By Conrad Black Special to the Sun, September 15, 2020
Seven weeks from the 2020 election, American politics have reached such an appalling state of incivility that there
is no precedent for it in American presidential history.
Of course, there was terrible acrimony between Jefferson and
Hamilton, and by and against Andrew Jackson, and in the awful
contentiousness leading up to and through the Civil War. Theodore
Roosevelt called William Jennings Bryan a “logothete and a human
trombone.” Many raved against Franklin D. Roosevelt as a communist.
As a young man, I was shocked to hear on the radio in 1956 someone
say of President Eisenhower (whose memorial is being unveiled in
Washington this week): “I cannot vote for a sick old man with one foot
in the grave and the other in his mouth.” The Nixon era produced its own
levels of opprobrium, ending in crowds singing “Jail to the chief,” and
it became tiresome to hear Ronald Reagan described, in the words of
Washington legal eminence Clark Clifford, as “an amiable dunce.”
None of this has prepared us for the sea-to-sea, round-the-clock mud-slinging of the 2020 campaign.
None of this has prepared us for the sea-to-sea, round-the-clock mud-slinging of the 2020 campaign.
I wrote
last week how I was shocked that Peggy Noonan described President Trump
in the Wall Street Journal on September 5 as “a malignancy
metastasizing in the oval office.” A week later, she fell to
mind-reading, as less distinguished journalists and indifferent
historians frequently do, and announced that the president, a graduate
of the New York Military Institute and the greatest White House friend
the American military has had at least since General Eisenhower,
believes with the elder son of the Godfather (in the famous Coppola
film), that people who join the armed forces are fools because their
personal interests are not directly involved..........To Read More....
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