Bush hadn’t gotten any smarter by 2004, but he still managed
to get himself re-elected to the job. I remember saying both times, “How bad do you have to be to
lose to someone as supremely unqualified as George W. Bush? If you can’t beat
him, who can you beat?”
Imagine our shock when those of us who thought Bush was the
worst president in our lifetimes – and possibly forever – went to bed on
November 8, 2016, and awoke to find that a make-believe real estate mogul,
snake oil salesman and reality TV star with the knowledge of a cinder block and
the attention span of a door knob had been elected president over a
highly-educated former first lady, senator and secretary of state.
Fool me once, as the saying goes, shame on you. Fool me
twice, shame on me. But fool me three times, well….
Unless he gets impeached, resigns or dies, Donald Trump is
going to be president for at least two more years. We won’t get another shot at
him until November 2020, but there is a mid-term election coming up in one
week, and it presents a secondary opportunity to correct part of our past
mistakes. We can do that by going to the polls and electing senators,
congressmen and governors who will throw a leash around this narcissistic president who thinks he was
elected “king” and would like to hang on to that title for life.
For roughly three years, Liberals and some Conservatives,
Democrats and some Republicans and rational Independents have complained
bitterly – and daily – about the policies, practices, partisanship and public
persona of the country’s first Twitter president who once said he could shoot
someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes, and has spent every day since then
trying his best to prove it.
I saved a paragraph that I wrote some time ago and have used
frequently to describe Donald Trump:
Donald J. Trump is a shallow, childish, vacuous, narcissistic,
misogynistic, xenophobic, racist con man tax evading sexual predator who’s also
a pathological liar with dangerous, Fascist-inspired ideas and a probable
mental illness. He has admitted to sexual assault and at one time was facing
court proceedings related to alleged rape, fraud and bribery.
In light of more
recent events, I’d like to add the following:
Since early in his campaign, Trump has incited his followers to
violence more times than I care to write about today, but now he has refused to
back down an inch, even after one of his followers mailed pipe bombs to a long
list of prominent Democrats and an anti-Semite upset over a migrant caravan
that Trump rails against walked into a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pa., and
murdered 11 elderly Jews. Trump’s answer to this new wave of violence is to
blame the news media for not being nicer to him while he rolls along on his
pre-election “caravans and Kavanaugh” campaign.
Even though he’s not on the ballot this year, Trump has been
crisscrossing America for weeks, projecting his administration’s failures,
fantasies and flaws onto Democrats, the news media and any other political
opponent who happens to be downwind, while also telling his angry rally mobs
that a vote for any Republican “is a vote for me,” so in effect this election
is a referendum on him.
Meanwhile, the rest of us keep telling ourselves that a “blue
wave” is coming to wash these bigots and racists and spineless demagogues out
of office and restore order to America. We keep telling ourselves that we own
the moral high ground and that America “is better than this,” but none of that
matters if we can’t come together in one week and meet at the ballot box.
If we can’t do that, we’ll be waking up one more time on
November 7 and asking ourselves, “If you can’t defeat the disciples of Donald
Trump, who the hell can you beat?”
And I’ll hear myself saying, “If you fool us four times, we're getting what we deserve.”
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