No one is innocent in Trump assassination attempt

America circa 2020. For one thing is clear. No one is innocent. Absolutely no one is innocent. When bad things happen, Americans love to point fingers. But we also hate to look in the mirror. We always sing the same song. Everyone did the wrong thing. While we did nothing wrong. Everyone else has dirty hands, but our hands are clean. We’re the victim, the martyr, the aggrieved party, someone call my lawyer, the culprits are all on the other side of the ideological divide. We never forget a slight but we also never remember when we slide someone else. We walk through life as saints living among senators. For us. I love my country. And so I’m always inclined to think of my fellow Americans as courageous. But there is at least one area in which we have shown over and over again that we are Stone Cold cowards. Americans in both political parties are afraid to step up, raise our hand and take even a sliver of responsibility for when things go haywire. One such thing is the creation of a toxic political climate, where some people now think that the best way to solve our political differences isn’t with ballots, but bullets. All this comes rushing back to me in the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt aimed at former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump. During a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump was shot in the ear and nearly killed. Tragically, one spectator in the bleachers was shot and killed, and another was badly injured. The shooter was identified as 20 year old Thomas Matthew crooks, who high school classmates have since revealed was severely bullied. Crooks was killed by agents of a secret service and agency it now finds itself under a lot of scrutiny.

The spectators who were injured or killed were innocent. But that’s not a word I would use to describe Trump innocent is the last thing he is there is this bonfire raging across American politics. Trump started when he got into the game in June 2015. For the next several years, he’s stoked it fueled it fanned it and then watched it burn. And now an amber has floated off the flame and burn him. That’s poetic. Trump insulted his enemies, demonize his opponents preyed on the weak, mocked the marginalized and even humiliated members of his own cabinet. He turned politics into professional wrestling, and he’s had experience with both. For Trump loyalty is a one way street. He’s a bad person, and he was a terrible president. Whatever else you think about him as a leader, and polls show that more than two thirds of Americans think he’s strong and decisive. Surely we can all agree that he failed a character test with flying colors. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to attack the victim. Political Violence is never acceptable, regardless of who is the target. When Paul Pelosi husband, a former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was attacked in his own home late at night by hammer wielding intruder. Some Republicans were terribly amused by this. Even Trump made wisecracks about it. The right wingers aren’t laughing. Now, of course, in fact, on social media, they have tried to instill a no joke rule As concerns the attack on Trump, look who got sensitive all of a sudden, what I am here to do is to remind Americans that we didn’t get here by accident, and that it wasn’t only one party that brought us here. Democrats have behaved recklessly, and so have Republicans, we have all said things that we should not have said, we have all done things that we should not have done. And all that noise helps bring us to this dark place.

The trick was to dehumanize the other side. Conservatives convinced themselves that only they loved the country. And liberals were just as sure that only they loved humanity. From there, it was easy. We could say or do whatever we want, because we told ourselves, we were on the side of the righteous and the other side. Well, they’re all made up of evil doers. There is no use pointing fingers. We all had a hand in mixing up the toxic brew that the Republic has ingested.