Our cretinous leader
by digby
The New York Times’ Bari Weiss, with an overview of the bipartisan disgust with President Trump:
“If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” That was the last Facebook post of Heather D. Heyer, a 32-year-old woman who went out on Saturday to face down white supremacists in Charlottesville and was murdered before the day was done by 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. Her death, and the injury of a reported 19 others when Mr. Fields rammed his car into a group of counter-protesters, was the horrific capstone to a weekend of violence in the Virginia college town.
Outrage is something Donald Trump typically has in no short supply. As Stephen Hayes reminds readers in The Weekly Standard, this president is promiscuous with his denunciations. “Brit Hume is ‘a dope’ and a ‘know-nothing.’ Mika Brzezinski is ‘dumb as a rock’ and ‘crazy.’ Bill and Hillary Clinton were ‘the real predators.’” Trump is always ready to blast those he believes — often wrongly — to be worthy targets. See: Judge Gonzalo Curiel and the Khan family.
But when it came to white nationalists who’d spent the day brandishing swastikas and chanting “Jews will not replace us,” our mad-libbing president offered uncharacteristic restraint: “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence. On many sides.”
Columnists across the political spectrum, including Josh Levin at Slate and Michael Gerson in The Washington Post, rightly tore into the president for the utter moral failure of this statement. So did many lawmakers. The one group that celebrated it, as our Editorial Board points out, were the white nationalists themselves.
There has been no shortage of powerful pieces and tweets over the past 48 hours, but there are three that shouldn’t be missed. The first is this moving symposium in The Times. Let these thoughtful University of Virginia students take you into the eye of the storm.
National Review writer David French and his family, especially his black daughter, have been viciously targeted by the alt-right as a result of his longstanding and outspoken opposition to Donald Trump. Read his short piece about how this weekend’s violence was nothing less than the alt-right’s chickens coming home to roost.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Charlottesville native who owns a home that “carries a racially restrictive covenant. No blacks, no Jews.” In other words, she owns a house “that could once have been taken from me by the force of law.” In this powerful rebuttal to the white nationalists’ slogan, “you will not replace us,” she shows how history proves their rallying cry to be “a bald-faced lie.” Amen.
By the time this posts he may have finally choked something out. But I won’t be surprised if he doesn’t.
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