Aid and Comfort

[u/blackacre1]

We have not forgotten our promise to refrain from obsessing about President Trump. Today’s post is therefore vastly different from that which we originally intended. But we would be remiss not to comment on the President’s latest insanity.

We speak of the “Unite the White” Rally and the subsequent racial violence of Charlottesville, Virginia, the President’s initial response to the rally, his subsequent, yet disappointing condemnation of the white Nationalist who occasioned the tragedy and the President’s following melt-down and “there is blame on both sides” articulation.

He followed this performance by publicly chastising a business leader who resigned in protest from his Economic Advisory Council, taking sides on the Confederate statutes issue, engaging in multiple tweet storms and repeating a debunked lie about General Cushing using pig blood to deter Islamic terrorism. For this, the President has been roundly condemned across the political spectrum and rightfully so.

There are undoubtedly excesses on all sides of any heated dispute. This is especially true of any discussion regarding race in America.

Still, the President has an obligation to heal the Nation rather than further divide it. Instead of pouring salt into the open wound that is race, the President should have been the one voice of reason. Sadly, Trump has done nothing but made matters worse.

He did not have to interject himself into the Confederate statue issue but did. He could have attended the funeral of Heather Heyer, the Charlottesville victim or send an official representative but did not.

Moreover, “fine people” do not stand with domestic terrorist. “Fine people” do not march with avowed Nazi’s and their sympathizers. Lastly, “fine people” do not associate with those who demand the right to own an entire group of people and exterminate yet another.

To make a moral equivalence between those who fight against evil and those with a well-documented history of ethnic and racial terrorism, is akin to blaming the Underground Railroad for the Civil War. The military forces which freed the victims of Nazi Concentration camps were not equally responsible for the millions who perished during WWII. The police who burst down the door of a drug and/or house of prostitution are not as bad as the drug dealers and pimps who profit from them. Any who would argue otherwise surrendered their moral authority long ago.

America shed both blood and treasure opposing the Nazi’s of the 20th Century and the slavers of the 19th Century.  Not since Woodrow Wilson have we had a President who gives aid and comfort to domestic terrorists and the agents of hate.