Make America Hate Again

[DemocratSinceBirth]

They didn’t riot in the streets of Cleveland, as Donald Trump said his supporters would do had things not gone his way. But you saw the raw essence of a riot, the madness and loss of reason, on display in four days of chaos at the Republican National Convention.

For a campaign now devoted to “law and order,” the launch was mob rule: in spirit, in tone, in words. Long after we’ve forgotten Trump’s closing speech — that paean to self, that nightmare portrait of an America where the lights have gone out — we will remember the savagery just below the surface.

Starting on night one, when Republicans chose to manipulate the grief-deranged mother of a terrorist victim, the build-up to the hanging of Hillary Clinton was never subtle. Imagine if one party had exploited a widow of one of the 241 service members killed in the 1983 suicide bombing of Americans in Beirut — the deadliest single attack on marines since World War II — as a stick against Ronald Reagan, whose administrative negligence was much to blame.

...


On one level, this convention was Fox News on steroids — the half-truths, the grievances, the demonizing, and certainly the elderly audience, as overnight ratings for the first nights showed. But what a strange irony it was that the mastermind of all that broadcast polarization — and, arguably, of the party that gave us Trump — was forced out on the night that should have been Roger Ailes’s apogee.

Ailes will be an asterisk. When the convention closed, fear had won the hall. And we should fear — for the republic, for a democracy facing its gravest peril since the Civil War.


http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/opinion/make-america-hate-again.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=1

[LoverOfLiberty]

1. Trump - For a bitter America.

[CrispyQ]

2. +1! That's good. -nt