Come Over to the Stupid Side

So someone linked to this piece from the Washington Post this morning, a citizen Op-ed by a woman who got up and yelled "Black lives matter!" at a Donald Trump rally.  It was the same rally where another black woman was sucker-punched by a white supremacist, but the writer of this piece wasn't punched or hit or even arrested, just escorted out "to meet the rest of the protesters and keep demonstrating outside the rally."

"This is what happened next," the headline reads.  Actually, nothing happened next.  She stood up in a crowd, yelled "Black lives matter!", was removed to the parking lot, and wrote this piece.  What did she think she was doing?  "I couldn’t just sit and watch someone who is trying to be our president incite violence." How is yelling something at a Trump rally going to stop Trump from doing anything? As protests go, it seems especially pointless to me. For that matter, every president incites violence. Has she ever protested against Obama's gleeful use of violence, against his cooperation with the Prison-Industrial Complex, against his contempt for ordinary black people? How about Hillary Clinton's "We came, we saw, he died," and her fondness for the idea that someone might kill Ralph Nader? Will she protest against the wars that will be started by Obama's successor whoever that turns out to be, or do only Americans' lives matter?

"What kinds of lessons would children learn from a president who says it’s okay to kill the families of alleged terrorists and to ban people from the country because of their religion?" Like I said -- she has no idea, or prefers not to know, what the president we already have is doing. Did Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki's life matter? What kinds of lessons have children learned from a president who jokes about killing some male pop singers with predator drones if they come sniffing around his daughters? What kinds of lessons do children learn from the Bush-Obama endless War on terrror? 

"But I had to do something" is the rallying cry of every misconceived, destructive action I've heard of in the past 20 years and more. Bill Clinton killed thousands of people in Kosovo, more than the bad guys there killed, with no good result. "But we had to do something!" was used to justify Bush's invasion of Iraq against effective criticism, and many liberals and progressives fell into line. "We've got to do something!" The 2008 bailout. "We've got to do something!" Whenever someone utters those magic words, I know they've abandoned all good sense and gone over to the Stupid side.

Think of all the links on Facebook to liberal online media where this or that celebrity liberal "shut down" Trump or "destroyed" him, or "shut him up." All those claims are lies: Trump is still at large, winning primary after primary. Liberals and leftists are at one with the Republican establishment right now: they don't care about anything but Stopping Trump, but they don't know how and they really have nothing positive to offer in his place. I'm really starting to worry that he'll win the Presidency this fall. Not because Sanders fans stay home rather than vote for Clinton, either, but because people thought that feel-good symbolic gestures were activism.