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Op-Ed

The Politics of Cowardice

July 20, 2018

I have long said that modern U.S. politics can be summed up in seven words: Republicans are liars and Democrats are cowards. Today I propose the 2018 Corollary: Republicans are liars and cowards; Democrats are cowards and stupid.

Robert Kahn

By Robert Kahn

Deputy editor emeritus, Courthouse News

I have long said that modern U.S. politics can be summed up in seven words: Republicans are liars and Democrats are cowards. Today I propose the 2018 Corollary: Republicans are liars and cowards; Democrats are cowards and stupid.

Anyone who read the news from Helsinki this week knows that the Basic Theorem and its Corollary have been proved — and not by me.

It takes quite a bit to outdo the Democrats in cowardice, since Bill Clinton renamed it “triangulation,” but the Republican Congress and revolving-door Trump Cabinet members have done it: They have redefined cowardice.

The word not so long ago was regarded as a shameful trait for any human being: either simple fear, or failure to stand up for one’s rights and beliefs.

That’s not cowardice anymore. That’s daily life under the 115th Congress. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and their colleagues have redefined the word.

Today it means toad-eating, lambent lickspittles illuminated in light of day under lackadaisical response, if any, from millions of voters and thousands of public officeholders who still, for some reason, believe, or pretend to believe that Donald Trump is out for anyone but himself, and wouldn’t run over you to get it.

I’m sorry: I meant to say “would run over you.”

So we take our Major Premise as proven: Republicans are liars and Democrats are cowards.

To prove our Corollary, we need only show that Republicans are cowards — which they themselves have done — and that Democrats are stupid.

That’s one of them QEDs — not to get elitist onya.

Now Democrats are about to be stupid again. They will refuse to run against Trump for the most basic and obvious reason: his moral character, which makes him unfit for office, by any standard.

All Democrats need do is make this the only issue of this year’s campaigns, and again in 2020. And if this not the most important issue, it is the one from which all of Trump’s blunders spring.

I don’t imagine the Democrats will do it, though, because, “after all, he is the president of the United States.” As though Trump were not disgracing the office of the presidency every morning with his short greasy thumbs.

Democrats should know by now that Trump’s only style of debating, and ruling, is insults.

They need not even impugn Trump’s moral character to win the debate: All they need do is recite it — then remind the crowd that all Trump will say in response will be personal insults.

And that is Trump’s only style of campaigning and ruling: insult — friend or foe, truth or fiction: Canada, Europe, the Queen of England.

That is how Trump will respond to Democrats’ charge, if the Democrats have the guts or intelligence to make it: with personal insults.

So the Democrats will be proved right time and again.

As if that mattered anymore …

What other president in U.S. history would have insulted the Queen of England?

He’s so stupid he didn’t even know he was doing it.

Because he hates to read.

And if those are the best excuses you can come up with for the president of the United States, well … I have millions of dollars in a Nigerian bank account I would like to share with you …

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