So now they call him ‘unhinged’?
Historians in the future will ask why it took the ‘serious guys’ in the race for the Republican nomination for President in 2016 so long to call out Donald Trump for the foppish buffoon he has become during the campaign for their party’s nomination!
Most Democrats, Independents, and thinking Republicans long ago accepted that this strange, egomaniacal thug and bully was damaging the Republican brand to wide swaths of potential general election voters.
The sad truth is Donald Trump running as our nation’s Chief Executive has been akin to Bozo the Clown, makeup still on, attempting to portray Hamlet on stage at the Old Vic in London.
This past week former Governor Jeb Bush (R-FL.) jumped all over Trumps ludicrous, mean spirited, and unconstitutional ‘ban all Muslims’ tirade, correctly labelling it, as noted above, as “unhinged’’.
US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) tweeted, “Trump has gone from making absurd comments to being downright dangerous with his bombastic rhetoric” while Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ), added, “this is the kind of thing people say when they have no experience and don’t know what they are talking about.”
Perhaps most startling of all was the statement offered by former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, considered by many observers to have been frequently unhinged himself in the past.
Cheney, long acknowledged as the ‘Darth Vader’ of the Bush 43 administration, called out ‘the Donald’ commenting, “Well I think this whole notion that somehow we need to say no more Muslims and just ban a whole religion goes against everything (the U.S.) stands for and believe in.”
The sad truth is that even Donald Trump must give himself pause when he realizes that when crazy Dick Cheney calls you out as being crazy, then you must really be crazy!
The truth is Donald Trump never was going to be President of the United States, even before this latest case of ‘foot in mouth’ disease.
That said, what actually ought to give the sane amongst us pause is how deep into the campaign cycle Trump penetrated before he finally appears to have self-emulated.
His list of his insults, half-truths, missteps, and lies will fill volumes of campaign book pages once this race is in the rear view mirror of history.
Yet it is his biggest lie of all that should give us all pause.
That lie is the one he printed on the hats; on the T-shirts; and on the bumper stickers: Let’s make America great again.
That statement, of course, assumes that our country somehow is not great today.
It is.
In fact, we are as great as we’ve ever been as a nation.
We are richer, better educated, and healthier than ever.
We live longer, have more shared opportunity, and are more diverse in our workplace than at any time in our past.
Don’t believe me?
Ask yourself where else you’d personally want to live, and why people from around the globe both want our homeland to become their homeland as well as our form of government the one under which they too wish to live.
Don’t buy into the ignorance involved with the so-called ‘fallacy of the innocent past’, a false illusion that Trump and his cohorts like to bandy about.
It is the wrongheaded myth that claims our past was superior to our present.
Okay, ask yourself if you’d rather travel on a train across country for days to get the West Coast in 1950 or by plane in five hours 2015; rather to have gotten cancer in 1960 or to get cancer in 2015; or rather have had a toothache in 1970 or have the same toothache in 2015?
Fear Isis today?
In 1880’s we feared Indians; in the 1910’s, Pancho Villa; in the 1920’s, the anarchists blowing up our cities; in the 1930’s, the economic depression; the 1940’s, the Nazis; the 1950’s, the Communists and the Bomb; in the 1960’s the Domino theory; in the 1970’s, the Ayatollah; and the 2000’s Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
You get the idea.
There all gone, we’re still here.
Fear not. Isis soon will join the list.
Oh, and, thank goodness, Trump will soon be gone too!