Motivation

So Joy Behar, whom this space has previously opined is not the sharpest pencil on the planet, today on The View offered a rationale for some of the bigger stupidities we have seen recently from media folks and others.

Behar answered moderator Whoopi Goldberg's question about why so many people were so quick to judge high school students shown on a viral video this past weekend. The original version had just a brief snip of confrontation between a Native American man in Washington for the Indigenous Peoples March and teenagers who, we were told, surrounded the man while wearing their Make America Great Again hats and chanting hatefully at him. Many people saw it and forcefully condemned the students, but within hours significantly longer video clips from other sources surfaced that showed a multitude of other factors the original video omitted. Among them: the presence of another group shouting insults at the students and the way the Native American man approached the students rather than the other way around.

In the meantime, the school which sent the students to Saturday's March for Life and several of the students themselves -- some of whom didn't behave well either -- had been identified and received death and bomb threats. Many tweets had flown around suggesting the students be punched or worse, only to be withdrawn or deleted when the new information began to come out.

Behar said that the rush to judgment came because so many of the people condemning the students were "desperate to get Trump out of office." She seems to have said it for a laugh line, but I think she revealed an important truth -- and weakness -- held by many people who oppose President Trump.

I'm no fan of the president. I didn't vote for him and I don't intend to vote for him in 2020. I think he is not of fit character to receive the salute of the lowliest buck private recruit in uniform. But I think he won the election in 2016 and so he's the President and will be until at least the morning of January 20, 2021.

Far too much of the energy that could go into opposing him, opposing his policies or attempting to negotiate deals with him is going into futile attempts to undo 2016. Rather than sitting back and let this unstable goofball self-destruct his way into a primary challenge from his own party, people do incredibly stupid stuff like run his press secretary out of restaurants, pretend that cursing him at awards shows was brave and take every frickin unsubstantiated negative story about him as God's own handwriting on Moses' memo pad. People who might consider voting against Trump if given a viable alternative see instead a 24-hour rage monster that offers no guarantees victory will turn it back into Bruce Banner.

Progressive folks seemed to have learned the worst lessons from the people who opposed President Obama during his terms. The birth certificate crap, his identity as a "secret Muslim (or atheist, take your pick)" and the like were issues raised by many people as reasons that the 2008 election was in some way illegitimate. Because of them, the election could or should be null and void -- leading to exactly what, nobody could say, because there wasn't that much thought going on in the process. Although those folks remained mostly fringe characters for much of Obama's first term, they had enough of a profile that some who might have supported Mitt Romney in 2012 were leery of putting them or anyone who might have thought like them anywhere near political power.

Currently, the problem is significantly more serious because the anger level seems so ramped up. But the end result could be exactly the same: Four more years of a hated president, in significant measure because people who opposed him were so "desperate to get (him) out of office" they believed any stupid thing that promised that possibility. And in the end they believed so many of them that they were never able to make a case that they could offer anything better to people who might have been interested in hearing it.