Yet another post inspired by a Facebook comment. So . . . I’ve put up a couple of articles about the whole Greg Gianforte mess, in which comments are made that now the pro-Trump right is trying to justify the behavior of the newest Republican member of Congress. The violence and vulgarity of the Trump campaign is now spawning further violence and vulgarity. Rush Limbaugh calls Gianforte “manly and brutish.” Laura Ingraham says that the reporter should have been manly enough to fight back. And on and on. What vile, nauseating balderdash!
Periodically I ask myself why I’m continuing to spend the time I do on reading and posting others’ articles or writing my own. After all, most of the time I’m just preaching to the choir, and, as I often say to my husband, no one’s paying me to do this! So why bother? And, as a followup question, Would I be doing this if Hillary Clinton had won?
Back in May, in fact, exactly a year ago tomorrow, Andrew Sullivan wrote an article in New York Magazine titled “Democracies End when They Are Too Democratic,” with the subtitle “America Has Never Been So Ripe for tyranny.” It was a long and erudite piece that was hailed in some circles as a masterpiece, one of the most important articles to be written about the election season thus far. His thesis, as far as I was able to determine, was that when a country becomes splintered into special-interest groups and there is no national unity behind the values of the country that a strongman,
Here we are on the day before the 100th day of the Trump Presidency (or Der Einhundert Tage, as Jonah Goldberg calls it, or perhaps Les Cent Jours, in honor of Trump’s advocacy for Marine Le Pen, or even Один hundnred дней in honor of his [perhaps now somewhat-moderated] affection for all things Putin.)
Despite, or more likely because of, the many words written and spoken about the subject of President Trump’s border wall there’s been a lot of confusion and inconsistent thinking.
