Leonard Pitts Letter To Marco Rubio

Dear Sen. Marco Rubio:

So I see where you came after me on Twitter. I’m flattered. Never knew you cared.

“This well known national writer,” you tweeted about my last column, “states very clearly that the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump are haters who should not be heard from or engaged in dialogue. It’s a view widely held by many elites on left, but very few of them so openly admit to it.”

It fascinates me how you Republicans have repurposed “elites,” which means well above average, into an all-purpose pejorative. I mean, sure, call me an elite, if you insist. But I’d point out that as a U.S. senator, hobnobbing with presidents and potentates while pulling down $174,000 per annum, you are hardly Joe Lunchbucket yourself. more

Democrats Just Don’t Have a Clue

You often seem terrified of alienating voters who do not embrace you, while discounting those — such as immigrants, African Americans, LGBTQ and, yes, progressive whites — who do.

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You made yourselves look feckless, spineless and brainless in the process. You’d said you would not vote to fund the government until the GOP acted to save DREAMers — from deportation. Three days later, you folded like a baby stroller, accepting a deal in which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed only his “intention” to take up the legislation you want.

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According to Debbie Wasserman Schultz you won, “the potential for momentum.”

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The truth is closer to what GOP Rep. Mark Walker of North Carolina told Politico: “We gave them nothing.” For that matter, it’s even closer to what Denzel Washington said in “Malcolm X:” “You been had! You been took! You been hoodwinked!”

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Frankly, you could stand to be more petrified of your own base especially since the political left is having itself a moment unlike anything we’ve seen in almost 50 years. People are marching and raising money. Upstarts are running for office. The left is galvanized by a 

fierce new energy.

By Leonard Pitts Jr.

John Siegenthaler: A Southern man of vision

When the history of this era is written, 
it will recount how so-called
conservatives gave aid, comfort and intellectual cover to the ugliest of human impulses under the guise of 
political debate. 
People will wonder how we could have seen all that ugliness without seeing a thing, how journalists could have been silent and supine to the point of malpractice in the face of such obvious and monumental misbehavior. here