Watching the rally in south Florida today, called following the Valentine’s Day school shooting, hearing the public lashing of The Donald and local Congressmen, there is no mistaking the mood: We’ve had enough.
Good. Donald Trump is an incurious, ignorant, unpatriotic and amoral cynic who is wildly out of his depth, and his enablers are whores servicing the NRA, the Evangelical Right, the xenophobes — that whole sick pastiche of paranoid far Right loonies united only by hatred of modernity.
The next step is to make certain that candidates can’t show their faces in public without being confronted:
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Will you publicly commit to defending your country against home-grown fascism and removing Donald Trump from office?
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Will you publicly commit to sane gun control — universal background checks that include mental health, a ban on military-grade assault weapons, and a cooling-off period of at least 10-days for the purchase of any firearm?
If a candidate won’t make those commitments, then vote for somebody else — and make certain they know those are deal-breaker issues.
Now and then I try to imagine what it’s like to know so little of American ideals and American history as to not recognize the existential threat that Donald Trump poses to this country, so inexperienced as to be unable to spot what smarmy and predatory frauds Tony Perkins et. al. are, so flint-hearted as to be unable to feel warmth toward those strivers who bundle-up the wife and kids and strike-out for the Gool Ol’ U.S. of A to build a better life for themselves.
That Deplorable One-third are not part of the decent, educated world; they are the ignorant, mean-spirited, backward-looking human sewage that the decent, educated world has struggled against all these uncountable millennia. And it does me good to know that Americans increasingly see what I saw years ago and are finally mobilizing against them.