2004: Republicans invented a non-story to make John Kerry’s naval heroism in Vietnam appear to be cowardice.
2008: Right-wing elements spread stories with no merit about Barack Obama’s citizenship in a clear display of racism.
2016: The GOP entry in the confuse them with BS was Hillary’s mail server.
This consistent approach to electioneering is the perfect definition of flogging someone as a way of punishing or controlling circumstances.
2024: The age issue is being flogged by Republicans against Joe Biden as if the 77-year-old Donald Trump didn’t have far more significant issues of age, health, and mental competence. Remember, Biden’s opponent isn’t just old, he’s corrupt, and he’s crazy on top of it. His legal debt is at least half a billion dollars at this point and could rise. He faces multiple criminal trials.
REALITY: Trump doesn’t look that healthy. His troubles are with a strange disease I call PTS—Political Tourette’s Syndrome— which is to utter whatever nonsense comes into his head when speaking or dictating a social network message.
REALITY: Biden does have a funny speech pattern, offers an occasional malapropism, and, yes, he walks carefully. But damned, his administration has accomplished a great deal under the most difficult of circumstances. He deserves more credit than he’s getting from media writers who once understood the difference between fact and deliberate fiction.
For this aging scribe, my eyesight is not what it was 50 years ago. But my sense of smell and taste seems as good as ever. I am amazed that millions of Americans have lost that basic sense of right and wrong. What makes sense or is illogical? When I ask, the quick answer is all about a particular issue—taxes, guns, America looking weak, or the economy measured by the price of a chocolate bar today. Dig deeper: people begin to admit it has much to do with changing demographics and attitudes: 1964 versus 2024, 60 years, including a 150 million population increase, not all of which is from the birthrate of the 1964 population. Immigration has been a mainstay of US growth. Just ask your native American friends if you can find one.
This election could be close because perhaps 50 million voters in this country believe Donald Trump. Hypocrisy and cynical exploitation are the handmaidens of faux populism. The Republican Party has become a subsidiary of Trump’s MAGA cult. Genuinely decent GOP politicians are so afraid of voters that they have shed their beliefs and morality faster than skinny dippers heading for water on the first warm day of spring.
Saving democracy and decency from increasingly malevolent fascism is not easy because, for most voters, it demands accepting half of something when you want it all. Democrats in control of the national government are the only tool we have. Pardon me for paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld, but it works: ‘Sometimes you have to defeat fascism with the tools you have, not the tools you wish you had.”