Summary: We can give thanks again this year for certain small mercies. That we should give thanks for families and friends almost goes without saying. Yet ironically, we should also give thanks, counterintuitively, for the Republican clown car of candidates. For as we move toward 2016, it becomes clearer that the Republican effort to elect a president may well prove unavailing, so yes, let’s give thanks for the unexpected gift of Donald Trump’s mouth.
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This Thanksgiving, it’s easy, as always, to get caught up in offering banal thanks for quotidian things. For me, to be thankful for family for friends, and for other similarly mundane blessings is to engage in an a most unenterprising and trite litany. Instead, let’s be thankful for other blessings at this time of year, remembering that the blessings of family and friends ought to go without saying, for we ought to be thankful for them always.
Instead, I’d like to give thanks this Thanksgiving for the Republican Party, particularly for the amazing clown car of candidates who, even now, are still seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States.
In particular, I’d like to give thanks for one particular part of Donald Trump’s anatomy, specifically, his mouth, which is, if we Democrats have a hardihood to realize it, is the gift that keeps on giving, if we only were smart enough to unwrap it.
But, of course, we Democrats are too cowardly and inept to know how to unwrap the countless gifts the Republicans have given to us. We, along with much of the American news media, seem utterly reluctant to call out The Donald for the demonstrable lies he continues to tell on national television time after time after time. When The Donald went on record at a rally in Alabama claiming to have witnessed in person thousands of Arab-Americans celebrating when the twin towers fell, there was almost no pushback, either from the national media, or worse, from the Democratic National Committee.
The charge that The Donald has descended into the rhetoric of fascism has not come from the spineless and incompetent leadership of the Democratic National Committee. Instead, it has come from other Republicans, including his rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
No, you did not misread. The attacks on Donald Trump are coming from his fellow Republicans, for whom we may perhaps give thanks this Thanksgiving. It has been people like John Kasich and others in the Republican Party who have dared to call out the Donald for his lies and his Fascist rhetoric.
But while I can give thanks for the fact that there are still principled Republicans who are unafraid to call Fascism Fascism, I have nothing but contempt for the people on my side of the aisle who will not call Donald Trump out for the Fascist he is. We Democrats are too nice to do so. So, when George Stephanopoulos confronted Donald Trump on Sunday morning, he couldn’t bring himself to use the word “lie.” Hell, he couldn’t even bring himself to use a weasel word equivalent like Winston Churchill’s famous “terminological inexactitude.”
Just about the only national media outlet that had the hardihood to call out The Donald was the New York Times, which ran an editorial a few days ago entitled “Applause Lies.” So far, most of the rest of the American media have remained cowardly silent, presumably for fear of being sued by the hyperlitigious bully they have been covering.
That’s a pretty sad state of affairs, when Donald Trump lies to the faces of the American people, and neither the media nor the Democratic National Committee has the balls to call Donald Trump's performance what it is: a textbook example of Fascism.
Nonetheless, we can hope that a sufficiently large number of American voters begin to understand that The Donald is simply unfit to be President. Because, in truth, Donald Trump is Benito Mussolini’s soul brother. A Fascist, who, like Mussolini himself, will probably come to a bad end, executed by partisans and strung up by his feet in a gas station where the public can take notice of and be educated by the bad end of a bad man. And for that, should it occur, we should be truly thankful.
