The choice of this headline wasn’t a shoe-in. There was also Bile Over Substance. But in the end, it is not the ugly rhetoric that is most disturbing. It is the environment of fomented hatred and the lingering foreboding it has left us with.
Donald Trump or Ted Cruz will hopefully never lead this country, but what kind of legacy will their campaigns leave? When this is all over (and that moment can’t come soon enough), will the lower life forms who cheer their every despicable syllable crawl back into the swamps from which they emerged? Or will they, persecuted white people that they are, with their alleged Christianity “under siege,” become a genuine movement of dangerous and likely armed vengeance?
On Super Tuesday, Trump indeed called his following a movement, crediting his gormless Sancho Panza, Chris Christie, for pointing this out. That movement, though, is led by a man who would need to do research to establish whether or not the Ku Klux Klan is indeed a hate group (sorry, the earpiece is not the defective one here.)
Even the dulcet-toned Garrison Keillor, during his final broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, called Trump “a bloated megalomaniac whose platform consists of hostility, paranoia and fantasy.”
Yes we could still laugh at The Producers parody on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in which Nathan Lane describes a scheme to find “the worst candidate in history…a real trainwreck. A schmuck, a putz, a grade-A, world-class, gold-plated nincompoop.” That would be Trump. But after Super Tuesday our laughter comes with a sick feeling in the stomach, too. Is this what our country has sunk to?
Republican House Speaker, Paul Ryan would like us to think otherwise with his desperate-sounding intonation that “this is the party of Lincoln.” But it hasn’t been for a very long time. Having white supremacist homophobes running for the highest office in the land is the natural outcome of the do-nothing, block everything, malign everyone Congress that the Republicans control.
If you really want vile, check out a KKK website to see what they think of the LGBT community. When I visited one, I immediately got a message on my screen warning me that “your Mac may have become infected.” Darn right.
During his Super Tuesday victory speech when asked why he had not distanced himself from the KKK, Trump whined “I disavow, I disavow, how many times must I disavow?” But he never mentioned the Klan by name.
Cruz, meanwhile, just addressed the Proclaim 16, National Religious Broadcasters’ Convention that also featured three anti-LGBT hate groups and multiple notoriously anti-gay extremist speakers, according to Media Matters.
Trump claims he has never heard of KKK Grand Wizard, David Duke, which is considerably less frightening, and less believable, than the fact that he has never heard of the nuclear Triad. That he will never own The Football is small compensation for the noxious fumes of hostility he has unleashed amongst us. Maybe his ascendancy shouldn’t surprise us. After all, his amoebic followers have been here from the beginning. Ask any Native American.
