Being Consistent

I CAMPAIGNED DOGGEDLY for every Democrat who ever ran for any office anywhere, starting with LBJ. With one exception. As a senior in high school I actually campaigned for Nixon, due to the influence of my friend and classmate, the president of the class, whose power and influence misguided me. Never again. What I see among recent Republican residents are one brilliant criminal (Nixon), three men of mediocre talent (Reagan & both Bushes), and a dumber than dirt criminal (you know who). Among Democrats I see a sly politicker with a great domestic agenda and misguided foreign policy (LBJ), a brilliant born again Christian with high ideals (Jimmy Carter), a brillliant womanizer (Clinton), a brilliant African-American (Obama), and a nice guy (Biden). Ever consistent, I like all the Dems, and despise the Repubs. But suppose one of the Democrats, say, Barack Obama, had behaved exactly the way Donald Trump behaved while in office. How would I have reacted? How would others have reacted? In the case of Bill Clinton, his supporters tended to ignore his womanizing, and his detractors emphasized it. The hypocrisy of this motivated me to examine my own hypocrisy. At length I became disenchanted with him, believing that he had thrown away a golden opportunity to promote a progressive agenda with moral integrity. But this I assert with the full force of my intelligence and moral values, such as they are: had any of my Democratic presidents behaved like Trump, I never would have supported the sad sack of shit. The constant, daily prevarication, amounting to an average of more than twenty falsehoods a day, the slanderous insults hurled at good people, including heroes like John McCain, the failure to staff and manage the state department and the EPA - these relatively "minor" presidential failure alone would have turned me against my own Democrat-president. But when Trump tried to steal the election from Biden with his outlandish lies, and when he sent an angry well armed mob to the Capitol to disrupt the electoral college formalization, it became serious, treasonous, traitorous. Any Democrat president who behaved like Trump would have evoked my harshest anger and disapproval. There is no doubt of that. Can you imagine how conservatives would have reacted to Barack Obama had he behaved exactly as Trump did and does?