Fauci should quit

From Fox News tonight:

Anthony Fauci has been a voice of reason during the pandemic. Perfect? No. But he has offered straightforward medical advice at almost every step of the way, and his guidance has frankly been better than the president's.

The president has undermined him, like he did tonight. And the president has stifled him -- the White House has curbed his U.S. TV appearances, probably because Fauci's advice rather notably conflicts with the president's.

So the best thing Anthony Fauci could do for public health at this point is quit.

He's 79. It's not like he has a lot of career ahead of him. And he wouldn't even have to criticize Trump directly. But as a newly retired foremost public expert on COVID-19, he might find his services to speak publicly and on TV in demand -- and might do a better job of getting good information to the public as a result.

The president is determined to magically think the virus away. And he has a leash on Fauci. The good doctor should quit, and serve the public by making his voice heard.

Donald Trump is holding our children hostage to his narcissism

Oh boy:

As I mentioned earlier today, we've already decided to keep our son at home this fall. You know why we made that decision? Well, it had nothing to do with Donald Trump.

Taking this tweet at face value, it means that the president of the United States cannot conceive of reasons why schools and parents would not want to fill up the classrooms this fall -- unless it's to make him look bad. He is so self-centered that the idea that people don't want to die, or that schools don't want to risk their students or be liable for that risk. He can only conceive of how that reflects on him.

Let me be clear: I wouldn't be sending my son to school this fall even if it meant that going or not going could guarantee Joe Biden's presidential victory. Again: Our decision had nothing to do with Donald Trump. But Trump cannot understand a universe in which he is not the center, in which people make decisions based on their own interests instead of how it affects his. His narcissism has always been one of his most terrible qualities. Now it could be positively lethal.

We are keeping our kid home this fall

We officially made the decision this week: Our son -- a rising seventh grader -- will be learning from home this fall.

We don't love this decision. The boy is better at learning in a classroom setting than in digital, distanced-learning environment. He would love to see his friends again. But despite President Trump's constant pressure on schools to reopen, I'm just not comfortable that sending him back to school is the best decision -- for his health, for the health of anybody working at the school, or for us in his family.

And there's stuff like this:

An overnight summer camp in rural southwestern Missouri has seen scores of campers, counselors and staff infected with the coronavirus, the local health department revealed this week, raising questions about the ability to keep kids safe at what is a rite of childhood for many.

Missouri is one of several states to report outbreaks at summer camps. The Kanakuk camp near Branson ended up sending its teenage campers home. On Friday, the local health department announced 49 positive cases of the COVID-19 virus at the camp. By Monday, the number had jumped to 82.

I realize that keeping our son home is a privilege. His mom and I both do most of our work from home, anyway. And we have wifi, as well as a school district willing and able to provide online learning. Not everybody does. As I said in THE WEEK a few weeks back:

Parents understandably worry that lost classroom time means their kids will fall behind. Others may not have access to the technology needed for remote learning, or they may need the schools to provide meals to their children. More than a few parents need schools to reopen simply so they can have some daytime childcare. Nothing about this is easy. It will be a good day when schools can reopen safely.

But parents should be wary of risking their children's health to buttress the president's vanity and image. If schools reopen this fall, there is a good chance my child won't be in attendance.

Well, the choice is officially made. 

Donald Trump and the 'Bradley Effect'

David Graham on Donald Trump's increasingly racist reelection effort:

While it’s true that a lot of the media coverage made a Clinton victory seem like a foregone conclusion, there were warning signs of her weaknesses for some time, and Biden is already doing better on several of those fronts. The presumptive Democratic nominee holds a larger lead, and a more consistent one, and he’s eating into Trump’s edge in key demographics including white voters and older voters.

The reason for this, as I wrote last week, is that voters are horrified by Trump’s handling of race issues and of protests. The president’s unfavorability rating remains high, though within its normal range, and voters still give him high marks on the economy, but there’s been an immense shift in opinion on race. White voters have changed their minds, and they’re no longer with the president—but he’s sticking to the same talking points.

I wonder if we're seeing an inversion of the "Bradley Effect" here.

The Bradley Effect is a phenomenon in which black politicians underperform their polling when voters actually cast their votes. The idea is that white voters tell pollsters they'll vote for the black candidate because they don't want to look racist but maybe are secretly a little bit racist when they go into the voting booth.

The idea is that racism and discomfort with racism can coexist in the same person. (We're large, we contain multitudes.) Republicans have exploited that discrepancy over the years by running meta-campaigns on crime and welfare while studiously avoiding going full N-word. As long as there was a plausibly non-racist explanation for a Republican candidate's position, the GOP got the benefit of the doubt. Voters could vote for the Willie Horton ad guy and still feel OK about themselves.

Donald Trump is a blunt object, though, given to saying the quiet part loud. Voters who might support a subtly racist candidate can do so and tell themselves that they're not supporting a racist candidate. But Trump is, increasingly, foreclosing that option to those voters. He is plainly trying to divide America along racial lines, defending the Confederate flag and racist team names, praising "Manifest Destiny," even going after NASCAR's one black driver -- and all of this in the last 24 hours. Voters who can look past somewhat subtle expressions of racism are finding that Trump's expressions aren't all that subtle anymore. They don't like it. And so Trump is failing.

Then again, if the Bradley Effect possibility holds, it could be that voters are telling pollsters they don't like Trump and his racism -- but will give him their support in the privacy of the voting booth. There's only one way we'll find out.

Movie night: THE PAJAMA GAME

Three thoughts about THE PAJAMA GAME:

* The original Broadway production marked Bob Fosse's emergence as an in-demand choreographer, and his work is on display here. The dances are nacently Fosse, but unmistakably so -- the hats, the herky-jerky Chaplinesque moves. Just good fun.

* I sometimes get very emotional when I see great joy expressed through dance. I found this out right after I got married -- oddly enough, during the "ABC" scene in CLERKS II. It can get embarrassing at times. But it has happened often enough that I recognize the pattern. So let's just say the performance of "Once-A-Year Day" got me a little bit verklempt.

* Why don't we have more great musical comedies about workplace labor strife?

On Trump's hope Americans will "grow numb" to death

WaPo:

The goal is to convince Americans that they can live with the virus — that schools should reopen, professional sports should return, a vaccine is likely to arrive by the end of the year and the economy will continue to improve.

White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day, according to three people familiar with the White House’s thinking, who requested anonymity to reveal internal deliberations. Americans will “live with the virus being a threat,” in the words of one of those people, a senior administration official.

I believe President Trump's political prospects are being kept alive by two groups at this point: Racists and pro-life evangelicals.

I have some sympathy for the latter group. I grew up with them, went to a conservative evangelical Mennonite college where almost everybody was pro-life. I knew four people on campus who admitted to voting for Bill Clinton in 1992, and I was one of them. I don't agree with all those folks on much these days -- but I love them still.

Admittedly, the abortion issue is a close moral call for me. I think that unborn children exist on a spectrum of bearing moral worth -- but I also think real questions of women's health and freedom is bound up in the all of this, and, for me, that settles the issue in favor of a pro-choice position. But I know a lot of people who come down on the other side, and I respect that for the most part. When I don't, it's because their acts and positions suggest to me that they're more interested in power over women than they are in saving lives.

I can kind of understand, then, why evangelicals support Trump despite his manifestly un-Christian bearing. He's giving them the judges they want to undo -- either by overturning or neutering -- Roe v. Wade. A good friend of mine once told me he was disgusted by Trump, but also felt like he should thank him. I wonder, though, how they can sustain their pro-life witness and continue to back this president.

I mean, consider again these words:

White House officials also hope Americans will grow numb to the escalating death toll...

Why? Well, because trying to save all those lives is hard. And (Trump believes, I think wrongly) that the economy will bounce back if Americans decide to live with the virus and the damage it does.

Pro-lifers tend to reject -- and can even be contemptuous of -- the many women who argue that they are unable to bring an unborn child into the world because they don't possess the economic resources (or other resources) to support that child. For pro-lifers, life trumps any economic argument.

But not now.

If Americans grow numb to death, I wonder how pro-lifers can defend the fact the president they support is OK with your grandma or spouse or child or other loved one dying or being disabled by the virus? Do they think that engenders a "culture of life?"

Maybe there's an argument that COVID was inflicted by nature, while abortions are an active choice. But when you look at America's climbing coronavirus cases and compare them to other developed countries not run by right-wing populists, it's is clear that allowing widespread death in America is a choice being made by the president and his accomplices.

Can you be truly pro-life and support President Trump? We all make moral compromises when we do politics -- purity is for the ineffective and impotent. But at some point, maybe the compromises become too much. Maybe they start to work against your professed values. I think that may be what is happening to pro-lifers right now. No one can say they weren't warned.

Movie night: THE ROCKETEER

Three thoughts about THE ROCKETEER:

* This is a movie from the last days of practical effects, before TERMINATOR 2 wowed everybody with CGI and things started to change.  By the end of the decade, George Lucas would be making movies entirely with green screen and computers. Here, though, there are lots of scenes that were shot in the real world - particularly the scenes involving airplanes. I miss real airplanes in movies.

* I was thinking that the movie owed a lot to the INDIANA JONES films, afterward looked it up -- THE ROCKETEER was directed by Joe Johnson, who got his start in movies doing effects on STAR WARS and the INDY movies. He learned at the feet of Spielberg and Lucas in the 1980s, and man, does it show. There ought to be a ROCKETEER/INDIANA JONES mashup, like Batman v Superman, or Alien v Predator.

* Alan Arkin is a sign of quality every time.