Shadows

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," was the historic line by Barry Goldwater that inflamed the 1964 Republican convention.  But his widow says that even Barry would be appalled by the Donald.

What would be his reaction? she was asked.  "Yuck," was her reply.

Barry would be appalled by Mr. Trump’s behavior — the unintelligent and unfiltered and crude communications style. And he’s shallow — so, so shallow.’”

Levine said she generally finds Trump’s candidacy “crazy and inappropriate”: “I can't believe we are doing this as a country," she said of Trump.

Other Republicans were also running the other way, and there was some noise again about trying to deny him the nomination at the Republican convention in two weeks.  Some of it driven by disgust but much of it by Trump's ocean-floor negatives in recent polls. As a Politico story began: In 2016’s race to the bottom, Donald Trump is going to find out if you can become president when two-thirds of Americans don’t like you — and a majority can’t stand you.  

Another day, another fantastic revelation about Trump's greed--this time a Washington Post story about his financial ties to Russia.  So the Republican party candidate is not only involved in a mutual admiration society with the dictator of an historic and growing adversary, he's financially in bed with their oligarchs and their likely criminal enterprises.

The WAPost also details Trump's relationship with mentor Roy Cohn, Joe McCarthy's right hand man and pretty much the personification of twisted evil in the darkest days of the 1950s. "Cohn also showed Trump how to exploit power and instill fear through a simple formula: attack, counterattack and never apologize."

In his NY Times column entitled A Week for All Time, Timothy Egan writes:"They will remember, a century from now, who stood up to the tyrant Donald Trump and who found it expedient to throw out the most basic American values — the “Vichy Republicans,” as the historian Ken Burns called them in his Stanford commencement speech."

Another dark political shadow passes over the western world with the murder of Jo Cox, a prominent young British MP and leader, an advocate for humanitarian causes and immigration, by a man who--it was revealed today--has direct and long-standing ties to a US neo-Nazi organization.  In this murder he may even have used a gun that he made himself from instructions obtained from this group.

It is widely reported that he shouted "Britain First!" as he shot and stabbed this 41 year old woman outside a library.  It is the slogan of a far right group that stages anti-Muslim demonstrations, adopted by some opponents of the UK's membership in the European Union, which is up for a vote next week.

It is of course echoed in Donald Trump's new slogan, "America First!" which itself was first used by Nazi sympathizers in the US in the late 1930s.

And while Trump's latest inflammatory and racist statements have been met with almost universal condemnation from even Republican politicians,  polls show that a bare majority of the public disapproves, and by a slight margin, Trump is preferred over Clinton to handle an "Orlando-like attack."