Chris on the attack- the real enemy, politically speaking

A fellow blogger who is doing an excellent series on Donald Trump and the truly stupid- as well as the factually based- complaints about him clued us in to another fellow blogger who has seen fit to turn his blog into a one-track insult fest against those who dare to disagree with his near-divine intellect.  And you know me, I had to send out a (what I thought was) well-worded rebuttal to his premise, which basically boiled down to this:  If you voted for Trump, you either support the hateful, misogynistic stuff he represents, in which case you are stupid; or, you choose to ignore the hateful, misogynistic stuff because he favors some policy you like, in which case you're stupid; or you are just selfish and don't care that the hateful, misogynistic hurts people and thus are stupid.

As you might imagine, you get some pretty amusing replies from such a self-righteous, self-important gentleman.  To wit:


Martin: You have obviously been eating the sugar cereal for way too long and have no ability to think beyond what the Republican Party is spoon feeding into your gaping maw. The only record of corruption is Trump's. He's done more corrupt things THIS YEAR than Hilary has done in her entire career. When you back that kind of record, even if he wasn't a racist, misogynistic piece of shit, you have no room to talk. 


Okay, so you can see where the problem is right away when you deal with this kind of logic.  So the walking litany of corruption known as Hillary Clinton has done NO wrong, and yet I am the one who has no ability to think independently.  Now MOST of the liberals I know- even the ones who are almost as intransigent as this fellow- will admit that Hillary is a bit problematic.  However, MOST of them wouldn't try to fry Trump supporters in the same hot oil that would leave them a french fry.  Unfortunately, you do end up hitting a few odd ducks like this guy, whose main claim to fame is apparently owning a Don Rickles thesaurus.  And you might say that he is a product of the times- but you would be wrong.


We've talked before about the ill-advised attempts to compare Trump, or Obama, or who-have-you, to Hitler.  You can debate the economic conditions, social standards of the day, etc, etc, but they aren't really the problem at root of people like the blogger above.  However, read this excerpt from an Al-Jazeera article I read just moments after I thanked the blogger for his help creating this post:


Moscow, Russia - Jesus Christ was the world's first Communist, Tamara Lavrischeva announced cheerfully.

"Jesus said, 'Don't collect earthly wealth, you won't take it with you after death,'" the 78-year-old pensioner and Orthodox Christian told Al Jazeera as she trudged through the snow-covered streets of central Moscow with thousands of other Communists during the November 7 rally that commemorated the almost-centennial anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

"And Communists thought the same," she added, her voice drowned by the crowd chanting Soviet-era songs under red banners with hammers and sickles and portraits of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.


With a dismissive shrug and a condescending smile, Lavrischeva rejected the killings, imprisonment and persecution of millions of Orthodox Christian clerics and believers at the hand of Communists.

What she said was not just an opinion of an elderly woman who wants to reconcile her faith with the ideals of her youth in the officially atheist USSR. Her selective amnesia about the persecution of believers - well-documented and brandished by Soviet authorities - reflects a seemingly paradoxical trend in the recent policies of Russia's Communist Party.


I don't share that to attack Russia or Russians, but to point out that there are people EVERYWHERE who are willing to overlook the most heinous deeds for the right combination of "chickens in their pots".  Indeed, if he could have kept the one-sidedness and the insults out, this would have been a very valid point in our blogger buddy's posts.  Unfortunately, he is crippled in removing the speck from my eye by the plank in his own.  The same people who find it convenient to compare Trump with Hitler- or any other current politician- forget that the reason WHY Hitler came to power was the heinous deeds forgotten by the "chicken seekers".  And in comparing the leaders we have now to this most despicable of beings, they are beginning the same train of thought that brought germany to that point back then.  The only way to defeat a Hitler is with an open mind- and being willing to say that there are warts on my candidate, and truly looking to see if they are bad enough to disqualify them.

Unfortunately, I have to admit that while I heard many on "my side of the aisle" do that very soul-searching- with many of them voting for candidates who had no chance  for that very reason, even though they opposed Hillary and what she stood for every bit as much as the all-in Trumpers.  The other side, I heard a lot of, "I guess I'll have to hold my nose and vote for Hillary", and not much in the way of "conscience" votes.  When these liberals wonder how it is that someone like Trump got elected, I hope they will come to realize it was this very attitude from them that led to his victory.


Bringing me to this conclusion- which I shared with that blogger, though I don't expect his comprehension- that the enemy of this country is not the Republican, nor the Democrat, nor even the Socialist.  No, the enemy of this nation, that is tearing us apart, are the people who refuse to listen.  That refuse to learn.  That refuse to accept that there are people out there who disagree with them, and many of them have good reasons.



But that blogger?  His mouth is a mirror he won't look into.