October 18, 2020: President Trump Declares "Character Counts Week."

 

10/18/20: President Trump announced that Sunday would mark the start of “Character Counts Week.” 

Really. 

This is not a parody.

 

If you’re an elementary school teacher, you can find ideas online to celebrate the “Six Pillars of Character.” You can do readings related to character too. For example: Is There Really a Human Race? You can look up what the pillars are, and discuss one each day in class. 

As a middle school or high school teacher, perhaps you could ask students to write an essay, “How Does President Trump Exemplify the Six Pillars of Character?” I think that might be fun.

  

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“Inspiring and incentivizing and inciting…domestic terrorism.” 

One person who might argue that the president has zero pillars of character, would be Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. Having heard Trump stir a crowd on Saturday to lock her up, she was rightly upset. “It’s incredibly disturbing,” she said on Meet the Press Sunday, “that the president of the United States, ten days after a plot to kidnap, put me on trial and execute me – ten days after that was uncovered – the president is at it again and inspiring and incentivizing and inciting this kind of domestic terrorism.”

 

If you follow the news closely, you might understand why Whitmer was spooked. In a separate but similar incident, Meredith Dowty, a retired firefighter in Wichita, Kansas, heard the president’s siren song. 

Dowty is alleged to have hatched a plan to fight “masks and tyranny” by kidnapping Mayor Brandon Whipple. 

Having seen some of the threatening messages Dowty allegedly sent, the mayor summed up his foe’s plan: “He said he was going to kidnap me and slash my throat and he needed my address because I needed to see the hangman – me and everyone who…” Whipple trailed off. 

“Something about tyranny.” 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Mr. Trump had a busy weekend campaigning and burnishing his fascist cred. On Friday, he told a Florida crowd that Rep. Ilhan Omar, another nemesis, had entered the country illegally at age 12, as a refugee. In an effort to stir the hate, he attacked her Muslim faith, saying – with zero proof – that she “married her brother or something.” 

At a rally in Wisconsin he brought her up again. He beamed, like Mussolini, when the crowd began chanting, “Lock her up! Lock her up!”

 

Call me old-fashioned, I guess. Before we lock anyone up, I would prefer we observe all the protections guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, regarding safeguards for the accused. (See: Amendments IV, VI, VII, VIII and XIV.)

August 12, 2021: Remembering when Tyrants Fought Smallpox and Black Plague

 

8/12/21: Sometimes, I like to check out Fox News. It’s fun to see what they’re all lathered up about.

 

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Remember when tyrants fought Black Plague, smallpox, polio, and AIDS?

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Today, we have a headline about how Obama lied when he said the War in Afghanistan had come to a conclusion. But the fact was, the U.S. role in the direct fighting was ending. 

Which was good. 

In 2014, only 68 Americans had been killed – perhaps you could say, 68 too many. In 2015, our losses fell to 26, and only 14 in Obama’s final year in office. 

The toll remained low with Trump in office: 17 dead in 2017, 19 in 2018, 26 in 2019, and then 11 in 2020. 

So far this year: 0. 

The war wasn’t over for the Afghan people, but it was turning in a better direction. Then Trump decided we should pull all our troops out. Joe Biden interrupted his plans, but followed them in spirit, and virtually all U.S. troops will be out of the country by the end of this month.

 

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Schmitt was fanning fear himself. 

CDC NOTES that on August 10, another 664 Americans died from COVID-19, and total cases exploded. The country logged 132,000 new infections, the highest since January 30. 

Strangely enough, Fox is not running stories about how Trump lied and said the virus was going away. 

Rather, Fox was quoting Missouri GOP Attorney General Eric Schmitt who was mad because Democrats used “fear” to get Americans to take their shots and stop dying by the hundreds every day. No one at Fox noticed that Schmitt was fanning fear himself, warning that this push for vaccinations was what tyrants do.

 

“Yeah, if someone says that using fear is good, that is what every tyrant in the history of the world, and every dictator in the history of the world, has ever said to accumulate, aggregate, and maintain power,” Schmitt told reporters. “This is America – the freest country in the history of the world – and I don’t think that we should be allowing individual politicians who want to grab power and never let go of it gain it in the first place.” 

No vaccine mandates for Schmitt! 

No tyranny either.

 

As a former history teacher, I am scratching my head. I am trying to remember a time in history when a tyrant seized power by fighting, for example, the Black Plague. Or smallpox. Or polio. Or measles, mumps, and AIDS. 

Since idiots like Schmitt keep howling about all these tyrannical plans, and scaring people into avoiding shots that would save their lives, it’s worth noting that two decades of war in Afghanistan cost roughly 2,300 American lives. By comparison, the U.S. lost more people to COVID-19 than that in just the last seven days. 

Somebody should let AG Schmitt know. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: I don’t know what to say about the American withdrawal from Afghanistan – and the incredible collapse, so far, of Afghan government forces. I do know the Pentagon estimates that the United States spent $824.9 billion fighting the War in Afghanistan. 

If you like math, you can divide that figure by the population of the country (an estimated 38.04 million). We could have given every Afghan $216,850.68 if they agreed to stop the fight. 

That would include babies.