’ occasional inclination to cast a swing vote in favor of justice, and enable the stripping away of the remaining laws that protect Americans from the depredations of unchecked reaction. At risk will be Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to control her own body (Republicans espouse a selective version of “right-to-life” that ends at birth), the right of all eligible Americans to vote, and everything else that the advancing arc of history has accomplished to improve our lives.
 
Dick Hermann
September 25, 2020

​Early on in the pandemic, it appeared that technology was going to be the seamless substitute for in-class learning and the great equalizer that would realize the goal of educational equity. Instead, it has starkly revealed the failures of remote learning. We now know that digital schooling is only as good as a family’s connectivity, equipment and parental ability to help kids as well as each school district’s technological competence. Last spring, the equity gaps widened, particularly among Black, Latino and disabled students. The disconnect between the promise and the reality is profound. The digital divide is a chasm.
 
Schools that recently reopened to on-site learning and then abruptly closed when Covid-19 cases among students and staff spiked were caught flat-footed when they had to fall back on remote learning. This should never have happened. By buying into the Trump and (Education Secretary) Betsy DeVos pressure to reopen to onsite learning and their politicizing of education at the expense of sound and safe policies, schools hung themselves out to dry.
 
Equity gaps and disdain for health and safety are only two of the three problems schools are encountering. Technological complexity is the other. In many jurisdictions, even prosperous ones where education is highly valued and adequately funded, technological failures have been rife. In Arlington, Virginia, one of the nation’s wealthiest communities with one of the top-rated schools systems, students were unable to access their classrooms remotely on the first day of school. There was no excuse for a technology collapse when the school system had months to prepare for the new academic year and ample opportunity to make sure its technology platform was up to speed. The superintendent said the connectivity problem was due to a firewall issue related to the large volume of traffic trying to access Microsoft Teams at the same time. How this was not anticipated bespeaks a failure that should have been foreseen and dealt with long before the beginning of the school year.
 
In neighboring Fairfax County, also a premier educational mecca and the 11th largest school district in the U.S., the first week of school was marred by a ransomware attack that may have compromised the personal information of thousands of students and their families. This was apparently part of a coordinated cyberattack on school systems nationwide. While it is a sad commentary on the world we currently inhabit, this kind of disruption was also predictable and should have been guarded against. The fact that it was not is an indictment of school system technology offices and their leadership. Unless we commit to doing more than paying lip service to the importance of education, we condemn ourselves and our children to a second-rate experience that has no place in an advanced, industrialized country that must compete with the rest of the world.
 
Arlington and Fairfax Counties are just the tip of the technology failure iceberg. Ransomware and malware attacks shut down learning in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Ohio. A number of school districts have had to recall thousands of devices they had distributed to students in order to resolve problems. Preventing stuff like this from happening should be the highest priority at a time when distance learning is the only solution. This requires taking technology seriously and committing sufficient resources to securing both the best state-of-the-art equipment, inexpensive broadband available to all, and the best people to design, implement, coordinate, manage and troubleshoot these systems. In the absence of national planning and support, these responsibilities fall upon state and local governments and school systems.
 
Unpreparedness is only one aspect of the technology problem. The principal technology schools use—virtual teleconferencing—is unable to work with any of the other key components necessary for a viable distance educational experience: content management systems, assignment organization, interactivity, reading comprehension, etc. This requires teachers, students and even parents to become IT experts if they have any hope of student success. Teachers are overwhelmed with the volume of information thrown at them, much of it technical and impossible to follow.
 
The rest of the world’s advanced economies have experienced few problems implementing remote learning. This is yet another core area where the U.S. earns a failing grade to go along with its failures to contain and mitigate the pandemic, revive its depressed economy and provide sufficient relief to the tens of millions of Americans abandoned by our government’s incompetence and ideological cravenness.
 
We needed a national policy framework that school districts could follow for the suggested types of software and the interoperability between them. Once again, Donald Trump was not up to the task. Teachers, students and parents deserve better.
 
Dick Hermann
September 18, 2020

“We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight…in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall never surrender.”
--Winston S. Churchill
 
“[The pandemic] is a Democratic hoax.” “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.” And so on.
--Donald J. Trump
 
In May 1940, Great Britain faced the greatest existential threat in its long history. French forces were collapsing before the German juggernaut. The Germans were preparing to invade Britain, soon to be the last holdout against Nazi oppression. On May 10, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and immediately painted a grim verbal picture of what Britain faced. He didn’t pull punches. He understood that his people needed to know the truth in order to prepare for and manage what lay ahead. Inspired by his unmatched, soaring rhetoric—“I have nothing to offer but blood, tears, toil and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind… many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, ….”—his people rallied around him, defiantly endured the Blitz, prevailed against unbelievable odds in the Battle of Britain, and ultimately, with the assistance of its Soviet and American allies, buried Nazism and won the war.
 
May 1940 was arguably the finest month any leader in history has ever had. It was marked by telling the unvarnished truth to the British people. In return, they responded with patriotic zeal, an absence of panic and a fierce resolve to survive and triumph.
 
Contrast Donald Trump’s approach to the greatest existential threat to the United States since the Civil War, as starkly revealed in Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage. Trump, in 18 taped interviews, told Woodward that he played down the Covid-19 threat because he “did not want to panic” the American people. He knew how dangerous the coronavirus was as early as January, then frittered away months before reacting. His half-baked Chinese travel ban (43,000 travelers from China entered the U.S. after the travel ban) was the only timid step he took early on to try to contain the virus. At the same time, he consistently lied about the danger. He pushed dubious cures and suggested injecting bleach, among other insane notions. He held six rallies following his January briefings about the seriousness of the situation, during which he disdained basic safety measures like wearing masks and socially distancing, a reckless advocacy he still espouses today. He went ahead with these rallies knowing full well that not taking the most elementary safety precautions spreads the virus and risks severe illness, suffering and death. Politicizing safety and health while knowing the danger is a crime against humanity. He puts his own supporters’ lives on the line for political gain.
 
Other countries' leaders told their people the truth and no one panicked. Instead, their honesty triggered a determination to contain and mitigate the virus so they could get their lives and economies back on a normal footing. Look where they are today while America flounders, saddled with the worst coronavirus record in the world under this sorry excuse for a leader.
 
Donald Trump is no Churchill. By lying to his people about the virus and playing games with his government’s response, he is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. This is without doubt the greatest crime in the history of the presidency.
 
Sadly, I doubt that Woodward’s condemnatory revelations will change a single November vote. Trump supporters, for reasons inexplicable after all the damage and carnage he has wrought, are baked into their unworthy candidate. When I read the polls, I am blown away by the fact that Trump still retains any support. He deserves none.
 
Dick Hermann
September 11, 2020

The “law-and-order” theme Donald Trump has invoked in hopes it will win him re-election appears to be based on the 1988 edition used so effectively by George H.W. Bush rather than Richard Nixon’s and George Wallace’s first use of this fictional leitmotif back in 1968.
 
Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis emerged from the 1988 Democratic National Convention with a huge 17-point advantage over Bush. That lead, however, evaporated quickly once Bush went all “law-and-order” on Dukakis. The centerpiece of his wildly successful effort to paint his opponent as “soft on crime” was the infamous Willie Horton ad that flooded the airwaves for more than two months up to election day.
 
Horton was a convict from Massachusetts (where Dukakis was governor) serving time for murder. While out of prison on a temporary furlough, he committed robbery, rape, and assault. The Bush campaign effectively exploited Horton to stoke fear and racial anxiety among white voters.
 
While the situation is quite different in 2020, the Trump campaign’s goal in invoking law-and-order is the same as that in 1988. However, the circumstances today are more complex:

• The chaos, violence and dystopia are all happening on Trump’s watch. He is the responsible party. He is, after all, the incumbent.
• Trump’s own lawlessness renders his law-and-order mantra a sick joke.
• Trump’s June assault on peaceful protestors in Washington, DC in order to clear them from Lafayette Park so he could have a photo-op holding a bible (upside down) in front of a church is not exactly consistent with a concern for law-and-order.
• Trump’s promotion of violence by armed right-wing, white supremacist  zealots who have attacked and killed protesters shows that he is only interested in selective law-and-order.

 
Nevertheless, Trump’s attempt to scare the daylights out of the electorate is a serious threat to the Biden campaign. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris must continue to address it forthrightly every day. In order to neutralize Trump’s smears, they must condemn every instance of looting and violence by whoever is perpetrating this illegal behavior. They must also hammer home the fundamental truth that this is happening on Trump’s watch and that he—and he alone—owns it.
 
Biden/Harris must also set forth their plan to deal with violence while drawing the contrast with Trump, whose only “plan,” such as it is, is to foment as much violence, disorder and mayhem as he can, believing it to be his prescription for election victory (along, of course, with extreme voter suppression and social media trolling and election administration hacking help from his mentor, Vladimir Putin).
 
Every single time Trump and his minions lie about Biden’s position on any issue, Democrats need to respond immediately, loudly and unambiguously with the truth. Trump cannot be permitted to get away with electoral murder.
 
Finally, Biden must continue to bring the conversation back to Trump’s complete and utter inability to manage the pandemic and its devastating economic consequences. He needs to point out in detail the many points along the road to this unprecedented disaster where Trump botched this test of leadership, rendered America the worst in the world, and crashed the economy.
 
Democratic vigilance must also go beyond Trump’s attempts to deflect, deny, delay and divert from his colossal incompetence and be able to respond rapidly to the lies and manipulations perpetrated by Trump’s congressional and White House enablers.
 
Trump is running the dirtiest campaign in American history. Cleanup crews must be right behind him.
 
Dick Hermann
September 4, 2020

Set aside for a moment (1) the alternate reality and fan fiction perpetrated by the platform-poor Republican National Convention, a.k.a., the hagiographic veneration of Donald Trump, and (2) the shameful, death-inducing White House pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to approve an untested treatment and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to reduce Covid testing. While the lies and insults emanating from the forked tongues at the GOP convention podium were dominating the airwaves, there was something even more ominous going on.
 
Marjorie Taylor Greene, an openly racist, anti-Semitic, QAnon conspiracy monger and professional hater won a Republican congressional primary in Georgia and earned President Trump’s high praise. Another candidate who openly hates Muslims and people of color prevailed in Palm Beach County, Florida, home to Mar-a-Lago, and Trump was once again all in for her. In all, 21 Republican congressional nominees who have secured a place on the November ballot have publicly supported or defended the QAnon conspiracy theory movement and its preposterous tenets, e.g., that the government is rife with Satanic cannibals who run a child-sex ring when they aren’t eating the children they have enslaved, and that Trump is the champion battling against them. At least 20 Republicans running for state legislative seats have also bought into these dark QAnon fantasies.
 
By the time the primaries are past, it is likely that more of these fascist fearmongers may find a way onto general election ballots this year. At least four additional Republican House and two Senate candidates are still in the running.  No fewer than 50 QAnon followers competed unsuccessfully for congressional nominations. Welcome to the new Republican Party, a formerly respectable organization that has now gone off the deep end of the political spectrum into Nazi-like paroxysms.
 
Because a number of these fanatics are running in deep red districts, they are likely to win and be seated in the next Congress. And what do Mitch McConnell and the other sorry excuses for Republican leaders do in the face of this lunatic fringe takeover of their party? Nothing. These fiends are the logical, albeit alarming outcome of almost half-a-century of Republican efforts to trample on the less fortunate while undermining government and rendering it helpless to function.
 
The FBI says QAnon is a domestic terrorist threat. Trump, however, has retweeted QAnon baloney at least 251 times at this writing and recently said: “I understand they like me very much. I heard that these are people that love our country.” In response to a reporter who asked: “QAnon believes you are secretly saving the world from this cult of pedophiles and cannibals. Are you behind that? Trump responded: “Is that supposed to be a bad thing? We are actually. We are saving the world.”
 
It is hard to believe that a president of the United States not only buys into this rubbish, but actually endorses it publicly. Aside from his countless other failings, this one stands out. We the people—and I mean all of the people—cannot allow someone this reprehensible, inept and irresponsible to hold the highest office in the land.
 
The choice this November is simple: the candidate and party of hate, fear and fascism vs. the candidate and party of decency, democracy, dignity and truth. Four more years of sinking into the darkness vs. striving for the light of reason.
 
You decide.
 
Dick Hermann
August 28, 2020

​Now is the time to fight to preserve what remains of our tattered democracy. Donald Trump’s latest assault on the Constitution, the rule of law and the sacred right to vote, his admitted effort to starve the U.S. Postal Service of the means of processing mail-in ballots, is voter suppression, nay prevention, writ large. He and it must be stopped and reversed.
 
The massive national pushback against Trump’s latest (and surely not last) attempt to subvert the election compelled Postmaster General/Political Hack Louis DeJoy to say that he is suspending his anti-post office efforts until after the election. He cannot be trusted, however, to reinstall the 671 sorting machines and thousands of mailboxes he has removed, among other initiatives to slow down the mail (including Social Security checks and life-sustaining medications).
 
The Trump façade camouflaging his anti-democratic war against mail-in voting is that the Postal Service needs to be run like a business, a philosophy that no other nation subscribes to, mindful that delivering the mail is a “public good” that should not be beholden to the profit motive. Moreover, if run like a Trump business it would be guaranteed to fail (six bankruptcies and numerous collapses—see, for example, the Trump Shuttle, the United States Football League, Trump Ice, Trump American Pale Ale, Trump: The Game and many more),.
 
Title 18 U.S. Code § 594, “Intimidation of voters,” makes it a federal crime to interfere with the right of any person to vote. By falsely claiming that mail-in voting is rife with fraud and undermining the Postal Service to aid his re-election, Trump is interfering with the right of millions of Americans to vote in a time when a pandemic makes going to the polls dangerous. Trump is escalating his efforts to steal an election he cannot possibly win fairly and honestly. This is the lowest depth to which a president has ever sunk in our history. His criminality must not be allowed to prevail.
 
The punishment if found guilty is a fine or imprisonment for up to one year or both. While the Justice Department is of the opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted, this has never been adjudicated. Because a federal crime can generally only be prosecuted in a federal court, a federal grand jury and U.S. Attorney would need to indict the president. The only one in a position to bring such an action is likely Acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Audrey Strauss, currently the only non-Trump appointee among the U.S. Attorney population.
 
In addition, virtually every state makes interfering with the right to vote a crime. That means that state attorneys general could also prosecute Trump. At this writing, 20-plus state AGs are considering suing to stop the attack on the Postal Service, but that would fall short of the criminal action that should also be on their priority list.
 
Reliance on the slow-moving engines of justice may not be enough to stymie a corrupt, criminal president. The people need to make their voices heard, loudly, as well. It is shocking that Trump’s felonious attempt to overthrow the process by which we choose who leads us has not generated the level of outrage it warrants. After almost four years of incessant daily scandals, distractions and deflections perpetrated by him and his corrupt cronies, we tend to normalize his sleaze, venality and depravity as par for what we have come to expect from the most unethical person ever elected to national office in our history.
 
Every American should be up in arms about Trump’s decimation of democracy and the rule of law. If there was ever a time to rise up and challenge an abuse of power that exceeds anything we have ever experienced, this is it.
 
The day after Trump’s inauguration, a million women converged on Washington to protest his misogyny and racism (an additional 3.6 million demonstrated across the country), which they rightly feared would mark his tenure in office. Now, with our very system of government under siege and a potentially stolen election staring us in the face, a nationwide protest is needed more than ever. In the absence of any congressional backbone to rein him in, it is up to the people to protest and proclaim that we will not tolerate the theft of the most important civic activity in which we engage: the vote. Trump must know that there is a line in the sand beyond which he cannot tread.
 
Dick Hermann
August 21, 2020

​In less than four years, Donald Trump has largely demolished the post-World War II foreign policy construct so carefully put together over 75 years by 12 presidents.
 
In so doing, he has recklessly withdrawn the United States from three of the five nuclear arms control agreements he inherited, the result of 70 years of painstaking work: (1) the Iran nuclear agreement, which slowed down that country’s drive to develop nuclear weapons; (2) the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, a centerpiece of European security since the Cold War; and (3) the Open Skies Treaty, which reduces the risk of war by allowing Russia and 31 western nations to conduct observation flights over each other’s territory. Moreover, Trump has also threatened to pull the U.S. out of the two remaining nuclear arms agreements—New Start, which limits U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons and is due to expire in February 2021 if not extended, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the U.S. has signed (observing a voluntary moratorium on nuclear tests) but not ratified. He will likely abandon these last two if, God-forbid, he is re-elected, thus leaving us and the planet in the incredibly dangerous position of being vulnerable to a Russian arms buildup and heightened nuclear threat.
 
Trump’s precipitate and unthinking dismissal of these critical agreements that made the world a much safer place is in addition to his equally imprudent bailouts from the Paris Climate Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), UNESCO, the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Relief and Works Agency, and his multiple threats to pull out of NATO. Each one of these thoughtless moves harms America in ways both immediate and long-term. Ditching the TPP, for example, a trade agreement among 12 Pacific Rim countries, not only greatly disadvantaged U.S. businesses and workers, but also opened the door to China, paving the way for it to be the arbiter of Asian trade rules and the dominant Pacific power.
 
The damage Trump has done and continues to do to America’s position in the world is deadly serious and may not be able to be easily undone should Joe Biden become president next year. Our allies no longer trust America and, while they will likely be greatly relieved should an individual with an understanding of the global balance of power succeed Trump, are not likely to discount him as an anomaly. Their great fear is going to be that, if someone who knows and understands nothing could be elected president, then all bets are off regarding to whom this country might turn in the future. If a Trump intent on upending years of carefully constructed and complex alliances could come to power in 2016, why not someone equally awful in 2024 and beyond? Convincing our allies that we have returned to “normalcy” will not be easy or guaranteed.
 
Similarly, Trump’s predilection for cozying up to dictators, while reversible in the short term, does not mean that history cannot repeat itself down the road. Our allies know that and rightly fear that America could once again go off the rails and elect a clueless fool who has no comprehension of the importance of maintaining the delicate balance of global order and stability.
 
The task that Biden will confront, if elected, will not be as straightforward as the one Barack Obama inherited when he succeeded George W. Bush and was faced with rehabilitating American foreign policy after the Iraq misadventure. This time, it will be a much harder slog.
 
Dick Hermann
August 14, 2020

​President Trump resumed his daily Covid-19 briefings in mid-July with an about-face on mask-wearing and the gravity of the pandemic. However, a few days later he was back to his abnormal comfort zone. He retweeted a video of a physician, Dr. Stella Immanuel, who proclaimed that masks don’t impede the virus. She also said that Hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug that clinical trials show has no effect on treating the virus, but has some potentially serious side effects, has cured hundreds of her patients. This is the same doctor who attributes medical conditions such as endometriosis, fibroids, and cysts to demons that have sex with women while they sleep, and who claims that “alien DNA” is being used in human medicines. Not only did Trump retweet this nonsense to his 87 million Twitter followers; he also endorsed the doctor as a respected authority before hastily seeking shelter when reporters’ questions put him on the defensive.
 
Can you imagine if any other president spouted such claptrap? The country and the Congress would be in an uproar, desperate to find a means to rein him or her in and get them far away from the levers of power. But not Trump. After 42 months of stupidity, loutish behavior and utter madness, this is just another in a series of daily inanities and dangerous drivel that spews forth from this president’s forked tongue.
 
The other theme of his resumed daily briefings is his constant refrain of self-pity and whining. “How come Dr. Fauci is more popular than I am?” “How come nobody likes me?” “Wah, wah, wah.” It’s always about him, the eternal victim instead of who he really is, the victimizer whose criminal negligence has meant the death of 160,000 Americans and the impoverishment of millions more.
 
When the coronavirus loomed, all he had to do was act rationally, as many of his peers around the world did. The viral curve could have flattened and a staged reopening of the economy could have been possible. But even that simple, obvious path was beyond his capabilities. Instead, he spouted lies (“the virus is a Democrat hoax;” “It will disappear.”), buried his head in the sand, and encouraged red state governors to act recklessly in prematurely reopening their economies, foolhardiness that their citizens are now paying for with their lives.
 
Black’s Law Dictionary defines criminally negligent homicide as [occurring] when the perpetrator acts in a reckless, dangerous, or negligent manner which causes the death of another person. By this definition, Donald Trump, once he leaves office, could be indicted for more than 160,000 counts (and counting) of criminally negligent homicide.
 
I supported President Ford’s pardon of disgraced Richard Nixon for his Watergate-related crimes, believing that the country did not need to endure more of the Nixon nightmare. Now, however, I believe that Donald Trump needs to be brought to justice for the nation to be able to move on from the travesty and tragedy of his aberrational and monstrously destructive presidency. He may be able to pardon himself from paying for his federal crimes. However, in every state where a person has died due to Trump’s criminally negligent homicide, no self-pardon is possible.
 
In closing, I need to apologize for a statistical error I made several weeks ago. I wrote that Donald Trump was responsible for 98.5 percent of the Covid-19 deaths that have resulted from his inaction and lies, and his stupid, cruel and incompetent response to the pandemic. I was wrong. Last week more than 1,000 healthcare professionals wrote an open letter to our national leaders—“Shut It Down, Start Over, Do It Right” in which they said that “We could have prevented 99 percent of America’s Covid-19 deaths. But we didn’t.”
 
Dick Hermann
August 7, 2020

​Both our intelligence agencies and the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee concluded beyond any doubt that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in order to help elect Donald Trump. Now, four years later and armed with more sophisticated digital weapons and the benefits of its 2016 experience, Russia is doing it again. Despite Donald Trump’s repudiation of our intelligence agencies and his continuing denials, America has been and continues to be attacked by Russia. Our Cold War enemy is deploying an array of state-of-the-art, high-tech hacking devices, trolls and bots against our American democracy with the intention of re-electing a president who is the best thing that ever happened to Vladimir Putin and his acolytes.
 
Russia’s Internet Research Agency, the culprit of 2016, has now been joined by a slew of additional state-run Russian troll factories in an all-out effort to corrupt and pervert the 2020 election and do whatever is necessary to steal it for Donald Trump.
 
Meanwhile, a passive, servile administration and its spineless congressional Republican accomplices turn a blind eye to what amounts to a declaration of war, intent on doing nothing about it so long as they benefit from it. So much for defending a 240-year old democracy that served us so well until a would-be despot came on the scene. Trump’s betrayal is two-fold: (1) he refuses to address our cyber vulnerabilities and protect us; and (2) he refuses to unleash our own very powerful cyber weapons against Russia in retaliation.
 
Richard Clarke, the U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism, who worked for both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, has for years been advocating an aggressive stance toward this undeclared Russian war on the U.S. Trump has ignored this option because his own political and personal interests always prevail over our national interest.
 
Moreover, because running ads from Russian trolls is big money for Facebook and other social media platforms, don’t put your money on Mark Zuckerberg and his greed-obsessed ilk to protect us against this sabotage of our voting process. The Russians learned in 2016 that American social media would not stop them from creating fiction and promoting it as real. Another lesson they learned is how gullible Americans who get so much of their information from already dubious U.S. Internet sources are and how easily they can be influenced by lies. Almost four years of Trump has only locked that in even more.
 
So here we are less than 100 days from the most consequential presidential election in our history, prostrate before our enemies. Trump’s treasonous avoidance of any counter measures is allowed to continue without any check. The U.S. military’s Cyber Command is prevented from reacting while America is under attack, prohibited from responding by Trump, who dares not offend the Russians.
 
Must we wait for a new administration to go on offense and take the fight to the Russians? No. The leadership vacuum can be partially filled right now by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden. Biden should publicly warn Putin that if he continues to undermine our democracy, there will come a day when Trump is out of office and his policy of abject surrender will be reversed, replaced by a retaliatory policy of aggressive cyber offense. We have the capability to harm Russia’s fossil fuel delivery systems, its connectivity systems, its electrical grid and some of its military capabilities. Biden needs to make it clear that, as president, he will make Russia pay. Threatening Russia now is the only way to deter it from attacking us. It may not work because it is so very much in Putin’s interest to see Trump continue in office. Nevertheless, it is worth a try. Putin may not want to gamble on a Trump victory to save his country from the disruption a cyber-attack could cause.
 
Dick Hermann
July 31, 2020

Donald Trump comes out once again on the wrong side of history. This time his overt racism has him defending the confederate flag, the symbol of slavery and its Southern defenders who betrayed their country and caused the deaths of 600,000 Americans.
 
I have yet to speak to a fellow veteran who cares as much as draft dodger-cum-chicken hawk Trump about preserving the names of our nine military bases named after traitors to the United States plus one  named after a slave plantation (Fort Belvoir). His true disdain for the armed forces, which he covers up with bromides about “our great military” was starkly revealed when he told Fox interviewer Chris Wallace: “I don’t care what the military says” in response to Wallace’s question about the Pentagon’s support for changing base names.
 
Trump’s resistance to doing the right and decent thing—big surprise there—is premised on his frantic attempt to hold onto the white supremacist component of his base and agitate them sufficiently so that they won’t forget to cast their ballots for him in November.
 
Trump cannot roadblock this long-overdue righting of a grievous wrong. At best, he can merely delay it until a sane, sober, rational and competent president succeeds him. When that happens, here are a few suggestions for base names that meet the criterion in Army Regulation 1-33, which states that installations may be named after “deceased distinguished individuals.”

1. Fort Tubman—Everyone knows her heroic role in the Underground Railroad. Few people know that she led Union troops on raids in South Carolina during the Civil War
2. Fort Parker—General Ely Parker was a Native American (Seneca) and principal aide-de-camp to General Ulysses S. Grant in the Civil War. He is credited with drawing up the surrender terms that Robert E. Lee agreed to at Appomattox.
3. Fort Barton—Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross. Before that, she ministered to Union troops under fire at multiple civil war battles. At Antietam, she arrived on the battlefield and performed her work under withering fire before the Union medics arrived on the scene.
4. Fort Lincoln—Surely the father of the Emancipation Proclamation deserves a base named after him.
5. Fort Hale—Nathan Hale was a 20-year old American spy who was captured and hung by the British during the Revolutionary War. His last words: “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” Aside: It would also make sense for Yale University, named after slave owner and trader Elihu Yale, to change its name to “Hale University” after this distinguished graduate whose statue is one of the first things to greet entering freshman when they arrive on campus.
6. Fort Truman—President Harry Truman ordered the integration of the armed forces and served with distinction in World War I as an artillery officer.
7. Fort Gavin—General James Gavin commanded the 82d Airborne Division in World War II, was a D-Day hero and worked to desegregate the military.
8. Fort Carney—William Harvey Carney was the first African-American soldier to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his Civil War heroics.
9. Fort Hays—Anna Mae Hays became the first female general in U.S. history. She led the Army Nurse Corps, successfully advocated for changes that paved the way for women to serve in the military, served in Burma, China and India during World War II and set up the first military hospital during the Korean War.
10. Fort Valesko—Joe Valesko was killed in action in Tay Ninh, Vietnam when he was 23 years old. Joe was awarded the Bronze Star, Silver Star and Purple Heart. He epitomized the highest ideals of his country. Joe was a friend of mine growing up.

 
There are, in addition to these, a large number of worthy candidates for replacement base names. We have suffered the insult of bases named for traitors long enough, as well as those who defend the Stars and Bars and treasonous confederate generals over our troops in harm’s way who fight even with bounties on their heads.
 
Dick Hermann
July 24, 2020