("With Malice Toward Quite a Few")
What is it they say about people in glass houses?
Democrats have been turning the other cheek for decades. Leaving the Republicans free to fabricate and aggravate, to create animosity as the centerpiece of their platform. Division and dissension their calling cards.
National unity is a fiction long since dissolved. Joe Biden has spent a lifetime reaching across the aisle trying to find compromise where none was evident. But even he has his limits and two years of aggravation, of countering lies and biting his tongue, while trying to bring this country through a pandemic and a war in Ukraine that has wreaked havoc across the globe, have given him ample cause to lash out at those who do little to make America better, stronger and more moral.
I am sorry if Mr. Stephens feels aggrieved by having to face the truth of the failures of a large portion of this nation. But our wake up call is long overdue. And leaving the messaging, and the "facts" to the Republicans is no longer an acceptable option.
1 comment:
after listing --albeit in a somewhat modest tone -- the threats posed by trump and his apologists, Stehens concludes,"The gravest threat American democracy faces today isn’t the Republican Party, MAGA or otherwise. It’s Trump. He’s one man, sinister but also buffoonish. To defeat him, the core task is to make him seem small, very small. Biden’s misbegotten speech did precisely the opposite"
and here I think he misses the significant historical point. Trump is the manifestation of a problem and nt the problem itself.
The members of Congress who deny the truth of the 2020 election do that because it resonates with their bae and perhaps because they sadly believe their own lies; trump permitted the fringe to emerge with a sense of legitimacy into mainstream, from himself to tucker carlson to the oath keepers and all those who stormed the capitol brought a confederate flag into that chamber or cheered them on from close or distance, the problem is the fear of change,the fear of diversity, the fear that white people are becoming a minority in this country and white people in power want to hold on to the power they have always had and they are willing to do that by any means necessary. In the face of that, charity has its limits.
J.O.
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