Trump's Twitter Tizzy Isn't About Free Speech At All

Free speech is one matter. But intentional, self-obsessed, alarmist lies, plainly designed to cause serious, irreparable harm to the U.S. citizenry, is another.

After President Donald Trump's Twitter tizzy on Tuesday, the President signed an executive order just two days later, on Thursday, that threatens U.S. government oversight of political speech on social media. 

Trump, at his press conference Thursday, proposterously feigned: "We're here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers." 

The President's executive order comes after Twitter, on Tuesday, added clarifications at the bottom of a pair of Trump's tweets, which baselessly fear-mongered that voting by mail invited rampant voter fraud. 

But Trump is the only true fraud. Twitter simply clarified the truth and the prerequisites of voting by mail, setting the record straight in the public's interest.

By the way, election fraud, not voter fraud, is the real looming threat to the integrity of the 2020 presidential elections. But Trump and his abetting Republican loyalists, for obvious reasons, don't want to go there.

Trump's childish lashing out at Twitter, unsettlingly, has become the typical, vengeful behavior we have come to expect from the tempestuous "commander in chief." 

Conveniently, such blowhard displays distract from Trump's criminal complicity in a deadly pandemic that has now claimed more than 100,000 American lives.

Of course, what Trump actually is proposing to do with his new executive order, is squeeze the life out of the First Amendment rights of free speech in America.

He's convolutedly, wrongly suggesting that free speech gives one, namely him, the right to purposefully mislead the public to their detriment.

It's illegal to scream "fire" in a crowded movie theater, risking panic and serious injury, if there is no fire. But, that's what Trump has been doing these past nearly five, mind-numbing years with mounting malevolence.

Trump's been screaming "fire" through: his discriminatory policy that deprives the needy to feed the greedy; in his accusatory pressers that provoke chaos; and his exhaustively inciting tweets that gratingly disparage the righteous to offer cover and comfort for the criminal.

The "Fairness Doctrine," requiring TV and radio broadcasts to provide equal time for advocates from both sides of a public issue, was disbanded under President Ronald Reagan in 1987. That gave us the caustic, misinformation-generating, Trump-propagandist news outlet, Fox News.

Now, Trump is attempting to twist our inherent sense of fairness, under the guise of "free speech," into something much more grotesque and un-American.

'Each Man's Death Diminishes Me'

Reading through the list of names of deceased Covid-19 victims on the front page of the New York Times Sunday, I was sorry to see famed, immensely talented jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli's name.

Bucky Pizzarelli, 94, Saddleback, NJ, master of jazz guitar, jumped out from the list of names on the Times' front page, just 1 percent of the nearly 100,000 dead from the Coronavirus pandemic.

Bucky Pizzarelli

Bucky Pizzarelli. It was a musically punchy name my brother and I heard a lot growing up. It's a name that's fun to say. Bucky Pizzarelli. It was a name my mother, Doris Kavanaugh McKinney, mentioned often.

"He could really play that guitar," my Mom would rave, pretending to fast strum a guitar as she relived exciting days of her youth and her brush with fame as the lead female vocalist with The Vaughn Monroe Orchestra in the late 1940's.

Bucky was the young, versatile rhythm guitarman, in his early 20's, for Monroe's big band when my mother joined Monroe's orchestra for a year right after graduating from Notre Dame High School for girls in Radnor, PA. in 1948.

My Mother Doris Kavanaugh

My mother, then, simply Doris Kavanaugh, aged 18, was often featured with Monroe's orchestra, accompanied by the "Moon Maids" quartet, on the Camel Caravan, a musical variety radio program. They broadcast out of New York City. My father, who had yet to marry my mother, would be listening in Philadelphia.

After a year, my mother lovestruck and homesick, would return to Philadelphia and marry my father, Jack McKinney who shared my mother's love for music.

While my father landed a gig as music/opera critic at the Philadelphia Daily News, my mother would continue to sing professionally the rest of her life, but closer to home.

As I reflect on the unfathomable number of lives lost from the pandemic, I can't help reminisce, conscious not so much of our transient lives, but the intransigent gifts of music, song, laughter, love and artistry in many forms that live on long after we've gone.

My mother would be a featured performer at the South Jersey Shore summertimes through the late '50s into the early '90s -- singing at Cozy Morley's in North Wildwood, The Whitebrier in Avalon and the Two Mile Inn just outside Wildwood Crest.

In the late '70s and early '80s, Doris Kavanaugh headlined summers at the Red Garter in North Wildwood, NJ, belting out Roaring Twenties favorites like "Hard Hearted Hannah" and "Second Hand Rose" to jubilant, crowds of Styrofoam "straw" hat-wearing, pitcher-of-beer drinking crowds. 

My father, Jack, gained notoriety as a fine music critic and then would become known as "Fearless Jack" in the Daily News' sports pages, sparring with Heavyweight Boxing Champ Sonny Liston and braving a cage of Clyde Beatty's lions, armed with just a whip and a chair. Later, he helped pioneer talk radio with his four-hour program "Night Talk."
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My father Jack McKinney

Jack and Doris would have five children. Their artistry lives on.

Bucky Pizzarelli would go on to greatness, often behind the scenes, nailing down the rhythmic bottom on hundreds of records for scores of music legends.

He performed and recorded with a who's who of big names, including Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Ben E. King to name a few.

Pizzarelli was a member of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show band when the show broadcast from New York. He widely recorded and performed up to his final years in his 90's.

I met Bucky about 15 years ago or so, when he performed at the Cape May Jazz Festival. He was awesome; a controlled explosion of jazzy chordal rhythms and exquisite runs.

Bucky was welcoming to me after his performance. "I remember her," he said fondly of my mother, the petite blonde with a bombshell voice, who had passed a few years earlier. I handed him a compact disc of my mom singing with tracks from the Nelson Riddle Orchestra.

He gladly took it and told me an acquaintance had just discovered some old recordings from the period my mom sang and Bucky played with Monroe's orchestra. I hoped to get a hold of them, particularly if they included my mother's singing. Bucky and I communicated through his manager, but apparently no recordings of my mother on the Camel Caravan or other gigs were discovered.

Seeing Bucky's name on the front page of the Times today, brought the toll of the Coronavirus pandemic a little closer to home. These just aren't simply names any more than they are mere statistics. They had families, hobbies, unique talents, dreams and loves as we all do.

They were teachers, singers, musicians, poets, cooks, artists, dancers, bus drivers and maintenance men. They strived, sweated, laughed, prayed and cried. And they loved -- a wife, a husband, their children, a pet bird or a cat. They were, and are, us.

Some reached for the stars and got a hold of one, like Bucky. I couldn't help thinking how much history, how much instructive wisdom and knowledge these mostly older Americans took with them. What gems could they have shared with us?

Many fought for their country on faraway battlefields and survived with the scars, only to be let down by their own government's failure to timely alert its citizens to a lethal virus that has claimed more lives in America in just two months than war has taken the past half century. 

A particularly inauspicious and sobering fact on this Memorial Day weekend, as we honor our fallen heroes.

Each life is so precious, worth so much more than jewels. And we lost a whole treasure chest full in just a matter of months. They are all part of a singular family now. They will be missed and thought of often and fondly.

I'm reminded of a quote from John Donne's poem, "For Whom the Bell Tolls":

Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

What of Maskless Masses?

The barrell-shaped, bearded guy with a Budweiser beer in his hand, approaches me as I belt sand smooth a deck handrail at a marina in Wildwood, NJ, last Friday. He's not wearing a facial covering, as he boldly insists that "this pandemic thing is overblown." 

The guy stood five or six feet away, but I slipped the bandana that was around my neck, up over my mouth and nose. I remind the guy that nearly 90,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the United States in a couple months.

"Yeah, more people die from pneumonia every year” he parroted what sounded like a Fox News soundbite.

What do you say to this?  

Then, the guy went on the tiresome lament, that Conservatives, in particular, like to muddy the water with -- "Really, you just don’t know who to believe."

Of course, he went on about how all politicians are crooked and all news stations can't be trusted.

 I suggested that for starters, he cross off Donald Trump and Fox News from the list of even remotely believable sources. "Okay, so you don't like Trump," he retorted, and went on a rant about "those Democrats."

Yadda, yadda, yadda.

It's as if we've lost our common sense, our ability to listen to our gut or think for ourselves. We need a talking head to tell us what to believe or how to feel.

So, amidst the confusion, what the heck? Why not, just party, man?

I thought of that Mark Twain line:

"Never argue with stupid people, they will only drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience."

A few minutes later, the same guy was gathered with about 5 or 6 other people around a small deck in front of a house overlooking the harbor. They were yukin' it up as if they were in a local bar and the Coronavirus had never happened. Only one person that I could see was wearing a facial mask covering.

On Saturday, hundreds of people swarmed the Wildwood Boardwalk. The Cape May Standard, published on Twitter a picture of the boardwalk crowds; the overwhelming majority were maskless. I could indentify maybe five people, out of about a hundred in the picture, wearing masks.

In the meantime, Governor Phil Murphy is still working out phased reopening plans for New Jersey. It seems to me, we need to more urgently insist that folks mask up and don't get lax about wearing a face covering in public, particularly amidst crowds.

How many individuals could be unknowingly carrying the virus and pass it on?

How many might catch the virus and spread it to wherever they came from after happy time on the boardwalk is over?

In the same way, the Trump administration criminally failed Americans by declaring a national emergency around the Covid-19 pandemic several weeks too late, hence ensuring the deaths of tens of thousands of people, President Trump prematurely, irresponsibly is chomping at the bit, egging on the impatient, to reopen the country.

This precarious moment in time demands wisdom, compassion and finesse -- three qualities in which the President is miserably lacking. Just a couple weeks could mean the difference between life or death for many.

I hope and pray the virus numbers drop steadily. But if New Jersey or surrounding states, like Pennsylvania, New York or Delaware experience any type of jump in Coronavirus cases in the coming weeks, we'll have a pretty good idea why.

So, yeah, if the maskless multitudes observed in Wildwood this past Saturday, is any indication of the senseless citizen behavior that we can expect this Memorial Day weekend re-opening -- we unwittingly could be ringing the dinner bell (to borrow from Jaws) for the "invisible enemy."

Trump: Virus "Numbers" Are "Really, Very, Very Strong"

President Donald Trump is downplaying the Coronavirus all over again. 

As parts of the United States get ready for a phased-in reopening at the President's urging, Trump is tapping out the same disingenuous dance number that led to the nearly 64,000 lives snuffed out in America.

This time, Trump is downplaying the virus's ravages, namely the deaths, fluffing off our lost souls as mere statistics and acting as if the epidemic is already over.

"Our deaths, our numbers, per million people, are really very, very strong," Trump upchucked today. "We're very proud of the job we've done."

Proud? 

It's as if the President's talking about the stock market performance of a corporate Trump sycophant like Walmart -- "Our numbers.. are really, very, very strong." 

Trump's meandering public addresses are increasingly the detached blatherings of a sociopath. And reminder: he's our President.

Those, 64,000 people happened to die because Trump was too focused, for more than two months, on stock market numbers, golfing, holding "Keep America Great" rallies and seeking vengeance against impeachment witnesses.

The President should be charged with manslaughter.

Yet, the imbecilic con man hasn't learned his lesson. He never learns his lesson. He's not interested in learning any lessons. Of course, he feigns concern. But not very well.

"This plague should never have happened," Trump said at last evening's business round table with industry execs who were present to dutifully lick the President's boots and convince America it was time to go back to work. "It could’ve been stopped, but people chose not to stop it."

That was the closest we'll get to an admission of guilt from the President. He's admitting "it could have been stopped, but people chose not to stop it." 

Trump just isn't saying he happens to be the guy who knew death was incubating in the homeland and simply blew it off as little consequence..

But, we knew that already.

The President ignored repeated warnings of the Coronavirus virus threat, detailed in his presidential daily briefings from early January through February.

Trump belatedly declared a national emergency on March 13. It was way too late. Some 1,700 cases of Covid-19 had been confirmed and 40 deaths reported.

The virus was already uncontrollably spreading across the homeland, compromising lives.

Now, the master illusionist President is promising once again the virus "is going to go away" as if this will happen at the snap of Trump's fingers.

In the meantime, the divider-in-chief continues to cast blame everywhere -- President Barack Obama, state governors, the World Health Organization and China. There will be others. 

I'm afraid that the death toll will climb much higher, particularly if citizens don't continue to take social distancing seriously. 

There still aren't enough virus test kits and components or reliable anti-body tests out there to track the contagion and help instruct who can safely return to the work place and when.

And I'm concerned that really deep down, the President -- who no doubt would happily turn a resurgent national emergency into a means of autocratic control come election day this November -- just doesn't give a damn either way.