Our Quote of the Day comes from political consultant Steve Schmidt on his must-read Substack page. Schmidt notes one of the saddest political developments of the 21st century: a political culture where cruelty and negativity is celebrated and rewarded. A far cry from the optmism of the JFK years:
Today, American politics is beset by a cast of low men and women whose service is an assault and whose power is a cudgel of cruelty. They are practitioners of an ideology of performative malice for which the most vulnerable people among us are the prey of political predators looking for a stroking.
Today, they follow a creed that could well read, “We choose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are cheap and mean. We choose to hurt and scare people who are frightened and alone. We choose to traumatize the child and hurt their mother. We choose to make the infant freeze and to humiliate his father. We choose to make the old and sick suffer. We choose cruelty. We choose to declare that our fellow human beings are less than. We choose to treat our brothers and sisters with a different skin color like animals. We choose to turn the mother and child away from shelter on Christmas Eve.”
This is the creed of Greg Abbott and every man and woman who participated in his act of bigotry, cruelty and indecency on Christmas Eve of 2022 when he deposited three bus loads of frightened and disoriented people into the freezing rain and cold of Washington, DC.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.