Through Biden’s 100th day in office, according to the WashingtonPost’s analysis of every speech, interview, tweet or public statement, he made 78 false or misleading statements. This compares to 492 during Trump’s first 100 days, followed by his record total of 30,573 documented falsehoods and lies.
A recent letter to the Forum (“The lying hasn’t stopped, Jan. 30”) tried to counter these totals with vague assertions from the GOP’s handbook that famously contains few or no facts.
When anyone mentions that our 45th president uttered 30,573 lies during his term in office, it’s not an allegation, as the letter claims: the count is a fact, well-documented and accepted by all the major news organizations.
We’re all aware that everyone in politics — or, likely, everyone, everywhere — tells untruths in some number, but never, ever, in the volume racked up by Trump. Even Barack Obama, my political hero and a historically fine role model for a national leader, uttered some claims and promises that turned out to be hollow, but likely fewer in a year than by Trump in a day. The letter writer “believes”that Biden is more untruthful than Trump, claims the media are giving Biden and Harris a pass and asserts that political fact-checking stopped after Trump lost and that even a deeply flawed human “can do many good things for America.”
But the most extreme pot/kettle claim is that the political careers of Biden and Harris are characterized by “immorality, lies and deception, including possible extramarital affairs (plural!), plagiarism and “living a lie every day.”
Now I ask, who comes to mind from that description?
Michael Whitman
Lyme
One reads about having a “school resource officer” or “social worker” as a necessary way to help kids. But the schools already have that staff! In my long teaching career, it became evident early that kids talk to the custodial staff, the office staff, the cafeteria people and sometimes even to the nurse. Those people have been there longer than most teachers.
They are part of the local community and they know what’s going on. In the schools where I taught, they directed kids to help, informed those who should know if a kid was in difficulty and spent a large part of their days helping kids along with their “regular jobs.”
The schools have the people they need, but the schools need to recognize their worth — and maybe even pay them more!
Susan Brown
Enfield
Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this letter misrepresented the writer’s views. A revised version is printed below.
Kudos to Jim Kenyon for his Jan. 31 story, “Who was Jason Moots?” and thanks to the paper for investing in it and for placing it so prominently.
Like many Norwich residents, I’m in Dan & Whit’s more than once on most days, and I expect I saw Jason behind the deli counter hundreds of times. I was saddened to learn of his passing and the circumstances surrounding it in particular — shocked though not surprised, perhaps — as overdose deaths and deaths of despair in general have increased during the pandemic, along with homelessness. As it’s said, the sick are more likely to be poor, and the poor are more likely to be sick.
Kenyon notes that he can’t help wonder if Moots’ legal troubles contributed to his mental health and substance use problems, and that’s certainly a reasonable expectation. It seems worth acknowledging that mental health and harmful substance use problems contribute to our nation’s legal burdens as well. The knee bone is connected to the hip bone, as it were.
So what to do? The most significant open secret I’ve encountered is that mental health care in general — and addiction medicine in particular — is segregated from the rest of medical care in the U.S. And the results speak for themselves: A RAND Corporation study from 2005 (McGlynn et al.) revealed that though the odds of U.S. adults getting appropriate treatment for health care issues in general was about one in two, for those with an alcohol use disorder the odds were one in ten. Separate but equal is, in fact, unequal.
The Science of Health Care Delivery is being created at Dartmouth (or was — I’ve lost track of that. Certainly it’s being studied and taught, in the Master of Health Care Delivery Science program). It seems like there’s a great opportunity to begin the end of the segregation of mental health care from the rest of medicine, right here, right now. Sadly it’s too late to benefit Jason Moots, but it’s not too late to help the roughly 10% of Americans who have or will develop a substance use disorder.
Chris Weinmann
Norwich