Vicious Buffoon

Dear Editor:

In my life, I have watched Franklin Roosevelt install the New Deal, Harry Truman order the atomic bomb to end WWII, Dwight Eisenhower sign the first Civil Rights bills, John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba,  Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and say, "And we shall overcome," Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill, George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing "Amazing Grace" in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Until now these were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men and were not perfect presidents.They approached the job, took to the podium, and with all the gravitas they could muster speak as appropriate to the job. They tried to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled, but they tried.

And comes now a hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. A man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House.

The scion of a multi-generational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now."