Being Critical vs. Being Harsh

First of all, here's wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving!  I'm going to keep doing this, because I'll probably forget that I have done it already.

There are many things that Trump has done, which we do not like, but which look to him (and to a lot of Republicans) as, "Well, this is how he (Trump) wants to do it, and, they are really just choices, aren't they?"  Some of these things are really outlandish, such as Giuliani wanting Pennsylvania to not certify the election; I really hope it will not work.  Every Pennsylvania election is liable to have challenges to them, if the losing side keeps looking at them the way Trump and Giuliani do.  What are we to do: wire the brains of each voter to Trump's personal computer?

I must go on the record that, on principle, I do not approve of humiliating public figures, or even humiliating anybody, really; at least generally.  Half the country really wants Trump to take strong leadership in dealing with the COVID epidemic.  In the end, Trump has judged whether, and how, to do this from the point of personal public relations, and not really whether he can be effective.  He figures: if I get serious, and ask for sacrifices, I might be remembered as "COVID Trump" at election time.  It's too much of a risk.  He wants his face to be always remembered as "So much Winning!" Trump.

Well, this is a reasonable fear.  It is quite possible that Biden might be remembered as COVID Biden.  Not as the man who shivered in fear of COVID, but a man who took it seriously.  Biden might end up fighting COVID for three years, leaving him almost no time to do even the simplest things on the Green New Deal, of which everyone is so pathetically frightened.  (We must look at it again another time.)

Anyway, a very dear family friend drew one of her very first cartoons, digging at Trump's continued insistence that we have the COVID epidemic almost licked.

Conservatives might well take exception to the tone of this cartoon, but I'll bet it is a lot gentler than almost any political cartoon in any newspaper this year!

Talking about being gentle.  Go look at Jimmy Kimmel's interview of Barack Obama.  There were lots of opportunity for Obama to humiliate Trump as Trump is dismissive of Obama.  But Obama never goes there.  He is critical, for certain.  But is not humiliating.  Trump does not know how to do that; it was the way he was brought up.  Reading what his sister (a retired judge, evidently) and his niece (a psychologist) say, the family culture was not as depraved as Trump's personal culture has been.

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