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THE MISSOURIAN

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 2020

Opinions&Commentary

7C

When Will Democratic Caucuses Be?
To The Editor:
There were about 75
column inches of various
sizes in the March 7 paper about the presidential preference election.
Monte Miller did a very
good job of covering it
from almost every angle
. . . especially the part

about what happens to
votes for candidates who
have dropped out, votes
from absentees, and people who vote for those
candidates.
He mentions the Democratic congressional county caucuses, but never
says where or when

those are held. I’m not
a party operative, but
as someone who voted
absentee before my candidate suspended, that
would have been good
information to have
had.
Jo Schaper
Pacific

Governments Coordinating to Handle Coronavirus
Coronavirus is obviously a huge topic in
the news, so I wanted
to let my constituents
know that the state and
federal
governments
are taking this situation seriously. Recently, I was briefed on the
state’s readiness, and
I can say that I have a
great deal of confidence
in the governor and the
team he has in place to
deal with coronavirus.
The governor has directed the Department
of Health and Senior
Services (DHSS) and
the State Emergency
Management
Agency
(SEMA) to coordinate
with federal efforts that
are being headed up by
the vice president.
DHSS has been taking steps to prepare for
coronavirus since Jan.
27, and the governor began receiving updates
shortly after.
Coronavirus, or COVID-19, is a new virus
strain. At the moment,
it is hard to know exactly what to expect, but

there are some things we
know about coronavirus.
According to DHSS, COVID-19 spreads like the
flu and may be spread
by coughing, sneezing,
personal contact and
by touch. The severity of coronavirus can
range from mild, coldlike symptoms to severe
pneumonia that requires
hospitalization.
It is important to
note that coronavirus,
like normal influenza,
seems particularly dangerous for the elderly
and for people with
pre-existing respiratory
problems.
Currently,
there are no vaccines
for this virus strain,
and treatment options
are limited. DHSS believes most people with
mild coronavirus will
recover on their own by
drinking plenty of fluids
and resting. Some cases
that develop pneumonia as a result of coronavirus may require
medical care or hospitalization.
According to DHSS,

prevention methods
to avoid coronavirus
include:
• Wash your hands
often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds
• Avoid
touching
your eyes, nose or mouth
with unwashed hands
• Avoid close contact
with people who are sick
• Avoid close contact
with others
• Cover your mouth
and nose with a tissue when you cough or
sneeze, then throw the
tissue in the trash and
wash your hands
• Clean and disinfect
objects and surfaces
More
information
about coronavirus, its
spread, information for
health care providers
and the government’s
response can be found
on DHSS’ website.
Please do not hesitate to contact my office
at (573) 751-3678 or by
email at dave.schatz@
senate.mo.gov if you
have any questions or
concerns.

Nukes: The Unmentionable Election Issue
By Mel Gurtov
One of these days,
national security policy
will get a few minutes
of campaign debate
time. And when that
day occurs, perhaps —
just perhaps — attention will turn to a matter of some urgency: the
continuing threat posed
by nuclear weapons.
As both the US and
Russia pursue MADness (mutually assured
destruction) with steep
investments in nuclear
weapons, they use the
same distorted logic to
justify them that has
been used throughout
the nuclear age.
The fundamental issue with nuclear weapons at this moment is
that, as happened in
the Reagan era, a U.S.
administration is playing with the idea of
having usable nukes
for a variety of conflicts,
non-nuclear as well as
nuclear. This comes as
no surprise, since the
administration’s
Nuclear Posture Review
in 2018 previewed just
such a strategy.
Among the specific
purposes of nuclear
weapons, the NPR
states, are to hedge
against the potential
rapid growth or emergence of nuclear and
non-nuclear
strategic threats, including
chemical,
biological,
cyber, and large-scale
conventional
aggression. ... the United
States will enhance the
flexibility and range of
its tailored deterrence
options. … Expanding
flexible U.S. nuclear
options now, to include
low-yield options, is
important for the preservation of credible
deterrence against regional aggression.
A c c o r d i n g l y,
Trump’s defense department announced
last month that a
new, “low-yield” nuclear warhead for
submarines will be
deployed, supposedly

in order to make deterrence of a nuclear
attack more credible.
It is not as though
the U.S.’s ability to
deter attack has been
weakened. Its current stock of nuclear
weapons and delivery vehicles remains
more than adequate to
deter any adversary.
The total U.S. nuclear
weapon inventory is
about 5,800 warheads,
of which about 1,750
are deployed — about
900 on submarines,
which are invulnerable, and 400 on landbased intercontinental
ballistic missiles. The
remaining 2,000 or so
warheads are stored at
more than 20 sites in
the U.S. and Europe.
As for launchers, under Trump new generations of strategic bombers, ballistic missile
submarines, and missiles are in research or
production. Overkill,
in short, has acquired
a new life.
Needless, Destabilizing
The history of planning for nuclear weapons tells us that the
introduction of a new
weapon is inherently
destabilizing; it makes
actual use more rather
than less likely, because it introduces
greater
uncertainty
than before about the
other side’s intentions.
Nuclear war due to
a miscalculation, accidental use, or false
alarm becomes an increased possibility, and
deterrence
becomes
more a matter of guesswork than ever. The
idea that a Russian
leader, for example,
would believe the
United States would
not respond if it
initiated use of a
“low-yield” nuclear
weapon rather than
some blockbuster is
absurd.
As a group of former
officials, including Secretary of State George
Shultz and Secretary
of Defense William

Perry, wrote in The
Wall Street Journal in
2019:
We write to respectfully request that Congress reject the Trump
administration’s
request for new, more usable, “low-yield” nuclear
warheads for Trident
[submarine]
missiles.
There is no need for
such weapons and building them would make
the United States less
safe. These so-called
“low-yield” weapons are
a gateway to nuclear
catastrophe and should
not be pursued.
Presidential candidates should also be
drawing attention to
the costs of modernizing the nuclear arsenal.
As three experienced
analysts point out, the
defense department’s
“projected expenditures
on nuclear weapons
for the period 2025-34
are at a level that was
exceeded only twice
during the Cold War,”
meaning over $400 billion (Physics Today,
April 2018). The major
corporations that produce the weapons benefit from enormous investments.
According to one report from PAX, a Netherlands peace group:
When examining the
top companies involved
in the nuclear weapon
industry, we found over
748 billion USD invested in these companies
by 325 financial institutions between January 2017 and January
2019. This reflects investments in the top
18 nuclear weapon producing companies.
In a word, nuclear
weapons are big business, and so long as
“deterrence” dominates
discussion, companies
that invest in them will
always thrive.
***
Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice,
is Professor Emeritus
of Political Science at
Portland State University and blogs at In the
Human Interest.

• Continued From Page 6C

in that manner on cases
before the court.
Schumer faced immediate criticism for
his remarks, even from
some Democrats. Chief
Justice John Roberts
and the court issued
this statement: “Justices know that criticism comes with the
territory, but threatening statements of this
sort from the highest
levels of government
are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous. All members of
the court will continue
to do their job, without fear or favor, from
whatever quarter.”
The statements were

Williams

unbecoming from the
minority leader in the
Senate.
Schumer lost little
time in backing away
from his remarks. He
denied he was making
a threat and said he
shouldn’t have used the
words he did. Schumer
said he was from Brooklyn and “we speak in
strong language.” That’s
a grade school response!
The American Bar
Association said the
legal organization was
“deeply troubled” by
Schumer’s remarks.
Schumer was defended by several top
Democrats.
The president also has
• Continued From Page 6C

legislators reaching into their own
pockets to pay for the service. That
means that in order for government
to provide medical services to someone who cannot afford it, it must
use intimidation, threats and
coercion to take the earnings
of another American to provide
that service.
Let’s apply this bogus concept
of rights to my right to speak and
travel freely. In the case of my right
to free speech, it might impose obligations on others to supply me with
an auditorium, microphone and audience. It may require newspapers
or television stations to allow me
to use their property to express my
views.
My right to travel freely might
require that others provide me
with resources to purchase airplane
tickets and hotel accommodations.
What if I were to demand that others make sacrifices so that I can
exercise my free speech and travel
rights, I suspect that most Americans would say, “Williams, you have
rights to free speech and you have
a right to travel freely, but I’m not
obligated to pay for them!”
A moral vision of rights does not
mean that we should not help our
fellow man in need. It means that
helping with health care needs
to be voluntary (i.e., free market

Buchanan
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in his
war to crush Houthi rebels
who had ousted Riyadh’s
resident puppet in Yemen.
And what has the
West reaped from our
Mideast wars?
In Syria and Yemen, we
have helped to create two of
the world’s greatest human
rights disasters. In Libya,
we have a new civil war. In
Iraq, we now battle Iran for
influence inside a nation
we “liberated” in 2003
In Afghanistan, we have
concluded a deal with our
enemy of two decades, the
Taliban, that will enable
us to pull our 12,000 troops
out of the country in 14
months and let our Afghan
allies work it out, or fight
it out, with the Taliban.
America is washing its
hands of its longest war.
In five wars over 20
years, we lost 7,000 soldiers with some 40,000
wounded. We plunged the
wealth of an empire into
these wars.
And what did these
wars produce for the peoples we went to aid and
uplift, besides hundreds
of thousands of dead Afghans and Arabs and

criticized members of the
court, especially Justices
Sonia Sotomayor and
Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
President Trump said
the two justices should
recuse themselves from
any cases involving him
because of alleged bias.
The attack mode
practices by some politicians need to be toned
down. They belittle
them personally and
are unbecoming for the
public office they hold.
We’d like to become
optimistic about civility prevailing in politics and in dealing with
each other but being a
realist, we don’t see it
happening.

decisions or voluntary donations to charities that provide
health care.) The government’s
role in health care is to protect this
individual right to choose. As Sen.
Rand Paul was brave enough to
say, “The basic assumption that you
have a right to get something from
somebody else means you have to
endorse the concept of theft.”
Statists go further to claim that
people have a “right” to housing, to
a job, to an education, to an affordable wage. These so-called rights
impose burdens on others in the
form of involuntary servitude. If
one person has a right to something
he did not earn, it means that another person does not have a right
to something he did earn.
The provision by the U.S. Congress of a so-called right to health
care should offend any sense of
moral decency. If you’re a Christian
or a Jew, you should be against the
notion of one American living at the
expense of another. When God gave
Moses the Eighth Commandment —
“Thou shalt not steal” — I am sure
that He did not mean, “Thou shalt
not steal — unless there is a majority vote in the U.S. Congress.”
***
To find out more about Williams,
visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

• Continued From Page 6C

millions of people uprooted from their homes and
driven into exile?
Now, Europe is being admonished by the
FT that, having done its
duty by plunging into the
Mideast, the continent
has a new moral duty
to take in the refugees
the wars created, for
decades to come.
But if the EU opens
its doors to an endless
stream of Africans and
Arabs, where is the evidence that European nations will accept and assimilate them?
Will these migrants and
asylum seekers become
good Europeans? Or will
they create in the great cities of Europe enclaves that
replicate the conditions
in the African and Middle
East countries whence
they came?
The history of the
last half millennium
tells the story of the rise
and fall of a civilization.
In the 16th, 17th and
18th centuries, Spain,
Britain, France and Portugal, and then Belgium, Italy, Germany and America,
all believing in the superiority of their civilization,

went out into the world
to create empires to uplift
and rule what Rudyard
Kipling derisively called
“the lesser breeds without
the law.”
After two world wars,
the rulers of these empires
embraced a liberalism that
now proclaimed the equality of all peoples, races,
creeds, cultures and civilizations. This egalitarian
ideology mandated the dismantling of empires and
colonies as the reactionary
relics of a benighted time.
Now the peoples of the
new nations, dissatisfied
with what their liberated
lands and rulers have
produced, have decided
to come to Europe to
enjoy in the West what
they cannot replicate
at home. And liberalism,
the ideology of Western
suicide, dictates to Europe
that it take them in — for
decades to come.
The colonizers of yesterday are becoming the colonized of tomorrow. Is this
how the West ends?
***
To find out more about
Buchanan, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.