The 24-hour news cycle’s demand for something fresh, in combination with Americans’ diminishing attention spans, means that items that should remain foremost on our plates quickly sink out of sight and mind. See, for example, the wars in Ukraine and Syria, implementation of the landmark infrastructure bill, or the ethnic cleansing atrocities committed against Native American children forcibly removed to distant boarding schools. These have quickly become old news and disappeared from both cable and the nightly news as well as above-the-fold in the newspapers.
 
It does not help to keep these stories relevant that a new Donald Trump barbarity or scandal crops up virtually every day, sucking up the entire news oxygen supply. Both the media and public cannot seem to get enough of his continual misconduct.
 
While investigations of his statutory crimes keep mounting, lost in all of this is his greatest crime, one that has generated no investigation, zero potential prosecution and not anything close to accountability: his colossal mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, the most incompetent presidential performance in American history.
 
More than 93 million Americans have thus far contracted Covid and more than a million Americans have died, a number that exceeds the death toll of any other nation and one that could have been much smaller if Trump had acted like a normal concerned and responsible president. But operating that way was beyond both his interest and his capabilities. Instead, he immediately politicized the virus to the detriment of all. Initially, he did this by denying its pandemic potential despite revealing to Bob Woodward that he knew all along how dangerous the bug was. He followed that by blaming China for it and employing pejoratives like “China Virus” and “Kung Flu,” heedless that such racist terminology could (and did) unleash violence against Asian-Americans. He endorsed snake oil therapies including dangerous acts such as ingesting bleach. He disdained masking and social distancing, setting a catastrophic example that ended up killing many of his followers and others. When he himself contracted Covid-19, however, he was treated with all of the latest and best scientifically vetted therapies, including some not available to the general public that he consigned to hospitalization and death. Once the vaccines became available, he equivocated about recommending them (despite taking them himself), thus fueling a disinformation campaign that will linger long after Trump leaves the scene.
 
We have all suffered from his inability to handle the pandemic maturely and responsibly. Moreover, the lasting effect of his chaotic approach and the nonsense he spouted is widespread lack of trust in public health and our healthcare institutions. Additionally, Trump’s invigorating of what had been a small anti-vaccination extremist movement is now paying negative dividends in the battle against the re-emergence of the polio virus.
 
This is criminally negligent behavior of the worst sort. Unfortunately, our criminal codes do not contain provisions covering something so unprecedented and unanticipated.
 
Given that the criminal justice system cannot hold Trump accountable, we might turn to the civil process. In the ideal world, the courts would certify a class action encompassing survivors of Covid victims who died because they believed and acted upon Trump’s baloney about ingesting bleach, hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, oleandrin, ivermectin and the other quack therapies he pushed. Getting sued by a class numbering in the millions won’t put him in jail, but might bankrupt him and leave him begging for handouts.
 
Dick Hermann
August 27, 2022

​Republicans have demonstrated that they are perfectly willing to accept America’s mass shooting pandemic as the price for maintaining the sanctity of the Second Amendment. While they won’t say that out loud, what they are always eager to talk about is their claim (false) that the murder rate is much higher in blue states with strict gun laws than in red states where gun-toting is encouraged and extolled. Like the fascist dictators they admire, they believe that if they shout this untruth loudly and frequently enough, it will take firm root in the minds of the MAGAverse.
 
It turns out, however, that according to FBI statistics, red states lead the nation in murder rates. The top five most murderous states, per 100,000 residents, are Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama and Missouri, all states that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. In fact, in 2020, per capita murder rates were 40 percent higher in states won by Donald Trump than in those won by Joe Biden. Eight of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century.
 
Fox News and other extreme right-wing media outlets constantly blame the rise in murders on Democrats, screaming that they are soft on crime, so what can the public expect of these “thug-huggers?” This is nothing more than yet another bare-faced lie perpetrated by the relentlessly lying media mavens of the hard right. Like Lt. Col. Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) in A Few Good Men, the pretend journalists of the reactionary right “can’t handle the truth.”
 
The conclusion from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports is that strict gun control measures, while not perfect, work to keep murders by gun down. Red states with lax gun safety measures in place suffer more homicides than blue states.
 
Unfortunately, you won’t hear this from red state governors and attorneys general. They continue to broadcast the lie that their states are safer than blue states. Moreover, they claim—again falsely—that big cities (the majority of which are Democratic) have higher crime rates and shooting incidents than their less densely populated, more rural jurisdictions. Once again, the FBI data tells a different story. Rural America is no safer than its urban counterpart.
 
It’s a shame and a disservice that the mainstream media does not constantly call out the lies being spread by the Republican message machine and its Fox News propagandists. These perpetrators of deceit have absorbed the lessons of Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf and Nazi mouthpiece Josef Goebbels to the effect that “if you tell the big lie often enough, people will believe it.”
 
Harriet Hageman, the newest Trump toady, who defeated Liz Cheney in Wyoming’s Republican primary, was quick to follow the Trump-Fox-Goebbels pattern: She claimed that Cheney never called her to concede, whereupon Liz released the recording of her concession call.
How unfortunate it is to live in a world where truth has a difficult time catching up with incessant falsehoods.
 
Dick Hermann
August 19, 2022

​Following its military defeat before the gates of Vienna in 1683, the Ottoman Empire began a 200-year decline, during which it earned the sobriquet, “the sick man of Europe.” By the end of World War I, the more than 600-year old, dominant Middle Eastern power was no more.
 
Today it appears that the two nations that dominated the 20th century—the United Kingdom and United States—are vying for the present-day “sick man” label. Both countries have gone off the rails and into precipitate declines from which they may not be able to recover.
 
The signposts of decay are obvious in both countries:
 
Britain’s descent arguably began during World War II, when she was reduced to playing third fiddle to her two more militarily powerful allies, the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The devastation wrought by German air attacks and battlefield losses were a huge setback. They set the scene for a post-war acceleration of her decline, marked by the loss of empire. The UK settled into a leveling off of further weakening when she joined the European Union in 1973 and quickly became one of its leading nations. She voluntarily relinquished that influential position and the economic benefits it conferred via “Brexit,” a thoughtless exercise that prompted the resumption of the country’s plunge into dire economic straits and global irrelevance. The chaotic, undisciplined three-year reign of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his humiliating “Bo-rexit” from 10 Downing Street only locked in the perception (and the reality) of a nation sinking into oblivion. His departure from office leaves his country in tatters with scant hope of reversing its demise.
 
While Britain’s tumble into inconsequence was probably predictable as far back as 80 years ago, the more abrupt decline of the U.S. in the 21st century is stunning. In less time than it takes to tag Donald Trump for his criminal wrongdoing and hold him accountable, this country has fallen from global dominance where it had been both a political and economic colossus and role model for the rest of the world. Instead, it is now the butt of global graveyard humor sprinkled with a heavy dose of schadenfreude. Both allies and adversaries scratch their figurative heads when they contemplate how far the U.S. has fallen in such a short time. They gape in disbelief at its reckless military adventurism, the 2016 election to the presidency of a uniquely unprepared, unqualified and unfit buffoon; the transformation of a major political party into a fuming, fearful, fawning cult eager to soak up its leaders’ lies; the inability of Congress to address serious problems; an ideological Supreme Court tethered to a spurious doctrine called “originalism;” a wealth gap that has widened to a chasm; a gun-crazy culture that accepts mass shootings as the cost of fealty to an out-dated and purposely misinterpreted constitutional amendment; a nation whose every institution looks to be failing; and a country careening down the road to autocracy absent appreciable resistance. Foreigners cannot believe that this beacon of liberty, democracy and stability appears willing to give up everything that made it exceptional.
 
Both the near- and long-term outlook for both countries are not good. They are on a downward slide that does not look as if it can be stopped, much less reversed. These two formerly great powers that contributed so much to the world have lost much of their moxie and are very possibly on their way to emulating the original “sick man,” the Ottoman Empire.
 
Dick Hermann
August 5, 2022