By james art To live in a world, the crazy one that is ours, where employees of a federal agency tasked with providing aid to victims of a devastating hurricane have their lives threatened by gun-toting fellow citizens who believe, at the instigation of an actual elected official, that a major political party is creating the bad weather to be bad for them is desperation.
And to witness the other major party’s presidential candidate not telling his supporters to think, but rather to see him incite the mad while disdaining their help, is to see that desperation cubed.
That candidate was at least given a chance to act reasonable when asked if it was a good idea to criticize hurricane relief workers after the Federal Emergency Management Agency was forced to suspend operations in the Carolinas due to militia threats.
The candidate responded by repeating the common lie that the hurricane response was hampered because FEMA spent its budget to help people who crossed the border illegally.
True, no trucks with bazooka militias were ever found. But a North Carolina man is facing a charge of “going armed to terrorize the public” after he threatened FEMA officials and was arrested in Rutherford County, North Carolina last week. The local sheriff said the time denier had a rifle and a handgun at the time of his arrest. He was immediately released on $10,000 bail. I wonder what he’s doing tonight.
Criticism from the candidate who was out there campaigning in the state and making up more stories? There wasn’t one.
It’s also true that not the presidential candidate himself, but rather his ardent supporter, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., said of Democrats after Hurricane Helena swept through her region: “Yes, they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for someone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
Of course. So ridiculous.
Over the next few days, the lying rogue vice president went to Greene’s district to call her “a great friend of mine” and told her constituents that they had “another great, strong female leader in Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. . . . She is a loyal man, and you have a great Congresswoman here in Marjorie.
Great congresswoman. The kind of person with whom truly sane, responsible American politicians would want to be associated.
The scary jester of a presidential candidate allowed himself to be represented at a campaign rally Wednesday by a scary jester of a former journalist, Tucker Carlson, who said a second administration would be like an angry father who would “fiercely” spank his disobedient daughter, the so-called. f. the rest of us Americans.
He said the country is now like a child who will “smear the contents of their diapers on your living room wall” or a “15-year-old daughter with an overabundance of hormones” who points the finger at her parents and slams her bedroom door.
But all will be well in the household because “When Daddy comes home, you know what he says? “You’ve been a bad girl, you’ve been a bad girl… This will hurt you a lot more than it will hurt me. And you earned that. You get hit hard for being a bad girl.
The crowd, as they say, went wild.
If its surrogates are like the personification of bad weather, like the hot waters of the Persian Gulf creating a new kind of hurricane, the candidate itself is, of course, the storm. In the past week, two former key aides — both ultra-conservative Republicans and senior military leaders — literally called him a “fascist.”
And it gets a little personal when a would-be president, expressing his distaste for the press and its right to use confidential sources, says, “When this man finds out that he’s going to be the bride of another inmate, he’s going to say, ‘I’d love to wanted to tell you exactly who it was.”
“There is every reason to believe that Donald Trump will seek to use law enforcement and the FBI as leverage for his personal and political goals in a second term,” says Peter Keisler, founder of the Federalist Society.
It’s worth thinking about between now and November 5.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].