Okay, You Hate Trump, But What Are You For...?

“Okay, You Hate Trump, But What Are You For…?

A couple of days ago, Scott Stantis, editorial cartoonist for the right-leaning board of the Chicago Tribune offered up another of his hastily sketched tropes of weaknesses in the political left’s drive to unseat the Republican hold on the Congress.  I say hastily because I am always drawn to Stantis’ difficulty in drawing hands.  

Take a look, and you’ll find they most often appear without rudimentary fingers, just nubs grasping items in a fist-like squeeze.  I don’t know why it bothers me so much.  Maybe because hands and fingers take time and thought.  And political cartoons should, too.  

Like the hands on his “subjects,” his messages are also underdeveloped and often similarly conservative/right.  Take his pen and ink portrait of October 24, 2018, which strongly suggests that those opposed to Trump (the Democratic Party) have little more than an irrational hatred for the reality-TV star rather any substantive suggestions to better our country.

I guess at this point on October 24, the buck-toothed and white-eyed donkeys in his inking might respond possibly – "health care, no pre-existing conditions, environmental protection of any sort, some regulation on fossil fuel drilling and polluting, a plan to draw in the violence instigated by access to weapons of war, a long-term action plan for climate change, a schema for assimilating those fleeing poverty and violence, fair voting rights for all, a prevention to the rocketing deficit after the tax giveaway, a guarantee that social security and Medicare will remain"…well, I could go on and so could the donkeys.

 But maybe the real answer is this: a respite.  A RESPITE.

We have had enough. We have endured enough.  When the man who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America stated that “the carnage stops now and it stops here.”  Trump did not tell the truth.

HE is the carnage.

Charlottesville was only the start.  After the last week, we have seen what a leader sowing division, disrespect, tribalism, and racism can wring.  And we as a people have been wrung out.

David Remnick, in the New Yorker pens an invaluable comment regarding this man’s inability to take any road but the wrong one, to fail at bringing anyone together in favor of dividing and generating hatred, to identify every crisis as one in which he has been personally targeted unfairly.  

Suggesting that “The Midterm Elections Are a Referendum on Donald Trump,” Remnick writes:

“What is there left to know about Donald Trump? Robert Mueller, various state officials, and a legion of reporters around the country are dedicated to penetrating any stubborn mysteries that still linger, yet who can argue that there is insufficient evidence to make a rational judgment about the character of the man, the nature of his Presidency, and the climate he has done so much to create and befoul?

“Law enforcement will continue to investigate the incident in the days ahead. But what’s already clear is that it occurred at a moment of tragic division and conspiracy-mongering generated, foremost and daily, by the President of the United States. The right has no monopoly on insult and incivility—the online universe can be a sewer of spite—but there is no real equivalence: no modern President has adopted and weaponized such malevolent rhetoric as a lingua franca.

“Trump is a masterful demagogue of the entertainment age. His instruments are resentment, sarcasm, unbounded insult, casual mendacity, and the swaggering assertion of dominance. From his desk in the Oval Office, on Twitter, and at political rallies across the country, he spews poison into the atmosphere. Trump is an agent of climate change, an unceasing generator of toxic gas that raises the national temperature.

“At a rally in Wisconsin, on Wednesday, the President reacted to the news of the multiple bombs with a barely perfunctory call for a ‘civil tone.”’Of course, he didn’t mean it, not remotely. He made it plain that civility is for suckers, a joke. ‘By the way, do you see how nice I’m behaving tonight?’ he said, with a smirk. ‘Have you ever seen this? We’re all behaving very well.’ The next morning, in a characteristically brazen tweet, Trump amped up the toxicity. A bomb had been sent to a media outlet. The fault was the media’s. ‘A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News,’ he wrote. ‘Mainstream Media must clean up its act, fast!’ At 3 a.m. on Friday, he tweeted his fury at CNN.

“When the leaders of the Republican Party first acquainted themselves with Trump’s rhetoric and character a few years ago, many of them were appalled. Ted Cruz, after hearing Trump insult his wife’s appearance and insinuate that his father bore some responsibility for the assassination of John F. Kennedy, called his rival a ‘pathological liar,’ a ‘snivelling coward.’ But, after Cruz became one more casualty of the 2016 Republican primaries, and reckoned that he could not hold his Senate seat while attacking Trump, he, like almost every other light of the ‘party of Lincoln,’ capitulated. The G.O.P. is now Ted Cruz writ large, a political party that has debased itself in the image of its standard-bearer.

Please read the entire article in the Nov. 5^thedition of the New Yorker or on line.  

RESIST AND VOTE ON NOVEMBER 6^TH.