COMMENTARY

BRUMMETT ONLINE: Hyper-partisan claptrap

We put on this newspaper’s “Senior Expo” political panel Saturday. I thought I’d report to the legions who forgot to attend.

State Sen. Jason Rapert of Conway said he cared about me and Skip Rutherford and that President Barack Obama was the cause of Islamic terror and that Obama had ruined the sound and robust economy he inherited from George W. Bush.

Rapert also said that Hillary Clinton clearly had something going on health-wise, although it apparently wasn’t clear enough for him to say what it was.

I called that a “right-wing smear” and said I loved everybody.

Rapert said I had a strange way of showing it.

Rapert also said that Bill and Hillary Clinton ought to be indicted over Clinton Foundation donations, and I asked on what basis, and Rapert said corruption, and I asked what specific kind of corruption and he said a governor of Virginia once got indicted for taking gifts.

I didn’t reply, because my mind didn’t work fast enough, that, in June, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned the corruption conviction of former Republican Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.

It did so with this relevant phrase from Chief Justice John Roberts about official public actions taken in behalf of gift providers: “Setting up a meeting, calling another public official, or hosting an event does not, standing alone, qualify as an ‘official act.’”

I wish I’d known to say it. It loses quite a bit of punch without spontaneity and only in later retrieval.

Republican lobbyist and man-about-town Bill Vickery said Rutherford had insulted white people without college educations, and Skip and I said he had done no such thing.

What Rutherford had said was that Donald Trump runs well in Arkansas because white people without college educations favor him, and Arkansas has a predominantly white population as well as the nation’s second, or second-lowest, rate of college graduation.

Vickery said nobody would dare stereotype African-Americans in such an insulting way and that Skip was basically invoking Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables.

Skip and I countered that the reference was simply to an empirical matter of demographics. It is not insulting to cite the fact that black voters favor Clinton. Nor is it insulting to say white voters without college educations favor Trump. Those are facts.

A poll over the weekend said Trump holds a 59-point lead — that’s what I said, 59 points — among white men without college educations.

If Rutherford had said that Trump relies on ignorant white people and that Arkansas has an abundant infestation of ignorant white people — well, that might have been insulting. But he didn’t say that. And I didn’t just write it. I merely wrote that he didn’t say it. OK? Don’t put that on me. I love everybody, ignorant or not.

I pronounced the entire panel discussion “tiresome” and “hyper-partisan claptrap,” which seemed to offend an audience member who resembled Democrat-Gazette president and general manager Lynn Hamilton, who said the discussion was splendid.

I agreed with a woman who rose as if to ask a question, but instead gave a sermonette that the event was being held for seniors and that she had expected a discussion of the candidates’ proposals on Social Security and Medicare. She said our discussion was an example of the very reason she turned off such things when they came on her television.

I replied that I’d like to turn it off, too.

But I added that nobody is going to do diddly about Social Security or Medicare because, either way, we will not have a filibuster-proof U.S. Senate and the polarization of the last eight years will only get unimaginably worse.

It may be that I won’t be invited back to the expo panel next year, in which case I can go to the food-truck festival or stay home and watch college football.

P.S. — To his credit, Republican panelist Vickery eschewed the usual tiresome hyper-partisan claptrap on the subject of rumors about Hillary’s supposed ill health. He said it didn’t matter because we’ve had presidents who did well enough while suffering diseases or even having just been shot.

On this day, Vickery’s answer in that specific context — though in no other — positively soared.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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