Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Trump mocks the pain of Chicago families

      I wrote this Tuesday morning, before Trump's frightening afternoon press conference throwing in his lot with white nationalist haters. Though it was tempting to react to the latest outrage, I had set aside one column already to react to Trump's tweet, and realized there will always be another shock around the corner—you cannot get ahead of the curve with this man—and it was probably better to let this fly and wait for the next shoe from our centipede of disaster to drop.

     "Meanwhile," Trump enthusiast Jack Posobiec tweeted and the president retweeted Monday, "39 shootings in Chicago this weekend, 9 deaths. No national media outrage. Why is that?"
     Ooo, ooo, me me! I'll take that one.
     But first a little background, for those lucky enough not to be reading this at the grim moment of America in mid-August 2017. A nation roiled by a sudden geyser of racial hate—or, rather, being reminded of the hate always seething just under the surface. A tiki torch-bearing mud flow of Nazis and Klansmen and other assorted mutants in Charlottesville, Virginia, vomited out of the earth and into view Friday night. On Saturday they were met by counter-protesters, patriots and regular citizens who reject the never-true vision of America as a white, Protestant enclave.
     One of those haters, allegedly, sped his car into the peaceful protest, killing a woman. And our president, who will leap onto Twitter to denounce a teenager who asks a pointed question, blamed "both sides" then remained mum for days about the source of this attack on our values, perhaps because he knows how popular he is among haters, perhaps because several of his closest advisers seeped out of the same subterranean cesspool.
     Trump's failure outraged the country. Because we are not used to seeing such bald cowardice, such indulgence of the undercurrent of American life.  Not from the president. It's news.
     Chicago, on the other hand, is a big city where shootings happen every day. We are not the most dangerous city in America. We are not the homicide capital. Chicago has a pervasive gang problem and its murder rate is five times that of New York City's. So it has problems with violence, but those problems, while news, do not have the fresh horror of a president winking at Nazis.

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12 comments:

  1. Neil, I admire your respect for Freedom of Speech. But it boggles the mind that there are still people attempting to defend President Bone Spur. He is a clear and present danger.

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    1. Some people can't even conceive of the possibility of being wrong. That's how you get so far lost in the first place.

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  2. Don't forget that they love bagging on Chicago because it's where Barack Obama is from. Like everything that goes wrong there is his fault.

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  3. Great column and a nice double hit out of the park back to back in the paper with Mary Mitchell's column, this morning.

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  4. An absolutely perfect column. And, Neil, regarding your preface, you're right; you can't get ahead of the curve, and that's exactly what Trump is counting on. He vomits up a crisis and while everyone is scrambling to identify what he had for breakfast, he pukes up lunch. People have almost stopped talking about Trump's dust-up with his morally repugnant equal, little Kim Jong Un, and nobody is talking about Russia and the election. Damn near the entire country could be diagnosed with ADD, these days.

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    1. yes, I agree. absolutely perfectly expressed . every point hits the mark . don't forget about Venezuela Tony. that where he's going to get us into another real mess.

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    2. You're probably right about Venezuela, F ME. Trump is incapable of rational thought, so all bets are off.

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  5. Trump loves anyone who loves him. He reminds me of Sally Field, when she won the Oscar, and said "you like me, you really like me!" He's giddy at the thought that any group, no matter how vile, loves and supports him. "They like me, they really like me!."

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  6. The chap standing next to Trump looking at his shoes during the interview was LTG Kelly, the newly appointed Chief of staff who was going to impose order on the White House. He probably wishes he was back in Afghanistan.

    tom

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  7. I guess we should be glad Trump is such a rank amateur. Were he a seasoned professional, like Dick Cheney for instance, he would send out his hate messages with a lot more finesse.

    john

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  8. I don't think we have any confederate statues to take down but we have the name of a racist leader prominently displayed right downtown on a big shiny building. Seeing it causes me emotional distress.

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