It has been only three weeks since 14-year old Colt Gray, whose irresponsible father gifted him an AR-15 assault rifle, walked into Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia and took the lives and futures of two students and two teachers while also injuring nine others.
 
Ho hum.
 
Consumed with the presidential election and the misplaced importance of headlining every Trump lunacy and lie, the media has quickly forgotten the unbearable human tragedy of the Georgia massacre and the larger national malignancy it represents. Instead, we get 24/7 coverage of Trump’s and JD Vance’s venomous falsehoods about pet-devouring legal immigrants and all the other insane clown shows and conspiracies these two dictatorial wannabes spew forth every time they open their mouths.
 
Enough already. We know who these spiteful villains are. We do not have to be reminded daily about their vulgarity and vileness. Similarly, we do not need to be retold incessantly that Kamala Harris needs to be more specific about her policy proposals (the mother of all false equivalencies given Trump’s lack of any coherent policies whatsoever…aside from the nefarious Project 2025).
 
At least some ink and broadcast language ought to address the escalating national crisis exemplified by what happened in Georgia. The media should focus some attention on why this latest slaughter happened and how it could have been avoided:
 

• Georgia does not have a safe storage law. Just weeks before the shooting, Republican state legislators rejected a bill that would have given a $300 tax credit to gun owners who purchase safes.
• The sale of assault-style rifles is legal in Georgia. Buyers don’t need a permit, nor do they have to take a gun safety course.
• Georgia does not require universal background checks.
• Georgia lacks a red flag law. About half the states authorize a judge to order the temporary confiscation of a firearm if law enforcement or, in some cases, a family member, warns about a person’s credible risk to do harm. Red flag laws have reduced intimate partner violence, suicide attempts and plans for mass shootings.
• Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a 2022 law that allows most Georgians to carry a firearm without a concealed carry permit.
• Republicans in control of Georgia’s state government have steadily loosened restrictions on firearm ownership in recent years.

Also, at the national level:
 

• Congressional Republicans oppose a national red flag law.
• House Republicans recently voted down increased funding for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives to more aggressively go after gun violence.
• The Supreme Court’s extreme right-wing ideologues contort themselves into murderous pretzels in order to interpret the Second Amendment in denial of its plain English text. The Court ignored the dependent clause that begins the Second Amendment in order to proclaim that it means that any individual has a right to tote a weapon that can kill people.

 
Republicans freak out whenever sane gun laws are under consideration. They much prefer banning books to guns. Trump, Vance, Georgia lawmakers, congressional Republicans and Supreme Court extremists: you have blood on your hands.
 
Dick Hermann
September 29, 2024

The impact. I have tuned into every presidential and vice presidential debate since Richard Nixon and Jack Kennedy squared off in the first one in October, 1960. I strongly disagree with the pundit consensus that debates don’t move the needle much when it comes to voter preferences.

• 1960. The debate outcome underscored the enormous impact of the visual. Americans who listened on the radio believed Nixon had won. JFK’s relaxed, telegenic performance versus Nixon’s affect and that the Vice President was disadvantaged by both a recent illness and the absence of make-up demonstrated to the public that his young Senatorial opponent was at least on a par with the experienced Nixon and could credibly serve as Commander-in-Chief.

• 1976. Gerald Ford’s gaffe about Eastern Europe not being under Soviet rule, followed by his immediate doubling down on his calamitous faux pas, contributed significantly to his defeat.

• 1980. Ronald Reagan’s question during his debate with Jimmy Carter, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?’ sealed the deal for him in 1980.

• 1988. Entering his debate with George H.W. Bush, Michael Dukakis enjoyed a 17-point lead in the polls. His passionless, scholarly answer to a question about what he would do if his wife was raped cost him dearly. It did not help that Bush’s height advantage was emphasized by the step stool provided for Dukakis.

• 2020. Trump’s boorish behavior during his first debate with Joe Biden turned off many voters and boosted the Democrat in the polls.

• 2024. Finally, Kamala Harris’s performance diminishing a bully was remarkable. The fact that Trump’s inability to perform under pressure gave her a modest boost in a very tight race is significant.

 
Don’t believe the pundits who proclaim that presidential debates have no impact. They do.
 
Post-debate reflections.

• The most remarkable takeaway was that the ABC moderators felt it necessary to check with Springfield, Ohio officials before going on air in order to determine if any pets had in fact been consumed by hungry Haitians. They suspected that Trump would not be able to resist raising this ridiculous nonsense.

• Just days after yet another tragic school massacre, the gun issue was barely addressed. All we learned was that Harris is a gun owner and supports the Second Amendment, the meaning of which the Supreme Court has perverted to such an extent that these judicial ideologues have blood on their hands.

• ABC did us a disservice by not asking the candidates: “What will you do if Iran gets the bomb?” It is hard to believe that Americans wouldn’t care if an ignoramus with no impulse control commands the nuclear release codes.

• The United States’ massive debt problem did not merit a single question. This is, alas, in keeping with both parties’ non-efforts over a half-century to suppress and distract from any mention of a sleeping giant of an issue that will come back to bite our progeny and eventually depress their standard of living.

• Campaigns and debates focus entirely too much attention on the presidential candidates and far too little on the people they will bring with them to the White House. It would be instructive to hear something about these people who will advise a president and implement his or her policies.

• Contrary to the excitement generated among members of the punditocracy  because 67 million people watched the debate, I was deeply disappointed. Seventy million Americans watched the first Nixon-Kennedy debate when the U.S. population was 179.3 million (est. 345 million today). In 2020, 155 million Americans voted. Were this turnout to remain the same this year (I think it will be higher), that means that 57 percent of likely voters tuned out. What a sad commentary about something so important to our future.

• After watching Trump melt down and self-destruct, it defies belief that he remains at 46 percent in the polls. It is shocking that his base clings to him despite his inability to control himself and project anything remotely resembling competence.

• Trump announced that he won’t debate Harris again. Nevertheless, he might if he keeps falling farther behind her in the polls as election day approaches. Desperation may make him change his mind despite the risk that she will do another rain dance on him.

 
Dick Hermann
September 22, 2024

​Following Donald Trump’s performance during his September 10 debate with Kamala Harris, there should be only one question in the minds of American voters: Do you want this person to have possession of the nuclear release codes?
 
The farther away Americans move from the putative end of the Cold War, and from knowledge and understanding of what it means to serve in the military, the less they understand about how central this question is to our national security and our very existence. The thought that an unstable individual with zero comprehension of nuclear weapons  and zero impulse control could order a first strike should strike fear in the hearts of us all.
 
Among the myriad of reasons why Trump is unfit to be President, this one stands out.
 
In Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg’s new book, On Heroism: McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump, describes a military establishment deeply concerned about what an immoral, incompetent, cognitively impaired commander-in-chief with no understanding of the global implications of deploying nuclear weapons might unleash. The presupposition had always been that the President of the United States would invariably be a stable individual with a deep respect for the office and its accompanying weighty responsibilities. In Trump, the top generals and admirals were faced with a person who was the exact opposite.
 
As the post-2020 election interregnum hurtled toward the January 20, 2021 transfer of power, they agonized over how to constrain Trump if, in his desperation to cling to power, he might launch World War III. His January 6 attempted coup d’état put them into panic mode.
 
There is a reason so many former Trump administration and other top military commanders have gone public with their concerns about what he might do if re-elected. Their fears of what a second Trump term could mean for our national security should make every American worried.
 
Kamala Harris demonstrated decisively that she possesses the qualities and character essential to serving as Commander-in Chief. The contrast with her opponent could not have been starker. Her beat down of Trump was epic. It was a surgical vivisection. And all he could counter with were 33 lies, including: ridiculous racist claims that migrants were eating our pets (an upgrade, I suppose, over many Republicans’ prior assertion that Democrats were munching on the children they were sex trafficking); that Viktor Orban, the anti-Semitic Hungarian strongman who favors him is “one of the most respected men” (he is reviled by the vast majority of world leaders); that Russia was justified in invading Ukraine; that Israel will no longer exist if Harris is elected; that he had no responsibility for January 6; and that Democrats want to execute babies.
 
Just because he is a pathetic, craven liar does not mean he isn’t dangerous. Hopefully, the debate will sway enough undecided voters to do the right thing and keep him as far away from the nuclear codes as possible.
 
Dick Hermann
September 13, 2024

​If you read the New York Times, Washington Post, or other mainstream newspapers, or tune into NBC, CBS or ABC, you should be blown away to discover that these elite power brokers of public opinion have abased themselves. Even after almost a decade of daily coverage of Donald Trump, they persist in (1) reporting on him as if he were a normal candidate, and (2) covering the presidential campaign as if it were a normal campaign. Bothsidesism, whataboutism, and false equivalencies prevail. By treating the two candidates as coequals, competing on a level playing field, headline writers and reporters mislead their readers and viewers.
 
The differences between the two candidates are not subtle policy nuances. But you would not know that if you read the headlines and articles in the mainstream media (MSM). Instead of calling Trump out about his misdeeds and plans for much more American carnage, they whine about Kamala Harris’s lack of policy specifics. To read and listen to them, you would not know that one candidate’s treason and sedition are central to his persona and not at all comparable to his opponent’s policy vagueness. They disregard the former while obsessing about the latter. How pathetic—and dangerous—is that?
 
The MSM appear unaware of the lasting damage they are doing. They ignore the fact that the rival propaganda machinery that fervently undergirds the Trump cult—Fox News, OANN, Newsmax, radio shock jocks like Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, etc.—are not constrained by similar qualms about being perceived as biased. The propagandists support Trump’s daily fusillade of lies and character assassinations with megadoses of their own falsehoods. They present his insanity and nonsense, and the existential danger he represents, as legitimate.
 
The fact that Trump attempted the overthrow of the government, was twice impeached, is a 34-time convicted felon, a serial sexual assaulter, a scammer who stole the life savings of hundreds who signed up for his bogus university, a slumlord, a bigot, an inept president incapable of confronting a pandemic, a commander-in-chief who lamented that “his” generals did not measure up to Adolf Hitler’s in terms of fealty, etc, etc., is not worth a mention by the MSM poohbahs who arbitrate what we read and hear. They will stick to their journalistic insistence on neutrality until they are marched away to a Trump “re-education” camp. If they don’t get a grip, there won’t be any free press left to extol if this fascist tool is re-elected.
 
The MSM does a huge disservice to the public with its horse race coverage, fueled by their delusions as to what constitutes honest reporting. They do not have a clue. They have abdicated any claim to the moral high ground.
 
This is an example of the media abandoning the conceit that they are a Fourth Estate. Along with that exalted label came the need to act responsibly and defend the very system that allows for the existence of a free press. They have surrendered that to Trumpist corruption. A modicum of partisan bias in favor of democracy, the rule of law, and basic decency and integrity would be appropriate. If they continue to contribute to normalizing and legitimizing him and his accomplices, it will be at their own peril.
 
MSM, Do Your Job!
 
Dick Hermann
September 7, 2024