For anyone who even considers laying blame for the sorry state of political civility in this country at the feet of President Donald Trump, just stop. Donald Trump is the consequence of our current environment, not its cause. As I’ve noted before, Trump is what happened when a generation of Republicans and conservatives grew tired of being bullied by the Democrat Media Complex, and so they went out and hired a bully of their own.

Do I like it? Nope.  

Do I think it’s the right response? Nope.

Did I vote for it? Nope.

Do I think that this will end well? Nope.

But if liberal Democrats really want to bemoan the way Donald Trump talks to them and treats them, they have no one to thank but themselves. Trump is just a callous and unfiltered version of the “sophisticated” slander the left has been lobbing against the right for years through a corrupt and complicit mainstream media.

For proof of that, we could start scrolling through the endless accusations of the last few decades: centrist John McCain was called a racist, the affable George W. Bush was tagged a bigoted war criminal, mild-mannered Mitt Romney was labeled a tax cheat, felon and murderer.  And this wasn’t done by fringe activists – these were libelous claims published by mainstream media organizations coordinating with their ideological allies in the Democrat Party.

But why turn to the pages of history to prove what you can observe right in front of your face? Is there any statement that better typifies the state of political dialogue in 2019 than what the Democrat’s chosen national leader and spokeswoman, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, said last week? 

“You’ve got to be ready to take a punch,” she warned Democrats. “And therefore, you have to be ready to throw a punch — for the children. Throw a punch for the children.”

Don’t talk to me about Donald Trump’s irresponsible rhetoric being the source of our problems. Not when the political left has, for decades, convinced itself that their abject hatred for the right – and the verbal and physical punches it has engendered – has been excusably and appropriately done, “for the children.”