Hail falls with a sound all its own and this morning that sound woke me up.
After starting the coffee and doing the few exercises I pretend will keep me limber, I logged on to see that President Obama had offered his statement on January 6. Cool, that makes two of us.
To write every day is great practice. I recommend it to everyone, if only because you must shelve your ego at some point knowing that whether today’s writing feels like a failure or a success tomorrow demands something new. Still, as was the case last night, it is hard not to think on some (or many) days: “I came nowhere close to my aspirations.” And yesterday I was writing about an event everyone else would be commenting on too. Thus, when the hail woke me up to a man of great rhetorical skill and a résumé far better suited than mine to the job of commenting on January 6th I thought I would read how should be done.
But without claiming what I wrote held together and with all due respect to Mr. Obama and his service to America, his statement said zero.
What the F? Even Joe Biden got serious about saying what President Trump has done and is doing.
You can't love your country only when you win. You can't obey the law only when it's convenient. You can't be patriotic when you embrace and enable lies.
Those who stormed this Capitol and those who instigated and incited and those who called on them to do so held a dagger at the throat of America, at American democracy.
They didn't come here out of patriotism or principle. They came here in rage. Not in service of America but rather in service of one man.
While I admire and respect Mr. Obama's restraint, thought him a stellar president overall, and will always count one of the craziest aspects of the last decade how the right responded to him as if he were Stokely Carmichael, Vladimir Lenin and William Tecumseh Sherman rolled into one, yesterday was a good time to stand in the big boots of his status and say:
My Fellow Americans,
As you surely know half the country did not vote for me and many of that number dislike me and distrust me.
Yet my election, like the election of someone I dislike and distrust such as President Trump, are not signs of American failure. They are signs of American success.
The whole point of America is that we work with those who see the world differently than we do.
To hash out our battles at the ballot box and in the debate hall, as unpleasant as that can be, is better than meeting on the battlefield. That’s what they do in S-hole countries. We are better than that.
The people who marched up the steps of The Capitol a year ago today did not believe the election of Joe Biden over President Trump counted. That is their right. And it is their right to bring their grievance to any public forum and to our courts.
A public forum is a peaceful protest, a newspaper, or the next election.
A riot is not a public forum. It is just a riot. And no event where police officers are killed and windows are smashed can claim torusim as a defense.
But that riot, as deadly and disgraceful as it was, is secondary to those who believe that a Vice President can declare who wins an election. To gin up a strategy that called for Mike Pence to betray his office and our country is a discervice to America and a betrayal of the rules which govern, if you will, our game.
Our courts are our referees, the people with the whistles there to tell us when someone has committed a foul or stepped out of bounds. Yet those referees found no foul in the previous election. And they looked over sixty times. In recounts in Arizona and Wisconsin and Georgia, we went to the equivalent of slow-motion replay. Nothing. Not even close. No roughing the passer, both feet clearly down, across the goal line as clear as day.
Sorry, I know it hurts. But in 2020 your team lost.
And yet President Trump and many Republican leaders continue to pretend the deep state had twenty men on the field or Democrats or got eight downs or who knows what. You will have to admit, it looks a little odd that you keep saying the game was rigged and are willing to claim that Ceaser Chavez, who has been dead since 1993, was part of the rigging.
I do not need to tell you that Democrats are not perfect.
I do not need to tell you, especially the Republicans out there, that Democrats have often failed to live up to the highest ideals of this nation. Myself included, myself especially many of you will say.
But Democrats need a worthy advisory to help us be our best as a party and our best as citizens.
We want to get back to the serious game of improving this country and you want to complain.
You pick up the ball and spread your feces on the field because you don’t like the rules or the score and then you call us communists and traitors and unpatriotic.
I can always do better. My party can always do better. My country can always do better too.
But so can you Mr. Trump. So can you Mr. Mcconnell. You want America to be great again. Start by doing better as Republicans and leaders and as Americans.
Start with basic decency.
The choice between Obama and McCain or Biden and Trump or Republican and Democrat is, by any measure, less important than being able to choose rather than having go to war every four years.
You are choosing war instead of choosing democracy.
You would return us to the gutter of history rather than keep us the shining city on a hill.
Let’s argue about taxes.
Let’s argue about the border.
And yes, let’s argue about choice and guns and how we fund the police and all the rest.
Let’s do it like Americans, not like thugs or spoiled children.
Bring your best arguments to the hall of debate.
We are brave enough to take you on honestly and in service of this great country.
I challenge you, Mr. Trump, and those who follow him, to man up and do the same.
Brandish your evidence instead of your weapons and use our flag as a symbol of how to behave rather than a club that shows you have forgotten how.
Real Americans do not kill each other over ideas. They debate them. We look forward to you returning to the field of play.
May God bless you and bless these United States.
Yeesh. That was fun to write. It would probably lead to automatic gunfire from every red quarter of America if Mr. Obama said anything like it and so I guess he knows what he is doing. But still . . .
Tomorrow, something from a different land altogether.