Suggestions for improving first debate debacle
After watching the first presidential debacle (it was not a debate), I have suggestions for the debate commissions for the future. Each candidate would be in a separate, soundproof booth with large windows for good visibility. Each booth would have a speaker and microphone. The speaker would allow the candidate to hear what was going on. The moderator would control the microphone. When a candidate had two minutes to speak, the other candidate’s microphone would be off. An addition would be a debate/shout time when both microphones would be on.
DAVID PITTS, ATLANTA
You don’t have to like Trump to see his strengths
Every day, scientists and the medical community announce new COVID-19 updates. Yet with no knowledge of this scourge and no plans in place, President Trump was supposed to attack it head on. Now, with 20/20 hindsight, Joe Biden and his cohorts criticize and undermine all Trump has done, with a laughable line that things would have been different had he/they been in charge. No, they would not. Until a person faces a problem, there’s no accurate prediction. Trump was in the trenches dealing with all the day-to-day problems. Joe Biden is now on the sidelines cheering for a team still in the locker room. You don’t have to like Trump, but you will have to admit that pre-COVID, his track record was stellar. Joe Biden is a career politician whose record reflects a lack of strength and innovation. Trump owes no one. Joe Biden has debts, and he will expect us to join him in the payback.
BARBARA KRASNOFF, ROSWELL
Our faulty two-party system got us to this sad point
Trump is not a committed fascist, although he does have strong authoritarian tendencies. He never should have gotten the job, but thanks to a collapsed two-party system that has decimated our democracy in service to an oligarchy of monopolists, he slipped in the open door. Now we have a rampant pandemic, permanent wealth inequality, a wounded Post Office, hobbled Social Security, courts packed for the next generation with troglodytes, and Trump administration officials inciting civil war. Not to worry, though, the Democrats have a knight in shining armor – a corrupt lifelong corporate stooge ready to challenge Trump in November. It’s as if the Democrats keep choosing a candidate capable of winning the popular vote but vulnerable to losing the electoral college. The Democrats' whole starting lineup are corporatists posing unconvincingly as champions of the working class. Their motto is, “Who else are you going to vote for?” The answer might be, “No one,” and Trump wins by default as many people again decline to vote.
DEAN POIRIER, LILBURN
Trump’s grand hospital departure was bad public policy
The ill-advised premature discharge of President Trump from the hospital was a grave mistake. Trump’s operatic, staged exit – descending grand stairs, taking off his mask, painting an unrealistically rosy picture of his illness, telling the American people to “not be afraid of this virus” – all so, so wrong! Also, do his doctors not realize that a part of his unreal “exuberance” is due to the transient side effect of euphoria induced by the steroid dexamethasone that he has been given? We should be afraid – very, very afraid – of COVID-19 and its unpredictability. More than 200,000 people have died. Trump never mentioned this nor expressed sympathy to the families of the dead. Also, the White House has no clear strategy for contact tracing of the dozens of people around Trump who have been exposed to him the past several weeks. The White House is now a COVID-19 hot spot. It needs to follow CDC guidelines, not sabotage them.
DR. SALPI ADROUNY, JOHNS CREEK
