Motes and beams

 The right-wing types who get their information from, or even populate, Fox News, have a predilection and a well-developed ability to interpret the tiniest faults of their political enemies as great monstrosities. Call it making mountains out of molehills, but it's even worse than that.

Did someone send them a Happy Holidays or a Seasons Greetings card at Christmas? That is another salvo in the War on Christmas (and, indeed, on the persecuted Christians).

Did some Democratic politician show up in public without his or her American flag pin? A sure sign of loyalty to some other country or alien political or economic system.

Did Barack and Michelle Obama exchange a celebratory fist bump? No. It was a terrorist fist jab.

Did Barack Obama wear a tan suit? Well, I don't know what the hell that's evidence of. One never heard any complaints about Ronald Reagan's multifaceted wardrobe.

In any case, the reason I rehash all of this is that I wondered whether after four years of Trump's attacks on democracy, women, immigrants (both legal and illegal), and anybody who was disloyal even once; his incitements to political violence; his obvious ignorance, laziness, and incompetence at his job; his incessant lying... and whatever other components of the vomitus he left in the public square that I have not included, Democrats might have gained some immunity from Republican nitpicking.

Well, I didn't really wonder. I knew that this particular bit of right-wing behavior wouldn't change. One reason is that, for all their magnification of perceived imperfections in Democratic behavior, they could not detect in Donald Trump's behavior any flaw at all. Indeed, when I trotted out a dozen or so of Trump's most egregiously offensive statements, a right-wing acquaintance of mine said, basically, Oh, come on! Everybody in public life occasionally says things that put them in a bad light!

A bad light, indeed. I'm afraid that pointing out the orders of magnitude of the difference between Trump's sins and those of just about any other politician from either party is a losing game. Indeed, this magnification of microscopic faults seems to be the only weapon left for a party that has no positive ideas of its own.