Is It Cool To Call the President a Bastard Again?: New at Reason

People who not long ago said it was disrespectful to criticize the tenant in the White House seem to have rediscovered the value of dissent. Well, maybe.

J.D. Tuccille writes:

President Trump is a piece of crap. Former President Obama was a bastard. And Hillary Clinton, who everybody thought was going to be president, is utterly worthless too.

Oh, that is so refreshing!

For years, we were told that criticizing the occupant of the White House was “rank disrespect,” as Jonathan Capehart wrote in the Washington Post. Opposition to the sitting president was very likely motivated by racism, Charles M. Blow mused in The New York Times. “Openly defying and brazenly disrespecting your president, while hoping that he fails, is not called patriotism… It is called treason,” insisted one particularly moronic meme by Occupy Democrats.

But a few years of experience can have a wonderfully transformative effect on political culture. One election later, and Americans who once insisted that saying mean things about an elected official was unseemly and unforgivable have rediscovered the liberating potential of dissent.

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