If that's the truth, why did we have over a month of secrecy about his condition?
I believe his problem was much more serious.
The folks at Really American Media also doubt we are getting the truth. Here is what they had to say.
Solar power is the cheapest form of electricity to set up in most parts of the world. Tariffs are paid by U.S. importers, who pass along the costs to consumers. And noncitizen voting is extraordinarily rare.
These three statements are facts. You can verify them by looking at scientific research, listening to experts or just reading reliable news outlets.
Recent polls, however, show that substantial numbers of Republican voters simply don’t believe these statements. That’s bad for the country, because it’s harder for us to solve problems and decide how to move ahead when we can’t agree on the facts. It’s also bad for Republican politicians — and they have only themselves to blame.
Led by President Donald Trump, many members of the GOP in recent years have made their case by attacking the underlying facts, making baseless claims and undermining the credibility of independent experts who could contradict them. The result is a party that is increasingly out of touch with voters outside its ideological bubble and unable to come up with good arguments or practical solutions.
Just look at the numbers:
The sheer number of Republicans who believe things that aren’t true distorts the political landscape. As problems arise, they effectively box Republican politicians out of making certain arguments or trying specific solutions. When Trump’s broad-based tariffs lead to increased prices, how can Republicans in Congress push back if their own supporters don’t see the link?
In Australia, cheap solar power is now so abundant that every household will soon get three hours of free energy every day. Promoting solar here would surely help Americans at a time of rising energy prices, but even if they wanted to, Republicans would have a hard time making the case for it so long as their own voters incorrectly believe solar power is more expensive.
Meantime, Trump’s persistent arguments about voter fraud have left Republican politicians chasing phantoms. But when state lawmakers look to curb mail-in voting or introduce onerous voter ID requirements, their own elections directors and strategists have to pull them aside and warn that these restrictions might backfire on their own party.
As just one example, Trump has repeatedly demanded that Congress pass a law that would require married women who have changed their last name to produce both birth and marriage certificates to register to vote, among other provisions. But a 2023 Pew survey found that 25% of liberal Democratic women kept their own name after getting married, compared with only 7% of conservative Republican women. So which party would that restriction hurt?
None of this is necessary. Trump could have stuck with his argument that any cost of the tariffs will be worth it in the long run. He could make a somewhat principled argument that government support for solar power distorts the marketplace and it should stand on its own. Or he could have stuck with the clever Republican line that it should be “easy to vote and hard to cheat.”
But that would be hard. It would require knowing some facts, having a consistent political philosophy and engaging with ideological opponents who would have counter-arguments of their own.
Instead, Trump chose the easy way, making wild claims and trying to shut down debate, and Republicans largely fell in line behind him. The result is a party whose debating skills have grown rusty, preaching the same tired sermons to an ever smaller choir of supporters as the day of reckoning grows closer.
The following post is by Paul Krugman at paulkrugman.substack.com:
Donald Trump has, at least for the time being, called off plans to bomb Iran’s civilian infrastructure. He has done so because, according to him, highly productive negotiations are underway involving the government of Iran, an invisible six-foot white rabbit, and his Canadian girlfriend.
What I just said is not strictly true, or it’s not all true. Trump did not say anything about the invisible rabbit or the Canadian, but the gist of it is true. He said that there’s highly productive talks underway. And shortly afterwards, the Iranian government and Iranian state media said, no, they aren’t. This is not happening.
I’m not going to say that Iranian state media is necessarily a credible source, but the odds are that they are in fact telling the truth and the President of the United States is either lying or fantasizing or both. There’s really no reason at all to believe that anything like what he said is happening is in fact happening.
Why do I say that, Aside from the fact that Trump has not exactly been truthful on a lot of things? But beyond that, there are three important reasons to believe he might be making this stuff up.
First, he put himself in a very bad spot with his threat to commit a massive war crime if Iran doesn’t open the Strait of Hormuz. and must be looking for a way out. Another president at another time might say that on careful consideration, We have recalibrated the policy or something like that. Trump doesn’t do that. Trump is always winning, never admits that he’s had a setback, never admits that he’s changed his mind.
So saying that, oh, the Iranians have come to the table, probably big, strong Iranians with tears in their eyes, but anyway, that the Iranians have come to the table and that’s why we’re not doing what I said we would do is a very Trumpian out.
Second, Why would the Iranians be making a deal at this point? We can talk a lot about how the war is going, but it’s pretty clear that as the Iranians are likely to see it, they’re winning. I mean, they’re not winning militarily, but that was never on the cards. They are, they have successfully turned what was supposed to be a lightning decapitation of their government into a protracted contest in relative ability to bear pain and all indications are that the Iranians are nowhere near cracking and all indications are that the United States, although obviously we’re not losing thousands of people, and we are having our whole life disrupted, but the American public really doesn’t like higher gas prices, does not believe Trump. The clock is ticking for Trump on this in a way that it is apparently not for the Iranian regime. So Iran has has the upper hand here. And very hard to see why they would be wanting to make a deal until they basically humiliated us substantially more.
Finally, consider possible motives. Imagine that you were somebody close to Trump, somebody close enough to actually have an influence on his decisions as well as inside knowledge. Here’s what you could have done really just between last night and now. You could have sold a bunch of crude oil futures, at very high prices, Brent was over $112 over the weekend, then bought them back immediately after Trump’s announcement of triumphal progress, but before the Iranians said that is not happening. And you could have turned a very, very nice, very large profit.
To say that insider trading might be driving U.S. policy would have been outrageous. in the past. Who thinks that that’s beyond the realm of possibility now? So all of this could be happening.
Last point to make here. Think about how much America’s position in the world has been weakened, not just by apparent failure to subdue a fourth-rate power, but by the fact that everybody now knows that you cannot trust anything, cannot trust any promises the United States makes, you cannot count on the United States carrying through with promises, with threats, not just promises, but threats are also incredible in the sense of not being all credible, and that the default assumption should be that anything that this administration says is a lie.
That is a really, really bad thing. That is, you know, influence in the world power is not simply a matter of missiles and bombs, although we seem to be running low on those too. It’s very much a matter of people taking what you say and what you promise and what you threaten seriously. And we are not ruled by serious people.
One of the most solemn responsibilities of this president, or any president, is to explain to the American people why he is sending our military into harm’s way. And just as important is to explain why and how our service members were killed in the line of duty.
Donald Trump has failed in both of those duties since he started a war of choice with Iran three days ago.
After failing to address the nation as every president has done since it became technologically possible, the president finally spoke on camera for just six minutes on Monday. It was a rambling preamble to an already planned White House event.
In remarks insulting to the intelligence of anyone following the events of the past three days, not to mention to the families of military members killed, Trump oddly segued from talk of honoring those who died to the curtains in the East Room of the White House and ballroom construction.
Among the most troublesome things about Trump’s despotic regime is all we don’t know.
The need for credible information about the war in Iran can not be overstated, and yet we are getting almost nothing from the White House and an administration not known for its truthfulness. How can we believe a word they say when the agenda has long been freewheeling falsehoods?
The paltry communications from Trump and the Department of Defense have been scattershot and contradictory.
Instead of a live address, shortly after hostilities began, Trump posted an 8-minute authoritarian-esque video on his own social media platform from Mar-a-Lago. This way, reporters couldn’t question his motives live. A second short video followed and was no more enlightening.
The White House did not send proxies to the Sunday morning talk shows to make the case for war. The famously available president did not hold a press gaggle on Air Force One on the way back to Washington from Palm Beach, nor did he answer shouted questions as he entered the White House on Sunday night.
The president did take quick calls from more than a dozen reporters, spinning different narratives, sometimes to the same people. On one of those calls with reporters from The New York Times he laid out three competing options for an Iranian endgame.
At one point he recommended complete regime change, saying the Iranian people should overthrow their government. “That’s going to be up to them about whether or not they do. They’ve been talking about it for years, so now they’ll obviously have an opportunity.”
He also suggested the Iranian military hand over their weapons to the Iranian people.
He then said he would remove the leaders but keep the government, Ã la Venezuela. “What we did in Venezuela, I think, is the perfect, the perfect scenario,” Trump said. So regime realignment but not change? He went on to say there are “three very good choices,” to take over for Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader who was assassinated early Sunday.
Later, he had to amend that suggestion. “The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates,” he told Jonathan Karl of ABC News in another phone call. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”
None of these options was accompanied by an executable plan. . . .
A lack of information breeds chaos and fear. A new CNN poll indicates that nearly six in ten Americans disapprove of the decision to go to war with Iran. Financial markets are down, and energy prices are surging. You will soon see the price of war at the pump.
Making no effort to quell fears or calm markets, Trump said the airstrikes could continue for four to five more weeks and told CNN “the big wave” is yet to come, though some reports question whether the U.S. has enough defensive weapons to sustain such a prolonged campaign. If he ever took questions from reporters in good faith, one might ask, “how is it possible that we could launch a war unprepared?”
This self-proclaimed “peace president” has ordered more strikes against other countries than any modern American leader. In just over a year he has attacked seven sovereign nations. The White House insists that Trump always exhausts diplomacy before attacking, though his brand of diplomacy looks a lot like ultimatum theater.
In the ultimate “ends justify the means” scenario, Trump believes the path to peace is paved with violence and force. About this new Iran war, the explanations are weak, the contradictions abundant, and they come from a regime that has proven to be untrustworthy in matters of life and death.
Citizens would do well to keep in mind the old saying, “The first casualty of war is the truth.”
And Trump's attorney is not the only one whining that Cohen is a liar. Republican politicians, especially those committed to Trump and his lies, are doing the same.
There is more than a little bit of hypocrisy in their claims though.
Michael Cohen is a liar. They are right about that. But what did he lie about? He lied when questioned by the government about Trump's secret payments to keep the tryst with Stormy Daniels from becoming public knowledge before the 2016 election.
He lied to protect Donald Trump. The Republican politicians didn't have a problem with those lies. After all, many of them also regularly lie to protect Trump.
It was not until Cohen was convicted and punished with imprisonment that his story changed. After serving his sentence and promising to testify truthfully that the GOP politicians began to attack Cohen for being a liar. It's not the lies that bothered them. It's the truth that he's now telling.
For today's Republicans, telling the truth about Trump is a sin. One is supposed to go to the grave telling lies to cover for Trump. Evidently, truth is no longer a Republican value.
Sadly, that no longer applies in the U.S. Congress, because one of our political parties has abandoned its belief in facts, logic and truth.
Most Republicans have cast their lot with Donald Trump, in spite of the fact that he told over 30,000 documented lies during his term in office. The now believe all of those lies, including the biggest one -- that Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. There is absolutely no evidence of that. But evidently they don't need any evidence to believe him.
To this day, a large majority of the GOP base believes President Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election. Why do they believe it? Because Donald Trump said it was true, and they want to believe it!
This lack of belief in facts, logic, and truth has even infected Republicans in the U.S. Congress. They have taken up Trump's claim about a "crisis" at our southern border, and demanded some very right-wing changes. But when Democrats agreed to the changes, they voted against the resulting bill. Why? Because Donald Trump told them to do it.
Compromise has become impossible in Congress because of the Republicans ignoring facts, logic, and truth. Only their agenda matters, and that agenda in whatever Donald Trump wants. And Trump will not let them compromise for the good of the country. He demands absolute loyalty, and cares only about what is good for him -- not what is good for the country.
I am a Democrat, but there have been many Republicans I respected in the past (like John McCain, William Buckley, Everett Dirksen, Nelson Rockefeller, and Dwight Eisenhower). Why I disagreed with them on some economic issues, I felt they were patriotic Americans who were acting in what they considered to be the best interests of the country -- and they were willing to compromise for the good of the country.
But the lack of facts, logic, and truth inherent in today's Republican base and elected officials is hurting this country. They have no true beliefs and are unwilling to compromise. They just wait for Trump to tell them what to think or do (whether it is good for the country or not).
Primary care clinicians like us who provide early abortions in their practices have long known that the pregnancy tissue we remove does not look like what most people expect. After Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and early pregnancy termination was banned across more than a dozen states, we felt it was important to make this information public and show the images we have seen more widely.
It’s important to us to counter medical misinformation related to early pregnancy because about 80 percent of abortions in the United States occur at nine weeks or earlier. So much of the imagery that people see about abortion comes from abortion opponents who have spent decades spreading misleading fetal imagery to further their cause.
Last fall, as members of the MYAbortion Network, a clinician-led organization dedicated to educating people about abortion and expanding early abortion services into primary care settings, we launched a multimedia project to provide accurate information regarding early pregnancy tissue after abortion.
The Guardian published our first photos on Oct. 19; they went viral, appearing in media outlets and getting shared widely on social media.
Many people, even those who support abortion rights, did not believe the photos were accurate. Some insisted we had deliberately removed the embryos before taking the photos. The images weren’t consistent with those often seen in embryological textbooks, magnified on ultrasounds or used in anti-abortion propaganda; these enlarged images are not what you see with the naked eye after an abortion. A Stanford gynecologic pathologist has validated our photos, but many people could not believe the pictures were presented unaltered. . . .
But showing these images is vital to counter misinformation, not only for patients but for our colleagues as well. Dr. Jeffrey Levine is a professor of family medicine and director of reproductive and gender health programs at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He’s been teaching abortion care to fellows, residents and medical students for nearly two decades.
“When we examine the tissue after a procedure, everyone is consistently surprised. They expect to see an embryo, fetus or at least some body parts,” he told us, describing the students’ experience as “underwhelmed.”. . .
We find ourselves in a country divided by politics rather than by patient need. Ensuring that our patients, colleagues and the general public have clear, objective information about abortion is critical for patients to get the care they deserve.
Here's what Michael Vickers, a former CIA officer, thinks Putin's advisors should tell him. The post is from The Washington Post.
Imagine yourself today in the unenviable shoes of Vladimir Putin’s national security aides, charged with briefing the Russian president on his options roughly one week into his disastrous Ukraine invasion.
The briefing, if it is an honest one, ought to go something like this:
Here is the situation, Mr. President: Our rapid-strike plan was supposed to have caused the Zelensky government to quickly capitulate, enabling us to install a puppet regime in Kyiv and incorporate Ukraine into the Russian Federation. Instead, it has unified the West, kindled in the Ukrainian people a fierce resistance, and led the NATO alliance and the European Union to boost their military support for Ukraine and impose economy-destroying sanctions on Russia.
We have suffered thousands of casualties and have been forced to disclose the names of at least some of them to the Russian people. We have lost hundreds of combat vehicles. Our main invasion force spent days stalled in what looks more like a traffic jam than an attack column.
Our economy is being squeezed by sanctions that have targeted our central bank, limiting our access to the $630 billion in foreign exchange reserves that we have carefully built up, causing the ruble to collapseand forcing us to suspend all trading on our stock market. Protests are breaking out in several Russian cities, despite the fact that we have arrested thousands of demonstrators.
Our options now are not great: We could double down in Ukraine by leveling Kyiv, Kharkiv and other major cities with artillery, missiles and airstrikes, killing large numbers of civilians. We could use chemical weapons, as Assad did in Syria, to terrorize the population further.
But the costs of taking these steps would be high and are unlikely to compel the Ukrainian people to give up. Even if we find and eliminate President Zelensky, he will be replaced by another leader, even in exile, and the war will go on. The longer it does, the more casualties we will suffer; and the more our military will be degraded.
We were driven out of Afghanistan in 1989 after we suffered 26,000 war dead over nine years. But Ukraine will be far worse for us. The size of our armed forces is a fraction of what it was during the 1980s. We can’t sustain such losses.
A resistance movement needs favorable terrain, a population willing to fight, neighboring states that can provide sanctuary, and an external sponsor willing to supply it with weapons, training, intelligence and political support.
Ukraine has all of these elements going for it.
Its active military and reserves number some 400,000 to 500,000.Many of them will survive to join the resistance. We have nowhere near the forces required to occupy and conquer a country of more than 40 million people the size of France. If we withdraw, any puppet regime we install will be in mortal danger.
The Ukrainian resistance will be equipped with many times more Stinger antiaircraft missiles and far more lethal antitank weapons than fighters had in Afghanistan. Were Turkey to supply more of the drones that are destroying our combat vehicles, we will be in even more trouble.
In short, Ukraine will be the mother of all insurgencies.
Meanwhile, our economy is swooning. Many foreign companies are refusing to do business with us. The West is already denying us the semiconductors and other advanced technology on which our armed forces and economy depend. We might soon be cut off entirely from SWIFT, the global financial messaging system. And the more we escalate, the faster the West will place crippling sanctions on our energy sector, which provides more than 40 percent of our government revenue. Sanctions on the energy sector will crater the Russian economy.
Escalation is not attractive for other reasons.
We could hit the West with cyberattacks to damage their economy, but the West will respond in kind. We can strike the NATO front-line states whose territory is being used to supply the Ukrainian resistance, but that could well lead to a war with NATO that will only make our position much worse. Killing large numbers of Ukrainian civilians might even lead the United States to use its air power to stop the bloodshed. The Americans would make short work of us.
We could again threaten to use nuclear weapons, but the West will realize that this is an empty threat. Even the most limited use would provoke the indirect destruction of Russia, and massive use would lead to our rapid and complete destruction.
In sum, every day this war goes on, more of our economy and military power will be destroyed. We risk our people rising up against us. Instead of ending Ukrainian democracy, this war might end our rule.
If we are rational, we should find a way to declare victory and extricate ourselves from this no-win war right away.
The following is from Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner on this subject:
The stories we tell of our past, to ourselves, each other, and especially our children, are the seeds that will grow to shape our future. This is not unique to our time or place. Wrestling over who controls historical narratives, and thus controls what a society views as its origins and values, can be found across the ages and around the world.
But in this vulnerable moment in our country, at a time of the “Big Lie” and schisms over how we view the fundamental definition of our nation and its fate, we can see the acrid smoke of the cultural battlefields hovering overhead.
One particularly egregious example comes out of Florida, where governor Ron DeSantis has tethered his political fortune to strumming the cacophonic notes of white grievance. A bill being moved through the Florida legislature would, according to the Washington Post, give “parents and state regulators considerable authority to ban books or teachings that cause discomfort, including carefully reviewing lessons about ‘the Civil War, the expansion of the United States … the world wars, and the civil rights movement.’”
The number of outrages this provokes are almost too many to count. And it points to a very dangerous reality that has existed for a long time, one that has only metastasized in the Age of Trump - a misplaced sense of white victimhood. It’s not just Florida. This struggle for the narrative of our nation is happening all across the country. It’s a big reason why reactionary candidates are trying to take over school boards.
The imbalance of feelings in this law over who might be hurt by the way we teach our history is stunning. Nevermind, apparently, the amount of “discomfort” non-white Americans have been subjected to over the course of this nation’s history. To deny telling the hidden stories of their central part in the building of this nation, or the stories of slavery, Jim Crow, the extermination of Native Americans, Japanese internment camps, the Chinese Exclusion Act, redlining, and all the other governmental and social actions that were meant to make sure those who were non-white didn’t feel welcome, often violently so, is to deny the truth about the United States. And let’s be clear, whitewashing our history hurts everyone because it is an attack on the truth, and the truth must be the basis for the foundations upon which we build our nation going forward.
For a political movement that likes to boast about how tough its members are, how Democrats and liberals are all a bunch of “snowflakes,” this represents a blizzard of “snowflakery.” But of course the intent is obvious. It’s a natural outgrowth of the misrepresentation and demonization of Critical Race Theory, or the attacks on “woke” culture.
This is not about the past as much as it’s about the future. It’s about a group that has had an unquestioned hold on power due to privilege, obfuscation, and being the unchallenged majority in a nation that is undergoing rapid change.
There are very ugly chapters in American history. Yes, they can cause “discomfort,” and they should. But they can be a path to pride. Even the founders believed in the pursuit of “a more perfect union.” At least that’s how I see it. Look at what this nation was, the chasm between its ideals and its truth, and look at how it has been able to evolve during its short history. We cannot be content with where we are, of course, not by a long shot, but we can take some comfort in how far we have come and what that means about where we can go.
This is a narrative where we can show that progress is possible, and that progress is not the purview of any one segment of society. Benefit cannot be seen as a zero-sum game. Our nation is stronger, more dynamic, and more resilient when it is more just and more equal.
But this view of American history, where we acknowledge openly our faults and how many of the problems of the present can be traced to the actions taken in the past, is a threat to those whose narrow self-interests are bolstered by telling myths. And it is a reminder that we never have fully contended with our past.
History is always open to debate. There is no view of the past that is completely unbiased from the present, or who is doing the interpretation. It is healthy to have disagreement, to seek new perspectives. But that cannot be an excuse for ignoring what is known and documented.
Those who seek to keep our history classes the realm of comfortable fairy tales rather than hard truths are not trying to wrestle with the past in good faith. They don’t care about what really happened. They don’t want to know about it. And they don’t want anyone else to know about it either.
What we are seeing, however, is also a broad recognition by millions of Americans of the dangerous game these people are playing. We are also getting a much fuller accounting of our history than most of us received in school. We should remember that those who are working to suppress this trend towards more context and knowledge are threatened by it. Theirs is an act of fear masked as bravado. That doesn’t make it any less perilous, but it does mean that the more truth that is out there the more they will lose control of the narrative they seek to force upon the country.
Here is how former Labor Secretary Robert Reich describes the shortcomings of the mainstream media:
I’m often asked how I keep up with the news. Obviously, I avoid the unhinged rightwing outlets pushing misinformation, disinformation, and poisonous lies.
But I’ve also grown a bit wary of the mainstream media –- the New York Times,Washington Post, CNN, and other dominant outlets — not because they peddle “fake news” (their reporting is usually first-rate) but because of three more subtle biases.
First, they often favor the status quo. Mainstream journalists wanting to appear serious about public policy rip into progressives for the costs of their proposals, but never ask self-styled “moderates” how they plan to cope with the costs of doing nothing or doing too little about the same problems.
A Green New Deal might be expensive but doing nothing about the climate crisis will almost certainly cost far more. Medicare for All will cost a lot, but the price of doing nothing about America’s cruel and dysfunctional healthcare system will soon be in the stratosphere.
Second, the mainstream media often fail to report critical public choices. Any day now, the Senate will approve giving $768 billion to the military for this fiscal year. That’s billions more than the Pentagon sought. It’s about four times the size of Biden’s Build Back Better bill, which would come to around $175 billion a year. But where’s the reporting on the effects of this spending on the national debt, or on inflation, or whether it’s even necessary?
Third, the mainstream media indulge in false equivalences — claiming that certain Republican and Democratic lawmakers are emerging as “troublemakers” within their parties or that extremists “on both sides” are “radicalizing each other”.
These reports equate Republican lawmakers who are actively promoting Donald Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen with Democratic lawmakers who are fighting to protect voting rights. Well, I’m sorry. These are not equivalent. Trump’s big lie is a direct challenge to American democracy.
In the looming fight over whether to preserve the Senate filibuster, the mainstream media gives equal weight to both sides’ claims that the other side’s position is radical. But ask yourself which is more radical – abolishing the filibuster to save American democracy or destroying American democracy to save the filibuster?
You see, the old labels “left” versus “right” are fast becoming outdated. Today, it’s democracy versus oligarchy. Equating them is misleading and dangerous.
Why doesn’t the mainstream media see this? Not just because of its dependence on corporate money. I think the source of the bias is more subtle.
Top editors and reporters, usually based in New York and Washington, want to be accepted into the circles of the powerful – not only for sources of news but also because such acceptance is psychologically seductive. It confers a degree of success. But once accepted, they can’t help but begin to see the world through the eyes of the powerful.
I follow the mainstream media, but I don’t limit myself to it. And I don’t rely on it to educate the public about bold, progressive ideas that would make America and the world fairer and stronger.
I read the Guardian, the American Prospect (which, full disclosure, I helped found thirty years ago), Mother Jones, and The Atlantic. I follow several blogs (Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo, for example). I listen to the always thoughtful Democracy Now. And I subscribe to a few newsletters (I hope you like this one and spread word of it).
But even with news sources I trust, I still ask myself: how are choices being framed? What’s being left out? What big underlying issues are being assumed away or obscured?
When our democracy is under assault from so many directions, I think we need to educate and re-educate ourselves (and our children) about how to learn what’s really going on — how to absorb the news critically. Isn’t this a minimal responsibility of democratic citizenship?
He has finally made his choices, and it seems obvious that he has picked members that will obstruct rather than investigate the January 6th seditious riots. His choices are Joe Banks (Indiana), Kelly Armstrong (North Dakota), Rodney Davis (Illinois), Jim Jordan (Ohio), and Troy Nehls (Texas).
I have no quarrel with Armstrong and Davis. They voted against impeaching Donald Trump, but did vote to certify the 2020 election results. I disagree with them on almost all policy matters, but we need five Republicans on the committee, and they are probably as good as can be expected among available Republicans.
The same cannot be said of the other three picks. All three of them not only voted against impeaching Trump, but also voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election. They were among the people who supported Trump's big lie, and in effect, gave their blessing to the rioters who wanted to stop the election's certification.
Jordan is the worst one of all. He doesn't seem to think his job is to legislate for the good of the country. Instead, he is a bomb-thrower -- trying to obstruct and destroy the legislative efforts of others. He has no business being on this important committee.
At the very least, Speaker Pelosi should ban Jordan from serving on the committee, and personally, I think she should also ban Banks and Nehls. They weren't picked to help find the truth, but to prevent the truth from being revealed.
But it's time to move past that and embrace a belief in equality for all citizens, and then make that equality a reality in this country. But that cannot happen until and unless the face (and teach) the truth about our history -- warts and all.
Recently, Jonathan Capehart interviewed Vice-President Kamala Harris. The following is part of his column written after that interview:
“We just have to speak truth no matter how painful it is to speak or hear,” Harris told me Friday during a telephone interview. “And the truth remains that racism is real in America. Sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia — these things are all real in our country. To speak it doesn’t mean that it is about a wholesale attack on the country. But it certainly is about saying, ‘Look, let’s also not approach this with a sense of naivete or denial.’”
Harris is the first Black person, first South Asian and first woman elected vice president, which explains why Harris said, “I feel a heavy weight of responsibility to use the bully pulpit I have in a way that is about elevating public discourse and engaging in public education about issues that [others] may not have thought about or haven’t been presented with a certain perspective.”
That perspective is invaluable, especially this week. For in the annals of America’s fraught history with race, this seven-day period we are now in is most wretched because of what we must remember.
May 25 marked one year since the murder of George Floyd by a White Minneapolis police officer. May 31 and June 1 will mark 100 years since the Tulsa race massacre that killed as many as 300 Black people in a hail of bullets and airdropped turpentine bombs, and completely destroyed their prosperous Greenwood community known as Black Wall Street. In the sweep of history between those two tragic events, so much has changed, and yet too much remains the same.
But we talk more openly and honestly about race and racism today. That “we” includes President Biden and Harris. Many of their predecessors handled issues of race the way we tiptoe across the thinnest of ice — if they didn’t avoid them altogether. Biden and Harris are not afraid to take them head-on — perhaps because the omnipresent subject of race has become so unavoidable. . . .
What happened in Tulsa was more than a tragedy. Harris called it “a crime.” A crime that White Tulsa initially tried to blame on their Black neighbors before pretending it never happened. A crime that Black Tulsa and Black America would never forget. Harris told me it was “the intentionality” of the crime that stands out for her.
O.W. Gurley bought 40 acres of land in Tulsa in 1906 and called it Greenwood. The Black community that grew from it thrived despite Jim Crow laws meant to stunt Black citizenship and advancement. The intentionality involved in creating such success was met by the intentionality of White Tulsa to destroy it.
“This was not an accident. This was not a fight that got out of hand,” Harris said. “It was purposeful destruction.”
That 100-year-old crime and the 2020 murder of George Floyd speak to America’s never-ending cycle of progress and regression on matters of race. Harris believes we can break this cycle, “but in order to have significant change, there needs to be real, significant intervention.” That means tackling the racial wealth gap by addressing access to capital for minority-owned businesses, expanding homeownership and widening access to broadband. All issues Harris has been working on since taking office.
Still, deeds have to be matched by words. “So there are a lot of things that we need to do. But we have to speak truth, and I have to tell you that’s where we can’t let up. Again, no matter how difficult it may be to hear,” said Harris.
After four years of an administration that flooded the American people with white nationalism, White grievance and their attendant lies, speaking truth is exactly what this nation needs from the White House right now. And I’m all for Harris being unafraid to speak it.
