Newenglanddeac
Well-known member
- Joined
- May 1, 2011
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Preach.
Joking about John McCain's death is our terrible new normal
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/05/11/...in-death/index.html?__twitter_impression=true
"On and on the list goes. And it all adds up to one thing: Trump weaponized nastiness and bullying. He turned it into a political art form. He gave cover for all of those people with uninformed views -- on race, ethnicity and everything else -- to emerge from the shadows and speak out.
And, if you didn't laugh or "get the joke" -- even though Trump was often not joking in these circumstances -- you were part of the problem. Just another defender of a status quo that rewarded elites and left out the little guy. Just another person who didn't get it.
The issue with all of this is that it bastardized a very legitimate issue -- the growing income (and everything else) gap between the rich and the poor -- for Trump's own political purposes. He drove the divide for political reasons and, in his language, made it totally OK to say whatever you wanted about people you disagreed with because they had been out to get you for years. This was just payback. And man did they deserve it.
Nuance went out the window. Speaking hard truths that the country needed to hear -- as McCain has done throughout his career -- became indistinguishable from calling Sen. Ted Cruz's wife ugly or suggesting that we need to ban Muslims from entering the country. Political incorrectness became a crutch to justify racist and xenophobic views.
And in the middle of it all was Trump. When he wasn't engaging in these behaviors, he was refusing to condemn them -- an example of his abdication of the idea of the President as moral leader. Who am I to say who is right and who is wrong in the Charlottesville violence, Trump asked. Who am I to judge who is telling the truth -- Roy Moore or the multiple women who said he had pursued relationships with them when they were teenagers?
That view has trickled down. When CNN's Chris Cuomo asked State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert on Friday to comment on the "joke" about McCain's death, Nauert responded: "I'm not familiar with what you're familiar with." Really? Nauert hadn't heard about the story? I find that very, very hard to believe.
That collective shrug from the President of the United States and his allies coupled with the extant factors of our internal divisions and the sort of campaign he ran in 2016 created the toxic stew from which comments like the one Thursday by Sadler grow.
No one is standing up and saying "We can't treat people like this." And sadly, that vacuum in moral leadership means that the better angels of our nature are being drowned out by our demons."
Joking about John McCain's death is our terrible new normal
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/05/11/...in-death/index.html?__twitter_impression=true
"On and on the list goes. And it all adds up to one thing: Trump weaponized nastiness and bullying. He turned it into a political art form. He gave cover for all of those people with uninformed views -- on race, ethnicity and everything else -- to emerge from the shadows and speak out.
And, if you didn't laugh or "get the joke" -- even though Trump was often not joking in these circumstances -- you were part of the problem. Just another defender of a status quo that rewarded elites and left out the little guy. Just another person who didn't get it.
The issue with all of this is that it bastardized a very legitimate issue -- the growing income (and everything else) gap between the rich and the poor -- for Trump's own political purposes. He drove the divide for political reasons and, in his language, made it totally OK to say whatever you wanted about people you disagreed with because they had been out to get you for years. This was just payback. And man did they deserve it.
Nuance went out the window. Speaking hard truths that the country needed to hear -- as McCain has done throughout his career -- became indistinguishable from calling Sen. Ted Cruz's wife ugly or suggesting that we need to ban Muslims from entering the country. Political incorrectness became a crutch to justify racist and xenophobic views.
And in the middle of it all was Trump. When he wasn't engaging in these behaviors, he was refusing to condemn them -- an example of his abdication of the idea of the President as moral leader. Who am I to say who is right and who is wrong in the Charlottesville violence, Trump asked. Who am I to judge who is telling the truth -- Roy Moore or the multiple women who said he had pursued relationships with them when they were teenagers?
That view has trickled down. When CNN's Chris Cuomo asked State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert on Friday to comment on the "joke" about McCain's death, Nauert responded: "I'm not familiar with what you're familiar with." Really? Nauert hadn't heard about the story? I find that very, very hard to believe.
That collective shrug from the President of the United States and his allies coupled with the extant factors of our internal divisions and the sort of campaign he ran in 2016 created the toxic stew from which comments like the one Thursday by Sadler grow.
No one is standing up and saying "We can't treat people like this." And sadly, that vacuum in moral leadership means that the better angels of our nature are being drowned out by our demons."
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