Conason, Joe
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an 8 26
At the core of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s rise as a political celebrity is the enduring American reverence for his family. Decades ago, during his career as an environmental advocate, that lingering aura inspired admiration and even hope.
Yet the longer Bobby Jr. remains in the corrupting orbit of this regime and its maximum leader, the more he has come to reflect the degraded values and morals of the Trump family rather than his own.
Flawed as the legendary Kennedys were, nobody has ever thought of Jack, Robert or Teddy as low-rent grifters seeking to scam the government or the public for personal gain. Quite the opposite, since they devoted their political careers to protecting the American people from crooks like Roy Cohn -- the Trump lawyer and moral mentor who was twice indicted when Robert F. Kennedy Sr. was attorney general.
On the current record, it is clear that RFK Jr. has long since abandoned the illustrious example of his forebears and embraced instead the grabbing-with-both-hands ethic of his new political family. During the past year alone, Bobby has abandoned all the environmental and public health principles that supposedly animated his career for the past 40 years, strictly to enrich and promote himself and his dear leader Donald Trump (a man his father and uncles assuredly would have scorned).
Consider just one of the many abuses of power perpetrated by Bobby for his own personal and political gain. As disclosed earlier this summer in The New York Times, he went out of his way to protect the distribution of Kratom, a highly toxic, mind-bending drug, mostly sold in gas stations and convenience marts, that has been linked to thousands of deaths. Exercising his authority as Health and Human Services secretary in the fall of 2025, he called the governor of Ohio in an effort to stop a state ban on the dangerous substance. Among the Kratom producers who benefited from this action -- the opposite of what any public health official should have done -- was a man formerly known as Jerry Cash, who had served time in prison for embezzlement and later changed his surname to Ross.
As Jerry Ross, the Kratom mogul poured $162,000 into the defunct RFK Jr. 2024 presidential committee after Trump named Bobby as health secretary. And several months later, after Food and Drug Administration granted additional favors to boost kratom, Ross wrote another million-dollar check to Kennedy's MAHA PAC.
Like Trump, Kennedy has profited from blatant conflicts of interest while refusing to divest himself of those deals and arrangements. He still stands to profit from his consulting contract with a Los Angeles personal injury law firm that is suing vaccine makers such as Merck. When he was confirmed, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others objected, noting that at HHS he could use his power to increase his legal bonanza (which has brought him millions of dollars over the past few years).
And like Trump, Kennedy banks big money from his "patriotic" sloganeering, by personally licensing "Make American Healthy Again" as a brand - while he uses government resources to promote that brand. When Dr. Anthony Fauci came under fire in a Senate hearing in July, Kennedy used the opportunity to promote his scurrilous book attacking the former federal science official -- despite his previous pledge not to run that particular sleazy grift.
How much longer Kennedy will be able to exploit the naivete of the "MAHA Moms" who form his political base remains to be seen. Many of them have grown restive as he repeatedly sells out their ideals to back Trump's pay-for-play arrangements with pesticide producers, tobacco firms and other industries whose depredations he swore to fight. For the MAHA movement, a bitter realization is coming: They followed a leader named and packaged as a Kennedy, but underneath he was just another shoddy Trump.
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AN 7 25 JOE CONASAN
Reacting with borderline hysteria to demands that the government open its files on Jeffrey Epstein — the deceased pedophile and financier who once described himself as Donald Trump's "best friend" — the president has aroused suspicion even among MAGA cultists. Few Americans believe the excuses Trump and his appointees in the Justice Department and FBI offer for pretending they have no relevant files about Epstein's depredations or that there is "nothing to see here." The Wall Street Journal's revelation of a racy scrawled message from Trump to Epstein on his 50th birthday underlined the appearance of a coverup.
In his latest gambit Trump is imitating a president he truly admires — the legendary crook Richard M. Nixon — by adopting what became known during the Watergate scandal as the "modified limited hangout." That's the best shorthand description of Trump's order to Attorney General Pamela Bondi to release grand jury testimony from the Epstein sex crimes prosecution (which ended in 2019 with his reported suicide in a federal detention facility).
It is a phrase originally uttered by John Ehrlichman, the late Nixon White House aide whose career ended with a federal conviction for obstruction of justice and conspiracy. On the afternoon of March 22, 1973, in an Oval Office meeting that included Nixon, Ehrlichman, White House counsel John Dean, Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman and Attorney General John Mitchell, the president and his advisers plotted how to extend their coverup of the Watergate burglary and an assortment of related felonies.
They decided to concoct a misleading official report on the White House role in the burglary, with "facts" designed to exculpate the president and his gang. Worried that even a phony report would provide too much information, Nixon asked whether "we want to ... go this route now? And let it hang out, so to speak?"
"It's a limited hangout," replied Haldeman.
Dean agreed, and then Ehrlichman chimed in: "It's a modified limited hangout."
Fast-forward to Trump on the evening of July 17, 2025.
"Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval," he wrote in a post on Truth Social. "This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!"
Trump has never explained — and will never explain — how the Epstein case, which he and his MAGA cohort have exploited for years, became a Democratic "scam." Many of the conspiracy theories involving Epstein, "perpetuated" by his favorite crackpots, supposedly implicate Democrats in the most terrible crimes imaginable. Yet it is Democrats, along with a few Republicans willing to stand up to Trump, who now clamor for transparency on Epstein.
They won't get much if anything from a grand jury transcript. Trump, as a convicted felon, and Bondi, as a career prosecutor, both know how very limited that document will prove to be, if a court ever approves its disclosure. The testimony and investigative evidence presented in Epstein's prosecution will implicate him — not the various friends, associates and public figures whose names and faces may appear in the gigabytes of text, video and financial data seized by the FBI.
No doubt Trump feels assured that his own name and image won't appear in the grand jury documents — because he was never questioned or investigated in the case that focused solely on Epstein. He feels safe in urging their release, hoping and praying that will quell the conspiracy-crazed mob that he created.
It won't.
NOW READ:Supreme Court lets Trump shred democracy in shocking agency takedown
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NO LNX JOE CONASON
alternet
How Trump corrupted Pam Bondi
Pam Bondi speaks at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. July 20, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Segar/File Photo
Joe ConasonNovember 23, 2024
Newspaper profiles of Pamela Bondi -- subbed in as President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for U.S. attorney general following the scandalous implosion of Matt Gaetz -- often describe her with a phrase like "longtime loyalist."
The former Florida attorney general's unwavering fealty dates back to September 2013, when a political committee supporting her reelection campaign received a $25,000 check from the Trump Foundation. And the story behind that check foreshadows four more years of exceptionally corrupt administration, when the first felon returns to the White House. It is a tale that revolves around two of the most notorious scams pursued by the president-elect during his career as a "successful businessman," namely the Trump Foundation and Trump University.
Rather than an institution of higher learning, Trump U was a for-profit real-estate seminar that promised easy wealth to the suckers who paid huge sums to learn the Donald's investment secrets and received no instruction of any value whatsoever in return. Over the years before Bondi got that Trump check, thousands of defrauded consumers had complained to her office, demanding action.
And just three weeks earlier, then-New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman finally had announced the filing of a massive fraud case on behalf of New Yorkers ripped off by Trump University. According to Tristan Snell, the assistant attorney general handling the case, they hoped Florida would join New York's lawsuit "because it opened up the possibility that, if needed, we could pursue additional witnesses and documents" in the Sunshine State, where subpoenas would require Bondi's assistance.
Evidently that possibility also occurred to someone in the Trump Organization. Four days after the dramatic New York filing, Trump executive assistant Rhona Graff sent an email to the Bondi campaign finance director, seeking details of how to make a donation. Made out to "And Justice For All," the ironically named Bondi PAC, that donation arrived by mail on Sept. 13, 2013, along with a note signed by Trump that misspelled the candidate's name as "Biondi" and declared, "Dear Pam, You are the greatest!"
The check was drawn on the Trump Foundation -- a tax-exempt nonprofit organization prohibited from giving money to political campaigns or partisan committees. That was merely one of many examples of Trump's abuse of his foundation's tax-exempt status.
You may have surmised by this point that the Florida attorney general blew off her New York colleagues in seeking justice for the Trump U victims. Snell recalls that after sending the case documents to Tallahassee, "we never heard from the Florida AG's office again."
None of that hindered the legal team led by Snell -- one of very few officials ever to hold Trump accountable -- from winning a $25 million settlement from the Trump Organization after the 2016 election. The proceeds reimbursed Trump's victims for roughly 80% of what they had lost. Two years after he coughed up that punishing payment, the New York attorney general's office came after the Trump Foundation again, charging that its charitable activities were nonexistent and that its expenditures benefited Trump himself.
In the humiliating conclusion of that lawsuit, his lawyers agreed their client would shut down the foundation and pay the remaining millions in its accounts to bona fide charities.
So egregious were the depredations of Trump U that Republicans felt obliged to condemn its swindling. The National Review ran a scathing investigative report headlined "Yes, Trump University Was a Massive Scam." Sen. Marco Rubio, then a Trump rival, denounced Trump U as a "con job," and warned that "we cannot allow a con artist to become the Republican nominee for president of the United States." (The Florida senator's more recent sycophancy has now earned Rubio the opportunity to become secretary of state.)
Every Republican senator who votes to confirm Bondi as the nation's attorney general knows the saga of Trump University. As Snell sardonically asks, "Did Trump just happen to want to make a donation to Bondi a mere four days after the New York AG's case was filed? Really?"
He goes on to demand that journalists and senators interrogate Bondi about this scandal -- and explore its implications for her integrity, her subservience to the president, and her ability to carry out the attorney general's duties.
"We need to make sure this full story gets told -- and any profile of Bondi or analysis of her nomination that does not include this story is itself another example of corrupt complicity." Nobody, in the mainstream media or the United States Senate, should be able to claim they did not know.
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AN 11 24
With Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House, the nightmare threat posed by him and his fascistic movement will all too soon become America’s waking reality. How the nation descended into this political abyss will no doubt inspire angry debate, but here is one response to this electoral disaster: We aren’t going anywhere and will continue to stand for the Constitution, the rule of law, and the principles of democracy and decency that endure even under aspiring tyrants.
Trump certainly aspires to tyranny, as he has repeatedly warned us, during the 2024 campaign and many times before. We can hope that his vow to use military force against opponents and dissenters and his openly expressed urge to arrest and harm his political adversaries is merely bluster, as his supporters insist. Many voters said they didn’t believe he would carry out those menacing promises, although his most fervent supporters evidently anticipate a campaign of vengeance with glee. Should he attempt such measures, he can expect fierce resistance in the courts and on the streets – and perhaps from military officers who have been trained to uphold constitutional values.
It remains astonishing that tens of millions of our fellow citizens have chosen to be led by a convicted felon -- described bluntly as a fascist by former members of his own cabinet and the military leaders who served under him – who calls his own country a hellhole and incessantly conjures racism, misogyny, division, and hatred to advance himself. What do those voters really want and expect from Trump?
:{Whatever they may want, what they are likely to get from him is probably not going to make them happy. Should he implement his reckless tariff scheme, much of which he can direct without Congressional approval, the nation’s economy will crater -- and the inflation that so irked consumers is certain to soar.
If he tears down the Affordable Care Act, without the alternative plan he has failed to propose for almost ten years, the nation’s health care system will lurch into chaos -- and many of his followers and their families will be left to suffer. And if he orders the mass detention and deportation of migrants, then many actual citizens of Latino origin – a plurality of whom helped him win this election – are likely to be endangered.
Appointing conspiracy kook Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health czar or awarding control of the federal budget to Elon Musk are scenarios designed to conclude in disaster. Kennedy's idea of making America "healthy again" would risk the return of lethal childhood diseases we had conquered, including polio and measles; Musk' notion of cutting a third of federal spending would sink the economy and impoverish the middle class. But maybe their fans must find all this out the hard way.}:
It is going to be a steep learning curve for anyone who expects Trump to make their lives better.
And those grim possibilities are merely the most obviously ruinous potential consequences of this election. We must expect the worst, from federal surveillance of women’s pregnancies to government attacks on the First Amendment. A profound sense of buyer’s remorse may be in store for Trump voters.
In the meantime, however, we must take whatever encouragement is to be found in these mostly dismal results – abortion protections won at the ballot box in several states, for instance – and must demand, both of ourselves and our elected officials, the courage to stand up against this would-be dictator’s excesses. This election has left us with no other choice.
Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief ofThe National Memo. He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting organization formerly known as The Investigative Fund. His latest book is*The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism
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an 10 24
Long before Donald Trump declared he would run for president, his first political adviser articulated the central idea that has come to define both candidate and campaign.
"Hate is a stronger motivator than love," said Roger Stone in 2008 -- and that corrosive outlook is obviously what still drives the Watergate-vintage dirty trickster and pardoned felon (although he now claims to be a born-again "Christian"). It is also what drives the man whose political persona Stone created.
The Trump campaign, and the MAGA movement at its core, embodies a malevolent spirit of hostility that endangers democracy, domestic tranquility and the very future of the nation. Both the candidate and his surrogates persistently spew out a noxious fog of deception and demonization, aimed at dehumanizing vulnerable populations that cannot fight back.
Sounding like a dollar-store knockoff of Hitler, Trump keeps intensifying his racist rants against migrants and minorities he describes as genetically inferior and predisposed to criminal conduct, from eating other people's pets to slitting the throats of young women. He has commenced a tour of cities supposedly overrun by these dark-skinned marauders, even as the local Republican officials have begged him to desist from his absurd lies and violent instigation.
But almost as toxic, and perhaps even more bizarre, is the Trump campaign's increasingly lurid, clamorous barrage of advertising aimed at trans people. So far, the Republicans and their allies have spent roughly $30 million on ads that aim to conflate trans people with murderers -- and persuading them that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris is devoted to advancing the interests of those trans killers above all else. While it is true that Harris has supported gender-affirming health care, including for prisoners, it is also true that the federal prison system under Trump provided that same care -- as the law requires.
But what is so weird -- how else to put it? -- about the Trump anti-trans crusade is its hidden underwriter. Behind the spending on much of the MAGA hate propaganda, especially the messages dehumanizing trans people, is none other than billionaire troll Elon Musk. Hatred is a more powerful motivator than love for a twisted character like Musk too, even when the object of that revulsion is his own child.
Now Musk, a pompous proponent of "conservative family values," has often bragged about littering the world with his offspring, possibly too many to identify. But what we know for certain is that he has a trans daughter who has changed her name to Vivian Wilson and successfully petitioned the courts to dissociate herself from her father.
Rarely present for Vivian when she was growing up, Musk has gone so far as to proclaim that his erstwhile son is "dead, killed by the woke mind virus," and mock his own child publicly for being "gay and slightly autistic" from an early age. Vivian says Musk knows nothing about her and has lied about being "tricked" into approving the medical treatment she says saved her life.
It is worth noting here that this same troll, who has reportedly financed millions of dollars' worth of anti-immigrant vitriol online and on the airwaves, is himself a migrant from South Africa via Canada -- and has collected more money from government, both state and federal, than any 10 million working-class noncitizens. His reintroduction of Nazism, white supremacy and outrageous conspiracies and falsehoods on his social media platform X makes him a far greater menace to American communities than those who have crossed the southern border to escape violence and seek a better life for their kids. Before the mass deportation begins, perhaps we could have a more selective approach.
Ugliness and grievance suffuse the Trump movement. They are as visible as a pustulant sore, not only in the would-be president's threatening rhetoric but in the aggressive thrust of his backers. It protrudes in different directions, always exposing the internalized fury of those around him, from his adviser Stephen Miller's desire to destroy immigrant families, to JD Vance's undisguised anger at the unmarried women who remind him of his errant mother, to Musk's festering grudge against his daughter.
An American political campaign, especially for the presidency, would normally seek to promote a vision of the future, an inspiring call to patriotism, or even a platform of policies and proposals. What Trump and his coterie of billionaires offer instead is incitement and the prospect of bloodshed, all so they can profit and loot the Treasury at will. What they are delivering already is a hellscape of hatred -- just as Stone so gleefully warned us.
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https://www.amazon.com/Longest-Grifters-Swindlers-Hijacked-Conservatism/dp/125062116X
kpfa ##### The Longest Con How Grifters, Swindlers, and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism by Joe Conason
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The Longest Con tells the fascinating story of the partisan con artists who have corrupted conservative politics in our time, creating a toxic phenomenon that culminated in the election of Donald Trump, a bumptious fraud whose checkered career and tawdry retinue, including his presidential cabinet, have featured almost every variety of scam. But long before he appeared, Trump's path to power was blazed by the motley horde of swindlers and quacks who preceded him.
From the "professional anti-communists" (whose tactics even J. Edgar Hoover despised) to the "populist" grifters of the Tea Party movement and the religious charlatans of the "prosperity gospel" (who provided a pious front for Trump), the right-wing ripoff has remained remarkably consistent, even as personalities change and new technologies emerge: Stir up anger and resentment, demonize political opponents, promise vengeance, and collect donations from the gullible. It's a highly lucrative game that any unscrupulous charlatan can play, as many have - and they are named in these pages.
In an unsparing and often comic narrative, Joe Conason explores the right's long, steep descent into a movement whose principal aim is not to protect freedom or defend the Constitution, but merely to line the pockets of pretenders and blowhards whose malevolent tactics now endanger the nation.
Joe Conasonis an American journalist and commentator. He is editor-in-chief of The National Memo, a daily political newsletter, and a senior fellow at Type Media Center. His articles have appeared in many publications around the world, including The New Republic, The Nation, The Guardian, Salon, and The American Prospect.He was executive editor of The New York Observer and a staff writer at The Village Voice. Two of his previous books, The Hunting of the President and Big Lies, were New York Times bestsellers.
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an 2 24
Plainly visible behind the melodramatic release of a special counsel report on President Joe Biden's retention of classified documents -- and its unprofessional partisan personal attack on him -- are several basic facts that ought to be understood by every American.
First is the character of Robert Hur, the special counsel, a Trump Republican who abused Attorney General Merrick Garland's good-faith appointment of him. Hur larded his report exonerating the president with irrelevant remarks that were obviously designed to inflict political damage. By doing so, Hur clearly violated Justice Department protocols and has earned investigations of his own misconduct by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility and inspector general.
It is worth noting that Hur's ridiculously verbose, overwrought document is marred by its slovenly composition. To cite one glaring instance among many, he claims to have found "evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified documents," and then admits more than 200 pages later that "there is in fact a shortage of evidence on these points." (Did the special counsel, only 51 years old, suffer his own embarrassing memory lapse?)
Second is the failure of mainstream media to duly emphasize the memory blips and routinely incoherent blabber of Biden's principal opponent Donald Trump. When the former president wrongly identified Hungarian President Viktor Orban in a recent speech as the president of Turkey, his error received only brief mention on the major cable networks. His repeated mistaking of his primary opponent Nikki Haley for Nancy Pelosi in another speech got more coverage, but only because Haley kept mentioning it to mock Trump.
Not so long ago, in the trial that found Trump guilty of sexual assault, he gazed at a photograph of plaintiff E. Jean Carroll and told the court that it was a picture of Marla Maples, one of his former wives. Anyone who has looked at Trump's testimony in any number of cases, notably the lawsuits over his phony Trump University, will find dozens of instances when he claimed, under oath, not to remember events, documents and people he knew.
Third and most important is that any comparison of the performance of Biden versus Trump reflects very poorly on the latter -- and quite positively on the current president. From a prolonged economic slump that was largely owed to Trump's mismanagement of the COVID pandemic, Biden has restored the U.S. economy. Although the country has suffered a spike of inflation that is now abating, it was far lower than in other developed nations and emanated from global supply problems, not his policies.
Economic growth and full employment have persisted strongly, crushing the dire and almost universal predictions of recession -- and the financial markets, which Trump predicted would crash, instead have reached record levels. (Now the Republican politicians, who usually measure their life achievement by stock prices, tell us that doesn't matter.) Across the country, Biden's achievements in office are improving American lives and communities, with higher wages, lower drug costs, and the enormous infrastructure program that Trump promised and failed to deliver.
Biden's extensive record looks even better when contrasted with the latest embarrassing antics of Trump and his congressional Republican lackeys. Anyone worried by the arrival of thousands of undocumented immigrants ought to have welcomed the tough -- indeed draconian -- border control legislation agreed by Senate Republicans and Democrats in a deal that would have included defense funding for Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, and humanitarian relief for Palestinian civilians in Gaza. That bill, fashioned at the insistence of Republicans, required four months of negotiation, overseen by one of the Senate's most conservative members, James Lankford of Oklahoma.
At a time when Republicans constantly bemoan the threat supposedly embodied by an influx of migrants, Trump suddenly ordered them all to abandon that legislative effort -- and vote down the same powers to close the border and mobilize more resources that he had demanded as president. It was an astonishingly irresponsible act that humiliated every Republican on Capitol Hill, from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Speaker Mike Johnson down to the most obscure backbencher. Thanks to Trump, all of them, except the indignant Lankford, look like craven underlings who put politics above their own definition of national security.
Of course that is how Trump behaves in every circumstance. Constantly shouting and posting incomprehensible, loony outbursts makes him appear insane. And whatever "gaffes" Joe Biden may utter, whatever names he may forget, he still knows far more than Trump ever will -- and he remains steady, reliable and devoted to the national interest.
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https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/joe-conason-has-a-prescription-for-a-sick-country
Before June 1, we will almost certainly have lost 100,000 Americans to the coronavirus, along with 25 million jobs. Without powerful government action, this national catastrophe, unlike anything seen here for a hundred years, will continue to ravage the United States. And there is every reason to fear that we will see yet more pandemic disease as this century unfolds.
Yet there is still no sign that the Trump administration is prepared to act with the determination, skill and urgency that the hour demands. Instead, the president consistently demonstrates his mental and moral unfitness to lead — as he did again this week when he idiotically declared that we have so many COVID-19 cases because we have done so many tests.
Which is why the world’s most respected medical journal has now prescribed a first step toward restoring America’s health.
Concluding a pithy editorial that indicts the decline of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the editors of The Lancet urged the administration to stop touting such “magic bullets” as hydroxychloroquine or an early vaccine — and instead empower the CDC to oversee the massive nationwide program of testing, tracing and isolation that ought to have been mounted months ago.
The Lancet editors are well aware that neither Trump nor his feckless minions can do that. They know the president will let thousands die rather than jeopardize his deceptive reelection campaign. So they offer a second prescription: “Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.”
The degradation of public health did not begin with Trump, as The Lancet editorial acknowledges. Right-wing governments and their affiliated “thinkers” have spent decades undermining support for science, international institutions, universal health care and all the other elements of an effective response to the pandemic threat.
Campaigns to denigrate science and curtail effective policy have most often sprung from commercial interests that bankroll politicians, notably the tobacco and fossil fuel lobbies. But the trend toward public ignorance — and with it a growing hostility toward science and scientists — has accelerated sharply with the rise of Trump, who exploits paranoia and superstition every day.
Before Trump, it was unimaginable that a president of the United States would publicly cast doubt on the scientific data compiled by his own government, or publicly slur the scientists who devote their lives to protecting the public. But we have seen Trump do exactly those things, again and again, as he did this week when he attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading epidemiologist, and Dr. Rick Bright, its top vaccine specialist, a courageous dissenter Trump mocked as a “disgruntled” employee.
It was also unimaginable that any president — even one of the dimmer Oval Office lights — would say something as stupid as Trump’s various absurd remarks about coronavirus testing. But we know that this president takes his advice from obsequious television personalities as intellectually vacuous as himself. He hears Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity say that the rise in coronavirus cases is a result of increased testing and confidently repeats that moronic theory.
(Aside from the logical fallacy, data shows that the opposite is true: New Zealand, which is one of the few places to successfully control the disease, has the highest ratio of tests performed to cases found. The Kiwis have conducted over 182 tests for every confirmed case.)
When America was truly great, as The Lancet suggests, our government rejected “America First” bluster and implemented policies that built the CDC into a truly robust and globally admired agency. Our political and religious leaders understood that we, our allies and even our adversaries shared the same interest in improving and protecting the health of the world’s people. That bipartisan consensus endured even into the George W. Bush administration, which spent billions to stand up the president’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to hold back the AIDS pandemic.
We cannot rescue ourselves from the coronavirus, or protect our children and their children from future threats, without restoring the nation’s commitment to scientific truth, public health and government integrity. And we cannot restore those elements of sanity until we remove the disturbed regime responsible for this ruin.
The message of The Lancet editors is simple: This November, voting is a choice of life or death.
To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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