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Joe Biden’s First Inaugural Event Highlights Failure Of Trump’s COVID-19 Response

By S.V. Date

The first nationwide memorial honoring the 400,000 U.S. coronavirus dead comes only as Trump is leaving and Biden arriving in office.

Just a half-mile from where President Donald Trump is spending his final night in the White House, twin rows of lights on the National Mall marked the first inaugural event of his successor — an implicit rebuke of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the 400,000 Americans it has already killed.

At 5:33 p.m., 400 rectangular lights — each representing a thousand Americans dead of COVID-19 — lit up on either side of the Reflecting Pool between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument as bells at the National Cathedral rang 400 times. The scene was set to repeat all over the country, with structures from the Empire State Building in New York City to the Space Needle in Seattle lighting up and bells ringing to honor the dead.

“To heal, we must remember,” Biden said in brief remarks. “It’s important to do that as a nation.”

Trump’s failure to ramp up testing production or to exhort Americans to take measures to slow the disease’s spread has likely already caused 200,000 more Americans to die than might have. Germany, for example, which has an equally advanced health care infrastructure but whose leader took the virus seriously, has suffered 579 deaths per million people, while the United States has suffered 1,220 deaths per million as of Tuesday.Trump, though, has instead claimed for nearly a full year that he’s done a tremendous job, and only occasionally mentioned in passing the Americans who have died. He did that again in a taped 20-minute “farewell address” he released Tuesday. “We grieve for every life lost, and we pledge in their memory to wipe out this horrible pandemic once and for all,” Trump said.

He began his COVID-19 response a year ago by denying that one was even necessary. Trump’s first public remarks on the matter came on Jan. 22, 2020, when he claimed he had stopped the virus from coming into the country at all. In the coming weeks, he claimed it was like a cold, and not as severe as the flu. At a February rally in South Carolina, he told his audience that the whole thing was ginned up by Democrats and the news media to make him look bad and hurt his reelection prospects.

“This is their new hoax,” Trump said.

Even as he continued downplaying the seriousness of the threat the virus posed, Trump began giving out death totals that would define success — and then continually shifted those figures upward as the death tally rose.

On Feb. 26, Trump boasted there had been no deaths at all, and fewer than two dozen total cases. “When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done,” he said.

By April 20, he was predicting 50,000 to 60,000 deaths. A week later, he was saying 60,000 to 70,000. By May 3, he was saying the death toll could be as high as 100,000, and by June, 200,000.

Eventually, he claimed that regardless of how many Americans died, he had done a great job because that number would have been in the millions had he done nothing at all.

“We were expected to lose, if you look at the original charts from original doctors who are respected by everybody, 2,200,000 people,” Trump said at an NBC News town hall on Oct. 15. “We saved 2 million people.”

Even after he himself caught the virus during one of several large gatherings at the White House with little use of masks and no social distancing, Trump failed to exhibit empathy toward other patients or their families. He himself recovered quickly after getting top-notch medical care at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, which included an experimental — and expensive — treatment of synthetic antibodies, and cited his experience to suggest everyone else could, too.

“Here I am, right?’ he told a rally crowd in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 26.

Neither the Biden transition team nor the Trump White House would say whether there was any discussion of the outgoing president and the incoming president participating jointly in the COVID-19 memorial, as might have occurred in a normal transition.Trump, however, made clear from the wee hours of election night, when he lied that he had won reelection, that the coming handoff would be anything but normal. Through the entire 11-week period, he continued telling his supporters that he had actually won and that the election had been stolen from him. His General Services Administration chief, the political appointee running the agency that administers an orderly transfer of power, refused to carry out her duty for weeks, making the task of the incoming Biden team more difficult and, potentially, endangering American lives and livelihoods.

After dozens of Trump and his allies’ lawsuits to undo the election results failed over two months, the president ultimately demanded that Vice President Mike Pence unilaterally overturn it by refusing to recognize the electoral votes from a number of states that had voted for Biden. Pence refused, which led to Trump’s angry attack on him for lacking “courage.” That further enraged Trump’s followers, who were at that moment overrunning the Capitol to block the formal certification of the November election.

Four Trump supporters died in the rioting, as did one Capitol Police officer.

In his taped farewell address, Trump took no responsibility for inciting that mob — for which he was impeached a record second time. Nor did he mention Biden by name or acknowledge that his successor had, in fact, won the election fairly.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-biden-coronavirus-memorial_n_600766e4c5b697df1a09c375

Opinion: Lincoln Knew in 1838 What 2021 Would Bring

By Bret Stephens

Before Jefferson Davis there was John C. Calhoun. What rougher beasts do Trump, Hawley and Cruz prefigure? In January 1838, when Abraham Lincoln was a member of the Illinois state legislature and two weeks shy of his 29th birthday, he delivered what was probably the most prophetic speech of his political career. It’s a speech whose time has arrived again in 2021.

The Lyceum Address is named for the Springfield, Ill., association that, according to Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon, “contained and commanded all the culture and talent of the place.” It concerns “the perpetuation of our political institutions.” Why would that matter in the still-young, ever-expanding American republic?

An obvious answer would be the existence and expansion of slavery. Lincoln’s answer is the rise of the “mobocratic spirit” and the sorts of leaders who abet it.

In Vicksburg, Miss. (“the Sodom of the South,” as it was then known), a mob of moralists from the town’s respectable quarters had, in 1835, stormed the waterfront, seized five gamblers and summarily hanged them. In St. Louis, Mo., the next year, a free Black man named Francis McIntosh, suspected of murdering one police officer and injuring another, was seized by a mob of vigilantes, chained to a tree and slowly burned to death.

Lincoln chooses his examples well. The motive of the Vicksburg mob, in Lincoln’s telling, is public virtue. The motive of the St. Louis mob is revenge. The high-minded yearning for moral purification and the low-minded lust for blood are two sides of the same coin, and the effects are the same. McIntosh’s lynching soon led to the expulsion and killing of an abolitionist editor. The Vicksburg mob set a precedent for other violent attacks against suspected threats to public order.

Willfully killing the (presumed) guilty rapidly descends to accidentally killing the innocent. “The lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice.” Normally law-abiding people, losing faith in government, “are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose.” Men of low scruples and overweening ambitions scout their political opportunities.

“Is it unreasonable then to expect,” Lincoln asks, “that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us?”

Donald Trump is not a man of “the loftiest genius.” He is, as I’ve written before, a political arsonist who managed, in his inveterately asinine way, to burn down his own presidency while attempting to torch everyone and everything else. Neither is Josh Hawley nor Ted Cruz a lofty genius. They are credential-holding ideological grifters who lack the wit to see how easily they are seen through. But the three are at least a hazy approximation of what the younger Lincoln most fears — men in the mold of Caesar or Napoleon who would sooner tear down than defend republican institutions in order to slake a thirst for glory. Before Jefferson Davis tore the federal government asunder, John C. Calhoun tried to nullify its power. What rougher beasts do Trump, Cruz and Hawley prefigure? For that matter, for what kind of Reichstag fire was the Capitol Hill insurrection merely a test run?

Those questions are timely in our own age of mobocracy. The president who got himself elected by summoning a digital mob through Twitter and Facebook wound up trying to reverse the results of an election by summoning an actual mob to Washington.

The left is hardly blameless, either. The same people who offered high-toned excuses and justifications for months of destruction of public and private property in the name of social justice might think twice before demanding respect for hallowed American symbols, institutions and traditions. They provided more excuses for the Capitol Hill rioters than either side likely cares to admit. What’s the solution? Lincoln’s answer in the Lyceum Address is what he calls “political religion,” built on pillars “hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.” Scholars have noted a tension between Lincoln’s passionate faith in reason and a political faith that must be sustained by passions that reach beyond reason — what he later called “the mystic chords of memory.”

That’s a tension that can’t be resolved but can at least be sustained, in part through an understanding that the space for reasoned debate has to be encased by respect for tradition and reverence for the symbols of government. One of the reasons the images of Jan. 6 were so grotesque is that they exposed how tissue thin and easily torn our sense of tradition and reverence have become in the Anything Goes Trumpian era.

When Joe Biden becomes president on Wednesday, he will face a larger job than ending the pandemic and saving the economy. He will have to exorcise the mobocratic spirit that is Trump’s chief contribution to American politics. Summoning the better angels of our nature in his Inaugural Address would be a fitting tribute to his greatest predecessor.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/opinion/trump-lincoln-mobs-democracy.html

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حکمران جماعت پی ٹی آئی کو بھارت اور اسرائیل سے فنڈنگ کے متعلق سوالات پر الیکشن کمیشن کو جواب دینا پڑے گا، چیئرمین پی پی پی بلاول بھٹوزرداری

 پاکستان پیپلز پارٹی کے چیئرمین بلاول بھٹو زرداری نے کہا ہے کہ حکمران جماعت پی ٹی آئی کو بھارت اور اسرائیل سے فنڈنگ کے متعلق

سوالات پر الیکشن کمیشن کو جواب دینا پڑے گا۔

عمرکوٹ میں پارٹی کے مرحوم رہنما و سابق صوبائی وزیر سید علی مردان شاہ کی پہلی برسی کے موقعے پر منعقد عظیم الشان جلسہ عام کو خطاب کرتے ہوئے پی پی پی چیئرمین نے کہا کہ پاکستان کی جمہوری قوتیں عوام کا سوال لے کر کھڑی ہیں کہ 2014ع سے آج تک الیکشن کمیشن یہ کیوں نہ بتاسکی کہ پی ٹی آئی کو کیوںکر بیرونِ مالک سے فنڈنگ ہوئی۔ انہوں نے کہا کہ شہید محترمہ بینظیر بھٹو کو سکیورٹی رسک قرار دیا جاتا تھا، لیکن اب جن کو حکومت میں لایا گیا ہے، وہ فارن فنڈنگ سے آئے ہیں۔ “یہ نااہل اور سلیکٹڈ ہونے کے ساتھ ساتھ اسپانسرڈ بھی ہے”۔

انہوں نے کہا کہ مہنگائی کی سونامی میں کسانوں اور مزدوروں کا جینا دو بھر ہوگیا ہے۔ کرپشن کا شور مچانے والا خود کرپٹ نکلا، بلکہ اس کی پوری جماعت ہی کرپٹ نکلی۔ انہوں نے نشاندھی کرتی ہوئے کہا سب سے مہنگا میٹرو بس منصوبہ پشاور کا ہے، جس کی بسوں میں اچانک آگ بھڑک اٹھتی ہے، اور مسافروں کو بسوں سے اتر کر دھکے بھی لگانے پڑتے ہیں۔

بلاول بھٹو زرداری نے کہا کہ وہ عمرکوٹ کی غیور و بھادر عوام کو مبارکباد دیتے ہیں، جنہوں نے ضمنی انتخابات میں اسلام آباد کو واضح پیغام بھیجا اور سلیکٹڈ کو رجیکٹڈ کردیا ہے۔ انہوں نے کہا کہ عمر کوٹ کی عوام نے ٹھیکے پر کام کرنے والے پیروں اور ان سیاسی یتیموں کو بھی جواب دے دیا جو کل مشرف کے ساتھ تھے، آج عمران خان کے ساتھ ہیں۔

پی پی پی چیئرمین نے مرحوم سید علی مردان شاہ کو خراج عقیدت پیش کرتے ہوئے کہا کہ مرحوم ہمیشہ پیپلز پارٹی کے ساتھ کھڑا رہا اور پارٹی قیادت اور عمرکوٹ کی عوام کا ساتھ دیا۔ انہوں نے مزید کہا کہ مجھے یقین ہے، پی ایس 52 سے نومنتخب رکنِ سندھ اسمبلی سید امیر علی شاہ بھی اپنے مرحوم والد کی طرح ہمیشہ عمرکوٹ کی عوام کا ساتھ دے گا، اور ان کے دکھ و سکھ میں شامل رہے گا۔