To live in a world, the insane one that is our own, in which workers for a federal agency charged with bringing relief to victims of a devastating hurricane are threatened with their lives by gun-toting fellow countrymen who believe, egged on by an actually elected official, that one major political party creates the bad weather to be mean to them, is to despair.
And to witness the presidential candidate of the other major party not tell his partisans to get real but rather to see him gin up the crazies by also disparaging their relief work is to see that despair cubed.
That candidate was given the opportunity to at least act sane when he was asked whether it was a good idea to criticize hurricane relief workers after the Federal Emergency Management Agency was forced to pause work in the Carolinas because of threats from a militia.
The candidate responded by repeating the plain lie that the hurricane response was hampered because FEMA spent its budget helping people who crossed the border illegally.
It is true that no truckloads of bazookaed militias were ever found. But a North Carolina man faces a charge of “going armed to the terror of the public” after he threatened FEMA workers and was arrested in Rutherford County, North Carolina last week. The local sheriff said the weather denier had a rifle and handgun on him at the time of his arrest. He was immediately released on a $10,000 bond. Wonder what he’s up to tonight.
Criticism from the candidate who was there campaigning in the state and making up more stories? There was none.
It is also true that it was not the presidential candidate himself but rather his fervent supporter Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, who said of the Democrats after Hurricane Helene swept her region: “Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.”
Sure thing. So ridiculous.
In the next couple of days the lying grifter’s running mate went to Greene’s district to call her “a great friend of mine” and told her constituents they had “another great, strong, woman leader in Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene … She’s a loyal person, and you guys have a hell of a congresswoman here in Marjorie.”
Hell of a congresswoman. The kind of person really sane, responsible American politicians would want to associate themselves with.
The scary buffoon of a presidential candidate allowed himself to be introduced at a campaign rally Wednesday by a scary buffoon of a former journalist, Tucker Carlson, who said a second administration would be like an angry father who would give a “vigorous spanking” to his disobedient daughter, i.e. the rest of us Americans.
He said the country now was like a kid who’d “smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room,” or a “hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter” who gives her parents the finger and slams her bedroom door.
But everything will be fine in the household, because “When Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl, you’ve been a bad little girl … This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl.”
The crowd, as they say, went wild.
If his surrogates are like bad weather personified, like steaming-hot Gulf waters brewing up a new kind of hurricane, the candidate himself is of course the storm. This past week saw two former key aides — both extremely conservative Republicans and top military leaders — literally call him “fascist.”
And it gets a bit personal when a man who would be president, in expressing his dislike for the press and its right to use confidential sources, says: “When this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was.”
“There is every reason to believe that Donald Trump would seek to use criminal enforcement and the FBI as leverage for his personal and political ends in a second term,” says — no, not me — says Peter Keisler, a founder of the Federalist Society.
Worth thinking about between now and Nov. 5.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].
