“In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and and say, "And we shall overcome." I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing 'Amazing Grace' in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
"These
were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not
perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached
the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster
as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the
presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not
all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried nonetheless.
"And
comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless
and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman
whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the
perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond
what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of
suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave
him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes
up in the White House.
"The
scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we
are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of
the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had
such a cheap counterfeit of a president* as currently occupies the office. We
never have had a president* so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small
in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the
requisite contempt.
"Watch
how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his
own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to
shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don't have to
be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity
is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political
commonwealth, too. Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United
States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch
the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now."
- Charles Pierce
Donald does like playing golf and grabbing women and lying.
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