Trump’s in the way
Describing our president accurately is not criticism, party politics, un-American or a failure to get behind our leader in a time of crisis.
The COVID-19 pandemic is just in its infancy. Although news broadcasters keep reminding us the mortality rate is “just” 1.2 percent, any visit to a website such as Johns Hopkins/cornavirus will show when you compare recovered to dead (infected compared to dead is just, wrong) it will show from 14 percent a week ago to 18 percent today (March 29), or just 1,800 times as deadly as the flu.
Our president has told 10,000 lies to Americans during his presidency. This assault on the truth has left vast numbers of Americans resigned to assuming that what the president says is irrelevant. The president has forfeited the bully pulpit ... and made the federal government useless in addressing the virus at all. ...
If you are one of the MAGA millions, I implore you to tell any politician to tell the president he is not a doctor.
Instead, find the best public health doctors in the world. Have them form a plan, then a team and then an army to do what has to be done. Fund it with state of emergency cash. Support them unquestionably.
Quit talking except to assure the public that this “war is going to be waged with the best, most-informed, public health doctors in the history of mankind, and I (Dr. Trump) am going to get the heck out of the way.”
Tommy Sanford
Lapwai
Worse than Nixon
Steve Rice (Letters, March 28) does me an injustice to insinuate that I would not correct my mistakes.
In my response to Marvin Dugger (March 15), I carelessly conflated charges of impeachment against Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton with those that were voted out of the House. Nixon had the good sense to resign before impeachment could proceed.
In his own businesses and presidential actions, Donald Trump is far more corrupt than Nixon, and he has no moral sense at all. Furthermore, covering up a burglary pales in comparison to putting Ukraine’s security (and ours) at risk in order to obtain dirt on the Bidens.
Clinton was acquitted in the Senate on charges of perjury because 55 senators did not believe that lying about sex with an intern rose to the level of an impeachable offense. As legal experts always reiterate: Some crimes are not impeachable, but some non-criminal actions are indeed.
Abuse of power is one of those non-criminal impeachable offenses. And in my letter, I quoted Alexander Hamilton in support of that view.
In the Nixon and Clinton hearings, I could find no record of a debate about whether abuse of power was a legitimate charge. With no precedent at all, Trump defenders still claim that it is not.
I did not misinterpret Alan Dershowitz: “If the president does something that he thinks will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
Nick Gier
Moscow
