The days are becoming noticeably shorter and the sun is not as intense as it was just a few weeks ago. Combined with the cooler temperatures that arrived this week, the inevitability of the end of summer cannot be denied.
On the bright side however, the Labor Day weekend is more than four weeks away, which means that there still is plenty of time to create memories with our friends and family members that will last a lifetime.
So our message is simple: Let’s use these next few weeks to make the most of the Summer of 2023!
Sinead O’Connor was a profile in courage
When the late Sinead O’Connor tore up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live after her acapella performance of Bob Marley’s “War” in 1992, the full extent of the Catholic Church’s complicity in facilitating widespread child-molestation was not fully known.
Here in the Boston area, the predations of the former priest from Revere, James Porter, who molested hundreds of Boston-area children with the full knowledge of Church officials (who had simply reassigned him to different parishes where he continued to molest more and more children) had just come to light.
Church officials assured their members that Porter was just an aberration. But a decade later, when the Boston Globe Spotlight team unveiled the full picture of the Church’s misdeeds and coverups, it became clear that Porter was just the tip of the iceberg, not only in Boston, but throughout the world.
Though O’Connor, who herself had been a victim of child abuse (though not by the church), destroyed her career with her outspokenness on that Saturday Night Libe appearance, the courage she displayed with that performance will far outlive her musical legacy.
Why DeSantis doesn’t have a prayer against Trump
For anyone who has even a passing interest in presidential politics right now, initially it may seem perplexing that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is getting clobbered in the polls by former President Donald Trump.
While it may be true that DeSantis has shot himself in the foot time and time again with his views about any number of issues that are so far Right that even the most conservative Republicans are bewildered by what he says (the most recent example being his support for teaching Florida school children that slavery may have benefited slaves), the real reason why he is trailing Trump by double-digits — and that margin is growing larger (even in Florida) — is that DeSantis is nothing more than just another politician.
From the moment that he rode down that escalator in Trump Tower, the big allure of Donald Trump (for his base of supporters) is that he is anything but a typical politician. His campaign rallies and rambling speeches do not follow anything close to a traditional political script.
For his opponents, particularly DeSantis, trying to outthink or outwit Donald Trump is a fool’s errand. Trump doesn’t play by the rules, which not only has proven bad for the country-at-large (January 6), but also means that he is not constrained by the conventions of politics-as-usual. It’s not so much that Trump is playing 3-dimensional chess, but that he flips over the board whenever he feels threatened.
In addition, DeSantis faces the conundrum that by accepting Trump’s pretext that the 2020 election was stolen from him, he cannot claim that Trump is a loser. In short, he has swallowed Trump’s bait — hook, line, and sinker.
The bottom line is that to Trump voters, Ron DeSantis sounds just like any other politician on the campaign stump. There’s nothing about him that is even remotely appealing to the GOP base (or anyone else, for that matter), not to mention that DeSantis has an intensely dislikable personality that makes him seem to be talking down to his audience.
Trump may be a con man — but both he and his supporters know it and even embrace it.
As for DeSantis, he is as appealing a candidate as Joe Biden — which is the biggest insult you can toss at any GOP politician.