American Civility: Hammered & Hurting
HOW ANYONE CAN CARE SO LITTLE about a fellow human being who gets beaten over the head with a hammer by a raging lunatic for political purposes is beyond those of us who actually have a heart. In this case, of course, the victim was Paul Pelosi, but it was wife, Nancy, who was the real target. This was nothing less than yet another assassination attempt.
Leave it to those who espouse malicious right-wing rhetoric to try to smear the poor 82-year-old victim with lies about his moral character.
President Biden put it all on the line in his speech yesterday, saying how it is democracy itself that is at stake in this Midterm election. Some 300 election-deniers are on the ballot and if they win, they will attempt to corrupt the system by saying that the system is already corrupted.
Granted, wealthy individuals and giant corporations do corrupt the system by giving huge sums of money to those lawmakers who use the money, first to get elected, then to look after the interests of their donors.
In a sense, that is indeed institutional corruption, but to say that the system itself is “rigged” or somehow corrupted in terms of fairness of the vote, that is part and parcel of Trump’s Big Lie.
It is simply not true.
I remember well how the King of Lies, a man who never restrains himself from offering quick jabs of toxic rhetoric and divisive, hostile hyperbole at his campaign rallies, called the sitting president of the United States an “enemy of the state” when he was in Pennsylvania last month. He spoke those words as if he were some duplicitous dictator from the Cold War era. In fact, he is a former president himself and never before has a former president called a sitting president such a noxious appellation. Its only purpose is to incite anger and hatred.
The use of such language is reminiscent to many of us of the kind of rhetoric Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini trotted out back in the terrible days when the major superpowers in the world were fighting each other with such industrial fury that the armies and civilian populations right across Europe experienced levels of carnage as never before seen.
Trump loves that kind of language. While he was a sitting president, he labeled the “liberal media” the enemy of the state. That was at a time when he was taking his first stabs at fine tuning his toxic rhetoric and creating an enemy which his supporters could focus on and rally against. They did. They gave the media the evil eye at rallies all across America and did so with gleeful relish, lashing out, sometimes violently, at reporters, journalists and camera technicians.
Now as Trump the traitor continues to incite hatred and violence against a perceived enemy, his focus is all about electioneering, which means the Democrats are the chosen targets and, most especially, the leader of the Dems, the man who defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
Few, if any, want a rematch of these two men.
What we do want, however, is another fair and free election without rancor this time. Nevertheless, whomever the nominees happen to be, it will not be okay to nominate a man who has defrauded the American people on multiple fronts. Trump has clearly committed election fraud (“Just find me 11,780 votes” he told Georgia officials), tax fraud, bank fraud and insurance fraud. He continues to lie about the 2020 election and his supporters cheer him on. Meanwhile, the highest-ranking Republicans keep silent, thus tacitly (and fearfully) offering their complicity.
President Biden is right: the state and fate of the nation is at stake in this Midterm election, for the simple reason that if the MAGA election-deniers get into office all hell is going to break loose where they are positioned. They will poison the system completely and wreak as much havoc as they can in terms of skewing the system to their party’s advantage.
Once America was a beacon of freedom and democracy, but Trump has dashed those laudable American values against the back of his thick brain and smashed them to smithereens for his own political ambitions. He wants to be the ruler of America and play the autocrat like his hero, Vladimir Putin.
Unfortunately, his supporters keep showing up at his rallies to gawk at and applaud him for saying the kinds of sarcastic, mean-spirited things no other politician would ever say, when he is clearly out to bring about the ruination of democracy. He claims, on the contrary, that he is out to “save America” from fascists, the Deep State and, especially, liberal Democrats whom he labels the enemies of the state. This is pure Goebbels-style propaganda and it is so harmful and toxic as to sicken those of us who can see through the poisonous hyperbole and understand what is at stake here.
Yes, we must not allow any “election denier” who supports Trump’s Big Lie to win a seat in any state or federal position up for grabs. We must do this by voting, not by employing any violent means to overcome these horrible candidates. Should they win, they will be in positions to stick the final knives into our democratic system and kill the freedoms which our forebears fought to defend with their lives.
We cannot allow that; we must not allow that.
Let us defeat those who let Trump trick them into believing things that are simply not true. There are too many issues at stake now and democracy itself.
