What did the men with Donald Trump do when he spoke of ‘shithole countries’?

This entire article is worth reading. But what struck me was a small point toward the end that made me realize how thoroughly disgusted I am with the pious platitudes about what does and does not "represent who we are" or "represent the goodness of the American people." I'm pretty sure it was President Obama who popularized this phrase, but it has long since become a favored refuge of the bullshitters. If you are in charge of the hospital that cast a half-naked patient out onto the streets of Baltimore, you don't get to make any claims about "who we are." What we do, not our wishful fantasies, constitute and represent who we are.

We did not learn this week that Our Current President is a racist. He has unabashedly flaunted his racism his entire adult life and with particular intensity since declaring his candidacy for President. Anyone who claims otherwise is a hypocrite or a moron. And the fact is that just short of 63 million Americans, for reasons I won't try to analyze here, decided to vote for him anyway. THAT IS WHO WE ARE.

Of course, over 70 million Americans in that same election voted for someone other than Trump. THAT IS ALSO WHO WE ARE. We are collectively every bit as complex and messed up as the Narcissist In Chief.

The idea that Donald Trump is some kind of pox visited upon an otherwise good, decent, and generous country is today a wishful fantasy. No FBI investigation, no impeachment trial will return our country to some golden age of political health. Destructive as he is, Trump is but the most recent and horrifying symptom of a much deeper disorder. To keep insisting that this President is "not normal" while simultaneously acting as if his base supporters are a completely normal right-wing counterpart to a left-wing democratic "base" makes as much sense as an oncologist treating a cancer patient's symptoms while taking care not to disturb the actual cancer tumors.

Although, to push the metaphor into the realm of the absurd, what fun our television news media, those midwives of our democracy, will have debating post-mortem whether it was the cancer or just the symptoms of the cancer that killed the patient they themselves had poisoned to death.