It has been a while since I posted a New York Times idiotorial.
That’s not to say there have been no opportunities. Believe me, there have. But I have forgone them…until this one, in today’s paper, which I can’t let go.
Here it is – in rust, with my comments in blue:
Donald Trump is scheduled to speak at a Republican Party fund-raiser on Thursday in Patchogue, a village on the south shore of Long Island, about 60 miles from Manhattan. Too bad The Times didn’t stop here. That is accurate, informative, and not idiotic at all. But this is The Times, so….
This is a wretched development, a disgraceful provocation by the Suffolk County Republicans and their chairman, John Jay LaValle, who invited him. Speaking at a fund-raiser is a wretched development and provocation? Don’t Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders speak at fundraisers? Obviously there is something more, so let’s see it.
There is no place that should welcome Mr. Trump’s politics, we see; you don’t like Donald Trump’s politics so he shouldn’t be welcome anywhere. You call yourself a “newspaper”, right? just asking… but the choice of Patchogue is particularly repellent. Patchogue is where Marcelo Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, was fatally stabbed in 2008 by a white teenager, one of a marauding gang of high school boys who had made a nighttime sport of assaulting Latino men. The Republicans will be toasting Mr. Trump in a dance hall called the Emporium, on the same street as the crime scene, steps away from where Mr. Lucero fell. Wait a minute. This is your reason? Eight years ago there was an ethnic hate crime in the town where Trump is speaking, and the venue he will be speaking at is not where it happened, but nearby? THAT is what makes it wretched , provocative and repellent? You have got to be kidding. Using that logic, I doubt there is a street in Manhattan where a candidate should be able to speak, because what street in Manhattan has not been the scene of a crime at some point in the past?
That attack helped to identify Long Island with vicious anti-immigrant attitudes and violence. After the killing, scores of Latino residents came forward to say that they, too, had been hunted and harassed by white youths for years. The Suffolk County Police Department had routinely ignored their complaints; widespread reports of racial profiling and other police abuses prompted a Justice Department investigation and oversight. So, should Trump – and Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and who knows who else – not speak in any part of Long Island? Unless you are accusing Donald Trump of anti-Equadorian bias, what the eff does this have to do with him? The “answer”, if you can call it that, lies toward the end of the idiotorial, so I’ll skip ahead…
