My great-grandfather was shot dead in front of his wife (my great-grandmother) and his daughter (my grandmother) in a pogrom that wiped out their town in 1919.  He was killed because the Cossacks who committed the atrocity believed that he was a member of an inferior race. My grandmother, her husband (my grandfather) and their two-year old daughter (my mother) escaped and made it to America in 1923. They came to this Promised Land, this goldene medina, the streets paved with gold, because of racism, there was no other reason at all.

              They came here because they wanted to come here. That happens not to be the case for every African slave who was brought here before the slave trade ended in 1808. Those human beings were brought here in chains, and it took a war that resulted in 1.5 million casualties and a Constitutional amendment to make them free.

              I don’t think there’s any reason why African-Americans should feel they are living in a Promised Land. For this community, the streets certainly haven’t been paved with gold. But I also believe that most White folks today think that African-Americans at least deserve the same opportunity that everyone else gets.

              Unfortunately, there’s a hard-core bunch of real racists out there who still subscribe to the idea that Blacks are inferior to Whites. Some of my Black friends have a term to describe that bunch. They are called ‘klan.’ Not the klan, not the Ku Klux Klan, just klan.

              During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump refused to condemn David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan, although his claim that he didn’t know Duke’s KKK connection was a lie. But the truth is that Trump can’t condemn the Klan because he’d be condemning himself. Trump is klan, okay? That’s exactly what he is.

              Let me make it clear that I don’t believe that just because someone votes for Trump, that this behavior ipso facto proves that they hold racist beliefs. Remember, I’m a gun nut, so many of my gun-nut friends vote Republican the same way I vote Democratic; they just show up at election time, pull the GOP lever and walk out. Which is what I have done for the Democrats in every election since 1968.

              But the President of the United States isn’t just some guy who remembers to vote every four years without first giving the way he’ll vote the slightest bit of thought. He’s the President, remember? What he says about anything having to do with politics really counts.

              Whenever Trump says anything out politics, it’s like a Chinese menu, you can take your choice: Column A is something stupid, column B is something wrong, Column C is a lie. Or you can order the special combination plate for $9.95 and get dumbness, errors, and untruths all at the same time.

              I didn’t think that Joe was in any way out of line by calling Trump a liar and a racist during Tuesday night’s debate. If anything, he was actually quite polite and usually just smiled whenever Trump trotted out his usual mixture of hateful and wrongful beliefs.

              What really bothered me was the degree to which the liberal media has once again given Trump the benefit of the doubt by stating that both he and Biden should have toned things down. How did Chuck Todd, NBC’s senior political correspondent describe the debate? He described it as a ‘train wreck,’ as if both sides were at fault.

Yesterday, The (failing) New York Times said that Republicans were trying to ‘distance’ themselves from Trump’s refusal to condemn white supremacists during the debate. Know what the word ‘distance’ means in politics? It means that something someone said isn’t all that bad. Did the Times even bother to point out that Senator Tom Scott, a Black Senator, completely dishonored himself by pretending that maybe Trump just “misspoke?”

No, they did not. Oh, I forgot. The first lesson in Journalism 101 is that you always have to be fair to both sides.

I thought that when Joe called Trump a liar and a racist that he was entirely appropriate and entirely correct. I hope he keeps it up and now I’m going to send Joe and Kammie some more cash.