Roy Exum
In the third act of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the queen was asked how she was enjoying the play and the immortal line was born, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” That line got louder and louder for me on Sunday as I read about our nation’s latest tragedy in Charlottesville. Three people are dead because of despicable white supremacists but what about the other slimy supremacists who surfaced the morning after the carnage and who, I believe, are a bigger threat to civility in the United States?
I am assured there are those who will blame President Trump whether it rains or shines. To them everything is Trump’s fault. Please. The President was in New Jersey this weekend and he had zero to do with the decision to tear down Robert E. Lee’s statue at the University of Virginia.
He also had no say in Charlottesville’s idiotic decision to issue permits to known and proven rabble-rousers. Yet our liberal snowflakes had worked themselves in a frenzy before Sunday school yesterday and the one who caught my eye was a supremacist indeed, Charlottesville Mayor David Signer.
Any and all of us will agree that the Charlottesville mayor should have dedicated himself to the healing of his beloved college town yesterday but – no – the catastrophic Saturday gave him a rare opportunity to go on a media tour. Educated at Princeton, Cal-Berkley, and UVa, the mayor’s snowflake level is so off the charts that he is unmatched at creating hatred and rancor.
Very active in the Democratic Party (he was a member of Barack Obama's State Department Transition Team) Signer found the car ramming into a crowd and killing a woman was his one-time ticket to go after Trump and earn huge party favors, as loathsome as such well may be.
Take a peek at a sampling of Signer’s “biggest hits” on Sunday, this in just one day:
ON CNN’S ‘STATE OF THE UNION’ – Signer’s objective was to blame Trump. “Look at the campaign he ran,” Mr. Signer told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “Look at the intentional courting, on one hand, of all these white supremacists, white nationalists … and look on the other hand at the repeated failure to step up, condemn, denounce, silence, put to bed all of these different efforts, just like we saw yesterday. This isn’t hard.”
ON NBC’S ‘MEET THE PRESS’ – Signer said Trump never disavowed any hate groups: “Old saying — when you dance with the devil, the devil changes you,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “I think they made a choice in that campaign, a very regrettable one, to really go to peoples prejudices, to go to the gutter. These influences around the country, these anti-Semites, racists, Aryans, Nazis, KKK, they were always in the shadows, but they’ve been given a key and a reason to come in the light. We saw a conscious decision to dance with all these devils in our politics. We saw them on full display. Now they're comfortable to come out in open daylight.”
ON CBS’ ‘FACE THE NATION’ – Asked to comment on the President’s response, Signer said, “You know, I don't want to make this too much about Donald Trump. We have a lot of grieving and a lot of work to do as a city and as a country, but he should look in the mirror.
"He made a choice in his presidential campaign and the folks around with him to go right to the gutter, to play on our worst prejudices, and I think you're seeing a direct line from what happened here this weekend to those choices," he added.
Signer said the extremist groups “are getting okays for that because they were invited into basically a presidential campaign. That has to stop and it can stop now."
The mayor criticized Mr. Trump for his statement on Saturday, in which he says the president should have called out the white nationalist, neo-Nazi groups by name. "I didn't hear the words 'white supremacy,' and I think it's important to call it for what it is," he said.
ON NBC ‘NEWS ALIVE’ -- “I’m not going to make any bones about it,” Mayor Michael Signer said. “I place the blame for a lot of what you’re seeing in America today right at the doorstep of the White House and the people around the President.”
NPR: ‘ALL THINGS CONSIDERED -- Signer called Friday night's torchlight rally of white nationalists "tantamount to terrorism" and a "display that was clearly meant to intimidate and terrorize."
"Look, I think anyone who watched the presidential campaign saw an invitation to these forces that call themselves 'alt-right' to really come into a mainstream presidential campaign. And that was a choice," he said. "[This] invitation of bigotry, hatred, racism, anti-Semitism, into the mainstream American civil society — it's time for this to stop," Signer tells NPR's Stacey Vanek Smith. "This is hopefully a turning point for the end of this movement."
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White supremacists and KKK wizards don’t bother me nearly as much as an elected official who would occupy his day, 24 hours after unthinkable chaos, to batter Donald Trump. He credits hate groups and perimeter crowds for electing Trump but the real truth – as has been proven – is that America is jolly well fed up with people like Michael Signer.
Whoever wants to be the next Mayor of Charlottesville has an unhampered waltz to the chair by showing the world what this PhD from Cal-Berkley did the very next day after tragedy came calling.
Michael Signer is far more dangerous to our country than any Bobby Joe from Ozark, Ark., because he hides his unabashed hatred behind the camouflage of politics. That way his actions, while repulsive, are legal.
royexum@aol.com