Democrats and the media would do well to avoid overplaying their hands and appearing too overwrought about this ripest of targets that the preposterous second-place president presents.
Donald Trump is plainly unworthy by character and temperament for the presidency. He is plenty bad enough even in the most reserved of contexts. There is no need to become creative in criticism.
The fact is that Trump was not remotely Nixonian, nor was he engaging in anything resembling a replay of Richard Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when on Monday night he fired a merely acting attorney general--a short-term placeholder for the right-wing Alabamian, Jeff Sessions.
That acting attorney general, Sally Yates, had openly resisted Trump's resistance-worthy executive order imposing an un-American ban on refugees, immigrants and visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton labeled "preening and grandstanding" Yates' letter to Justice Department officials in which she said: "My responsibility is to ensure that the position of the Department of Justice is not only legally defensible, but is informed by our best view of what the law is after consideration of all the facts. In addition, I am responsible for ensuring that the positions we take in court remain consistent with the institution's solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right."
Her position was noble and likely will be validated by coming events. But Cotton was right that she could have resigned if she felt that way rather than make a sanctimonious public statement that lent itself to partisan interpretation and forced Trump to fire her.
Nothing about that incident comes close to the universe in which the paranoid and criminal Nixon ordered the Saturday-night firing of the special prosecutor investigating him, Archibald Cox, and then accepted the resignations of the attorney general and deputy attorney general, Elliott Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, who refused to carry out what Nixon demanded.
Democratic and media overstatement gave Cotton the opportunity he seized to say earlier this week on a nationwide conservative radio show: "These are the wages of not teaching sound American history to snowflakes who grew up to become bloggers and correspondents."
"Snowflake" is derisive right-wing name-calling for persons sensitive enough to be frightened by the evident menace of a Trump presidency. It's real name-calling, unlike my referring to Trump as the "preposterous second-place president," though Trumpians have cast my apt phrase as such.
"Preposterous" is an adjective encapsulating Trump's megalomania, hypersensitivity, meanness, dishonesty and absence of qualification that now besmirch the American presidency. "Second place" is where he finished in the presidential race. It's not a derisive name. Those are accurate modifiers.
People tell me to get over Trump's win in the Electoral College. But I am over it. I do not invoke the "second-place" reference to litigate an election outcome I accept. I invoke it as a patriotic act, as a defense of my great country. I want to remind everyone that most of us didn't vote for this ... this ... preposterous second-place finisher.
Meanwhile, Democrats would do well to consider the wisest fights they should pick, and to think of using their scant supply of powder judiciously, before rushing to invoke the filibuster in opposition to Trump's new nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court.
At its worst, the new nomination will merely restore the Supreme Court to the status quo that existed before the vacancy arising from Antonin Scalia's death. It would recreate a court of five Republican nominees and four Democratic ones, but with enough slack in the center--in Anthony Kennedy for a case here and there and Chief Justice John Roberts occasionally in another--to legalize same-sex marriage, preserve the bare essence of Roe V. Wade and save Obamacare.
The bigger fight would be over the next Trump nominee, perhaps to replace the swing centrist Kennedy, who is said to be interested in retiring. On that one, Trump could be replacing a swing vote with yet another hardened right-wing vote to solidify an oppressive legal environment for a generation.
Democrats will want to shoot all their bullets this time, and then shoot all their blanks next time, out of understandably deep-seated anger and resentment that the Republicans denied former President Obama--now there's a sad phrase--his rightful authority to fill the Scalia vacancy that arose a year ago.
But electoral colleges that defy the popular vote have consequences, and it appears a lousy U.S. Supreme Court for a long time will be chief among them.
Well, next to a President Trump for four years, that is.
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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.
Editorial on 02/02/2017