Yes, Biden was loopy. But Trump is loopier

& an early contender for typo of the year

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Tuesdays at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

Yes, Biden was slipping into senescence, but let’s not lose track of the fact that Trump is a gibbering fool

This is a word-for-word transcript from President Donald Trump’s rambling monologue last week at a roundtable for military contractors, beginning at about the 3:58 mark of this video.

(Military drones are) very good, too and fast and deadly. Horrible, actually. When you look at what's happening with Russia and Ukraine, the drone is killing tremendous numbers of people. You hide behind a tree, and the drone comes down and it circles you with fire. You don't have a chance. The tree comes down also, by the way. It’s so intense. I mean, you see these trees being knocked down like — like they’re being sawed down by a top-of-the-line timberman like — like you know who? Sean Duffy. Do you know that? Sean Duffy, the head of the Transportation Department, who’s working right now on the airports and getting a system because Biden didn’t do a thing for four years and Pete Buttigieg was the head. And he goes bicycling to work. He takes a bicycle to work, can you believe it? He’s running the biggest air system in the world and he takes a bicycle to work. What a — And they say he's going to run for president. I don't see it. Who knows? Right? But I don't see it. But, when I look at what they've done. It’s so horrible what they have done. And the work they did do they wasted billions of dollars in trying to hook up air systems to copper, and they tried to hook up copper to glass, and the glass doesn’t work with the copper. And they had 30,000 different contractors doing 30,000 jobs, and when they put it all together they spent billions of dollars, it didn't even come close to working. And we're going to be giving out a brand new system. It's very important. We’ll have the best system and we think we know who that system is. But we have a lot of a lot of bidding. But we want one check. We want a unified system. We don't want to have 5,000 contractors in all different places, some digging ditches and some not doing ditches because they want to go by satellite— satellite seems to be the way to go— but, so, we're going to be giving that out pretty soon. But what people don't know about Sean, as I mentioned, lumberjacks. That Sean, you probably didn't know this — I’m not talking about this Sean, this Sean, no, not, this is a different Sean. Sean Duffy the head of transportation. He’s a great Sean though, I have to tell you. But Sean Duffy was the world champion for five years, climbing trees and down, up and down, world champion. So that’s what you call a serious lumberjack. And he’s doing a fantastic job, too. A really respected guy and terrific guy. And I mentioned the champion because when somebody’s a champion — he’s the world champion for a long time, he came down, when you come down those trees, coming down at a rapid — He said that started getting your back. You will often break your back. You miss a shot, and you’re coming down a lot faster than the human body was meant to come down. But he's doing a fantastic job at transportation.

If an elderly relative were prattling along incoherently like this, it would be cause for mild concern. That the president of the United States is prattling incoherently like this on the world stage ought to be cause for significant alarms.

Trump calls his goofy, disconnected oratorical style “the weave,” but I call it “the babble.” It’s every bit if not more troubling and disqualifying than his predecessor’s occasionally weak and confused utterances.

I don’t discount or diminish Biden’s manifest unfitness for a second term, the subject of “Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” a book by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson published today. The book already has many staunch Democrats in a rage, claiming:

• That its thesis is not true

• That even if it were true, Biden still did a great deal of good as president

• That this medical retrospective is no longer relevant

• That it’s a distraction from the horrific truth that a mentally unfit man is currently the president

No, yes, no, yes. Tapper and Thompson have the receipts and Biden’s physical and mental health were failing him to the point where it was plain he would not be up to doing the toughest job in the world for four more years. And this was before we learned his week of his prostate cancer diagnosis.

And though Biden was overall a pretty good president in the view of most of us who are on the left, the blinkered denial of his unfitness for reelection was shameful and obtuse. We can’t demand that Republicans recognize the unfitness for office of their Dear Leader unless we admit to our own failure to demand that Biden step aside early in the campaign cycle and to stop, for the love of God, pretending that he was still up for the job.

The audio of Biden’s interviews with special counsel Robert Hur came out this week, totally vindicating Hur’s observation that Biden was an “elderly man with a poor memory.” That observation, as well as isolated news accounts of Biden’s slipping mental gears, provoked conniptions of indignation from Biden world until, of course, that disastrous debate performance when he bleated “we beat Medicare.”

Moderate voters who take note of the continued furious denials and attacks on Tapper and Thompson from the what-about caucus will have cause to distrust any candidate who continues to be a senescence denialist, just as they have cause to distrust any candidate on the right who continues to be a 2020 election denialist.

To quote The Associated Press:

“The stench of Joe Biden still lingers on the Democratic Party,” Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett said. “We have to do the hard work of fixing that, and I think that includes telling the truth, frankly, about when we were wrong.”

Sean Duffy was a lumberjack, and that’s OK

CNN reports he was a two-time winner of the Lumberjack World Championships speed-climbing competition. On Instagram, Duffy’s wife says he was a three-time champion. But who’s counting (besides not Trump)?

Typo of the year (so far)

It took just 37 minutes for the Sun-Times to issue a corrected version of its “Morning Edition” email newsletter — he’s the Chicago-born pope — but the idea of a Chicago-porn pope delighted my friends on Facebook:

• Marti J. Sladek — Chicago porn is a hot dog with ketchup.

• Tim Tuten — I heard he’s a big White Sex fan!

• Lou Carlozo — Wait, that’s not a pope typo that’s an EXCLUSIVE!

• Nick Cole — I've always felt Chicago porn is the best porn, but I'm hopelessly provincial.

• John Greenfield — Sorry, there was only one Chicago porn pope.

• Chris Duffy — Pope Leo XXX!

  

Notes and comments from readers — lightly edited — along with my responses

On Brandon Johnson’s multiple misstatements about the firing of Dr. Allison Arwady

Thursday’s lead item was about Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s repeated and false insistence that he didn’t fire city health commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady in August 2023. Here are some letters about that:

Alan Kuska — Dr. Arwady was a hack. She shut down the city and only pretended to buck the CTU. Ask any restaurant owner downtown what they think of Arwady. Public health officials completely discredited themselves in 2020 and 2021. None of them will admit that the lockdowns caused more harm than good, and that we made the same mistakes as during the Spanish Flu in pushing useless masks and quarantines of healthy people. And why do you think that throwing progressive icon Brandon Johnson under the bus is going to help his billionaire buddy JB get elected president?

Zorn — So easy to second-guess! It was a confusing and frightening time in early 2020. Nobody really knew exactly what the risks were and how to contain them. Arwady was hardly alone — see “Half of humanity now on lockdown as 90 countries call for confinement.” A University of Michigan study concluded, with striking specificity, that “from March through August 2020, implementing widespread lockdowns and other mitigation in the United States potentially saved more lives (866,350 to 1,711,150) than the number of lives potentially lost (57,922 to 245,055) that were attributable to the economic downturn.” Quantifying harms and benefits even in retrospect is difficult, and anticipating what to do when the next pandemic hits — as surely it will — won’t be simple and straightforward even in light of what we’ve learned from efforts to mitigate the impact of this virus and its mutations. Arwady, like most of the world’s public health officials, was acting in what she believed to be the best way to “flatten the curve” of COVID-19 and save lives. That she — and many others — made mistakes in the moment doesn’t make her — or the others — “hacks.”

Johnson owed her that much understanding. He owed her a chance to at least talk though their differences in a meeting and he owed her a more graceful exit. He richly deserves a metaphorical toss under the figurative bus for the way he handled that situation, and I see no connection whatsoever to that critique and JB Pritzker’s chances at the presidency, which I consider slim.

C. Pittman — I totally agree that the firing of Arwady was such an obviously vindictive act as a payback for her push to open schools against the CTU's desire to work from home. So Trumpian!! But the problem of "not getting into the weeds of when schools should have been reopened," as you put it, is a mistake made by journalists, as well as all Democrats and the Biden administration.

If Democrats in congress, or the Biden administration's CDC would have done a transparent and scientific look at the decisions made in managing COVID-19, it would have shown the voters that they really did "follow the science" and help us all learn lessons for future pandemics. It would have helped de-fang the far right to show that Democratic governing bodies could evaluate scientific data and admit mistakes and might have increased support for the vaccines and the wearing of masks. At what point in a pandemic is it so widespread that closings even matter, would be good to know for the future. The learning loss and mental health toll for kids has been well documented. The fact that the majority of school districts had opened up throughout the suburbs and nation with no negative effects, while the CTU was still insisting on closings was ridiculous to most parents and voters.

And about his disagreement with Arwady over whether to reopen community mental health centers or follow the Emanuel/Lightfoot model of subsidizing not-for-profit providers, I wish someone would do an in-depth look at the effectiveness of these two approaches. Other than hiring more city employees, spending on fixed structures, and future pension costs, are the numbers of clients being served actually increasing or decreasing? Are outcomes any different?

Zorn — I think it’s notable that Lightfoot, who had vowed to reopen the clinics, changed her mind when she looked at the data. This does seem like an excellent topic for investigative reporters to dig into.

Ben — I remember Dr. Arwady's firing distinctly because I found it so shocking at the time. It was one of Johnson's most Trumpian acts, disposing of an expert so overqualified for her position that we were lucky to have her in the first place.

On the effort to outlaw pornography

In News & Views last week I noted that Republicans were once again trying to ban porn.

Jake H. — I don't agree with banning porn generally of course, but I gotta say that I'm pretty sympathetic with attempts to rein it in. See this, for example, from NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof about Pornhub:

The site is infested with rape videos. It monetizes child rapes, revenge pornography, spy cam videos of women showering, racist and misogynist content, and footage of women being asphyxiated in plastic bags. A search for 'girls under18' (no space) or '14yo' leads in each case to more than 100,000 videos. Most aren’t of children being assaulted, but too many are.

The article goes on to describe a site that caters to sicko misogynistic depravity that harms real people.

I don't know enough about proposed solutions and/or how well they would work, but I think seeking to rein in the current porn free-for-all — especially as it relates to kids' access and unauthorized and/or actually criminal content — would be a great and politically popular idea.

Joanie Wimmer — There are already laws prohibiting possession of child pornography, revenge porn, photographing people in the shower without their consent, sexual assault, and the other bad things Jake H. cites in regard to porn hub. So this law proposed by Republicans is not about making those things unlawful. It’s about making it illegal to show, or possess, or watch anything which “appeals to the prurient interest in [among other things] sex.”

This Republican proposed law really seems to be all about control, and seems to be related to their obsession about controlling female sexuality. They want women to have sex only for purposes of procreation. So they want to outlaw books and movies with a prurient interest in sex, outlaw abortion, outlaw contraception, etc.

Sexual intimacy and the desire and need for sexual intimacy is a part of the human condition. It’s wild; it’s beautiful; it’s mysterious, and it’s lovely. And this law, which seeks to regulate, limit, and control how people express themselves about this very personal aspect of what it means to be human is really fascism on steroids.

John Houck — The same morally superior people who attack trans women for using the bathroom, have a hissy fit over drag queens reading to kids, want to end gay marriage, etc., and now are back to trying to ban pornography over its “prurient content” — those people also voted three times for Donald Trump who bragged about sexually assaulting women and walking in on underage girls as they changed clothes at his beauty pageant, was held liable for sexually assaulting one woman, and was credibly accused in other incidents. Those people can sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.

Pondering the 23-year-old Bob Greene scandal

My tribute to the recently deceased media critic Michael Miner led, in last week’s Z-mail, to a discussion of Tribune columnist Bob Greene’s departure from the paper in 2002.

Steven K. — The Chicago Magazine article detailing the abrupt end of Greene’s career at the Tribune shed a lot of light, but it makes me realize how much my view of him and the details of his downfall have shifted over 23 years. Like many people, I couldn’t stand Greene’s cloying, saccharin writing style and maudlin sentimentality, and thus felt a surge of schadenfreude on the Sunday that I looked at the front page of the Trib and read the details of his ouster. Good riddance, I thought.

But in hindsight, I think that judgement was kind of harsh. No one was making me read Greene’s columns, yet I did read them, and if others found gold where I saw nothing but dross, then who was I to take pleasure in their loss?

I guess since I wasn’t a reader of the Chicago Reader — which ran Neil Steinberg’s “Bob Watch” column under a pseudonym — or Spy magazine — which referred to his work as "the journalistic equivalent of Tuna Helper" in Magda Krance’s December, 1988 article, "You Wouldn't Want to Be Bob Greene" — I was unaware of how much hostility there was toward Greene from some of his fellow journalistic brethren.

Although much of that would seem to come from the same sort of objections to his style of journalism that I had, it’s difficult to consider that hostility without sensing a little bit of professional jealousy. That Greene made a lot more money, had a bigger office, had a larger profile and pedigree that many other journalists might have felt was undeserved would make some resentment understandable, but the degree to which some of it came out seemed a bit too vindictive.

This is especially true in some of the sanctimonious indignation (and glee) that erupted in the wake of Greene’s downfall, despite the fact that all he seemed to have done was taken advantage of a perk that has been indulged by countless politicians, pop stars and rock gods.

My own distaste for Greene had also, I think, prevented me from giving proper consideration to the woman who got him fired and what her motives were. Chicago Magazine shields her identity (not sure why), but the background details that are provided, along with the phone call that she made to Greene and a few other hints make it fairly obvious that she was either attempting, or setting the stage for attempting a shakedown. Not exactly a sympathetic figure.

Zorn — Greene did not have a particularly big office, but he did have a big following and a big presence on the national scene, with regular star turns on ABC’s “Nightline” and features in Esquire along with broad syndication of his columns. My memories of how those of us on staff thought of him in those days was not that we were jealous so much as that we resented him for giving his best work and finest efforts to national media outlets and book projects while lazily bleating on and on about child custody cases and indulging in his taste for cultural nostalgia in his newspaper columns. In my view, when Greene was on his game he was excellent — a keen observer and a clear writer — and his editors should have insisted that he give newspaper readers his best efforts, not his sloppy seconds.

What happened? Here’s Chicago Magazine:

As a 17-year-old high school senior in 1988, (Greene’s accuser) had arranged an interview with Greene for a school project. Her parents had driven her downtown and waited while she completed her assignment. (Greene later wrote a column about their interview). A few months later, after she had graduated from high school, Greene and she saw each other several times over dinner and at least once they went to a hotel, where they had a sexual liaison. … (In 2002), she called Greene to congratulate him on the publication of (his new book) “Once Upon a Town,” but, according to one account, she also mentioned that she was writing a book — one that would touch on their relationship. She implied that Greene would not be pleased by her revelations. Greene told the FBI that he felt threatened by her calls. When contacted by the bureau, the young woman denied that she had made any threats.

The FBI quickly closed its investigation. But the woman, then 32, was angry that Greene had sicced the FBI on her, and sent an email to the Tribune outlining his indiscretion 14 years earlier. Neither he nor those in charge at the Tribune have revealed just what transpired in the days that followed. Here’s from a Tribune article published the day after his resignation was announced:

In a meeting Monday with Tribune staff members, Editor Ann Marie Lipinski delivered a somber address in which she acknowledged that she was not free to disclose additional details of the newspaper’s internal investigation.

Lipinski heard strong support from her staff but also was asked pointed questions, several of which came back to the same issue: What part of Greene’s behavior, in particular, violated Tribune policy?

“This was not a judgment about a personal choice that somebody makes,” Lipinski said. Rather, she said, the case was an example of Greene using his “status and position at the paper in a way that causes conflict” for the Tribune.

Author and blogger John Scalzi weighed in with a question that’s still unanswered:

I do have to wonder what the problem is here. Greene’s sleeping with a teenage woman is gross to think about, but they were both of legal age, and even if she was just barely so, “just barely so,” counts as legal. So far as I know, Greene applied no coercion other than his not-especially-dazzling celebrity, and as everyone knows, if a great many celebrities didn’t do that (especially the not-especially-dazzling ones, and especially ones, like Greene, who have a face for radio) they wouldn’t get any action at all; they’re just as lumpy and furtive as the rest of us.

Journalistically speaking, having sex with someone in one of your stories isn’t very smart and is definitely suspension-worthy (a nice long “leave of absence” would have been good), but it’s not a crime. From what I can tell, Greene even waited until after he had written about the woman to hit her up. The Tribune is labeling it a “breach of trust” between journalist and subject, but if he did in fact wait until after he had written about her (and did not write about her post-boinkage), where is the breach? What I see is simply middle-age-death-denying sex, which God knows is common enough. Unseemly, sad and more than a little creepy, but there are worse things a journalist can do. Hell, it’s not plagiarism.

True. He was no longer reporting on her, and it’s not uncommon for journalists to date and even marry people they meet when acting in their professional capacity (it’s how Johanna and I met). There was never any suggestion that their sexual contact was anything other than consensual.

Would it have made a difference if the woman with whom Greene had a liaison had been in her late 20s instead of her late teens? If Greene had not been married? If he’d not cultivated the image of a humble, wholesome Baby Boomer? If he’d contacted his editors and been honest with them instead of going to the FBI when the woman reached out to him?

I’ve even wondered if Greene’s career would have survived this scandal if he’d had more allies in the newsroom. After all, the widely beloved columnist Mike Royko didn’t even get suspended when he actually did break the law — caused an accident in 1994 while driving drunk and then resisted arrest in a particularly ugly fashion. Here’s the account of that incident from the aforementioned Michael Miner:

According to the (police) report, (Royko) pushed one cop in the chest and shouted, “Fuck you, fag. Get your fucking hands off me. Jag off, queer,” and yelled at ambulance attendants trying to examine his bleeding head, “Get away from me! What are you — fags? Why are you wearing those fag gloves for?”

Tribune management deemed Royko’s offenses, to which he pleaded guilty, “personal matters.”

Unpopular opinions?

I’m simply going to channel an opinion I’ve been seeing repeatedly on social media with which I disagree (see above): It’s unseemly and inappropriate at this time to focus attention on the Democratic Party’s failure to recognize and admit to Joe Biden’s weakened mental and physical state and to make sure early on that he would not run for reelection in 2024.

Last week’s result

The discussion in the comment thread on this topic was lively:

Marc Martinez — I’m surprised at the number of “not my business, but I say yes” to female ordination responses. Why nitpick about any particular belief of a religious sect that one rejects? Opinions of non-believers regarding roles, or dress, or dietary rules, or whatever seem like itemized rejection of beliefs that have already been rejected in whole. I am indifferent to the way any sect practices its rites or manages the evolution of those practices. I have no problem with criticizing human rights abuses in religions, cultures, and judicial systems. Stoning adulterers and executing or imprisoning heretics are also practices which we do not hesitate to condemn.

Who can wear a robe or perform a rite are not in the same category. I don't see many people demanding rights for Amish and Mennonite women. Many Islamic women accept far more restrictions, even when living in Western countries. Hasidic Jews have strict rules, and their members often submit to rabbinical courts.

I wish people of every country in the world enjoyed the same rights, freedoms, and protections as we enjoy in the U.S. Taking a position against abuse, punishment, and murder of people, for any reason, is something I agree with. I don't think the rules for who can perform the roles and rites of a religion is in the same category.

Wendy C. — I disagree. The oppression of women for religious reasons is wrong and should not be taken for granted, and certainly should not be considered a rejection of a religious belief in its entirety. The harm suffered by women worldwide due to spiritual laws and restrictions is real. In any form, it's discrimination.

Mark K. — Female genital mutilation is still practiced by some religious sects, I would hope no one here is indifferent to that. I know that's not what we're talking about here, but it's certainly within reason to have an opinion on how religious practices infringe on equality and other human rights.

Skeptic — I am in the group that voted that way. We are all part of the same society. What they do affects us all. Similarly, I care about leaders and lawmakers elected in jurisdictions that I am not a part of for the same reason.

Joanie Wimmer — The Catholic Church has about 1.4 billion adherents, many of whom demand, sometimes successfully, that we enact laws reflecting the doctrines of the Church (see the current abortion bans in many states). Another is that church doctrine has been and is currently being used to justify hatred against particular classes of people: women, gays and lesbians, transgender people, that would be difficult to justify in any other way.

This occasional Tuesday feature is intended to highlight opinions that are defensible but may well be unpopular. If you have one to add, leave it in comments or send me an email, but be sure to offer at least a paragraph in defense of your view.

From the suggestion box

I’m responding for the next few weeks to some of the hundreds of anonymous suggestions/comments that readers posted to my recent reader survey:

Suggestion: Don’t link to any articles behind paywalls in Land of Linkin’ and Squaring Up the News. It’s frustrating.

Reply: I share the feeling of frustration and I wish more publications included a few freebies each month or offered a way to pay a small amount to read one article rather than ask you sign up. Charlie Meyerson and I try to include gift links when possible, but we also recognize that publications need revenue to continue operating.

Suggestion: Offer ranked-choice voting in the quip and joke polls, and provide a “none of the above” option for those who don’t find any of the finalists funny.

Reply: Ranked-choice voting is possible in the CrowdSignal app I use, but I worry that it would be too fussy and therefore too time consuming for most readers. But I’ll try it one of these weeks to see how you all like it. As for “none of the above,” I feel that introduces excessive negativity into the results. I know when too many of the entries are stinkers because the overall total of votes drops (and I’m usually aware of it)

NewsWheel

Inspired by the WordWheel puzzle in the Monday-Friday Chicago Tribune and other papers, this puzzle asks you to identify the missing letter that will make a word or words — possibly proper nouns; reading either clockwise or counterclockwise — related to a story in the news or other current event. The answer is at the bottom of the newsletter.

The week’s best visual jokes

Here are some funny visual images I've come across recently on social media. Enjoy, then evaluate:

There’s still time to vote in the conventional Quip of the Week poll!

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Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

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Answer to the NewsWheel puzzle

PROSTATE