memorial

Saturday June 18, 2022

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday June 18, 2022

Hence, Mike Pence

The fate of a sycophant is never a happy one.

July 21, 2020

At first, you think that fawning over the boss is a good way to move forward. But when you are dealing with a narcissist — and narcissists are the ones who like to be surrounded by sycophants — you can never be unctuous enough.

Narcissists are Grand Canyons of need. The more they are flattered, the more their appetite for flattery grows.

That is the hard, almost fatal, lesson Pence learned on Jan. 6, when he finally stood up to Donald Trump after Trump asked for one teensy favor: Help destroy American democracy and all we stand for.

Two new photos shown at a hearing of the House committee investigating Jan. 6 tell a shocking story — one of the most incredible in our nation’s history.

August 15, 2017

In one, Karen Pence is protectively pulling a gold-fringed curtain shut in the vice president’s ceremonial office in the Capitol, off the Senate floor, as Pence — sitting beneath a large gilt mirror — stares off into space, probably wondering where it all went wrong.

We learned this week that when the vice president fled down the stairs, followed by an Air Force officer carrying the nuclear launch codes, the marauding mob was a few feet from him.

In a second picture, taken after Pence was brought to a secure location in an underground garage, his daughter Charlotte is anxiously watching him. He is holding a phone to his ear as he stares at another phone showing a video of Trump professing love for the crowd, which included some who carried baseball bats and zip ties and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!”

July 18, 2016

In the early afternoon, as the crowd tore down barricades and fought police, White House staffers worried things were “getting out of hand,” as Sarah Matthews, a Trump aide, testified.

They thought that the president needed to tweet something immediately. At 2:24 p.m., they got a notification that the president had indeed tweeted. But it was not the calming tweet they had hoped for; it was one designed to drive the rioters into a frenzy.

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify,” Trump tweeted. “USA demands the truth!”

As Matthews recalled in her deposition, “The situation was already bad, and so it felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that.”

Trump was still steaming from the contentious morning phone call when he failed to persuade the vice president to reject some of the states’ electors so they could be replaced with fake electors who supported Trump. He had railed at Pence with emasculating epithets.

January 20, 2017

As Trump recalled in a speech on Friday in Nashville, “I said to Mike, ‘If you do this, you can be Thomas Jefferson.’ And then, after it all went down, I looked at him one day and said, ‘I hate to say this, but you’re no Thomas Jefferson.’”

In the same speech, Trump had another line that was strikingly delusional, even for him. “For the radical left,” he said, “politics has become their religion. It has warped their sense of right and wrong. They don’t have a sense of right and wrong, true and false, good and evil.”

February 8, 2022

Trump sparked the mob to seek vengeance against Pence the same way Henry II sparked a crew to murder Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, in 1170. According to legend, after Becket defied Henry by excommunicating bishops supportive of the king, Henry muttered something to the effect of, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Four knights immediately rode to Canterbury Cathedral and sliced up Becket.

The line became a famous example of directing loyalists with indirection, cloaking an order as a wish. Who will rid me of this meddlesome vice president?

A Times video, showing how the Proud Boys breached the Capitol, underscored that within the confederacy of dunces, there was an actual organized conspiracy. The group began plotting even before the election to take up arms for Trump. When Trump barked “Stand back and stand by” about the Proud Boys during his debate with Joe Biden, the Proud Boys felt as though they had received a directive, like Henry’s knights.

The Bengal Levee, by James Gillray | The Marquess Cornwallis (1738-1803) was made British Governor-General of India in 1786 and a Marquess in 1792. He held a weekly levee at Government House, making a point of speaking to all those who attended. Here Cornwallis is standing in the inner room on the right, his right hand on his breast and his left in the pocket of his breeches, awaiting chat time with a following of sycophants. Not far off from the current parade of Republicans who gather for meet and greets at Mar-a-Lago.

With each hearing, it becomes clearer that Trump has no plausible deniability. He put the lives of the vice president and his family at risk, as well as the lives of lawmakers, by sending a crowd, stewing in lies, into a frenzy.

Pence did not have the power to do what Trump wanted, and it’s good that he resisted the insane, illegal and unconstitutional plan of the narcissist in the Oval. But Pence still wants it both ways. He has steered clear of the committee. He wants to become president by staying on the good side of Trump supporters, but they’re never going to forgive him.

At the end of the day of infamy, John Eastman, the nutty lawyer trying to help Trump overturn the election, sent an email imploring Pence to adjourn the congressional certification so sympathetic state legislators could help with Trump’s fairy tale of a rigged election.

When Greg Jacob, Pence’s counsel, showed the email to the vice president, Pence said, “That’s rubber room stuff.”

The fate of a sycophant is never a happy one. (Maureen Dowd – The New York Times) 

Letter to the Editor, The Hamilton Spectator, Thursday June 23, 2022 

Pence did well

Letter to the editor

I really do appreciate Mr. MacKay’s daily offerings filled with wit, insight and hilarious satire, whether I agree with his message or not. I do however take exception with the depiction of Vice President Mike Pence as subservient lap dog to a delusional, narcissistic sociopath, his boss. Mike Pence displayed real courage, honour and dignity in the face of unpredictable violent behaviour and refused to comply with that megalomaniac’s demand to circumvent the peaceful transition of power. Whether you agree with his politics or not, when offered an escape from danger, Mike Pence refused, checking on the safety of staff instead, during perhaps one of the most dangerous moments in American history.

To quote the great Rudyard Kipling, “ if you can keep your head while all about you are loosing theirs and blaming it on you … yours is the world and all that’s in it And, which is more, you’ll be a man my son.” You did good Mike.

Claudio D’Amato, Stoney Creek

 

 

 

Saturday August 28, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday August 28, 2021

Time to say it: We’re done with the vaccine refusers

December 11, 2020

On Monday, the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for the coronavirus, and approvals for the Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines could follow soon. This could be a significant step in convincing the millions of unvaccinated Americans to finally get vaccinated, even if it doesn’t quickly transform the state of the pandemic.

It’s also an opportunity for us to say to the hard-core vaccine refusers: We’re done with you.

We’ll treat you when you come to the hospital, of course, because that’s how medicine works; while doctors and nurses dealing with the wave of covid-19 patients caused by the delta variant might like to turn away anyone who refused to take a vaccine, they won’t. But it’s time to refocus our outreach efforts and our public and private pandemic policies so that accommodating, understanding and pandering to the refusers is no longer one of our chief concerns.

It remains to be seen how much of an effect the move from emergency-use authorization to full FDA approval will have on vaccination rates. What we know is that a lot of hesitant people said it would make a difference to them; in a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 31 percent of the unvaccinated said they’d be more likely to take the vaccine if it had full FDA approval. It’s not that those people had a detailed understanding of the FDA approval process; more likely they’re just looking for additional reassurance.

June 17, 2021

And every little bit — carrots, sticks and even a dose of fear — helps. We’ve seen an increase in vaccinations in recent weeks as the delta variant has plunged parts of the country back into the depths of the pandemic; for some people who may have previously thought we had this thing pretty much licked, the waves of infections and deaths pushed them to action.

FDA approval will also probably convince more companies to begin demanding that their employees be vaccinated. All of this, we can hope, will create an atmosphere in which being unvaccinated by choice will mean voluntarily marginalizing oneself from society. If you’re determined to make that statement about yourself, that you’re the kind of person to whom “freedom” means taking the chance of infecting other people with a virus that has killed millions, we’re going to do everything we can to isolate you.

May 8, 2021

To those who say “mocking those people will never convince them to take the vaccine!”, let me suggest that it’s too late to persuade them. I’m not talking about the hesitant and the uncertain — they can be persuaded, and we need to redouble efforts to reach them. But when you see that in Mississippi — which like many states with low vaccination rates is now being ravaged by the delta variant — the state’s chief public health official felt compelled to make a public plea for people to stop drinking livestock dewormer, since a good number got the idea that it’s a treatment for covid, you have to ask if there’s anything at all that would persuade committed refusers.

Actually, we know how they got the dewormer idea: the supercharged rumor-spreading machine known as social media. Over the weekend, Facebook reluctantly admitted that “an article raising concerns that the coronavirus vaccine could lead to death was the top performing link in the United States on its platform from January through March of this year.”

It’s gotten to the point where at a rally on Saturday in Alabama of his most loyal dead-enders, former president Donald Trump said that while he believes in everyone’s freedom, “I recommend: take the vaccines. I did it. It’s good. Take the vaccines,” and boos rang out.

January 12, 2021

I’m pretty sure that if between swigs of horse dewormer, your uncle is booing his god-king Donald Trump for saying a good word about vaccination, gentle persuasion isn’t going to have much effect on him.

Will one more anti-vax conservative talk radio host dying from covid do the trick for him and his Facebook friends? How about another Republican governor contracting it? Don’t hold your breath.

Experts now say we’ll never reach true herd immunity; rather than covid being eliminated, the pandemic will end with it becoming merely endemic, a part of our lives that never goes away but is suppressed to a level of infections and deaths we can tolerate, like other viruses.

In the shorter term, there is reason to believe that an accumulation of factors — FDA approval, the current wave of covid deaths, more businesses requiring vaccinations, perhaps even simple fatigue after living with this for a year and a half — could convince more and more of the vaccine hesitant to overcome their doubts.

July 3, 2021

But just as the virus itself will always be with us, so will the adamant refusers. They’ll be trying out insane new treatments, while the rest of us shake our heads at people who’d rather gargle with turpentine (or whatever the next Facebook remedy is) than get a free lifesaving vaccine. They’ll keep engaging in unhinged and violent public behavior (like assaulting teachers over mask policies), for which they should just be arrested. Our only concern should be keeping ourselves safe from them; they deserve no more consideration than that.

They won’t disappear, but we can treat them like social pariahs. And if they don’t like it? They can go ahead and wallow in their fantasies of oppression and courageous independence. Nobody said “freedom” was free. (Paul Waldman – The Washington Post) 

 

Wednesday March 17, 2021

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday March 17, 2021

The Colorado attack is the 7th mass shooting in 7 days in the US

The mass shooting at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, on Monday took place less than a week after eight people were killed in a series of attacks on spas in Atlanta.

The two incidents are likely to spur discussion about gun control legislation in the United States, where firearm deaths are tragically common.

They are also among at least seven mass shootings in the past week across the United States — including three incidents on Saturday alone.

CNN defines a mass shooting as: a shooting incident which results in four or more casualties (dead or wounded) excluding the shooter(s).

Tuesday, March 16, Atlanta, Georgia: Eight people, including six Asian women, were killed when a White gunman stormed three spas, police said.

Wednesday, March 17, Stockton, California: Five people who were preparing a vigil in Stockton, in California’s Central Valley, were shot in a drive-by shooting, the San Joaquin Sheriff’s Department said. None had life-threatening injuries.

July 25, 2018

Thursday, March 18, Gresham, Oregon: Four victims were taken to the hospital after a shooting in the city east of Portland, police said in an initial report.

Saturday, March 20, Houston, Texas: Five people were shot after a disturbance inside a club, according to police. One was in critical condition after being shot in the neck, the rest were in stable condition, according to CNN affiliate KPRC.

Saturday, March 20, Dallas, Texas: Eight people were shot by an unknown assailant, one of whom died, according to police.

Saturday, March 20, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: One person was killed and another five were injured during a shooting at an illegal party, CNN affiliate KYW reported. “There were at least 150 people in there that fled and believed they had to flee for their lives,” Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said.

Monday, March 22, Boulder, Colorado: Ten people, including a Boulder police officer, were killed in a shooting at the King Soopers supermarket, according to police.

It’s unclear how this number of mass shootings compares to an average week in the US.

Though some official gun violence data is available, the US federal government does not have a centralized system or database to track firearm incidents and mass shootings nationwide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracks some gun violence data, nearly 40,000 people were killed in incidents involving firearms in 2019. (CNN) 

 

Wednesday November 11, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday November 11, 2020

Remember our war dead and a nation that endures

There will be no parades of aging veterans marching to Canada’s war memorials on this Remembrance Day and in this pandemic year.

May 8, 2020

There will be fewer wreaths laid at these monuments to the nation’s war dead and fewer people to lay them or stand silently to hear “Last Post” played at 11 a.m. by buglers who must keep their distance from everyone else. 

In some places, the public has been ordered to stay away from the cenotaphs to stop the spread of COVID-19 and participate at home in virtual ceremonies or, alternatively, to simply put on a poppy and pause for two minutes wherever possible.

That’s how it must be. No matter where you are in Canada, this Remembrance Day will be unlike any in memory, and for this full blame lies with a microscopic and potentially lethal virus.

June 6, 2019

But there’s no reason this Remembrance Day can’t be as meaningful and, yes, instructive as every one that preceded it. In fact, as Canadians cope with a pandemic that has changed every aspect of their lives, what this country went through in the past facing enormous threats under extreme duress can inspire us today, in a very different kind of national emergency.

Of course, more than anything else, this Nov. 11 is a day when every person in this country should recall the sacrifices hundreds of thousands of Canadians made in two world wars, in the Korean and Afghanistan wars and in decades of peacekeeping and even peacemaking missions in the world’s hot spots. 

June 6, 2014

More than 100,000 Canadians died in those 20th century wars and another 158 soldiers from this country perished in Afghanistan earlier this century. Hundreds of thousands of other Canadians have been permanently injured in body or mind by war. 

Those who have served in this country’s military and emerged unscathed by the experience should be in our minds, too. Many of them put their lives on the line. All were in one way or another defending the interests of their country when it called. They all deserve our recognition and unflagging gratitude.

That deliberate act of remembering in this very strange year may bring unforeseen benefits, too. Like us today, the Canadians who lived through two world wars — the second of which was the most deadly and devastating in human history — also faced terrifying dangers, witnessed great suffering, experienced the painful loss of loved ones and had massive changes thrust upon them.

May 5, 2000

But the country got through it. For instance, in the Second World War, which dragged on six years, basic foods such as sugar, butter, tea, coffee and even meat were strictly rationed to Canadians at home so those serving overseas would have enough to eat. 

The rationing of gasoline and tires limited travel and getting in or out of the United States became difficult. On the east coast, blackouts were strictly enforced with air raid wardens going door-to-door to ensure blinds were drawn so enemy submarines would not see merchant ships illuminated by city lights. Taxes were hiked as Ottawa ran up massive deficits to fund the war effort.

Pandemic Times

Renowned historian J.L. Granatstein has accurately described that war effort as “a complete mobilization of Canadian society” in which “Canadians consciously and deliberately set aside their individual desires for the common good.”

On this Remembrance Day, wear a poppy for the sake of those who served Canada and, too often, paid the greatest sacrifice in doing it. But remember, too, what other generations of Canadians have endured, what they gave up and how they prevailed. (Hamilton Spectator Editorial) 

 

Thursday September 24, 2020

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday September 24, 2020

Covid: US death toll passes 200,000

More than 6.8 million people are known to have been infected in the US, more than in any other country. 

September 15, 2020

The milestone comes amid an increase in cases in a number of states, including North Dakota and Utah. 

President Donald Trump said on Tuesday the new death toll was a “horrible thing” and claimed China “should have stopped” the virus. 

He also defended his record, claiming that had the US not taken action, “you could have two million, 2.5 or three million” dead. 

JHU reported the new death toll of 200,005 on Tuesday. The university has been collecting US and global coronavirus data since the outbreak began late last year in China. The first case in the US was confirmed in January.

President Trump’s administration has been repeatedly criticised over its handling of the outbreak. 

August 26, 2020

“Due to Donald Trump’s lies and incompetence in the past six months, [we] have seen one of the greatest losses of American life in history,” Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said on Monday. 

“With this crisis, a real crisis, a crisis that required serious presidential leadership, he just wasn’t up to it. He froze. He failed to act. He panicked. And America has paid the worst price of any nation in the world.”

But on the same day, Mr Trump said he and his administration had done “a phenomenal job” and gave himself an “A+” for his handling of the pandemic. 

He said the US was “rounding the corner on the pandemic, with or without a vaccine”. (BBC)