OPINION:
You go low, we go lower — lower and uglier and more violent: That’s apparently the principle driving Hollywood moviemaker Michael Moore, who called on his like-minded leftist fan base to take to the streets by the scores and protest all-things-President Donald Trump.
As if times aren’t already tense enough. Moore now wants more mob mentality to take to the streets, more anti-Trump types to “put our bodies on the line” and resist. Does this seem a tad irresponsible to anyone else?
Moreover, he’s fanning flames by taunting the Democrats as “wimpy and weak” and “constantly giving in” and caving to Republican agendas, as he put it, during a discussion on “The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert.
“If the worst that happens in the Trump administration is that they don’t get to have a chicken dinner in Virginia,” Moore said, Mediaite reported, in apparent reference to the booting of Sarah Huckabee Sanders from a Red Hen restaurant, “I mean, I don’t know. … I don’t think it’s right to throw Sarah Sanders out of the restaurant because I disagree with her politically. If I see her come into my movie, I’m not going to say, ’You can’t see my movie.’ But that’s not what’s going on now.”
True. What’s going on is the mental breakdown of an entire class of people called Democrats, who simply can’t stomach the idea their candidate, their political goals, their visions for America didn’t win in 2016. And it’s a mental breakdown that’s bringing out the desperation and violence in the already-out-theres of the left, from Maxine “Impeach!” Waters to Nancy “Resist!” Pelosi — to, sadly enough, the likes of Laurence Wayne Key, the Florida man just charged with threats to kill Republican Rep. Brian Mast’s children.
But Moore didn’t put it that way.
Or see it that way, for that matter.
“We’re not talking about political differences,” Moore said. “We’re talking about thousands of children being kidnapped and put in jails.”
Sigh. But the real gem on the interview came when Colbert asked Moore what an “end game” looked like, if violence and “revolutionary confrontation” against Team Trump were indeed to be avoided.
And Moore, who moments earlier said he didn’t advocate thuggery — that “we don’t have to be violent” — then said this: “The despair that I have in going forward and making movies is when are people going to get off the couch and when are we going to rise up. The only way that we’re going to stop this is eventually we’re all going to have to put our bodies on the line. You’re going to have to be willing to do this. When I see those children down in Brownsville, I don’t see them as somebody else’s children. I see them as my children. Those are my children.”
Well, they’re not. Not to pester with the facts — but they’re not Moore’s children.
And calling for “bodies on the line” to fight not just for illegals, but against this White House’s rule-of-law agendas, is nothing but a call to aggression and violence.
At this juncture, with this swirling fiery political atmosphere, rhetoric like that just doesn’t seem prudent.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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