Letters: President Donald Trump is ensuring peace abroad; St. Patty’s Day event irresponsible
President Trump ensuring peace abroad
In a span of just 30 days, President Donald Trump negotiated the following: 1) a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates; 2) a separate peace agreement between Israel and Bahrain; 3) a deal between Serbia and Kosovo to normalize economic relations; 4) a deal between Kosovo and Israel to establish diplomatic relations, and 5) an agreement between Serbia and Israel to move the Serbian embassy to Jerusalem.
The agreements between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain were the first Middle-East peace agreements in over 25 years. The last was signed in 1994. President Trump received a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for the agreement between Israel and the UAE, and he received a second Nobel Peace nomination for the agreement between Serbia and Kosovo. This brings Trump’s total Nobel Peace nominations to three. His first Nobel nomination was in 2018 for his successful efforts to ease tensions with North Korea. Trump destroyed ISIS and has kept Iran, Russia, and China in check, but he’s the first president in four decades that has not started a new military conflict.
His goal is to finish our seemingly endless military conflicts and to ensure peace and prosperity through strength, not appeasement. It’s working! Thank you, President Trump!
St. Patty’s Day even irresponsible
Given the current spoke in COVID-19 cases in Centre County, the type of behavior enabled by The Phyrst’s St. Patty’s Day event is reckless and irresponsible. It increases the risk to all of us and further jeopardizes our children’s education. Regrettably, it puts our community in a single state of mind — avoid downtown State College.
The upset
It was around dawn on Wednesday, Nov. 3. I was a junior in high school. I had been listening all night on a little radio (my parents hadn’t yet bought a TV) in my bedroom. Finally the returns came in from Illinois and Ohio and the president had pulled off the greatest upset ever.
Americans who were born between 1948 and 2016 should know that to achieve a historic upset Electoral College presidential majority you don’t have to be a mean man.
You can even win the popular vote.
DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN was the Chicago Tribune’s famously premature headline, and the title of A. J. Baime’s new book. Ninety-nine percent of polls and pundits forecast President Truman a loser.
Harry Truman was a nice man. He became “Give ‘em hell Harry” to the surprisingly large trainside crowds during his whistle-stop campaign. The Republicans had recaptured Congress. Truman blistered the “do nothing” 80th Congress. It had approved his Marshall Plan, but would happily see Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms buried.
Truman rarely mentioned Dewey. An impeccably honest man, Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, of New York, held many policy positions similar to Truman’s, including expanding Social Security to more workers, and ensuring the civil rights of Black citizens.
Dewey’s running mate was Gov. Earl Warren, of California, later named chief justice by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower.
With John McCain dead and Mitt Romney shunned, men like those could never again be nominated by Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
Make the right choice
Picture this: an outside attack kills every person in Centre and Clinton counties. That population equals the United States’ deaths from COVID-19, approaching 200,000. President Donald Trump prepared for this attack by eliminating our early warning system abroad and eliminating our pandemic preparedness office. While the pandemic raged, Trump responded by denying that the problem was occurring, lying about being briefed about it, contradicting scientific and medical advice on best strategies to limit the damage, failing to provide a national system for obtaining personal protective equipment, and failing to implement an effective national program of testing, contact tracing and treatment.
The result: the U.S. leads the world in the number of COVID-19 cases, more than 6 million. Meanwhile, job losses triggered by the pandemic are at historically high levels and millions of families are using food banks for the first time. Trump did not cause COVID-19, but he led our response to it. When asked if he takes responsibility for that national response, he was very clear: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
Elections are choices about leaders and the directions they chart for our country. Given Trump’s record in responding to the first big crisis he faced, why would you hire him again? I wouldn’t. I’ll vote for Joe Biden.
It’s been too long
In his rally on Sept. 14, President Donald Trump said, “I’m not worried about getting the virus because I’m far away from the people.” What about the supporters who are crammed together in chairs listening to his vitriol? Obviously he doesn’t care, has never cared and never will care ... except about himself. He refuses to wear masks, insults doctors/scientists (claiming he knows better because he’s such a scholar), and lies constantly, which he has proved to everyone on tapes that eventually will be used for historical reference.
The people attending these rallies don’t wear masks, won’t/can’t practice social distancing, and apparently aren’t in the least bit concerned that eventually they will transmit COVID to other people such as their loved ones. Or perhaps to someone who’s been following the protocols. Trump has been in office for too long and it’s beyond belief. Please help change this fact by voting in November for someone else.
A tax break worth losing
Taxes are always a hot topic in political campaigns. Many low-to-middle income people could use a tax break, but there is one long existing break that could be eliminated, and which could bring in a large amount of revenue without hurting the the society — the one on income from qualified dividends and long-term capital gains.
Time to act as a team
Richard Harris, the National Public Radio Science correspondent, remarked that the difference between the Chinese and American response to the virus was in main part that the Chinese identify with the group in moral solidarity makes their response whereas we define the individual apart from others and act by calculating our advantage in a libertarian way. We ride off to the mountaintop apart to decide what o do.
I think in the matter of the virus, at least this is unfortunate and it would be better to approach the crisis as a team which both China and New Zealand have with good results.
After all, we really put on the mask not for our ourselves but for each other, and the other we at for is now every person in the world.
Acting as a team, this way we begin to realize the worth of many and the depth of humanity hidden there in the center of each of our hearts.