New covid cases should not make headlines. Plus, Kareem rips Smith, but forgets his own punches

By Gary Abernathy

Why are new covid cases still worthy of headlines?

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

The New York Times — and most other major media outlets — reported in breathless fashion that “Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Wednesday that they had tested positive for the coronavirus, the latest in a series of prominent Democrats, lawmakers and Biden administration officials to say they had been infected. Also Wednesday, Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the assistant House speaker, and Representative Scott Peters of California announced their own positive tests.”

The Times added, “The officials who announced their test results on Wednesday came the day after three other House Democrats — Representatives Joaquin Castro of Texas, Adam Schiff of California and Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida — said they had tested positive.” And then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tested positive too.

Interestingly, the Washington Post blamed it on a recent Gridiron Club gathering, since a number of media figures also tested positive.

But we’re at a point where the question becomes: Why is it still headline-making when high-profile people test positive for covid? Vaccines and boosters are effective to prevent serious illness or death, cases are exceedingly mild, and if we had mandatory testing of every American — thank God we don’t — it would probably be shocking to find out how many people have covid and just don’t know it. The mandatory testing required of most officials in this week’s news stories is the only reason they even know they have it, in most cases.

Blaring headlines announcing covid cases just fuels more unnecessary panic and worry. A high-profile individual — particularly in public office — getting truly ill with covid is worth a story. Someone merely testing positive is not.

As always, David Leonhardt of the New York Times has another interesting story this week on covid cases not spiking as some had predicted. He writes, “To many people’s surprise — including mine — new Covid-19 cases in the U.S. have not begun to rise. Over the past two weeks, they have held roughly steady, falling about 1 percent, even as the highly contagious BA.2 subvariant of Omicron has become the dominant form of Covid in the U.S.”

Leonhardt has by far done the best — and least alarmist — reporting on covid of anyone in major media.

The Hill fails to prove Trump wrong about gay support

The Hill did a story last week critical of former president Donald Trump for saying recently to a group of “Gays for Trump” who attended fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, “You don’t look gay.”

According to The Hill, it happened like this:

“Where’s Gays for Trump,” Trump asked a crowd of supporters while speaking at the fundraiser, which was organized to support John Gibbs, a Republican from Michigan and a former Housing and Urban Development official under the Trump administration running to unseat Rep. Peter Meijer (R) in Congress.

According to a video clip of the interaction, an audience member responded, “We’re over here,” prompting Trump to point at them and say, “You don’t look gay,” drawing laughs from the crowd.

On Thursday, Gays for Trump founder Peter Boykin told Newsweek that members of the organization “probably wouldn’t ‘look gay’ because it’s a stereotype that fits more with the typical ‘look’ of leftist LGBT.”

Boykin suggested to Newsweek that he was relatively unbothered by Trump’s comment, but added that Gays for Trump is a “nationwide movement full of various types of gays and the gay community has a lot of diversity—the difference is the Gays for Trump lean right.”

Then, the story added this: “Trump on Wednesday told supporters his administration “did great with the gay population, as you know.’” Trump was presumably referring to support from gays at the ballot box.

The Hill decided it had to shoot down that notion — and then promptly failed to do so. Instead, it rolled out some examples of actions Trump took as president which various organizations claimed were anti-gay. For example, “according to the Human Rights Campaign, the former president launched ‘persistent attacks against the LGBTQ community’ while in office, including rolling back Obama-era nondiscrimination protections.” It quoted Trump making comments it implied were not supportive of LGBTQ+ communities.

Trump did not say he “did great things for the gay population.” He said he “did great with the gay population. The Hill provided absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Trump was wrong about that. He may have been right, or he may have been wrong, but The Hill certainly failed to prove him wrong.

Tragic that more Republicans won’t support Jackson

As of this writing Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is on track to be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court. As everyone knows, she will be the first black woman on that court, which is, as the media reminds us over and over again, history-making, if not the most important thing about her. What’s actually most important about her is that she’s a person who will be serving on the Supreme Court, regardless of her race or gender.

The media is constantly enamored with firsts, especially when it comes to progressives — not so much with conservatives, as Condoleezza Rice, Winsome Sears — the first black women to be secretary of state and lieutenant governor of Virginia, respectively — and others could tell you. That’s also because conservatives tend not to be so taken with the notion that they’re the first to do something. They just do it.

What disappoints me about the Jackson confirmation is how few Republicans will be voting for her. Jackson certainly would not be my choice for the court because of the fact she will undoubtedly be another liberal vote along the lines of Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen G. Breyer, whom she is replacing following his retirement. But without this nomination changing the ideological makeup of the court, Republicans had a great opportunity to return to the days when court appointees received overwhelming — sometimes even unanimous — Senate confirmation, despite ideology. It was a recognition that the president, regardless of party, has the right to nominate the person of his choice to the high court.

Republicans voting to confirm Jackson would have put Democrats on the spot the next time a Republican president nominated someone. Maybe they still wouldn’t have done the same, but it would have given Republicans a legitimate reason to point fingers at them.

As of now, only the three predictable Republican senators — Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Mitt Romney — have said they will vote for Jackson. I’m particularly disappointed that my former boss, Ohio’s Rob Portman, has said he will not vote for her, despite the fact he is retiring from the Senate and is someone more willing to reach across the aisle than others. But all Senate Republicans are blowing a chance to show some bipartisanship in regard to a Supreme Court seat that is not even changing the ideological balance, and is going to be approved with or without Republican votes. Very sad. If this seat can’t gain bipartisan support — and no, three votes don’t make it truly bipartisan — then no Supreme Court nomination ever will.

Does Kareem forget when he retaliated with punches?

Will Smith’s slap-heard-round-the-world of Chris Rock is still generating buzz. But as I noted last week, there’s not much to be said that wasn’t evident from what simply happened. Rock made a joke that offended Smith’s wife, and Smith marched up and smacked him.

People say that, well, violence is never the answer. Correct. But the reality is, in the real world, the fear of physical retaliation prevents people from saying lots of things, from the inner-city ghettos to the backroads of rural America. Fear — or, let’s say, a healthy respect — for what someone’s father, brother, husband or boyfriend might do to you in retaliation for saying or doing the wrong thing regarding someone’s daughter, sister, wife or girlfriend keeps a lot of people from spouting off something they might otherwise spout off. It’s foolish to pretend that’s not the case.

Smith was wrong on many counts. He was in a showbiz setting with a professional comedian cracking jokes. Everyone in the audience was fair game. It was a bad joke about baldness considering Jada Pinkett Smith’s medical condition, but maybe Rock was unaware. Who knows. Either way, Smith took the spotlight away from everything else that happened at this year’s Oscars. He has apologized and taken other steps. He may pay a steep professional price.

But what’s done is done — and why it was done is pretty obvious. Words can sometimes have consequences in more forms than one, rightly or wrongly.

I thought a rather odd response came from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who wrote a piece saying that Smith “brought back the Toxic Bro ideal of embracing Kobra Kai teachings of ‘might makes right’ and ‘talk is for losers.’ … Young boys—especially Black boys—watching their movie idol not just hit another man over a joke, but then justify it as him being a superhero-like protector, are now much more prone to follow in his childish footsteps.”

I’ve always had a lot of respect for Kareem, but is he forgetting a couple of famous punches he threw during his basketball career? Both happened as retaliation, apparently.

In the first instance, when Kareem played for the Milwaukee Bucks, he nailed the Los Angeles Lakers’ Happy Hairston during the 1972 playoffs. Have a look.

Then, in 1977, playing for the Lakers, he punched Milwaukee Bucks rookie center Kent Benson, after Benson apparently elbowed him in the ribs. Here it is.

That last punch left Kareem with a broken hand, and many think Benson was never the player he could have been after that incident.

As Kareem wrote of Smith, there are other ways he could have responded. Instead, these were cases when Kareem could have written of himself, as he did of Smith, that his young fans “are now much more prone to follow in his childish footsteps.”

Sign up or share this newsletter

Please sign up to receive this newsletter directly into your inbox or, if you are already a subscriber and reading this by email, share with a friend using the convenient button below. Thank you.