As President Joe Biden said following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump last Saturday, there's no place in America for this kind of violence.
"It's sick. It's sick," Biden said. "We cannot be like this. We cannot condone this."
But of course this is, unfortunately, what we've become. America's history of violence has now spilled over into its politics, and with no small thanks to the man who was its target last week.
Some knee-jerk Republicans claimed that it was Joe Biden who caused the loner from a little Pennsylvania community to climb atop a building near a Trump rally and fire at the former president, who was in the process of claiming that Biden was allowing criminals to invade America.
"Today is not just some isolated incident,” puffed Ohio Republican Sen. J.D. Vance, now Trump's running mate. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Pretty rich coming from one of the gang that has staunchly supported Trump as he threatened to execute American military generals, posted tweets ridiculing Nancy Pelosi's husband for getting hit over the head by an intruder, described self-styled Nazi marchers as "good people," called for law enforcement to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in the legs, and orchestrated an attack on the U.S. Capitol that killed several people, just for starters. And how about his biggest House supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, suggesting that former President Barack Obama needed to be executed?
None was more ridiculous than Wisconsin's own 3rd District GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden.
“It is obvious (that the shooting) was because of the leftists,” Van Orden told an interviewer.
He added that he condemns “100% of all political violence,” but argued it was “much more so on the left than on the right — people feel like they can’t wear anything that reflects their Make America Great Again, Republican beliefs.”
All of that inane talk has helped morph our political campaigns from an exchange of ideas on how best to run the country to one of pure hatred and contempt for the other side. The bottom line is that the attempt on Trump's life doesn't make him any more qualified to return to the presidency than before.
While we need to deplore the violence, we also need to make sure that this master of deceit doesn't get anywhere near the oval office again, as his fellow Republican Liz Cheney constantly reminds us.
One GOP representative noted that Trump was "lucky" that the bullet aimed at him at that Pennsylvania rally wasn't just an inch closer to his face, thank goodness.
But Trump has no shortage of luck. He was lucky when, out of the blue, a judge he appointed to the federal bench threw out his charges for stealing classified documents on Monday.
And he was also lucky that Joe Biden let him off the hook during last month's 90-minute debate as he spewed untruths about everything from immigration to abortion and, of course, the four-year running joke of a stolen election — according to Urban Milwaukee's data wonk Bruce Thompson, 30 blatant lies in total, or roughly one every 90 seconds during his turn at the mic.
But because the president didn't effectively answer him or call him out on specifics, Trump got by with it, and then, because the entire post-debate coverage focused on Biden's shortcomings, he continues to escape the kind of scrutiny that would hold him accountable, or at least exposed.
To witness the press and TV coverage of the debate and read the learned pundits, apparently it's acceptable for presidential candidates to feed the American people unadulterated BS. The only thing that seems to matter now is how the Democrats will deal with their Biden problem. Trump's lies can continue to fester and to be believed by more and more Americans who may have been sitting on the fence.
Sen. Bernie Sanders put it all in perspective:
"Trump lied, lied, and lied. Biden did not successfully defend his record or expose Trump for the fraud that he is. Further, he did not bring forth a strong agenda for his second term.
"Trump told us that 'everybody' wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Lie! More than 60% of the American people disagreed with that horrific Supreme Court decision.
"Trump told us that illegal immigrants are destroying Social Security because of the benefits they receive. Lie! Illegal immigrants do not receive Social Security benefits. In fact, they put some $10 billion a year into the program that they do not benefit from.
"Trump ignored the question on climate change. Maybe it's because he has the unique and insane view that climate change is a 'hoax' created in China.
"Trump refused to answer the question about whether he would accept the election results if he lost. Maybe that's because he won't, and because he doesn't believe in democracy."
The pity is that the convicted felon should have been called out on those 30 lies by Joe Biden himself. But because of Biden's lapses, Trump was lucky enough to escape having his feet held to the fire.
And this week's Republican convention in Milwaukee is doubling down on those lies, claiming to defeat inflation (it's already below 3%), making America the dominant energy producer in the world (it already is) and a host of other bogus claims enshrined in its platform.
The question now, of course, is whether Donald Trump can lie his way back to the White House or whether the Democrats can effectively inform American voters what a charlatan he really is and what's at stake for us all.
The people must know, as Sanders noted, that Republicans are proud to have overturned Roe v. Wade, that they think climate change is a hoax, that they want to cut Social Security and Medicare, that they want to give tax breaks to billionaires, that they oppose raising the minimum wage to a living wage.
If Joe Biden can't do it, then the party may need to make a change during August's national convention.
The inescapable truth is for the sake of America, Donald Trump must be defeated in November.
