Well, the snowball is gaining steam as it rolls downhill. The only problem is there doesn't seem to be a resting place for it.
Since his election, President Trump has attracted more than his fair share of slings and arrows. Some of it comes with the territory. As president, he's a magnet for criticism -- some of it fair, some of it unfair. Every one of his predecessors was skewered to some degree while in office. The criticism largely ended after the man left the Oval Office, although recently, the Left has made a hobby out of beating up George W. Bush.
I doubt that President Trump will ever see the end of criticism, no matter how good his policies turn out to be for the country. He's the Left's whipping post, a figure to be tarred and feathered, drawn and quartered, for as long as the anger of the Left continues. It's gotten so bad that the Left is criticizing him for saying exactly the same thing that dozens of highly-visible Democrats have been saying, publicly and for the record, for years. But because the POTUS has the temerity to utter the same words, they are immoral.
Take, for example, the border wall issue that has led to the shutdown. President Trump, in a televised conversation with Senator Chuck Schumer and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, told them that he would hold his ground on the border wall even if it meant a shutdown of the government. When negotiations resumed a fortnight into the shutdown, Pelosi told the president that she would not even consider funding for a wall, so the president walked out of the meeting. Schumer then told the public that the president had a tantrum at the meeting.
The odd thing about this is that both Schumer and Pelosi are on record against illegal immigration. While they're busy doling out billions of dollars in foreign aid, they refuse to give the president $5B for the wall. Meanwhile, illegal aliens continue to commit horrible crimes in this country, siphon off much needed services and welfare and do so while they're here illegally.
But Schumer and Pelosi are politicians. We've come to expect this from the likes of them.
Josh Charles in an actor. Josh Charles does not have any discernible formal education, but he believes himself to possess a monopoly on morality and political science. Recently, he declared that anyone who still supported President Trump could go fuck themselves. As for as social scientists go, this is pretty lame. Perhaps thinking he was improving his prescription, he advocated that Vice President Mike Pence also be muzzled. In so doing, he referred to both the president and the vice-president as motherfuckers.
Perhaps he was taking a cue from newly minted Rashida Tlaib, the congresswoman from Michigan who began her tenure with a flourish, suggesting that one of her first jobs on the Hill was to impeach that motherfucker (the president). That is is one way to announce one's presence with authority. It's also a way to ingratiate oneself with the base and alienate at least half, if not more, of the population. It also paints the person uttering the declaration as classless, disrespectful and unhinged.
Not to be outdone, Ron Perlman, perfectly typecast as the Beast in the television version of Beauty and the Beast, likened the Republican party to the Ku Klux Klan. Buoyed by a master of arts degree in theater, which qualifies him as a social scientist superior to Josh Charles, Perlman decided to condemn other Republicans who in turn had condemned congressman Steven King for his apparent support for white supremacy. Turning logic on its head, then, Perlman criticized people for criticizing someone for his support of white supremacy because they had remained silent until his remarks were made public. To take this to its logical end, unless one is clairvoyant and can divine things hidden ahead of time, no amount of criticism will shield someone when he doesn't act according to the dictates of the coastal elites.
Some might say the next anecdote doesn't reflect an unhinged state of mind, but if not, what is it? Leftist lawmakers traveled to Hawaii and Puerto Rico during the shutdown to be feted by lobbyists while thousands of federal employees went unpaid due to the shutdown. Those visiting Puerto Rico were also treated to a performance of Hamilton. If in fact this were only the President's fault, wouldn't the prudent thing to do be trying to get the government back on its feet so these people can be paid? At a minimum, being in tropical locales with all expenses paid is not a good visual. But for the Left, protected as it is by the MSM, this is not a concern.
Speaking of the MSM, Jim Acosta, this century's version of Gunga Dan Rather, tried to poke holes in the President's story about there being a crisis on the border. Instead of accomplishing that, he managed to set himself up to be the butt of a thousand memes portraying himself as clueless. Even so, he may have been outdone by the rest of his brothers and sisters in ink and celluloid, who have shrieked at the news that President Trump paid, out of his own pocket, for junk food for the visiting Clemson Tiger national championship football team, at the the White House. The move was necessitated by the shutdown, which has White House staff furloughed. No matter, this was a travesty, an insult of the highest order. How dare the president pay out of his own pocket for food that didn't meet the coastal elite's standards for for visiting guests!
The only problem is: The football players loved it.
So in this latest installment of the Left's foibles, several things emerge: The coastal elites ignore any acknowledgement of the double standard or hypocrisy. That Democratic lawmakers are frolicking in the sand while federal employees are going without pay is meaningless to them. That the Democratic leadership is at least partly to blame for the shutdown is equally unimportant.
When actors started to believe that their commentary on politics was important to the national discourse escapes me. Sure, they're entitled to their opinion, but why they think their opinion is any more valid than the man in the street's mystifies me. What's more, why they feel that invective and profanity is the way to drive home a point -- especially since they use words as part of their living -- is equally mystifying.
As for Tlaib, I'm not surprised. I find her to be nothing more than a Trojan horse for the attempted subversion of our society. The citizens of her district ought to be ashamed of themselves.
The more this hysteria progresses the more I wonder whether we're truly headed for civil war as some surmise. If that's the case, pass the ammo and keep your powder dry. The good news is the Right has a lot more firearms, ammunition and know-how than the left.
(c) 2019 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
