Ward on Words

Just a few days before the 2024 general election, the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, was interviewed by Tucker Carlson on the RSBN network (full disclosure: Tucker Carlson alas, graduated from the same college as me - different years) and mentioned (about an hour into the interview) that Liz Cheney, former US Representative and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney is a problem he'd like to address: "Let's put her there with a rifle, nine barrels shooting at her. Let's see how she feels about it when the guns are trained on her face."  (Tucker Carlson chimed in with: "that'd be Dick Cheney's repulsive little daughter" in  that same interview .)  Donald Trump is a candidate for president of the United States, who during a televised interview, expressed the desire to shoot a political opponent - who happens to be a member of the same party as Trump, though she has been "purged" from any leadership roles in the p

For year now, the New York Times, the "paper of record," has employed as its senior political editor someone who loves using the Trump frame for her stories about Trump. Maggie Haberman has worked long and hard to maintain her "access" status within the Trump campaign and the only way to keep that status is to present insider gossip as if it is factual news. She has a story in the paper today (Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024), co-written with Matt Flegenheimer (I rarely see her name as a solo byline) that uses Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden (MSG) as a "show of force." In the NY Times story, Haberman and Flegenheimer decide to pretend that only Democrats are noting the similarities between Trump MSG rally and the Nazi rally that took place in 1939.  But that's not true. Anne Applebaum, noted scholar of fascism, posted a picture on Threads that links Trump's MSG event with the 1939 Nazi Party event at that venue. Here's a link to the documen

On June 27, 2024, the two presumptive presidential candidates engaged in a debate televised on CNN. Moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper asked questions and the candidates answered. Moderators provided no pushback on lies made by either candidate.  It was painfully obvious that Joe Biden was having a very bad night. For me, having watched his high-energy SOTU address, seeing his extemporaneous reactions to the GOP heckling, it was shocking to see Biden's performance at the debate. He had one big task with the debate - to prove he was not "too old" for the job of four more years, and his halting performance and slow response to questions unleashed a tsunami of articles about his age and fitness for the office.  And nearly a month after the debate, the focus of national news media remained on Biden's fitness for the job and who should replace him and also to replace Kamala Harris – apparently because being VP for four years isn't considered the right prep for the jo

There is a curious story in the New York Times about "the complicated legacy of Betty Ford's breast cancer story."  As someone considered high risk for breast cancer due to family history of the disease, I have some thoughts on Betty Ford's legacy.  Betty Ford was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1974 and was one of the  first women to openly talk about her diagnosis and subsequent mastectomy. At that time, her role  as First Lady gave her an enormous platform to raise awareness about the disease.  I was curious about this New York Times essay because of the impact breast cancer has had on my family. In 1970, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was 37 years old, a mother with three young daughters. When this happened, she was sedated for a biopsy and knew that if the cancer was found, they'd perform a mastectomy before she woke up. She woke up without a breast.  I n later years, when I thought about the brutality of this medical approach, I thought I p

Donald Trump, a candidate for president of the United States, the other night promised his "beautiful Christian' supporters in attendance at a Turning Point Action event in Florida that if they voted for  him in 2024, " You won’t have to do it anymore, you know what? Four more years, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” It is remarkable to see a candidate promise that "you're not going to have to vote" any more if he wins in November. Democracies are fragile things; voting is one of the few ways that citizens can engage in holding elected officials accountable. There has never been a president thus far who has "fixed things" in ways that people no longer need to vote. In fact, as noted by Brian Klass in The Atlantic , " He’s telegraphing his authoritarian intentions in plain sight." You would never know that, however, from the landing page of yesterday's New York Times that a preside

It has been an eventful summer in America, and the last month has been incredible to witness.  On June 27, Donald Trump and Joe Biden met in a debate; the performance of the 81-year-old president was disastrous and in the days and weeks since then, there has been a steady drip of news stories asking him to withdraw from the race. Nothing he did post-debate assured Americans that he had the energy and stamina to engage in a brutal presidential campaign and the news coverage of his age and infirmities never stopped. His opponent is just three years younger than him, but there has not been a similar avalanche of stories about his age and his infirmities. It is unclear why the age of one of the elderly men running for president is considered newsworthy, and the age of the other has been ignored for the most part.  Jennifer Schulze, a Chicago-based journalist, did an accounting of the age-related news stories that ran in just one outlet - the New York Times - after the debate up until July