Cagle World

In the wake of every mass killing in this country, politicians do what politicians do, which is to circle their respective wagons and offer solutions that fail to get to the heart of the issue.

I don’t have a dog in the gun control fight. We already have laws on the books that are designed to prevent criminals from possessing firearms. If Congress wants to strengthen those laws and ban so-called assault weapons and/or high capacity magazines, fine. But keep in mind there are plenty of firearms already in circulation.

To be sure, there are immediate steps we can and should take. Author David French, in his column for the Dispatch, made a case red flag laws, which essentially would allow for, within certain parameters, the seizing of weapons of a person who demonstrates he’s a threat to others or himself. It would also prevent the individual from purchasing additional weapons. You would think this is a measure on which everyone could agree. Mass shooters almost always leave a trail. According to police, the Uvalde shooter sent a series of messages: “I’m going to shoot my grandmother,” “I’ve shot my grandmother,” and then: “I’m going to shoot an elementary school,”

In the aftermath of Tuesday’s shooting, much of the political and media attention was devoted to – as it always is – the method of killing rather than to the killer himself. It seems, at the very least, naïve to believe that someone hell bent on mass murder will fail to follow through on his crime if he doesn’t have access to a certain type of firearm. Violent criminals tend to be resourceful. The question is, “Why do mass killings happen?” Looking at how they were carried out or which type of weaponry was used, while not irrelevant, will only get us so far.

I just returned from Germany and Poland where another professor and I took students on what the university calls the Human Dignity tour, in which we examine, among other things, the relationship between the Holocaust as a historical event and modern, contemporary issues related to human life. We toured three concentration camps, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbruck in Germany, and Auschwitz in Poland.

The Nazis used a variety of techniques to kill people including but not limited to firing squads, carbon monoxide, starvation, hanging, and a cyanide-based pesticide call Zyklon B. The evidence, including gas chambers and crematoria still exists, lest anyone need to be reminded of what horrors evil can achieve.

Our discussions with students and our guides organically led not so much to how these murders were committed but why. What leads human beings to have such little regard for their fellow human beings that they are willing to participate in their wholesale slaughter? Some 77 years after the Holocaust, this still seems to be the question of the moment.

The answer begins with the biblical but countercultural assertion that human beings are not inherently good. Anyone who disagrees I would urge to consider the evidence, which can be found in any newspaper. In my case, all I need to do is look in the mirror. In Jeremiah 17:9, the prophet says the heart of man is “deceitful and desperately wicked.” In Romans, Paul reiterates the psalmist when he writes, “There is no one righteous, not even one.”

If we begin with the premise that mankind is flawed and in need of salvation, how does such a premise inform our discussion on mass killings, suicides and violence currently playing out major American cities?

Study after study indicates that young Americans are lonelier than ever. A CDC survey during the height of the pandemic in 2020 found that some 63% of young people, ages 18-24, are suffering significant symptoms of anxiety or depression. Between 2007 and 2018, suicide rates among young people ages 10 to 24 increased by 57%, according to a report by the U.S. Surgeon General.

We don’t know what combination of factors led the Uvalde shooter to commit his terrible crime. We can ban all the weapons we want but unless we commit to making sense of these numbers, and combine that understanding with measures such as red flag laws and enhanced backgrounds checks, we’ll have little chance of intervening before evil and opportunity meet.

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Copyright 2022 Rich Manieri, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Rich Manieri is a Philadelphia-born journalist and author. He is currently a professor of journalism at Asbury University in Kentucky. You can reach him at [email protected].

“You wanna borrow, you gotta pay the man.” Rocky Balboa was right, even way back in Rocky I.

Rocky didn’t break Bob’s thumb like Mr. Gazzo told him. Bob was late on his payments and Gazzo didn’t like it.

“How come you didn’t break this guy’s thumb like I told you?”

“I figure if I break the guy’s thumb he gets laid off and he can’t make the payments…”

“Let me do the figurin’ Rock! Just let me do the figurin’! These guys think we’re running some kind of charity or something.”

Rocky, Philly palooka though he was, had a tender heart. Still, he collected the debt because he understood the deal. Whether you’re borrowing from a loan shark on the docks or from a major lending institution – and the difference is sometimes negligible – a loan is an agreement, a contract.

“You wanna dance, you gotta pay the band,” Rocky reminded the terrified Bob.

President Biden, however, is working his way toward turning the basic principles of borrowing, understood by everyone from the ancient Mesopotamians to South Philly leg breakers, upside down. He wants to cancel student loans on a mass scale. A terrible idea in the presidential pantheon of terrible ideas. He’s already canceled some $17 billion in student loans for 725,000 borrowers through what the White House calls “targeted relief.” But that was clearly just an hors d’oeuvre.

Biden appears to be considering forgiving $10,000 of student debt per borrower. Who will pay for this? We will. And by “we” I mean those of us who paid cash the old fashioned way, or took out loans and paid them back, or who never even attended college. It’s such a bad idea than even Biden himself poo pooed it which, like many other things, he’s apparently forgotten.

“The idea that you go to Penn and you’re paying a total of 70,000 bucks a year and the public should pay for that? I don’t agree,” Biden told New York Times columnist David Brooks in an interview last year. Right, Mr. President. So, what changed?

For starters, Biden’s popularity is plummeting like Wile E. Coyote from a cliff and that little dust cloud you see when he hits the dirt is the Democrats’ fate in the looming midterms unless something changes. In short, Biden needs a win and he appears willing to pursue it through executive action despite rising inflation and a shrinking economy. The timing for this will never be good but it’s difficult to imagine it being much worse.

If there’s any good news, it’s that Biden doesn’t appear prepared – at least not yet – to go as far as socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who wants to forgive all, yes all, $1.7 trillion of student loan debt. The whole scheme seems grossly unconstitutional and illegal.

My family wasn’t wealthy by any stretch but my mother, who never attended college, managed our finances with ruthless efficiency. She operated by one simple axiom – don’t buy anything you can’t afford. She was also loath to take out any loans unless she knew she could pay them back in short order. My parents put my sister and me through college, debt free. There was no magic involved. They sacrificed. There were no expensive vacations or cars. They lived comfortably but simply, always within their means.

So, the Biden administration is effectively saying to people like my mother and millions of others who paid, or are in the process of paying back students loans, “You’ve done pretty well for yourself so we want you to pay back the loans of some strangers, like the kid who borrowed 70,000 bucks a year to go to Penn.”

This is, above everything else, a wealth redistribution scheme straight from the Sherwood Forest School of Economics. And really, Robin Hood and his Merry Men were just a bunch of thieves in silly underwear anyway.

College tuition is too high and has risen at rates that far surpass inflation. Of course, one of the reasons tuition is so high is because virtually anyone can get a loan, regardless of their ability or intention to pay it back. If this sounds familiar it’s because similar loan practices led to the catastrophic burst of the housing bubble in 2008. We tend to learn little from history.

Still, if you’re going to borrow, you gotta pay the man. Rocky understood. So did Bob. I wish the politicians advocating for loan forgiveness in the name of “fairness” understood how unfair it is.

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Copyright 2022 Rich Manieri, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Rich Manieri is a Philadelphia-born journalist and author. He is currently a professor of journalism at Asbury University in Kentucky. You can reach him at [email protected].

I never had the Easter Bunny pegged for a PR flack, but he can now add it to his CV.

Shortly after the White House Easter Egg Roll, the basket-toting Easter Bunny intervened and led President Biden away from a reporter who asked the president about Afghanistan. The funny thing was Biden actually followed the Easter Bunny’s instructions as if it were all perfectly normal. Additional questions on international affairs were referred to the Tooth Fairy.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn) fired off an Easter tweet taking issue with a viral video that showed a Christian worship leader playing his guitar and singing with several other passengers on a commercial flight. It was, after all, Easter Sunday.

“I think my family and I should have a prayer session next time I am on a plane. How do you think it will end?” Omar tweeted.

To answer her question, I predict it would end uneventfully. Omar wasn’t on the flight so I’m not sure why she cares, unless she just objects to anyone publicly celebrating a faith that isn’t hers.

CNN spent $300 million to launch it’s new CNN+ platform which proved to be about as popular as John Wilkes Booth. The network had hoped to attract about 2 million subscribers the first year but signed up a paltry 150,000 before announcing it was pulling the plug. I have an idea for CNN that could solve all of its problems – how about just covering the news?

If you’re going to transport illegal drugs, you need to pay attention to the details, such as making sure you have fuel in your vehicle. A Tennessee woman, who was hauling about 230 pounds of marijuana, ran out of gas on a bridge, which tends to attract the attention of police. When the cops showed up, she advised them not to go inside the vehicle, which also tends to attract the attention of the police. Police did search the vehicle and found enough cannabis to get half of Memphis stoned silly. The woman was promptly arrested.

Actor Johnny Depp is involved in a very public defamation suit against his ex-wife. It’s all very sordid and sad but I don’t care either.

It was inevitable but Major League Baseball players will soon serve as walking billboards. The San Diego Padres are the first team to strike a deal with an advertiser. Motorola will be buying space on uniform sleeves and helmets to advertise its line of cell phones. The bigger story is that Motorola still makes phones.

If you own stock in Netflix, I hope you sold most of it. If you don’t, now might be a good time to buy. Shares are down 25% and the streaming giant is hemorrhaging subscribers – 200,000 last quarter. What happened? For starters, consumers are no longer housebound and other streaming services are gaining traction. Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk believes he knows what’s going on. “The woke mind virus is making Netflix unwatchable,” Musk tweeted. Instead of listening to Musk, Netflix announced it was going to crackdown on password sharing, further endearing itself to already-disgruntled subscribers.

A California woman flipped out on flight attendants, opened the plane’s emergency exit door and slid down the inflatable slide moments before takeoff from Buffalo. She then ran around the tarmac for a bit until police caught her. There’s something about air travel that turns otherwise reasonable people into raving maniacs. It has to be more than surly flight attendants and delays. Maybe travelers will be less grumpy now that a federal judge has struck down the Biden administration’s mask mandate. Maybe not, which dovetails nicely with our final item.

If you were going to become rude and unruly on a commercial airplane, who is the last person on earth you would want to antagonize? Go ahead. I’ll give you a minute. How about Mike Tyson?

Indeed, on a recent JetBlue flight, a passenger sitting behind Tyson made the ill-advised decision to talk trash to the former heavyweight champ. Published reports indicate that, initially, Tyson repeatedly and politely asked the man to stop. He didn’t. What happened next? Take another minute. Yes, Tyson, having had enough, unleashed a restrained combination to this Bozo’s skull. I say restrained because if Tyson really wanted to hurt the guy, he would have disembarked toes up. As it was, he had a few cuts and bruises.

I would like to propose the launching of a new airline specifically for passengers who can’t behave themselves, like the guy behind Tyson and the woman in Buffalo. We can call it “Unruly Air” or something like that. I’m not married to it. But we need capital and leadership. Mr. Musk, are you listening?

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Copyright 2022 Rich Manieri, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Rich Manieri is a Philadelphia-born journalist and author. He is currently a professor of journalism at Asbury University in Kentucky. You can reach him at [email protected].

Sometimes, I catch myself, as I explain to 19 and 20-year-olds what life was like before Al Gore invented the Internet.

“In my day, if you wanted to read an old newspaper, you had to walk over to the library.” I actually said this.

I’ve never said, “I had to walk a mile and a half in the snow to get to school” even though this is technically accurate. There was no school bus in my neighborhood so I legged it.

The point is, I think, every generation believes it has the market cornered on hardship. I can remember my great grandmother, not known for her sunny disposition and optimistic outlook, saying in the 1970s, “This country is going to hell in a handbasket.” I wasn’t sure what she was on about – Vietnam, hippies, clouds. I was about seven at the time and I remember asking my mother, “What’s a handbasket?” I’ve yet to receive a satisfactory answer.

I confess that even a brief scan of any news website today can lead one to despair – war, pandemic, violent crime, chaos, inflation, gas prices. The list goes on but none of this is new.

I can remember – I’m dating myself again – the gas lines of the 1970s. Of course, my father, who drove a Pontiac Bonneville Brougham, which was about the size of Noah’s Ark, was singlehandedly responsible for the fuel shortage in our neighborhood. However, we had no air conditioning in the house so we did our part in balancing the energy consumption scales.

My parents lived through World War II, rationing and air raid drills. Their parents survived the Great Depression, soup lines and 25% unemployment.

Hand wringing over the current state of affairs is understandable, but also unproductive. The question, “What’s wrong with the world?” inevitably directs our focus outward and away from the mirror.

In the early 1900s, the Times of London asked, on its opinion page, “What’s wrong with the world?” Writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton responded, “Dear Sirs: I am. Sincerely, G.K. Chesterton.”

In his full-length treatise not coincidentally titled, “What’s Wrong with the World?” Chesterton takes on a variety of society’s ills – greed, hypocrisy, the impact of secularism, personal responsibility. “Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities,” he wrote.

It was difficult to argue in 1910, as it is today, against the reality that we would rather cast blame for our personal and societal deficiencies on external circumstances rather than acknowledge our own predicament. The Judeo/Christian tradition identifies this predicament as sin. The Bible shows us ourselves and it also shows us a Savior. Yet, we seek salvation in all the wrong places – in our politics, in our possessions, in our status. How much time do we spend on social media, or elsewhere, trying to show the world how wonderful and well-adjusted we are?

It seems to me that I have to acknowledge who and what I am before I begin pointing out society’s flaws and foibles, as much as I am naturally inclined to believe that I’m really a rather loveable fellow and everyone else has a problem.

Robert Murray M’Cheyne, a Scottish minister who died at 29, famously said, “The seed of every sin known to man is in my heart.” A young man only comes to such a realization on his knees.

As a Christian, I’ve undergone a spiritual “before and after.” You might ask, “OK, so you’re a Christian. What’s so great about you?” My answer would be, “Not a thing.” But you didn’t see the “before” version of me and I might be absolutely intolerable today if not for God’s mercy and forgiveness. I might be pretty intolerable anyway, at least if the emails I receive are any indication.

We do have a choice. We can bemoan the struggles of our age or we can realize that we live in flawed, fallen world and that strife and conflict transcend generations. That doesn’t mean we do nothing. We can get involved in a number of ways and on a number of fronts.

For me, the mirror might be a good place to start.

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Copyright 2022 Rich Manieri, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Rich Manieri is a Philadelphia-born journalist and author. He is currently a professor of journalism at Asbury University in Kentucky. You can reach him at [email protected].

The world seemed surprised when Hitler annexed the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in 1938. More surprised when he invaded Poland in 1939 and flabbergasted when he marched into the Soviet Union in 1941.

Never underestimate the ambitions of an evil tyrant.

Perhaps the West thought Vladimir Putin was bluffing about invading Ukraine. If so, the U.S. and its NATO allies are lousy poker players.

History tells us that the only deterrent to evil despots is strength. This is the nature of bullies. Why the Biden administration, and President Biden himself on more than one occasion, told the world, including Putin, that he would not use American force in defense of Ukraine was as baffling as it was irresponsible. Force and the threat of force are two different things.

It is certainly understandable why we would want to do everything possible to stay out of a shooting war with Russia. But saying so out loud amounted to a calligraphed invitation to Putin to move forward.

Think of it this way. If I was in a boxing match but was unable to use my left hand because it was broken, I wouldn’t tell my opponent before the fight, “By the way, I can’t punch with my left hand,” even though I had no intention of using my left.

Even as Ukrainians were dying and fleeing the country, the U.S. and its allies still felt the need to reemphasize their commitment to military passivity.

“We are not going to move into Ukraine, either on the ground or in the airspace,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said earlier this month in Brussels. “We understand the desperation but also believe if we did that we’d end up in something that could end up in a full-fledged war in Europe involving many more countries.”

On March 16, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky begged President Biden to be the “leader of the world.” It’s a shame he had to ask.

Biden responded to Zelensky’s impassioned plea with an additional $800 million in aid, including weaponry, and by calling Putin a “war criminal.” Biden continues to pass on Zelensky’s ask for a NATO-enforced no-fly zone and fighter jets.

We’ve apparently learned nothing from history. The west took a similar posture in the late 1930s and early 1940s, which resulted in “a full-fledged war in Europe involving many more countries.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, knowing the American public didn’t have the appetite for another foreign war, made a political calculation to stay out of it, even while Great Britain was being bombed into oblivion. Prime Minister Winston Churchill begged Roosevelt for help, but to no avail. Roosevelt sent material but stayed out of the fight, until Pearl Harbor forced his hand.

Of course, we have no way of knowing whether Putin would have invaded Ukraine had Biden or our allies taken a harder rhetorical line. He may have. But it’s difficult to imagine that Putin wouldn’t at least have had some pause if he feared reprisal from the west.

Putin saw an opening and he swung hard. He isn’t stupid. Nor do I believe, as some have suggested, he’s crazy or detached from reality. He knows exactly what he’s doing and he’s already told the world why he’s doing it. Let’s not let him off the hook by medicalizing his bad behavior.

If you believe media reports and the U.S. State Department, it’s possible that Putin underestimated both his military wherewithal and the Ukrainians willingness to fight.

If this is true, one could make an argument that if, in fact, the Russian military is in disarray, Putin would be far less inclined to tangle with the U.S. and its NATO allies, even if we took a more aggressive posture in helping Ukraine defend itself.

The humane thing to do is to help a sovereign nation defend itself against an invader who, if victorious, will only feel emboldened to initiate further aggression.

Andrei Kozyrev, former Russian foreign minister, said this week that Putin’s ambitions include all of Eastern Europe, with intent to “attack, to pressure, to intimidate other countries, including members of NATO.”

In response, the first thing the U.S. and NATO should do is believe him.

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Copyright 2022 Rich Manieri, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Rich Manieri is a Philadelphia-born journalist and author. He is currently a professor of journalism at Asbury University in Kentucky. You can reach him at [email protected].

History’s tyrants have at least one thing in common – their willingness to destroy and slaughter anything and anyone who stands in the way of conquest. This is not new. From Genghis Khan to Adolph Hitler to Vladimir Putin, civilization’s greatest monsters have always been able to justify unspeakable atrocities in the name of imperial expansion.

Putin’s rationale for invading Ukraine was especially chilling, given its Hitleresque overtones – denying Ukraine’s right to exist while providing the same sort of fractured justification the world heard from Hitler before he annexed the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Among the differences between then and now is the world is much smaller. Weaponry is far more advanced and information (true or false) can spread internationally within seconds.

Explaining all of this to young people, in my case college students, most of whom were born after 9/11, can be a challenge. Mostly, they ask, “Why? Why is Putin doing this? Why is he killing Ukrainians?” Telling 19-year-olds about Ivan the Terrible or Julius Caesar only satisfies to a point.

There is another answer.

Evil is present in the world and we underestimate its existence at our peril. After all, the devil’s greatest trick is convincing us he doesn’t exist. Thus, the manifestations of evil shouldn’t surprise us.

In the New Testament, in Matthew’s gospel, in chapter 6, Jesus says, “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 7 Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.”

As Christians, we accept this and find comfort because we know the ultimate outcome; in the end, God wins. Death and evil are already in checkmate. In the meantime, we’re not called to a spirit of fear or fatalism so what should be our response?

A good place to start is to turn our gaze away from the tyrant and toward his victims. There is a massive humanitarian crisis unfolding as hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians flee the country for parts unknown. Many who remain are, at this moment, huddled in bomb shelters, without food, water or medical care. Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are fighting and dying. And much of this unfolding human drama is being witnessed live throughout the world.

We need to remind ourselves that what we see is real, more real and potentially combustible than any such conflict in our lifetimes. We don’t know what’s going to happen but we should all be well aware of what can happen.

But there’s work to do. First, we can pray. Pray for the people of Ukraine and for their courageous president. Second, we can look for ways to get involved in a material way via volunteer and financial support. For example, Samaritan’s Purse, a non-profit, international Christian relief organization, has deployed disaster response teams to Poland, Romania and Moldova to receive and help thousands of fleeing Ukrainians who left their homes with nothing more than they could carry. Samaritans Purse typically provides food, clothing, shelter and medical care to victims of disasters, from hurricanes to wars. There are other churches and organizations in Ukraine right now doing what they can to meet the needs of suffering people.

Christians are called to empathy and turning empathy and compassion into affirmative action is both a Christian and patriotic response. As author and Iraq war veteran David French writes, “a healthy patriotism extends our sphere of concern” while an unhealthy nationalism “narrows our focus, leaving us often indifferent to the suffering of others.”

The Bible is replete with passages about empathy. But nowhere will you find empathy described as a virtue we can manufacture or acquire simply by trying a bit harder. The Spirit of God gives us an empathetic heart. That’s not to say a non-Christian can’t show genuine empathy. But Christian empathy comes from Christ and it can turn a self-centered rascal into someone willing to die for someone else.

What can we do for the people of Ukraine? We can pay attention. We can donate to charity and yes, we can pray for them. And we can pray that we will never become indifferent to their or anyone else’s suffering.

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Copyright 2022 Rich Manieri, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Rich Manieri is a Philadelphia-born journalist and author. He is currently a professor of journalism at Asbury University in Kentucky. You can reach him at [email protected].

The longer President Biden lingers in the vicinity of a live microphone, the higher the probability for mischief and yes, entertainment. Given enough time, he may even accidentally recite Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities in its entirety.

I’ve been taken to task recently by Biden supporters and critics of the former president for highlighting Biden’s gaffes and misspeaks, including his calling Fox News White House correspondent, Peter Doocy, a “stupid son of a b—-” in response to a reasonable question about inflation.

It’s interesting that any criticism of Biden inevitably draws an angry comparison to his predecessor.

Trump haters point out, correctly so, that the former president regularly attacked the press, cast the media as his hated adversary and said generally mean and inappropriate things on a fairly regular basis. All true. But unless I missed something, and unfortunately for CNN and MSNBC, Trump isn’t president anymore. When he was, I was highly critical of his inflammatory rhetoric and incessant tweeting. Now, according to Biden’s defenders, the president, who ran on a promise of restoring civility to our discourse and unifying Americans, should be immune to criticism.

“Seriously? Joe Biden at least makes sense when he speaks. Trump was the king of word salad,” read an email I received in response to a column about Biden’s gaffes. And that was the nice part. Later, in the same email, the writer told me to “Shut up!”

By the way, I’ve been told to “Shut up!” before. I’ve also been asked to “Go away!” and to “Drop dead!” So far, I’ve done none of the above though the third is inevitable at some point.

Another emailer, in defending Biden, called me a “worthless idiot” before he got nasty. I responded by offering to have a civil dialogue. He emailed back, “Sorry you’re already on my ‘don’t waste my time’ list; I’m surprised I took the time to write this to you. Nice not knowing you.”

So much for polite, productive discourse.

“I am not joking when I say this, if you are ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot,” Biden said on his first day in office. “On the spot. No ifs, ands or buts.”

If you’re going to preach civility and unity, calling a reporter an S.O.B. in a public forum tends to detract from the message.

Biden isn’t the first president to call a reporter a name. I’ve been around politicians who have called reporters much worse, though not in front of a live microphone and running camera. I’ve been called worse myself by public officials and private citizens alike. It kind of comes with the territory. If your criteria for job satisfaction is, as George Costanza declared, “I must be liked!” journalism probably isn’t for you.

I do wonder why it is so difficult to have adult conversations about important issues on which we might disagree without hurling insults at one another. Constructive debates used to be a staple of polite society and even major news outlets. CNN had Evans and Novack. Fox had Hannity and Colmes and 60 Minutes had its “Point/Counterpoint” segment, all programs featuring representatives from the political left and right. Just debate. No yelling or name calling. These programs now stand out in sharp contrast to the agenda-driven advocacy and/or shouting matches currently featured on cable news.

If we’re honest, I don’t think we’re all that interested in civility. Civility requires empathy but it’s difficult to empathize if we refuse to listen. And if we were really interested, we’d be more intentional about listening. We’d rather be “right” than kind.

If we’re looking to politicians to restore civility we’re likely to be very disappointed. Sure, they’ll talk about it because it works nicely in a stump speech. But being civil only until someone disagrees with or annoys you doesn’t indicate a genuine commitment to productive discourse. It’s in those moments when we discover how committed we really are.

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Copyright 2022 Rich Manieri, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Rich Manieri is a Philadelphia-born journalist and author. He is currently a professor of journalism at Asbury University in Kentucky. You can reach him at [email protected].

Misspeaking requires some knowledge of what you’re saying. For example, if you meant to order a Diet Coke but ordered a regular Coke because you didn’t specify “diet,” you would have realized, either at that moment or, when you took your first sip, that you misspoke.

In a particularly divisive, Jan. 11 voting rights speech that was mostly awful for a number of reasons, President Joe Biden again referred to Vice President Kamala Harris as “President Harris.” It’s at least the fourth time Biden has unknowingly elevated the vice president.

I’m not sure if anyone has checked the Constitution to see if there’s some obscure provision which automatically promotes the vice president if a sitting president has called the VP “president” a certain number of times. If there is, we must be getting close.

The Biden camp pretends not to notice the error and simply changes the text when publishing the speech transcript. The worrisome thing is I don’t know if Biden notices.

Much like Ron Burgundy, the president will say whatever is in the teleprompter, i.e. his “end of message” regurgitation at the end of speeches, the most recent and unfortunate of which occurred at the end of his eulogy of Sen. Bob Dole.

In my career, I’ve read from a teleprompter and I’ve written a fair amount of speeches.

I can honestly say I never said anything while reading a prompter that wasn’t meant to be spoken. Sure, I stumbled or messed up words, but I never uttered “end” or “pause” or “take package” – all terms that are or were common in a TV news script. I never said any of those things not because I was a genius but because I knew what I was supposed to be saying. I suppose some writer could have slipped “You stink!” in a script to really test me but, thankfully, it never happened.

Biden, at times, will freestyle during speeches. There’s nothing more soul-crushing for a speech writer than to watch his or her boss meander off script and wind up in a rabbit hole from which there is no graceful escape. If the president’s speech writers aren’t tranquilized, they must each be sporting a blood pressure cuff.

Biden isn’t the first president to butcher a speech, make a mistake, say something stupid or outrageous. (See also Trump, Donald.)

True, Biden and Trump are prolific, but they’re not alone.

President Warren G. Harding said, “Oftentimes, I don’t seem to grasp that I am president.” Gerald Ford reflected, “If Abraham Lincoln was alive today, he’d roll over in his grave.” Barack Obama said there were 57 states.

Some, like Biden, are gaffe-prone. Others are masters of malaprop. George W. Bush said his opponents “misunderestimated” him.

The point is presidents are human and fallible. But it’s reasonable to expect that a president should at least know what he’s supposed to be saying.

Biden has had held fewer news conferences and fewer media interviews at this point in his presidency than his five predecessors. As the Associated Press recently pointed out, Biden has held nine news conferences. At this point, Barack Obama had held 27, Donald Trump 22.

There’s a reason for this. In fact, there can be only one – Biden’s handlers don’t trust the president enough to expose him to questions. Why? They’re afraid of what he might say. Because he often appears disoriented, inappropriately angry, confused and tired.

A Politico poll in the fall showed that almost half of Americans were concerned about Biden’s cognition. For some reason, Biden, unlike Trump, didn’t undergo a cognitive test during his annual exam. There’s a reason for that too, only one – his advisers don’t want the results. Otherwise, he would take the test, if for no other reason than to put Americans’ minds at ease.

This need not be a partisan issue. The American people – Republicans and Democrats alike –need to know that their president, whether they voted for him or not, is functioning on all cylinders. This is a serious issue that needs to be addressed.

End of message.

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Copyright 2022 Rich Manieri, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Rich Manieri is a Philadelphia-born journalist and author. He is currently a professor of journalism at Asbury University in Kentucky. You can reach him at [email protected].

Back by lukewarm demand, for all of you Festivus enthusiasts, it’s time for the annual airing of grievances. Let’s get right to it. I have to get back to training for the feats of strength.

For Jussie Smollett and anyone else contemplating staging a hate crime, you really need to do better. Maybe he thought his story was so unbelievable, so fantastical, so implausible, that the public would have to believe it. But no one was buying Jussie’s fable of being attacked in the wee hours of the morning, on his way home from an egg run in Chicago of all things, by two MAGA-hat wearing white guys shouting, “This is MAGA country!” Chicago is a lot of things. MAGA country isn’t one of them. And who goes out to buy eggs at 2 a.m.? People who work third shift and vampires. That’s it.

If you haven’t heard, there’s a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania who’s dominating the Ivy League and tearing up the competition. Most recently, Lia Thomas, a transgender female and formerly Will Thomas, a biological male, set two school freestyle records and broke a national record in the 500-yard freestyle earlier this month. For the university, this is reason to celebrate. “Lia Thomas delivered another record-breaking performance…” Penn announced, rejoicing in its progressiveness. For two years, Thomas had competed for the men’s team with middling results.

Just a couple of years ago, concerns about what would happen when the trans movement hit college sports were dismissed as bigoted and transphobic. They were neither. There were, however, legitimate issues raised about how allowing trans athletes to compete would impact the future of women’s sports. Now we know, or at least we’re beginning to.

In an age when virtually anyone, as long as you’re a billionaire or celebrity, can be launched into space, do motorists still need to hold their phones while talking and driving? Stop. You’re navigating a 2000-pound projectile and you’re driving like an idiot. Please, stop.

For those of you who still frequent an actual post office, a word of advice, as delicately and sensitively as I am able to deliver. Do your business and get out. I’ve never spent more than 90 seconds in any postal transaction. But for some reason, the person in front of me is invariably engaged in some complicated negotiation that involves the manager and other officer personnel trying to figure out how to send a cooler containing a human liver to a cave in Pakistan. All I want are some stamps with birds on them.

There’s nothing new about plug-in headphones. I once used plug-in headphones and a transistor radio to listen to a football game while my parents forced me to sit through a live performance of the Nutcracker. Unfortunately, reception in the Academy of Music in Philadelphia was not good. Thus, I missed the most famous play in the history of NFL football – the “Immaculate Reception” by the Steelers’ Franco Harris against the Oakland Raiders. And no, I still haven’t gotten over it. The point is, Philistine though I was, I didn’t subject the other patrons of the arts to my game, or static as was actually the case. Today there are all sorts of headphone options. If you want to watch the Tiger King sequel or the latest episode of The Bachelorette, that’s between you and God. But I don’t have to hear it.

Here’s one for the media. Not everything is “breaking news.” Now that I’ve dated myself in the previous grievance, I can say that I’m old enough to remember when terms like “breaking news” and “special report” actually meant something. Today, everything is breaking. The president having a scheduled press briefing is not breaking news. On the other hand, if he unexpectedly breaks into a verse of “Being Alive,” that’s “breaking news.” If everything is “breaking” and “special” then nothing is.

Why are flight attendants still so concerned that my seat is in the upright and locked position? If the plane goes down, having my seat reclined two inches will not be among my primary concerns. I thought they’d have more to worry about with unruly passengers and masks, and unruly passengers refusing to wear masks. Speaking of which, after feeding us snacks and drinks on a recent flight, the flight attendant came over the intercom and said, “A reminder. You need to keep your masks on even while eating and drinking. Pull your mask up in between bites and sips.” As I was sitting in my seat thinking about how stupid this is, it came to me that this might be the greatest barrier to overeating ever devised. The “mask diet.” Just in time for the holidays.

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Copyright 2021 Rich Manieri, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Rich Manieri is a Philadelphia-born journalist and author. He is currently a professor of journalism at Asbury University in Kentucky. You can reach him at [email protected].

I’ve never been fired from a job, which I’m sure will now trigger calls from a portion of the readership for my immediate ouster.

Anyway, I’ve quit several jobs but was never fired. I attribute this largely to my ability to make myself useful. Early in my TV news reporting career, I’d volunteer for any job, whether I knew how to do it or not. Call it misguided confidence.

“We need someone to do weather tonight,” declared my first news director.

“I’ll do it!”

“Great. You’ve got an hour to get ready.”

Of course, I had no idea what I was doing but I was confident – clueless but confident – that I would figure it out, which I eventually did. However, I am thankful that no one has ever unearthed tapes of my earliest weather segments, which I hope have been burned, the ashes scattered to the four winds.

Another reason why I’ve avoided the security escort to the parking lot is that I’ve never done anything to warrant getting fired, which, as we all know, isn’t necessarily a guarantee of employment but it helps. All of this leads me to query the folks who run CNN. What are grounds for dismissal at the Cable News Network?

I’m not calling for anyone to be fired. I’m just asking.

I asked myself this question as CNN’s Anderson Cooper transitioned from a discussion with Jeffrey Toobin, the network’s top legal analyst, to a story about the suspension of CNN’s Chris Cuomo.

Perhaps the better question is what won’t get you fired at CNN? We already have a few answers.

There was Toobin, back on the air as if nothing had ever happened. Perhaps CNN execs figured if they kept him out of sight long enough – which they did for about nine months after “the incident” – they could slide him back in there and he could pick up where he left off, with the legal analysis I mean, not the…well…just google it. The best I can do here in terms of providing context is borrow the Seinfeld euphemism. You might remember that Toobin revealed, in a Zoom session of all things, that he was not “master of his domain.”

If this doesn’t get you canned at CNN, the suspension of Chris Cuomo makes perfect sense. Cuomo committed journalistic malpractice by using his influence and sources to help his embattled brother, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who is facing sexual harassment allegations. It’s one of the more spectacular conflicts of interest in recent journalistic history. Yet, Cuomo was given what amounts to a long vacation. His bosses are relying on the public and media’s short attention span and figure that, eventually, most everyone will be distracted by another shiny thing, forget, lose interest, or all of the above. Then, Cuomo will reappear. I don’t know that they’re wrong.

Still, given this background, I would like to go to work for CNN, at least for a while, just to see what I can get away with. It would be a sort of social experiment. Not that CNN would ever hire me of course but just in case, I have a few ideas.

For starters, I will microwave salmon and cabbage every day for lunch.

I will install a chain-link fence around my cubicle.

I will nap every day at 3 p.m.

I will spend at least 30 minutes of each day staring off into the distance.

I could go on but one might argue that if we’re doing the equivalency thing here, no matter how exhaustive my list of atrocities, it wouldn’t come close to rivaling the behavior of Toobin or Cuomo. Sure, I would be the most annoying employee ever, but I wouldn’t have compromised my or the network’s credibility and I certainly wouldn’t have…well…you know…show such a horrific lack of self-control during a Zoom session.

Chris Cuomo himself has been accused by a TV producer of sexual harassment. He also lied to viewers about his involvement in his brother’s scandals. Not since George Constanza smeared strawberries on Babe Ruth’s jersey has a man done more to get fired and still kept his job.

I’m a believer in forgiveness. We all need it. But there are practical consequences of bad behavior, or at least there should be. That’s called justice. Once we’ve cracked the eggs, we can’t put them back together. Unless, of course, you work for CNN and you can just make an omelet.

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Copyright 2021 Rich Manieri, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Rich Manieri is a Philadelphia-born journalist and author. He is currently a professor of journalism at Asbury University in Kentucky. You can reach him at [email protected].