It's so easy to get numb - to adjust to things now as they are and say, "Well, they're not really that much worse than they used to be, are they?" and "Hey, politics has always been a dirty business." Outrage fatigue is real. If you are ever overcome by this, feel free to listen to Steve Schmidt remind you just how absolutely ahistorical and unAmerican this "president" is in his behavior.
There's never been a genteel period of American politics but what we're seeing here is something new, particularly from a president. He uses lying at mass rallies to scapegoat minority populations. He alleges conspiracies. He creates a sense of mass victimization and then positions himself as the avenger on behalf of the victims, defending them from the invading hoard of migrants coming from the south, approaching the border. This is all BS of the first order.
Folks, there is a reason our current White House occupant cozies up to dictators. He likes their style. This isn't new for him - he has always had this approach to his own life and businesses. Lying, cheating, treating people like objects meant to serve him, easily discarded when they stop fulfilling any of his requirements. Only now he has the power of a dictator, too, thanks to Republicans (and a few Democrats) in Congress.
Who cleared the way over the last few decades for this degradation of the office to take place, after the previous occupant treated it with the greatest of respect and awe? Steve Schmidt correctly places the blame squarely on Newt Gingrich. "When you see Newt Gingrich up there, one of the most singularly pernicious forces in the history of American politics, a man who more than any other has wrecked the collegiality, the comity, who began and begat this era of partisan warfare," he practically spat.
Schmidt went on to talk about the group of Hondurans walking north - that they are vulnerable, desperate to escape the violence in their homeland. The Orange Menace (and Gingrich — a professor of HISTORY, of all things, he likes to think of himself...) talk about these refugees as if they are filth. It takes us back to the absolute worst parts of our national historic roots, makes the ugliest parts of our past our current face again.
The caravan. These are vulnerable people fleeing some of the most violence-ravaged places on earth. And why do they walk for 2,000 miles? Because of the power of an idea. That idea is this place. America....[T]he idea that when a mother through suffering, through abuse, through risk and sometimes death all around them, when they reach the border and they see a uniform with an American flag and they are no longer safe. Or that baby is ripped away and put into an internment camp, this is a moral outrage that harkens to the worse excesses in the history of the country, to the separation of families at the slave auction blocks, to the separation of Native American families.
Well. That'll snap you out of it, America. No one can afford to wallow in outrage fatigue. Take a break if you need to but listen to Steve Schmidt take down the Republican party to get yourself ready for action.
