You have seen and heard the video and audio mashups this week of the President calling for; people to be carried out of campaign rally venues on stretchers, to be punched in the face and excuses being made for the murder of an international journalist. Columnist, bloggers, and teens lying on their beds with Facebook diaries have made jokes and written enough words about the mismanagement of the country’s morals by the current President of the United States, to fill a 1960 set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
We have tried to laugh our way through the Trump Presidency because we have all dreaded the natural progression that brought us to today. A gun-wielding hate-filled devotee of violent anti-Semitism and racial animus shot and killed innocents at a synagogue in Pittsburg this morning. Republicans tip-toe around saying the President has set the tone for the current rise in hatred. They choke on their own words searching for ways to draw a false equivalency between a President who has the biggest megaphone and underlings and opponents who make benign statements in retaliation. There is no comparison between Donald Trump and Congresswoman Maxine Waters. I am sorry but Rep. Waters asking you to interrupt someone’s dinner and the President offering to pay the legal bills of someone who physically assaults a dissenter is entirely different.
I am fully willing to admit that the President cannot be held responsible for the insanity of some of his followers, but he can be held responsible for goading them into making threatening gestures at reporters and chanting themselves into an irrational fervor. The President likes the word “mobs” but were he to have any self- awareness and looked over the crowds that attend his rallies, with something other than self-aggrandizement, he would see a mob. Of course, we know the President has had trouble distinguishing the size and temperament of crowds from day one of his Presidency.
Predictably as he stood on the tarmac on his way to meet with a farming group, his response was to meet violence with escalated violence. When asked about gun control, he thought or rolled the dice against the wall of his head for a political answer and blurted out, guns in churches and synagogues is the answer; CRAPS!
The people who are betting on a cogent response to the tragedies we face by Mr. Trump may as well burn their money, that will always be a losing wager. His followers confuse political gain with winning but ignore the concept of a Pyrrhic victory. For those of you who read the Bible, I think the comparable passage would be, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” We are entering territory where collectively we are now condoning murder, the mailing of bombs, the degradation of women and if the Honduran women and children making their way to the United States are gunned down, conservatives would shrug their shoulders.
Had the recent mad bomber been a better assembler or a competent mechanic we would have had the worse multiple political assassination events in America’s history. No cries of false flags or false equivalency will fix it, VOTING WILL!
Vote November 6th for Change.