Some here say there is too much republican bashing and too little introspection about the Democratic party and its problems. Fair enough, on some days. Not today for me.
Today I hit the outer limits of disgust and it isn’t really even partisan. It’s just simply utter rage with more than a smattering of fear. Not of terrorists, but of the ignorant and evil in this country, led with bombast and insane hubris by Donald Trump…with the rest of the GOP candidates fighting hard to best his foulness, but not able to keep up.
What has totally tipped me over is the story of the BLM protestor at a Trump rally. Know you’ve all heard about it, but do you know the details?
At least a half-dozen attendees shoved and tackled the protester, a black man, to the ground as he refused to leave the event. At least one man punched the protester and a woman kicked him while he was on the ground.
All of the attendees who were involved in the physical altercation with the protester were white.
The Black Lives Matter protester attacked during Donald’s Trump’s Birmingham rally said he was punched, kicked and called “n****r” while a group of eight or nine people were on top of him…”
He said people encircled him, and he was being pushed and punched from every direction. Someone hit him from behind, and the next thing he knew, he was at the bottom of pile. He was kicked in the stomach, and the chest, both men and women. “I got enough people off of me that I was able to get up a little bit,” he said. “Somebody got behind me and started trying to choke me out.”… Southall said he was repeatedly called a “n****r” and “monkey” and told his life doesn’t matter.
Trump’s response:
“Maybe he should have been roughed up, because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,” Trump said on the Fox News Channel on Sunday morning. “I have a lot of fans, and they were not happy about it. And this was a very obnoxious guy who was a trouble-maker who was looking to make trouble.”
Ok, not much news here for most of you, and this is just me setting the groundwork for how I feel today.
There is NO going Godwin here. With this incident, and Trump’s response, we ARE THERE. No hyperbole. This is jack boot stuff, Hitler stuff, Nazi stuff. No apologies for saying it--- We ARE THERE.
And whatever happens, we are there because Trump can back up this kind of behavior and stay at the top of the GOP polls. Folks, he is not going away. In fact, I think there’s a real chance he will be the GOP candidate, and even if he isn’t, he has released the bats of hell upon us and it’s not just the media who has failed to say “STOP. ENOUGH”
I looked at the rec list today and I saw the usual Hillary vs. Bernie stuff for the most part. Rinse and repeat. Bunch of folks trying to talk each other into another POV, or convince people their candidate is winning. Fine. That’s what primaries are about.
But if you want to talk about your false equivalencies, then for God’s sake people, whether you’re for Bernie or Hillary, get the freak out of your bubble and LOOK WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST.
It’s a Stephan King clown car, a nightmare. And imo, THERE IS NOTHING negative you can say about either Bernie or Hillary that comes within a million miles of what’s going on in the GOP primary.
And I would like to mention that the much maligned front pagers here, took this incident on with more gusto than anything on the rec list.
Yes, fight for your democratic candidate. Absolutely. But in the end, we will have who we have. And we WILL be up against fascism. Period. Because it’s here, and it wants to grow. Like any disease. The recent events in Paris have given it life and breath that is larger even than 9/11, because hard as it might be to believe…we are in even more treacherous times. Not from the outside, but the from the inside.
And I wonder at our growing callousness to it. And I fear it. So think about that. Really think about it, before you exclaim who you’ll vote for, and who you won’t.