Safeway Parking Lot

Comparing apples to oranges is not a new idea, but what if the guy doing the comparing happens to be one great big Tangerine? A frustrated "President" Trump lashed out at reporters the other day, asserting that "George Washington was a slave owner." With his next breath, he asked we can assume rhetorically, "Was George Washington a slave owner?" The answer, just in case, is "Yes." George Washington was a slave owner, as was the next target of his tirade, Thomas Jefferson. So, his orangey-ness wants to know, if we start tearing down statues of slave owners, are we going to knock George and Tom off their pedestals?
A pretty keen argument if you're getting drunk in the Safeway parking lot with your buds on a Friday night. But this is the President of the United States making these wild swings of mood and taste. He's ignoring simple facts of the matter, like the community of Charlottesville had decided to remove the statue and it was a group of protesters from outside that descended on that college town and decided they wanted to argue the matter. If someone in the District of Columbia could get enough signatures on a petition to change the name of the monuments to reflect more culturally sensitive individuals, then we might have some quid pro quo.
As it stands, this was the desperate flailing of a drowning man. A man so mired in his own fear and loathing that he can no longer distinguish right from wrong. The thugs that dropped by the University of Virginia were there to incite. They were not there to discuss. They showed up armed and ready for battle. This is not, in spite of our current "President's" vision of the world, how we conduct business in the United States. What the Nazis did was stand outside a crowded movie house and shout "Fire!" as they lit a match. If they had shown up and stood there in the dark with their Tiki torches smoldering and chests puffed out without their racist epithets and hateful propaganda, they might have kept their permit and walked home the next day.
That's not why they came. They came to kick at the hornet's nest and then blame the hornets for being angry. Just like our "President." Thinking people from across the globe watched him melt down as he did yet another turnabout when someone asked him why he couldn't be a little more succinct about what was wrong with the events of the past weekend. He couldn't do it. Instead he went for that Safeway parking lot argument and made everyone of the pinheads who spewed their venom in the name of White Supremacy feel vindicated. By the President of the United States. Just under seventy years before the Civil War, George Washington wrote in his will that he wanted to emancipate the slaves he held on his farm at Mount Vernon. Not exactly an abolitionist, but still pretty forward thinking for a gentleman of his time. Thomas Jefferson wrote legislation as far back as 1778 to abolish slavery. Was there hypocrisy in his maintaining his own plantation slaves? Yes. the kind of conflict that was unclear back before we elected our first President.
Now we're on number forty-five. You'd think he would know better.
You'd think that he would think.
Alas.