WS Chronicle

Tom Hastings

Guest Columnist

Watching the 2016 campaign is hypnotically akin to the gawker slow-down that affects traffic with the slightest accident. Rubbernecking the three most recent Trump offenses in any given week has given America an entirely new hobby.

*He might be insulting KIA Muslim American soldiers or their parents, as he did with Capt. Humayun Khan. That was brilliant.

Tack on his clumsy idiocy about John McCain, telling us that he, Trump, prefers pilots who don’t get captured. Does he not realize he sounds like a sociopathic son of Saddam with these chickenhawk utterances?

*He might be mocking people with disabilities, as he did with reporter Serge Kovaleski. That took courage. Trump, for all his bluster and pomposity, is a profile in pusillanimity.

*Inexplicably meeting with Enrique Peña Nieto, President of Mexico, with-out bringing up The Wall he’s designed against all the rapists crossing the border now, The Wall that Trump decides unilaterally that Mexico will pay for.

Ineffable.

*He really fixed that when he called Pope Francis “disgraceful” for the Pope’s critique of the proposed Wall. Just to con-tinue with the Catholic vote, he managed to be the first candidate in memory to get booed at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation traditional candidate roast.

*Perhaps his basket of deplorable comments about women in general and specifically. Maybe he’s caught on tape bragging about his woman-groping. Donald! Basic Groper manners – get permission, then grope away. Calling Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe, Miss Piggy. Women are loving you, Donald. Referring to Carly Fiorina, he said, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?” (OMG, Trump, look in the mirror when you say that and same thing when you call someone a “nasty woman.”)

*Luckily, he is on top of the refugees-as-terrorists-in-the-U.S. crisis. Oh, that’s right. Zero terror attacks by refugees inside the U.S. to date. Looks like they’ve all been vetted adequately, so far, despite his hysteria.

We could go on, but let’s just leave it with a secret for The Donald: Oscar Wilde was brilliant, but your devotion to his erroneous dictum, “There is no such thing as bad publicity,” is your political undoing. You have your base of basket cases and that’s it.

Michelle, you get four years off for great behavior, but we want to see you run in 2020. No one could heal this nation better.

Tom H. Hastings is Founding Director of PeaceVoice, of the Oregon Peace Institute,

http://www.peacevoice.