Cynical life among the bottom-dwellers

NOT A FEW televiewers have noted that this year’s presidential electoral campaign in the United States has been hitting new lows in terms of political civility.

Leading Republican candidate Donald Trump set the pace some months ago, when he launched a tougher, rougher, tell-it-like-it-is campaign that hit viewers and voters where they lived and breathed

—sometimes,  below the belt!

Everyone except Trump was surprised when the gung-ho approach resonated positively with the viewing and voting public, especially with politics practiced by “leaders” who promised one thing but did something completely different.

They loved Trump for telling it like it is, and rewarded him with victories in many preelection primaries, making him the man to beat as the Republicans’ presidential candidate later this year, possibly against the Democrats’ eventual choice, Hillary Clinton.

At first, traditional politicians and Trump’s baker’s dozen of rivals in the Republican race didn’t know how to “handle” and deal with him.

He didn’t speak their comfortable and safely reassuring “coded” language, and thrived on irritating rather than pleasing and placating people.

String of victories

So, he ran circles around them in the early state primaries—until his string of victories “forced” them to join him “below the belt,” and impress people, not with their logic and credentials, but with their hastily developed pugnacity.

Trouble is, they’re still learning the ropes in this rude, crude regard, while Trump is a past master at it, so he’s still outpacing them—but not for want of trying!

For instance, rival candidate Marco Rubio hit an even lower and newer low recently, when he borrowed a line from locker room lingo and lore, and cast “macho” aspersions on him, because (in his “winking” opinion), Trump had “small hands.”

The winking, smirking comment threw less-macho people for a loop, because it was the first time that a candidate’s hands ever became a political issue, or even just a subject of speculation and winking “interpretation”!

Of course, like-minded people knew darned well what Rubio was subliminally driving at, due to the locker-room lore that a man with small hands has other, ah, whatever (mumble-mumble)—!

The wonder and consternation was why the crude remark was ever dignified by the media.

But, it looks like some media people and organizations, including news TV networks that should know better, decided to go the newly popular “tell it like it is” route, and came up with follow-up features about it.

They prompted Trump (and his wife) to assure everyone that he had “absolutely no problem” in that anatomical area (and he and his wife should know, right?).

The big loser here is Rubio, whose desperation at being only No. 3 in the Republican race is believed to have driven him to sink so winking low.

Collateral damage was similarly suffered by the otherwise legit TV media people and outfits who succumbed to the temptation to gain top ratings by similarly becoming “bottom-feeders.”

Rubio has already apologized for his gauche gaffe. When will the other winkers and smirkers follow suit?