Our president spends much of his public speaking and tweeting insulting people. Favorite targets are the honest media and anyone who challenges his skewed worldview.
I was once a city editor called into a meeting with college bigshots, my editor and my publisher to watch the bigshots lie about what I had accurately reported. We ran enough of a retraction to cause me to distrust my publisher thereafter. It can get lonely on the front lines of journalism. You deal with Very Important People whose wealth and status dwarf those of the ink-stained wretches trying to hold them accountable. Still, reporters are trained to take the abuse and even to report it accurately without retaliation.
But, suppose reporters were permitted to answer personal insults in kind:
Mr. President, does naming a son Barron display your innate contempt for the American republic or your pathetic envy of the truly wealthy Hilton family?
Mr. President, do you plan to revoke the immigration and subsequent citizenship status for your current in-laws since their arrival is based on their anchor-daughter?
Mr. President, have you congratulated your namesake son for becoming the same philandering, wife-deserter as his father?
Mr. President, do you realize that the “very fine” klanazis your hate-speak encourages would put your favorite daughter, her husband and your grandchildren in gas chambers if given the chance?
Mr. President, when will you instruct U.S. marshals to arrest your favorite daughter for using private, unprotected emails to discuss government business? When will you “Lock her up; Lock her up; Lock her up?”
Mr. President, do you feel like a fool when you accuse the Baltic nations of starting World War I because you don’t know the difference between the Baltic Sea and the Balkan Peninsula?
Mr. President, do you realize yet that not all wildfires are forest fires and that the use of private property as the owner sees fit is a basic American right, not limited to just the wealthy?
Mr. President, does your support for the murder of American resident and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, as ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, reflect the hundreds of millions of dollars you bragged that the Saudis invested with you, their continuing massive rentals at your D.C. hotel or your envy for a tyrant eliminating a journalist called an “enemy of the state?”
Mr. President, you called a past paramour, whose silence you tried to buy, “horse-faced.” But, don’t your present wife and the daughter you’d like to date reveal your preference for an oblong facial structure?
Mr. President, when you call on three women reporters with accents and then dismiss them with “I can’t understand you,” does that reflect your failing faculties or you basic bigotry?
Mr. President, is that how you talk to your current wife?
And, Mrs. Sanders, as someone who stands before us lying on a regular basis and who sank to disseminating doctored evidence to back up your lies, can we assume that you are a true representative of the kind of Christianity your preacher daddy teaches?
But the honest press is trained in restraint. SAD.
(Gary Edmondson is chair of the Stephens County Democratic Party. Check it out at scdpok.us)