OPINION:
Michelle Obama has a new book out where she vows she will “never forgive” President Donald Trump for spreading the birther talk about former President Barack Obama because — her words — it was “dangerous” and “deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks.”
Never forgive? That seems a bit harsh, particularly when there’s that whole “sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt” thing from, oh, you know, every American child’s youth since the dawn of the public school system.
Methinks there’s some political potshotting going on here.
“What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk,” the former first lady wrote, The Hill reported. “And for this I’d never forgive him.”
Hmm. Let’s think about this for a moment. There are layers to peel.
First off, unstable minds are character traits of Democrats and the left, not Republicans. Everybody knows this. From Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter to burn, baby, burn types on any college campus around the nation that dares to host a conservative speaker, fact is, angry violence and cringe-worthy vitriol — both abhorrent, even criminal, behaviors to the ideological right — are nonetheless considered proper First Amendment expressions to the left.
Ask baseball-playing Steve Scalise, for goodness sake. Or restaurant-dining Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Or, nowadays, Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Second off — how could someone with a loaded gun go to Washington? Come on, Mrs. Obama. You silly rabbit, you. The District of Columbia has among the strictest firearms’ laws in the nation. Democrats call them “common sense” gun controls, and they’re the very same type the Obama White House advocated and pushed all the states to adopt.
Surely, these laws aren’t useless now, are they?
Mrs. Obama?
But third off — and this is the larger point: Enough of the hate already.
Enough of the hypocrisy, too.
“I stopped even trying to smile” during President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Obama wrote in her book, “Becoming,” ABC News reported. Boo freaking hoo. Conservatives stopped smiling for eight years of the Obama administration.
She also, in writing, called Trump out for “bigotry and xenophobia” for his birther comments; as a “misogynist” who should’ve lost with women voters to the “exceptionally qualified” Hillary Clinton; and said she was so disturbed by his 2016 wind that she tried to “block it all out,” post-election. Yawn, yawn. Nothing new from the left there. But note the hypocrisy.
This is the same Michelle Obama who sold herself as a gentle healer, a voice of reason, a mild and moderate above-the-fray type of gal, all these years — and that others tried to sell just as similarly.
In 2008, Obama took to the campaign trail on behalf of her husband and claimed that he could heal our nation, help “fix our souls.”
In 2013, the Huffington Post wrote a fluff piece, “49 Reasons We Love The First Lady,” that raved of Obama, in Number 25: “She doesn’t retaliate against people who badmouth her. When Larry King asked her opinion of Sarah Palin — an outspoken critic of both Obamas — Michelle responded that she tries not to make a negative opinion of people she hasn’t had an ’substantive interaction with.’ Classy.”
In July 2016, The Nation published a piece titled “Michelle Obama Brings the Healing.”
In mid-2017, CNN ran an opinion piece with this headline, “When racism cuts, Michelle Obama helps us heal.”
The best, of course, is the one where Obama tells King she doesn’t like to retaliate. But once again, Trump has the last word. When asked what he thought of Obama’s “never forgive” remarks, the president said, of her husband’s administration: “I’ll never forgive him for what he did to our United States military by not funding it properly.”
Bam. And with that, the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, the Obamas and the Trumps, shines abundantly clear: With the Obamas, it was, and apparently is, always personal first, country second. With this White House, however, it’s all country first. It’s all “America First.”
And no book, not even one by the former first lady, can make voters forget that.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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