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Hopefully you’re well armed Jim, so when this fool in the White House starts the war to get re-elected you can defend yourself.
When I said months ago that he’d start a war to get re-elected, I didn’t imagine that it would be in this country.
Here’s the part you failed to read, sorry if they’re not small words
Here is the thing: One of the boring, hypocritical norms of elite politics over the last 50 years has been the insistence at the top of the political world of going through rote condemnations of bad actors and rote paying of respects to victims of violence. Even if you suspected that the people doing the condemning or paying the respects didn't really care.
Donald Trump broke that norm. He knows that a lot of the people who showed up at Charlottesville and in Lansing are his voters, and he's always going to be loyal to his people. So he refuses to condemn them. And Trump never actually gave a crap about John Lewis or anything John Lewis stood for, so he skipped Lewis's funeral.
Whatever else you want to say about it, this is honesty, of a sort.
But it turns out that those boring, rote, hypocritical norms are pretty important. It's important when George W. Bush comes out and vouches for Islam as a religion of peace. It's important when Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein and Bernie Sanders stand shoulder to shoulder with Steve Scalice.
I happen to think that all four of those people meant what they said, but the point is that it doesn't especially matter whether or not they meant it in their heart of hearts. The fact that they understood they had a duty to say the words meant something.
Because that's how you cut down on the numbers of people in those extremist bases and keep the pyramids of civil conflict to a smaller, less-deadly size.
All of these norms and traditions have (had?) very real functions in society. And as Donald Trump and his enablers break them, we all pay the price.
Posted from my iPhone/Mobile device
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