"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 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 now
comes 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.
– Charles Pierce
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