Good morning, it’s Monday, Dec. 21, 2020. Eighteen years ago today, as White House physicians looked on, George W. Bush pulled up the sleeve of his shirt so an immunization technician from Walter Reed Army Medical Center could administer an injection in the president’s left arm.
At his own direction, Bush was being inoculated against smallpox, a dreaded scourge that over the previous two millennia had killed tens of millions of people. In one sense, Bush was doing what a good commander-in-chief should do: lead from the front. The previous week, he had announced that the Pentagon would administer the smallpox vaccine to 500,000 military personnel in “high-risk” areas, and that it would be made available to willing front-line health care workers.
Posted By Ruth King on December 19th, 2020
Some 3,000 Americans a day are dying of COVID-19, a significant chunk of the country won’t accept November’s election results, and Russian hackers appear to have compromised much of the federal government. Amid this mayhem, the mainstream media found time to address an issue that most Americans haven’t given a second thought: Will Jeffrey Toobin’s career survive?
In case you haven’t heard – or have mercifully forgotten – during an Oct. 15 New Yorker magazine staff meeting held on Zoom, the 60 year-old Toobin “was seen lowering and raising his computer camera, exposing and touching his penis, and motioning an air kiss to someone other than his colleagues,” according to a New York Times report. Dozens of staff members from the venerable magazine were assembled online for an election simulation exercise, which in retrospect sounds like an unfortunate euphemism.