Lloyd Russell: It never occurred to founding fathers we would elect a bowling ball

The 19th century minds that authored our constitution could never have anticipated the 21st century American. The republic’s founders must have assumed that future voters would never elect as president a morally challenged compulsive liar with the mental acuity of a bowling ball. If they had, the requirements for one seeking the office of president would have been a lot tougher than simply being a natural-born citizen of the U.S., 35 years of age and a 14-year resident of the country.

At the very least provisions could have been made to weed-out lunatics, traitors, criminals and the incompetent. Our current “leader,” the champion of mammon’s worshippers, our own all-American Jim Crow, and the diseased spawn of dead European Nazis has helped to foster the alt-right – a species of knuckle-dragging troglodytes that re-emerges whenever an entrenched privileged class feels threatened by a change in the social order.

This was demonstrated at the “Unite the Right” hate parade in Charlottesville. There an assemblage of chanting, torch-bearing mental microbes tried to enact their own version of an East European pogrom, a KKK cross burning or Hitler’s “night of the broken glass.”

This story was originally published September 11, 2017 at 4:49 PM with the headline "Lloyd Russell: It never occurred to founding fathers we would elect a bowling ball."