And now they're shocked--shocked, I tell you--that, egged on by Donald Trump, angry, resentful white men have risen up in opposition to the black president and the female nominee.
Trump and his father were sued twice for refusing to rent to blacks in their apartment complexes. That's called racism. Trump called for the execution of one Hispanic and four black teenagers falsely convicted of raping a white banker ("the Central Park jogger") in 1989. After they were fully exonerated by irrefutable DNA evidence and the confession of the actual rapist in 2002, Trump said they still should have been executed. Because, "guilty." And on Oct. 7, 2016, he said he still thinks they're guilty. "Because they confessed." Without lawyers, under coercion and with police telling them that they'd face the death penalty if they didn't confess. That's racism. That's hate.
The playground defense: you do it, too!
Democrats are often accused by the GOP of being full of hate for them, for white people, for Christians, for Donald Trump. But no one I know hates them, or him. We find Trump, in particular, pathetic, revolting, deplorable, self-obsessed, incompetent, narcissistic, self-aggrandizing, pathologically dishonest, and loathsome, but we don't hate him.
We consider him utterly unfit for the presidency, and the epitome of what the tea-party movement was all about: racial hatred of the first black president, whom they and he consider A) uppity; B) illegitimate; C) a non-citizen. But we don't hate him for that, either.
We see in Trump the worst underside of American politics and racial animus, the tactics of a bully, the petulance of a spoiled child, and the thin skin of a fearful, frightened, cowardly rich boy who has been in over his head his entire life. An entitled narcissist who has thrived only through bluster and breaking promises--and contracts--with thousands of people who trusted him; a man who finally resorted to selling the only thing he had left: his name, which he plastered on enough companies to convince low-information, gullible people that the "brand" was worth something.
But we don't hate him. We see him as woefully ill-prepared even for a debate that required preparation and that he knew about for months and for which he decided to "wing it"--because surely a privileged white boy can defeat a lowly woman without even trying.
Hate him? No. We feel only contempt, disgust, weariness, and disbelief that such a person could climb anywhere near the levers of power.
So, the election
The issue for America is whom to elect to the most powerful and important job in the world. Are we willing to elect a woman who has prepared for this work her entire life, who knows the facts and the issues and the leaders of the world, who understands how government operates and how politics works, who has demonstrated for 30 years that she is capable of handling adversity, unexpected change, conflict, compromise, and common ground that will benefit the entire nation? A woman who has always shown empathy for "the least of these," who has lived by Methodist John Wesley's creed to "Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you can." A woman who without any doubt has the temperament, character, intellect, personality, and interest in the job to do it well and with diligence?
Or, conversely, do we choose a self-obsessed narcissist with the ego of a three-year-old, the attention span of a five-year-old, the temperament of a 10-year-old, the psychosexual development of a 14-year-old, and the pathetic anger of a frustrated 70-year-old loser who has never accomplished anything in his life other than selling his name and a false image of himself to gullible rubes?
That's the issue at stake on November 8.
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